Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in unused condition. Two volumes in excellent condition. No dustcovers. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> ANDREW MCLAREN YOUNG the first Richmond Professor of Fine Art in the University of Glasgow died suddenly in 1975. He began this catalogue; we have brought it to completion as a fulfillment of his life’s work. On behalf of his colleagues and students we dedicate it to his memory. Although this is the first comprehensive catalogue of Whistler’s painting the usefulness of making one was seen in his lifetime. His friend the publisher William Heinemann was anxious to see him properly memorialized and in the course of years of badgering’ proposed W. E. Henley as author. Whistler objected to the choice but in 1900 he agreed to cooperate with Joseph Pennell an illustrator and printmaker from Philadelphia and with his wife Elizabeth Robins. The Pennells had met Whistler in London in 1884. Thereafter they studied him and with never- diminished admiration they recorded all that passed at their meetings. Their biography was published by Heinemann in 1908 five years after Whistler’s death and it has been the foundation of all subsequent studies. Yet the Pennells knew that Boswellizing was not enough in itself. Their original intention had been ‘to publish one volume of biography and one dealing with Whistler’s work which naturally could not be complete if it did not include a catalogue’. That the latter component of their intention came to nothing must have been due in part to a recognition that little information could be gained from Whistler himself because of ‘the difficulties of dates to which he was so indifferent and of identification of pictures whose titles he so capriciously changed”. And if Whistler felt in the end that the Pennells were too patently trying to make an Old Master of him before his time’ there was also an element of defensiveness behind Whistler’s display of im- patience with details. As readers of this catalogue will discover there are passages in the histories of some of his pictures which he hardly would have wished to bring out of the twilight. (OS)