This exhibition is now in our archive.
This second exhibition of the Fitzwilliam’s collection of etchings, drypoints and lithographs, by the American artist James McNeill Whistler, is devoted to the cityscapes for which he is most celebrated as a printmaker.
Exhibits range from the early French set of the 1850s to the late etchings of Brussels and Amsterdam. Whistler’s move from crisp realism to atmospheric impressionism is wonderfully demonstrated by his etchings of London and the Thames, which by the late 1870s approach the poetry of his Venetian views:
When the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil ... and the tall chimneys become campanile - and the warehouses are palaces in the night.
