UNIVERSITY of GLASGOW

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Portrait sketches including F.R. Leyland and Whistler

Impression: Hunterian Art Gallery
Hunterian Art Gallery
(50327)
Number: 122
Date: 1874/1875
Medium: drypoint
Size: 305 x 178 mm
Signed: no
Inscribed: no
Set/Publication: 'Cancelled Plates', 1879
No. of States: 1
Known impressions: 17
Catalogues: K.101; M.102
Impressions taken from this plate  (17)

PUBLICATION

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

EXHIBITIONS

It was not exhibited in Whistler's lifetime. An impression was, however, shown at the Whistler Memorial exhibition in London in 1905. 4

4: London Mem. 1905 (cat. no. 388).

SALES & COLLECTORS

Surviving impressions are almost all from, or still in, albums of cancelled impressions. For instance, the British Museum bought an album in 1887 (), and Charles Lang Freer (1856-1919), bought a set in 1893 ().
Early owners included George Aloysius Lucas (1824-1909) (). Thomas Glen Arthur (1858-1907) acquired a set in 1887 () which later went to Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Boston Public Library also acquired a set (). Finally, a set acquired by J. Littauer, Munich was sold to the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1896 ().
Prices were low but collectors and collections were keen to have the set of cancelled etchings, as a record of a substantial number of otherwise unrecorded etchings and drypoints. A set, probably acquired from the Fine Art Society by Alphonse Wyatt Thibaudeau (ca 1840- d.1892), was auctioned in 1889 and bought by the London print dealer Robert Dunthorne (b. ca 1851) for £0.6.0. 5 Dunthorne exchanged it for other works with Rosalind Birnie Philip (1873-1958) who bequeathed it to the University of Glasgow (see ). She acquired another set, trimmed the impressions and stuck them on the envelopes containing the copper plates (i.e. ).

5: Sotheby's, London, 13 December 1889 (lot 787 or 789).