Letter to William Heinemann with corrections for Eden versus Whistler: The Baronet and the Butterfly. A Valentine with a Verdict

1898·Pen and brownish black ink, with graphite, on cream laid paper and etching in blue (recto); pen and brownish black ink and graphite on cream laid paper (verso)·27.2 × 21.5 cm (10 3/4 × 8 1/2 in.)

Whistler disseminated ideas about art in his “Ten O’Clock” lecture and the pamphlets that recorded it as well as The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, a compendium of his newspaper correspondence issued in book form in 1890. Eight years later he enlisted William Heinemann, publisher of the Gentle Art, to produce a booklet to broadcast—and immortalize—the favorable outcome of Whistler’s legal case against Sir William Eden, which vindicated his position that artists had the right to control their own work. Whistler’s scrawled corrections on this sheet of stationery from a Paris hotel are related to that publication.

Catalogue

Year: 1898
Medium: Pen and brownish black ink, with graphite, on cream laid paper and etching in blue (recto); pen and brownish black ink and graphite on cream laid paper (verso)
Dimensions: 27.2 × 21.5 cm (10 3/4 × 8 1/2 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: James McNeill Whistler

Artist

James McNeill Whistler

Painting

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American painter in oils and watercolor, and printmaker, active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom. He eschewed sentimentality and moral allusion in painting and was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake".

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

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