Provenance

• 1892: possibly bought from Whistler on 10 November 1892 by Alexander Reid (1854-1928) , Glasgow art dealer;
• 1893: in April Whistler borrowed it and returned it to an unspecified owner.
• By 1901: owned by James Carfrae Alston (1835-1913) , Glasgow;
• 1903: with William Stephen Marchant (1868-1925) , London art dealer;
• 1905: bought from Marchant by Charles Lang Freer (1856-1919) in February 1905;
• 1919: bequeathed to the Freer Gallery of Art.

See MacDonald 1995 (cat. rais.) [more] (cat. no. 1291).

Exhibitions

• 1895: A Collection of Paintings representing The Glasgow School, Artists of Denmark and Some Others, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1895 (cat. no. 164) as 'The Shell'.
• 1901: International Exhibition, Glasgow Art Galleries, Glasgow, 1901 (cat. no. 1074) as 'The Shell'.
• 1905: Œuvres de James McNeill Whistler, Palais de l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1905 (cat. no. 148) as 'The Shell'.

On 30 November 1895, Lucy Monroe in The Critic commented that Whistler had 'sent three pastels, delicate and exquisite in colour – suggestions, dreams, flashes of light from the wings of the butterfly as it flits by.'

Whistler intended to exhibit this at the Salon in 1892 but changed his mind, saying 'the pastels would have been too little - and at the same time too much by themselves!'. 1

By the terms of Freer's will, this work cannot be lent to another venue.