UNIVERSITY of GLASGOW

From Billingsgate

Impression: Freer Gallery of Art
Freer Gallery of Art
(1898.362)
Number: 165
Date: 1876/1877
Medium: drypoint
Size: 152 x 229 mm
Signed: butterfly at lower right (6-final)
Inscribed: no
Set/Publication: 'Cancelled Plates', 1879
No. of States: 8
Known impressions: 28
Catalogues: K.168; M.164; W.130
Impressions taken from this plate  (28)
Etching: PK168_01 (plate)
The copper plate is the same size as Pickle Herring Wharf [164] and close in size to several other Thames etchings, some much earlier (Thames Police [53], Longshore men [52], Black Lion Wharf [54]) and to both figurative and city-scape subjects of the 1870s (such as Speke Hall: The Avenue [101], Maud, Standing [169], The Little Forge, Liverpool [141], and Price's Candle Factory [166]).
The copper plate was cancelled with widely spaced crossed diagonal lines. The cancelled plate was probably among those bought at Whistler's bankruptcy sale by the Fine Art Society, London. It was published in an album of Cancelled Plates ('Cancelled Set') by The Fine Art Society, London, 1879.
The plate was probably among those acquired in exchange for lithographs from Robert Dunthorne (b. ca 1851) by Rosalind Birnie Philip (1873-1958). 8 The plate was given by Miss Philip to the University of Glasgow in 1935.

8: Note by R. Birnie Philip, inserted in the album, Hunterian Art Gallery.