?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
JAMES A. M. WHISTLER La Belle Dame Paresseuse.
Lithograph on Japan paper, 1894. 236x175 mm; 9 3/8x7 inches, full margins. Edition of approximately only 28. Signed with the butterfly in pencil, lower right. A superb, richly-inked impression of this extremely scarce lithograph, with the "test marks" from Whistler's lithographic crayons upper right and upper left distinct and with all the tonal nuances clear.
We have found only 10 other impressions at auction in the past 30 years.
Whistler (1834-1903) was particularly proud of this lithograph, both in the quality of the impressions and the papers selected for printing, when he wrote to his London printer Thomas Way, "Take a fine proof of this and put it beside any one of the old lithographs out of your portfolio—and then see how this 'belle dame' looks fair and silvery, and beautiful in the quality of blacks! Indeed far and away more like the charcoal drawing itself of the painter—than anything that has ever been printed!—It is really also quite velvety—like . . . the burr in a drypoint!," (Spink, The Lithographs of James McNeill Whistler, Chicago, 1998, volume I, page 306).
The sitter is Whistler's wife Beatrix. She appears in several other lithographs drawn by Whistler in August/September 1894 similarly at rest and casually posed, perhaps signaling the onset of her fatal illness which was diagnosed as cancer at the end of the year. Way 62; Levy 93; Spink 98.
