?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
JAMES A. M. WHISTLER The Unsafe Tenement.
Etching printed in dark brownish black on cream laid paper, 1858. 160x228 mm; 6 3/8x9 inches, full margins. Fourth state (of 4), with pentimenti of of the standing woman replaced by the pitchfork leaning against the wall at left and with remnants of the the burnished-out sky still printing. From Twelve Etchings from Nature. A brilliant, richly-inked impression, with crisp plate marks.
This is a scene from Alsace that Whistler created on the outbound portion of his Rhine sketching trip from Paris during the summer of 1858. The first impressions of the "French Set" were printed in Paris by Delâtre in November 1858. Another edition was issued in London several weeks later. Impressions like the current work, with the printer's name removed, were pulled for Ellis and Green of Covent Garden, London, who had bought the plates in 1871.
The clean-wiped, high contrast appearance of this impression differs from the warmer, more luminous and earlier impression on Chine collé (lot 15). Kennedy 17.
