Details

Object type

pastel

Title

A Side Canal, Venice

Artist/Maker

James McNeill Whistler artist

Culture/School

Aestheticism

Place Associated

Europe, Italy, Venice, Ponte delle Turchette (place depicted); Europe, Italy, Venice, Ponte de le Romite (place made)

Date

1879/1880

Materials

chalk and pastel on brown paper

Dimensions

overall: 631 mm x 479 mm x 27 mm; overall: 286 mm x 194 mm

Description

View of the Ponte delle Turchette in Venice around which Whistler drew a number of his early Venice pastels. Figures cross the bridge while a barge passes underneath. Further figures stand in a doorway to the left. Sheets are hung out to dry between the houses in the narrow street at the centre of the composition. The facades of the houses are treated almost as a decorative pattern, with colour picked out in shutters, windows and frames. Unlike other artists of his day, Whistler was less drawn to the obvious tourist landmarks of Venice and preferred the quiet back alleys and canals.

The Athenaeum described it as ‘very strong indeed, and shows the effect of deep rosy light, like the flash of sunset, on the buildings’. The Standard wrote: ‘only a most skilled use of the Pastels could have enabled Mr Whistler to place equally on his paper the solidity of the houses […] and the indefinite reflections of those houses in the sluggish yet still moving water of the side canal. For the first, the touch of the Pastel must be decisive and sharp; for the second, it must seem indeterminate and hazy’. The Spectator too was complimentary, describing it as ‘a typical Venetian scene – bridge, canal, and old houses – is in every way beautiful, strongly drawn, and fresh as possible in its impression of the scene, and giving, above all, to its few inches of brown paper, a size, a solidity, and a vitality impossible to express in words.’ However, Whistler’s friend, the architect and designer E. W. Godwin criticised the perspective of the bridge and the coverage of the paper, saying: ‘the paper tone not playing here such an important part of the concert of colour as in many others’. It does look like Whistler changed his mind about the position of the bridge.

The pastel was exhibited at the Fine Art Society in London in 1881 as The Bridge; flesh colour and brown. It was acquired by Louis Huth by 1886 and was possibly the work lent by him to the Grosvenor Gallery’s first pastel exhibition in 1888 as Venice (no. 84), although it may have been Fishing Boats (1880; Cincinnati Art Museum). Morley Roberts reviewing the exhibition in the Glasgow Boys’ short-lived journal, The Scottish Art Review, held Whistler up as an example of an artist who understood the medium: ‘It is a pleasure to note that the instinct of this artist, who has done good work in most mediums, has led him as correctly in pastel, as it has done in etching, in oil, and in watercolour, if indeed we except some eccentricities’. He wrote of Whistler’s ‘studies of Venice’ that some ‘are subtle, and will repay study, while others are trivial’ (‘The Pastels at the Grosvenor’, The Scottish Art Review, vol. 1, no. 7, December 1888, pp. 178-80). This exhibition which included more than 300 pastels from Britain and Europe, many from France, was influential for the Glasgow Boys who were encouraged to experiment with the medium in 1888-1891 influenced by Whistler and Edgar Degas.

This pastel descended to Huth’s widow, later Mrs Howe, and was sold at her death at Christie’s, London on 24 April 1925 (lot 97), when it was bought by David Croal Thomson for 580 guineas. He sold it on 28 May 1925 to William Burrell for £675. Burrell had bought a number of important oil paintings in the 1890s but had sold them in the early 1900s, capitalising on rising prices. He bought another Whistler pastel, The Dancing Girl, in 1937.

Credit Line/Donor

Gifted by Sir William and Lady Burrell to the City of Glasgow, 1944

Collection

Burrell Collection: Pictures [Oils, Pastels and Watercolours]

ID Number

35.644

Location

Burrell Collection