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Exeter Street

Impression: Hunterian Art Gallery
Hunterian Art Gallery
(54892)
Number: 274
Date: 1887
Medium: etching
Size: 128 x 177 mm
Signed: butterfly at left
Inscribed: no
Set/Publication: no
No. of States: 2
Known impressions: 6
Catalogues: K.280; M.275
Impressions taken from this plate  (6)

KEYWORD

awning, children, fish shop, greengrocer, people, shop, street.

TITLE

It has always been known by the same title, as in the following examples:

'Exeter Street' (1888, Whistler). 2
'Exeter Street' (1902, Edward Guthrie Kennedy (1849-1932)). 3

2: Whistler to Wunderlich's, 29 June 1888, GUW #13052.

3: Kennedy 1902[more] (cat. no. 287).

DESCRIPTION

A view of the ground and lower part of the first-storey of a row of shops. At left is a shop with a bow window and an open door; then, to right, a closed wood-panelled door; and then an awning shading a large greengrocer's shop that has a wide open entrance into a dark interior. There are rectangular boxes and circular baskets of fruit and vegetables arranged on tables in front, on either side of the entrance. On the pavement in front is a little girl at left, then two older girls wearing bonnets and short skirts, and at far right, another toddler.

SITE

There are two Exeter Streets in London, one between the Strand and Covent Garden, and the other, a fairly new development in the mid-1880s, in Chelsea. In 1888, James Herbert Wilson, greengrocer, was at 33 Exeter Street, Chelsea, and Richard Gold, dairyman, at No. 35. This is almost certainly what appears in Whistler's etching.