WHISTLER, James McNeill

J.M.Whistler lithograph ‘La Robe Rouge, 1894’

Description

J.M.Whistler transfer lithograph in black ink, printed on fine laid paper with the watermark O.W.P & A. C.L.  This is one of only 42 impressions printed by Goulding in 1904, the stone was erased the same year.  A  posthumous edition by Whistler’s printer Goulding. There were two states of this lithograph, of which there were only twenty-three life time impressions.

Image size 188 x 155 mm (7 x 5.75 inches)

Sheet size 380 x 267mm (14 7/8 x 10 inches)

Item details

Reference: Chicago 107 II/II; Levy 96; Way 68.  Chicago states that the sitter was Beatrix Whistler, his wife. ‘Whistler plainly stated in a letter to the Ways, this lithograph and La Belle Dame endormie were drawn on the evening of 22nd of September 1894,making them among the most precisely dated images in his lithographic oeuvre’.
‘When Whistler received the proofs of La Robe Rouge in early October 1894, he ordered up to twenty impressions, saying that he might wish to ‘touch the stone’ during an anticipated visit to London.’

This lithograph was also published in The Studio magazine in 1895 in an edition of 3000 copies. ‘The image was transferred from the original stone to supplementary stones in preparation for the large machine-printed edition that Thomas way pulled for The Studio.’