Provenance

• By 1902: Denman Waldo Ross (1853-1935), Cambridge, MA;
• 1909: given by Ross to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Dr Denman W. Ross was a collector, particularly of Oriental art, and lent the painting to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1902 and 1907, and to the Boston Whistler Memorial show in 1904, before giving it to the MFA on 26 August 1909. The Boston website comments:

'Although the early history of Street in Old Chelsea is unknown, by 1902 it had been acquired by Denman Waldo Ross, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, artist, teacher, and collector with wide-ranging tastes. ... Ross gave Street in Old Chelsea to the MFA in 1909, one of over 11,000 objects he would donate to the Museum.' 1

Exhibitions

• 1884: Possibly 'Notes' - 'Harmonies' - 'Nocturnes', Messrs Dowdeswell, London, 1884 (cat. no. 42) as 'Harmony in Yellow and Brown – Sunday'.
• 1904: Oil Paintings, Water Colors, Pastels and Drawings: Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Mr. J. McNeill Whistler, Copley Society, Boston, 1904 (cat. no. 72) as 'Street in Old Chelsea'.

Myers suggested that this was Chelsea: Yellow and Grey [YMSM 247], but that has been identified as Chelsea Shops: Yellow and Grey [YMSM 246]. 2

The Boston website comments on the 1905 exhibition:

'Denman Waldo Ross, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, artist, teacher, and collector with wide-ranging tastes ... entered the painting in the one hundredth annual exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1905, where a critic called it and Whistler’s eight other landscapes “the real gems of the centenary exhibition.” ' 3