The Shoemaker

 

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

  1834 - 1903 (biography)

1896  

transfer lithograph with stumping 

6 x 8 3/4" image size 

printed butterfly, upper center 

proof, edition not specified by Way (apart from 56 posthumous impressions printed by Goulding on 2 M 

in pencil, bottom of sheet "R77UN" and "Rg172", and "20243 A/E/F" on verso 

Spink, Stratis & Tedeschi: A Catalogue Raisonne, The Art Institute of Chicago; AIC 169; Way 151; Levy 129. 

grayish ivory China 

I/I 

 

20892 

SOLD

A shoemaker sits reflectively in a chair in front of his low workbench. In the background a woman, possibly his wife, stands with her chin resting on her hand.

Quoted from The Art Institute of Chicaco (AIC), The Lithographs of James McNeill Whistler, Vol. I catalouge resone, pg. 477:

"...'The Shoemaker' was one of two transfer drawings that Whistler consigned to the Parisian printer Lemercier on 6 January 1897 to be processed and proved. The other image, definitely drawn in Whistler's Paris home and on the same type of transfer paper, was The Medici Collar (cat. no. 170), a portrait of his sister-in-law Rosalind Birnie Philip.

"Whistler had returned to London by January 14, when he wrote to Birnie Philip in Paris instructing her to send his lithographs over immediately and to be sure they were packed flat. In that letter he remarked peevishly: "You say nothing about them - therefore I suppose they are bad - I mean badly printed." After an eight-month hiatus in his lithographic work, the artist was clearly impatient to see the results of his recent efforts, for two days later he dispatched another letter to Birnie Philip complaining about her tardiness in sending them."