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Watercolor of reclining woman with book on brown background

A light-skinned woman in a long-sleeved black dress reclines in a white hammock. She is in profile facing right. She holds an open book in her left hand. Her cheeks are flushed, and her lips are parted with a slight smile. The space around the woman and hammock is a medium gray-brown. Whistler’s round, dark brown “butterfly” signature is painted near the top left. The features of the woman and her surroundings are presented in suggestive washes of color rather than detailed lines.

Identification and Creation

Object Number
1943.330
People
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, American (Lowell, MA 1834 - 1903 London, England)
Title
Maud Reading, in a Hammock
Classification
Drawings
Work Type
drawing
Date
1880
Culture
American
Persistent Link
https://hvrd.art/o/307971

Physical Descriptions

Medium
Watercolor on off-white Japanese paper
Dimensions
13.7 × 22.9 cm (5 3/8 × 9 in.)
frame: 32.1 × 41.9 × 1.4 cm (12 5/8 × 16 1/2 × 9/16 in.)
Inscriptions and Marks
  • Signed: Brown watercolor, u.c.: butterfly monogram
  • inscription: verso, black ink: Presented to George E. Hopkins / by J. McNeill Whistler / Venice July 11th 1880
  • label: mount, paper: [printed:] K & Co / Kennedy & Co. / 613 5th Ave / Rare Prints / [handwritten:] Maud Reading in a / Hammock / Original drawing by Whistler
  • label: mount, paper: [white label with red borders:] 292-C / I / Henderson
  • label: mount, paper: 14
  • label: in envelope attached to back of mount, cardboard, painted: "Maud" / J. McNeill Whistler

Provenance

Recorded Ownership History
Gift of the artist to George E. Hopkins, 1880; A. Buck, by 1905; G.H. Buck, by 1905; Kennedy Galleries; Hunt Henderson, New Orleans; his bequest to Tulane University, 1939; its sale to Grenville L. Winthrop, April 1941; his bequest to the Fogg Art Museum, 1943.

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop
Accession Year
1943
Object Number
1943.330
Division
European and American Art
Contact
am_europeanamerican@harvard.edu
Permissions

THIS WORK MAY NOT BE LENT BY THE TERMS OF ITS ACQUISITION TO THE HARVARD ART MUSEUMS.

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Publication History

  • New Gallery, Memorial Exhibition of the Works of the Late J. McNeill Whistler, exh. cat. (London, England, 1905), pp. 121-122, cat. no. 120
  • Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, J. B. Lippincott/W. Heinemann (Philadelphia, PA and London, England, 1908), p. 29, bottom
  • Gustave Kobbe, "American Water Color Painters", Mentor (May 15, 1917), vol. 5, no. 7, pp. 1-11, p. 2, ill.
  • Dorothy W. Gillerman, ed., Grenville L. Winthrop: Retrospective for a Collector, exh. cat., Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, 1969), p. 243
  • Marjorie B. Cohn, Wash and Gouache: A Study of the Development of the Materials of Watercolor, exh. cat., Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, 1977), p. 14, cat. no. 64 p.110
  • David Park Curry, James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art, exh. cat., Freer Gallery of Art / W.W. Norton & Co. (New York and Washington, DC, 1984), p. 198, fig. 128.2
  • Margaret F. MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler: Drawings, Pastels and Watercolours: A Catalogue Raisonné, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT and London, England, 1995), pp. 288 - 290, no. 780, reproduced
  • Margaret F. MacDonald, Palaces in the Night: Whistler in Venice, exh. cat., Lund Humphries (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, 2001), p. 153
  • Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Virginia Anderson, and Kimberly Orcutt, ed., American Paintings at Harvard, Volume Two, Paintings, Drawings, Pastels and Stained Glass by Artists Born 1826-1856, Harvard Art Museums and Yale University Press (U.S.) (Cambridge, MA and New Haven, CT, 2008), p. 420-421, cat. no. 447, reproduced in color
  • Murray Whyte, "A Century of Watercolors at Harvard Display the Form's Unruly Pleasures", Boston Globe (Boston, July 2, 2023), p. N4, repr.
  • Joachim Homann, Margaret Morgan Grasselli, and Miriam Stewart, ed., American Watercolors, 1880–1990: Into the Light, exh. cat., Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, 2023), pp. 17, 74, repr. as pl. 5 on p. 74

Exhibition History

Verification Level

This record has been reviewed by the curatorial staff but may be incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. For more information please contact the Division of European and American Art at am_europeanamerican@harvard.edu