?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
JAMES A. M. WHISTLER Tête-à-Tête in the Garden.
Lithograph on ivory laid Japan paper, 1890. 198x164 mm; 7 3/4x6 1/2 inches, full margins. Edition of 28. Ex-collection Thomas R. Way, Whistler's printer (Lugt 2456, verso); and Hunt Henderson (Lugt 1317, verso). A very good impression of this extremely scarce print.
We have found only 2 other impressions of this print at auction in the past 20 years.
According to Joseph Pennell, the figures seated in the garden at Whistler's home at 110, rue de Bac, Paris, are Ethel Birnie Philip, Whistler's sister-in-law, and her husband Charles Whibley.
Whistler's primary focus during the late 1880s/early 1890s as a printmaker was lithography. His new wife, Beatrix, loved lithography and inspired him to create more. In many of his lithographs from this period, he returned to intimate, family scenes, like in his etchings of the late 1850s. This late part of his career was a relatively stable and successful time, he had survived the financial hardship following the Ruskin libel trial, he was a world famous artist and he had finally married. Averse to his, "Many declarations that art should not deal with emotions duch as devotion, pity, or love, the prints demonstrate that personal associations and affections were important to Whistler; to deny that they constitute an important ingredient of his art is to rob these works of much of their appeal," (Getscher, The Stamp of Whistler, p. 10). Way 27; Levy 41; Spink 36.
