?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
JAMES A. M. WHISTLER St. James's Park.
Etching on cream laid paper, 1885. 65x100 mm; 2 3/4x4 inches. One of only several proofs (MacDonald cites only 5 known impressions). Signed with the butterfly and inscribed "imp" in pencil on the tab, lower left. Ex-collection Henry Study Theobald (Lugt 1375); purchased from P. & D. Colnaghi, London. A superb impression of this extremely scarce etching.
According to MacDonald, Whistler sold one impression to the London print dealer Thomas M. McLean and another impression to the New York gallery H. Wunderlich & Co. The Wunderlich impression, though intended for the collector Ross Revillon Winans, might have been purchased instead by Henry Harper Benedict and later acquired by Lessing Julius Rosenwald before he donated it to the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Further impressions were acquired by the Freer Gallery of Art, through Charles Lang Freer (who had bought his impression from Keppel in New York), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from collector/donor Harry Brisbane Dick.
MacDonald also notes that Whistler's record book from around 1890 showed only one impression in his stock, though two impressions came with his estate to the University of Glasgow.
We have not found another impression at auction in the past 25 years. Kennedy 255; Glasgow 250.
