UNIVERSITY of GLASGOW

cancelled plate, landscape, man, rain, river, weather.

The original title included the name of the figure in the scene, but the majority of published and unpublished titles concentrated on the weather:


'The Storm - (Ridley)' (1870s, Whistler). 1
'The Storm' (1874, Whistler). 2
'The Storm' (1874, Ralph Thomas, Jr (1840-1876)). 3
'The storm' (1875, Whistler). 4
'The Storm (Ridley)' (1881, Union League Club). 5


'The Storm' is the title published by Whistler and generally accepted. 'Ridley' was probably added by Whistler as a piece of personal information for the buyer of the drypoint, Samuel Putnam Avery (1822-1904), and was not the full title.

Near the bottom left corner, a man, in profile to right, walks bent over and holding onto his hat against the force of the wind. A few grasses and bushes are seen on each bank of the river behind him, which is drawn parallel to the bottom of the plate. The sky is cloudy, with masses of diagonal lines suggesting pouring rain.

Matthew White Ridley (1837-1888). Whistler wrote 'The Storm - (Ridley)' on one impression (), probably in the early 1870s, and this impression was shown in New York in 1881 under that title - 'The Storm (Ridley)'. 6

The site is probably in the Thames valley, near Sunbury-on-Thames, where Whistler also etched The Camp [80] and Landscape with Fisherman [85].

The effect of driving rain, achieved with dozens of closely-massed diagonal drypoint lines, is comparable to effects obtained by Rembrandt Harmens van Rijn (1617-1681) in such major etchings as The Three Crosses. The composition and format, 'a low horizontal band beneath a big sky' is also Rembrandtesque, as pointed out by Fine. 7 A similar interaction between figure, landscape and weather is seen in Speke Shore [139].