Subject
A very early plate by Whistler. As has often been recounted, the twenty-one year old Whistler had been a largely unproductive but notably bohemian art student in Paris since 1855. In January 1858 he collapsed in the street and, unrecognised and un-missed by his friends, was taken to the public hospital. By a lucky coincidence his brother-in-law, the surgeon Francis Seymour Haden, was also in Paris on business and sought his relative out and demanded that Whistler return to London with him in order to rebuild his health. It was during this convalescence (in February and March 1858) that Whistler began to investigate the relationship between etching and photography. Five of his earliest plates were portraits of his nieces and nephews and this image is the second of his two depictions of Annie Haden, then aged nine. The composition translates the conventions and scale of carte de visite photography into etching, a format which was then at the peak of its intense but short-lived popularity amongst fashionable London society.
At this time Whistler and Haden were collaborating very closely on their etchings and it is probable that both men had input into the plate. According to the Glasgow online catalogue raisonné, “At some time in the late 1870s Whistler wrote on an impression of the final state, 'Legs not by me - the impertinent work of another -'”
History
Purchased online at auction from Jeffrey F. Evans and Associates, Mt. Crawford, Virginia, US on 26 April 2025
