JAMES A. M. WHISTLER "Unfinished Sketch of Lady Haden" 1895 VERY RARE Lithograph

Description: Unfinished Sketch of Lady HadenLithography by James McNeill Whistler1895 Way 143; Levy 139. Lithograph with scraping in black ink. With the printed butterfly, upper left. Way lists only 6 impressions of this late lithograph; the catalogue raisonne lists 15, all in museum collections. The stone was erased in 1905. I was fortunate to come across another impression of this print several years ago and sold it on ebay for $2000; this impression here is in better condition. I believe that it matches the lone impression in the third state which is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. It has additional scraping around the hairline and chin of the sitter. Like that impression, this one is printed grayish white chine mounted on ivory plate paper. It is the only other extant impression on chine colle. Faint rounded depressions along upper and lower left corners. Pencil annotations in margins of mounting paper and on reverse. Image is in excellent condition. Plate: 8 x 12 inches I quote in full from the entry for this print in the catalogue raisonne: Whistler’s affection for his half-sister, Deborah Delano Haden (1825–1908), remained constant throughout his life. Deborah married Dr. (later Sir) Francis Seymour Haden in 1847, while her father and his second family were living in Russia. The Hadens settled in London, and the young James often stayed with them to avoid the rigors of the Russian winters. Whistler was also a frequent visitor to their home on Sloane Street during the period between 1855 and 1867, and he made portraits of his sister and her three children in a variety of media. Although Whistler and Seymour Haden worked quite closely together at etching in the late 1850s and early 1860s, their relationship began to deteriorate by 1863, and a permanent break that resulted in Whistler’s banishment from the Haden household took place in 1867. After that time brother and sister often arranged to meet surreptitiously at his home or the homes of friends and family members. They also carried on a written correspondence, in which Whistler always addressed Lady Haden affectionately as “Sis.” When he drew this portrait, she was approaching seventy and was almost blind. The image is one of two (see also cat. 117) drawn on stone sometime between late December 1894 and early March 1895, when Whistler and his wife, Beatrix, were in London for medical consultations. [glossary:T. R. Way (1912)] implied that the lithograph was drawn at Long’s Hotel in New Bond Street, the Whistlers’ temporary London residence; if so, the stone (an unusually large one) was carted there from the Ways’ printing offices in Wellington Street.2 Given the requisite secrecy of Deborah Haden’s meetings with her half-brother, it is likely that most of the work was carried out in one sitting, although subtle modifications were later made. Examination of a number of impressions clearly reveals that the image was taken through three states, but correspondence between the artist and the printers provides only a partial explanation of its history after the initial drawing was made in London. Whistler returned to Paris in early March 1895. The Ways, perhaps believing that he would soon return to London and complete his work on the stone, delayed the processing of the image for three weeks. Finally, on March 25, they prepared and proved the stone and sent two first-state proofs to the artist.3 Having received no word from him by May, T. R. Way wrote that he had “sent some prints awhile since, and hope you liked them” (letter 135). The silence continued, and Way wrote again in mid-July, mentioning that he had heard about the Lady Haden lithograph from New York dealer Frederick Keppel, which led him to conclude that Whistler must have liked the proofs (letter 136). This time Whistler responded, but he denied having shown the portrait to Keppel: “I have only had the two proofs sent me and have never shown them to a soul!” (letter 137). He instructed the printers in the same letter to “wipe out at once the Ly. Haden.” The lithograph is not mentioned again in their correspondence. This chronology does not account for either the existence of subsequent states or for the extreme disparity between the number of impressions that have been identified to date and the number of impressions listed by Way. It is possible that Whistler reconsidered his decision to have the stone erased; Way noted that “at the end of 1895” Whistler was “revising his many drawings upon the stone,” and this subject might have been among them.4 The artist must have seen the image through two states, since a signature appears on a second-state impression in the Cleveland Museum of Art. He apparently went on to make still more changes to the image, as indicated by a unique third-state impression in The Art Institute of Chicago (illustrated here). T. R. Way’s use of the title Unfinished Sketch of Lady Haden in his 1905 catalogue and the lack of signatures on all but three impressions suggest that after that point Whistler decided to follow his initial inclination and abandon the stone.

Price: 2500 USD

Location: South Hadley, Massachusetts

End Time: 2025-01-21T20:16:44.000Z

Shipping Cost: 25 USD