Composition

This is a sketch of Landscape with Horses [45], an etching and drypoint dating from 1859: the print is fairly rare and Whistler did not have the copper plate nor a single impression of it. Some impressions were probably owned by members of his family (in fact one of these came from Joseph Whistler Revillon (1886-1955) to the Whistler collection in the Hunterian, University of Glasgow), two were in the British Museum, and several in private collections. 1

Technique

Whistler's very summary sketch may have been drawn from memory, and was not particularly accurate. It omits the foreground figure, a second horse, and the other buildings and trees in the distance.