UNIVERSITY of GLASGOW

The Silk Dress

Impression: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
(1949.5.539)
Number: 151
Date: 1875
Medium: etching and drypoint
Size: 209 x 134 mm
Signed: no
Inscribed: no
Set/Publication: 'Cancelled Plates', 1879
No. of States: 2
Known impressions: 18
Catalogues: K.107; M.115
Impressions taken from this plate  (18)

PUBLICATION

It was published in an album of Cancelled Plates ('Cancelled Set') by The Fine Art Society, London, 1879.

EXHIBITIONS

The Silk Dress was not exhibited in Whistler's lifetime. One impression was lent by John Charles Sigismund Day (1826-1908) to the Whistler Memorial Exhibition in London in 1905. 5

5: London Mem. 1905 (cat. no. 382).

SALES & COLLECTORS

Mortimer Luddington Menpes (1860-1938) owned an impression (Graphic with a link to impression #K1070102), which was sold through Obach & Co. to Charles Lang Freer (1856-1919) in 1903. Freer had already bought a cancelled set including this etching (Graphic with a link to impression #K1070302) from Knoedler & Co. ten years earlier, in 1893.
George Aloysius Lucas (1824-1909) bought a cancelled set, now in Baltimore Museum of Art (Graphic with a link to impression #K1070305); the British Museum bought a set in 1887 and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, bought a set from J. Littauer (fl. 1896), Munich, in 1896 (Graphic with a link to impression #K1070308). Rosalind Birnie Philip (1873-1958) owned two cancelled impressions, (Graphic with a link to impression #K1070303), one which was stuck on the envelope containing the copper plate, and another (Graphic with a link to impression #K1070304), both of which she gave to the University of Glasgow.
Later collectors included William McNeill Whistler (1836-1900), who owned an early impression that was later acquired by Lessing Julius Rosenwald (1891-1971) and given to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (Graphic with a link to impression #K1070202).