BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Fine Impressions: Whistler, Freer, and Venice

DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Fine Impressions: Whistler, Freer, and Venice:

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Description of Pictures: Fine Impressions: Whistler, Freer, and Venice
October 18, 2014 – Indefinitely
In 1887, museum founder Charles Lang Freer purchased the entire Second Venice Set, twenty-six atmospheric etchings by James McNeill Whistler. This precipitous act marked the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership. The mutually beneficial relationship between collector and artist eventually led to the founding of the Freer Gallery, today the world's largest and finest repository of Whistler's works.
The Second Venice Set is well known within Whistler’s oeuvre. It has most frequently been exhibited to highlight changes in Whistler’s style and to underscore the popularity of Venice as a tourist destination and artistic subject. Fine Impressions, however, tells the story from Freer’s perspective: how his epiphany in Mansfield’s apartment and his acquisition of the Second Venice Set catalyzed a shift in taste and came to shape his legacy as a connoisseur and collector.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SIFGFI_141105_009.JPG: Fine Impressions: Whistler, Freer, and Venice On a November day in 1887, museum founder Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919) walked into a New York City art gallery and purchased the entire Second Venice Set, a suite of twenty-six etchings by the American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). Freer, an industrialist from Detroit, Michigan, had amassed a fortune manufacturing railroad cars. A burgeoning aesthete, he had been collecting prints by contemporary European artists for several years, but works by Whistler were not among his earliest acquisitions. Despite the artist's rising reputation among American collectors, Freer was not impressed. "Why anyone in the world should make any fuss over Whistler as an artist" was beyond him. Freer's feelings changed suddenly when he was invited to the apartment of Howard Mansfield, a fellow collector, to inspect some especially "fine impressions" of Whistler's etchings. Mansfield recalled Freer was "comfortably seated, with a large cigar, which he never lighted," but as one portfolio after another of Whistler's work was brought out, Freer leaped from his chair and paced around the room "uttering large adjectives." "My purchasing began the day thereafter," Freer later confided, "and has continued ever since whenever opportunity has offered." When Freer "discovered" the Venice etchings, he had never traveled to Italy. The sites and subjects of the prints were of little significance to him. Instead, he was enthralled by Whistler's originality: the technical mastery and innovations of form that evoked light, atmosphere, texture, and color in the linear, monochromatic medium of printmaking. Hoping to purchase new works directly from the artist, Freer paid an unannounced call on Whistler during a business trip to London in 1890. Over the next thirteen years, the two men developed a close friendship, and Whistler helped Freer amass what the artist called "a fine collection of Whistlers -- perhaps the collection." Ultimately, that "fine collection of Whistlers" became part of a larger, cross-cultural collection of Asian and American art that Freer bequeathed to the Smithsonian in 1906.
2. SIFGFI_141105_029.JPG: Whistler's Venice When Freer purchased the Second Venice Set from the art dealer M. Knoedler and Company in 1887, the prints were among the most up-to-date examples of Whistler's work on the market. Venice was a timeworn artistic subject, but Whistler's approach was fresh and original. Claiming to have "learned to know a Venice in Venice that the others never seem to have perceived," Whistler tended to avoid notable landmarks and familiar topographical views. Instead, he sought out back canals, obscure buildings, and shadowy doorways, often depicting them in the shimmering light of early dawn or the gathering darkness of night. Whistler's first and only visit to Venice commenced in the fall of 1879, when his professional and personal fortunes were at their lowest ebb. Hoping to recover from financial troubles -- the result of a falling-out with his patron Frederick Leyland over the Peacock Room and a disastrous lawsuit against the art critic John Ruskin -- Whistler accepted a commission from a London art gallery to produce twelve etchings of Venetian scenes over the course of three months. Captivated by the city's loveliness and obsessed with the technical details of his craft, Whistler remained in Venice for more than a year. He returned to London with a hundred pastels and a handful of oil paintings. The fifty etchings he produced, Whistler declared, "are far more beautiful in subject and more important in interest than any" he had yet created.
3. SIFGFI_141105_057.JPG: Making the Venice Etchings Although Whistler had achieved his earliest critical success as an etcher, it was only during his time in Venice that he developed a truly experimental approach that enabled him to create aesthetic effects comparable to the painted Nocturnes of the 1870s. Utilizing a radically attenuated, skeletal line, he enveloped selected areas of the composition in films of plate tone, using ink left on the etching plate to suggest color, light, and atmosphere. He discovered his subjects while strolling on foot or floating in a gondola, and he drew the initial composition onto the plate seated before his chosen motif. Later, he refined and varied each image, sometimes returning months or even years later to make subtle linear changes that resulted in a new "state." Whistler often combined the distinct processes of etching and drypoint on a single copper plate. For etching, he covered the plate with a waxy black coating, or ground, and drew on it with sharpened dentist tools. Generally, the plate is then placed in an acid bath that "bites" into the copper where the ground has been removed. Whistler, however, poured the acid directly from a bottle onto his design. He used a feather to move the acid over the plate, "coaxing" out the lines and achieving different degrees of depth and tonal variations within a single line. Then, he cleaned off the ground and often added drypoint by drawing directly on the copper plate. Drypoint creates a velvety fragile line that Whistler frequently used to add details or texture in darkly shadowed areas. He then inked the cleaned plate and selectively wiped it to vary the amount of plate tone. Dampened paper was placed on the plate and run through a printing press, producing a mirror image of the composition. Consequently, Whistler's views, drawn on site, appear in reverse when printed. Unlike many graphic artists, Whistler undertook every aspect of the printing process himself. After printing, he trimmed the paper to the plate line, leaving a tiny tab that he inscribed with his signature butterfly and imp to indicate he had printed the work. These qualities enthralled Freer in 1887, but when Whistler first exhibited these prints seven years earlier, one critic characterized them as "another crop of Mr. Whistler's little jokes."
4. SIFGFI_141105_061.JPG: A Crane Style of Ogata Kōrin Edo period, 19th century Japan Ink and color on paper F1887.1 Nearly from the beginning of his career as a connoisseur-collector, Freer cultivated the habit of cross-cultural comparison and juxtapositions. These objects are among the earliest Japanese works to enter Freer's collection. He purchased the fan from a New York dealer in the winter of 1887. Later that same year he acquired the Second Venice Set of prints by Whistler. In 1892 he bought his first Asian ceramics, including this Satsuma ware bottle. Freer said its underglaze design reminded him of a "Whistlerian landscape." The decoration's spare composition, textured surface, and delicate linearity echo similar formal qualities in Whistler's prints.
5. SIFGFI_141105_070.JPG: Fine Impressions: Whistler, Freer, and Venice
6. SIFGFI_141105_092.JPG: Marketing the Venice Etchings Whistler first presented his Venetian subjects in a series of highly theatrical solo exhibitions staged in London between 1880 and 1883. The most influential was Arrangement in White and Yellow, which opened at the Fine Arts Society in the winter of 1883 and subsequently traveled to six cities in the United States, including New York and Detroit, Freer's hometown. It featured fifty-one recent etchings displayed in an artist-designed setting that was as noteworthy and original as the works on display. The prints were enclosed in plain white frames and hung against white felt walls accented with stenciled citron-yellow designs of lines and butterflies. Yellow draperies and furnishings and choice bits of Asian pottery carried the theme into ambient space. Whistler even devised a yellow and white uniform for a roving gallery attendant, who sold the specially designed brown-covered catalogue. When the show travelled to the United States the following fall, the American press heralded it as "startlingly novel" and "the most important exhibition of [Whistler's] work yet seen." Freer's future colleague Howard Mansfield was among the most enthusiastic visitors to the exhibition. By the time he met Freer three years later, Mansfield owned more than three hundred works on paper by Whistler. In 1886 the London firm of Dowdeswell and Dowdeswell contracted with Whistler to publish A Set of Twenty-Six Etchings, a selection of Venice subjects culled from Arrangement in White and Yellow. Buoyed by the favorable reception of his work, Whistler and his publishers energetically marketed the Second Venice Set to dealers and collectors in the United States.
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