Acquisitions

Whistler's The Kitchen

An exceptionally fine early impression of a Whistler etching has come into the collection through the generosity of the friends and family of Mary Salisbury Becker (class of 1947). Family members worked with the museum staff to establish a memorial fund and then to select a print that would be purchased with the funds contributed. We decided to focus our search on the work of James McNeill Whistler, considered to be the greatest American graphic artist. A small number of desirable prints were available, none more exquisite than The Kitchen. It is fortuitous that the Becker family expressed a strong interest in devoting the Memorial Fund toward the purchase of this particular print, since it represents the artist's early realist phase and thus complements effectively the museum's existing holdings of Whistler prints.

The Kitchen reflects Whistler's interest in 17th-century Dutch art, which was instilled in him by his most important mentor, Seymour Hayden, and then rekindled in 1858 by the publication of Thoré-Bürger's Musées de la Hollande: Amsterdam et La Haye. A few months after its appearance, Thoré-Bürger published an excerpt from his forthcoming book on Rembrandt in a widely read journal. About Night Watch he exclaimed, "it is amazing this picture, the most fantastic ever painted, beyond compare, is also the most realistic." Twenty-two-year-old Whistler determined to see Night Watch and investigate its realism for himself. He undertook a pilgrimage to Amsterdam where he would see paintings by Rembrandt and all the great Dutch masters. He planned his route through Alsace and up the Rhine River, etching a number of plates along the way and making several sketches that would be used later as the basis for etched compositions. Subjects included rural landscapes, dilapidated farmyards, and domestic interiors.

A few miles east of Maladrie, Whistler and his traveling companion, Ernest Delanoy, stopped at Lutzelbourg where they stayed for a few days. While there, Whistler produced a sketch and a more developed watercolor (both now in the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution) that would serve as the basis for The Kitchen, the most important of four etchings he produced after his return from Amsterdam and one of two that include a figure silhouetted against a window.

The subject and compositional structure recall in particular the work of Dutch artist Pieter de Hooch. Whistler must have admired the underlying geometry of de Hooch's picture space and the devices he employed to carry the eye into the depth of the picture plane and into narrow recesses such as the carefully defined space at the middle left of The Kitchen. The use of strong chiaroscuro, particularly to frame a light area by a dark one, also recalls de Hooch, as does the stillness and timelessness of this humble domestic scene.

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