The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler

Date

Street in Old Chelsea probably dates from 1884. ¹

Street in Old Chelsea, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

It is dated from the technique and butterfly signature.

Images

Subject

Titles

Several possible titles have been suggested:

• Possibly 'Harmony in Yellow and Brown – Sunday' (1884, Dowdeswell). ²
• 'Street in Old Chelsea' (1904, Copley Society, Boston). ³
• 'Street in Old Chelsea' (1980, YMSM). ⁴

Since the 1884 title is not certain, the descriptive title 'Street in Old Chelsea' is preferred.

Description

Street in Old Chelsea, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

A row of three storey houses, with shops on the ground floor, is seen across a wide street. In the foreground at right are several people sitting on a bench. A few people are on the distant pavement by the shops. The houses are all different sizes and shapes, the view dominated by a white-painted fish shop to left of centre.

Site

Maunder’s Fish Shop, Chelsea, 1890, lithograph, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 17.3.180

Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London. The scene includes Maunder's Fish Shop, and the shops of a tailor, a boot-maker, a chimney sweep, and a plumber. Whistler drew Maunder's in a lithograph, Maunder's Fish Shop, Chelsea c037, in 1890, and in two etchings (Fish-Shop, Chelsea [267] in 1886, and Little Maunder's [273] in 1887). Fish-Shop, Chelsea shows virtually the same scene as the oil, though, being a print, it is in reverse.

Mrs Elizabeth Maunder's fish-shop was at 72 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London. The building was demolished in 1892 (the lithograph shows a sign saying 'TO BE SOLD'). The medallion from the top of the gable-end is now in Chelsea Public Library. Whistler later lived in the house that replaced it, which was built by the architect Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942), and which was destroyed in World War 2.

Comments

Whistler's shop fronts are discussed in depth by Anna Robins, who comments on the grinding poverty of the area, where the inhabitants lived literally hand-to-mouth, trying to make ends meet, with the fish shop representing 'the take-away food culture of fried fish ... when they had enough money to supplement their staple diet of bread and dripping with a treat.' ⁵ In the oil painting and the etching of the same scene, children throng the street, peering into the shops, running errands, playing, living on the streets because their homes were horrendously over-crowded. ⁶

Technique

Technique

Street in Old Chelsea, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

It was painted in an almost calligraphic style, with a very small brush and with a minute attention to detail – comparable to Whistler's work in etching.

The Boston website describes the painting:

'Whistler used many shades of gray and brown, punctuated by reds, to render this London street scene, making Maunder’s fish market, with its facing gable and light color, a focal point. As in most of his images of building facades, he placed the shops fronts parallel to the picture plane. He painted the foreground thinly with smooth strokes, and he used tiny brushes to render an incredible amount of architectural detail in the upper half of the panel and to depict the figures in the foreground and on the sidewalk in front of the stores.' ⁷

Conservation History

The edges of the painting are abraded, either from the frame or Whistler's paint-box.

Frame

1884: the style and whereabouts of the original frame are unknown.

Street in Old Chelsea, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Grau-style frame dating from ca 1904. The profile is rather large for the picture, but the construction is similar to a Grau frame; it may have been taken from another work when the painting was sold, or after Whistler's death. ⁸

History

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.' ⁹

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 y247, but that has been identified as Chelsea Shops: Yellow and Grey y246. ¹⁰

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.” ' ¹¹

Bibliography

Catalogues Raisonnés

• Young, Andrew McLaren, Margaret F. MacDonald, Robin Spencer, and Hamish Miles, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, New Haven and London, 1980 (cat. no. 249), plate 166, as 'Street in Old Chelsea'.

Authored by Whistler

• None.

Catalogues 1855-1905

• Possibly 'Notes' - 'Harmonies' - 'Nocturnes', Messrs Dowdeswell, London, 1884 (cat. no. 42) as 'Harmony in Yellow and Brown – Sunday'.
• 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'.
• 100th Anniversary Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1905 (cat. no. 427) as 'A Street in Old Chelsea'.

Journals 1855-1905

• M. B., “Pennsylvania Academy Exhibition,” The Collector and Art Critic, vol. 3, no. 1, 15 February 1905, p. 8.

Monographs

• None.

Books on Whistler

• Petri, Grischka, Arrangement in Business: The Art Markets and the Career of James McNeill Whistler, Hildesheim, 2011, p. 377.
• Robins, Anna Gruetzner, A Fragile Modernism. Whistler and his Impressionist Followers, London and New Haven, 2007, p. 129.
• Taylor, Hilary, James McNeill Whistler, London, 1978, repr. pp. 163, repr. p. 164.

Books, General

• Hausberg, Margaret Dunwoody, The Prints of Theodore Roussel: A Catalogue Raisonné, Bronxville, New York, 1991.
• Hendy, Philip, CCCXXI Reproductions : Selected Oil and Tempera Paintings and Pastels, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1932, repr. p. 83.

Catalogues 1906-Present

COLLECTION:

• American Paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Greenwich, CT, 1969, vol. 1, p. 286.

EXHIBITION:

• Taynton, Carol (intro.), Whistler in New England Collections, [checklist], Boston, 1977 (no cat. number).
• Myers, Kenneth John, Mr. Whistler’s Gallery: Pictures at an 1884 Exhibition, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2003, pp. 19, 57, 86.

Journals 1906-Present

• M. B., “Pennsylvania Academy Exhibition,” The Collector and Art Critic 3, no. 1, 15 February 1905, p. 8.
• Anon., Boston Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, March 1903, p. 4.
• Anon., Boston Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, April 1907, p. 16.

Websites

• Comey, Janet L, "Street in Old Chelsea", Museum of Fine Arts website at http://www.mfa.org.
• Hausberg, Meg, and Victoria Sancho Lobis, Whistler and Roussel: Linked Visions, Art Institute of Chicago, 2015, URL at https://www.artic.edu.
• Margaret F. MacDonald, Grischka Petri, Meg Hausberg, and Joanna Meacock, James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings, a catalogue raisonné, University of Glasgow, 2012 (cat. no. 267) website at http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk.
• Photograph of the painting at the Library of Congress website at https://catalog.loc.gov.

Unpublished

• Revillon, Joseph Whistler, Draft Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings of J. McN. Whistler, [ca 1945-1955], Glasgow University Library (cat. no. 370).

Other

• None.