?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
JAMES A. M. WHISTLER Little Venice.
Etching and drypoint printed in black on antique cream laid paper, 1880. 184x264 mm; 7 1/4x10 3/8 inches, full margins. MacDonald's second state (of 2), with the burnishing marks at the corners removed. Edition of approximately 54. Signed with large shaded butterfly and inscribed "imp" in pencil, lower left. From Twelve Etchings. A superb early impression, likely printed soon after Whistler's return from Venice to London; before the majority of the edition from the early to mid-1880s for the Fine Art Society; signed in the wide, untrimmed margin with the large shaded butterfuly and with strong contrast and crisp, inky plate edges (similar in quality to another early impression at the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC).
According to MacDonald, impressions from the late, mid-1880s printings "were printed with a light, carefully wiped surface tone of ink, to augment the color and atmospheric effect of oily stillness of the lagoon." Kennedy 183; Glasgow 238.
