?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
JAMES A. M. WHISTLER Sketches on the Coast Survey Plate.
Etching on thin, cream laid Japan paper, 1854. 134x247 mm; 5 1/4x9 3/4 inches, wide margins. A very good impression of this extremely scarce print.
We have found only 4 other impressions at auction in the past 20 years. The last impression sold at Swann, May 5, 2005, sale 2042, lot 348.
Whistler took his first drawing courses as a young teenager at the Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia. His father, a civil engineer, had been commissioned to supervise the construction of a railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow and the Whistler family lived in Russia from 1843 until the father's death in 1849. Whistler's older half-sister, Deborah, married the English physician and artist Francis Seymour Haden in 1847 and Whistler lived with the Haden's and attended boarding school in England during the late 1840s. In 1849, Whistler enrolled at West Point (where his father had once been a drawing instructor); he was expelled after 3 years at the Academy, due to unsatisfactory grades and his anti-military establishment attitude.
After West Point, he worked for a few months as a draughtsman/etcher during the winter of 1854-55 for the U.S. Coast Survey. Apparently bored with work as a map-maker, Whistler would doodle characters on the survey margins. Such behavior, evident on this, his first documented etching, soon led to his leaving the coastal survey position and setting off for Europe to pursue his future as an artist.
Whistler added etched portrait studies of women, a couple of men in hats, a mother and child and a hooded man in the upper corners of this plate. Kennedy 1.
