Provenance

• Unknown.

Exhibitions

• 1885: The sixty-second Annual Exhibition, Society of British Artists, London, 1885 (cat. no. 234) as 'Note in Grey, Holland'.
• 1887: possibly Exposition Internationale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 1887 (cat. no. 202) as 'Note Grise: Hollande'.

It was priced £31.10.0 in the SBA catalogue.

In the review of Whistler's work at the SBA published in Truth in 1885, which was probably written by Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), Whistler's two seascapes were described favourably:

'two little oil paintings of yellow seas are also full of brilliant colour, brilliant by means of being very calm and truthful. They are entirely personal in their selection and composition. They have a marvellous luminous quality, unknown in the usual studio landscape ... Devoid of all palpable evidence of labour, the drawing of these pictures speaks of the masterly precision of the hand trained to trace its lines irrevocably on copper.' 1