WHISTLER REDISCOVERED

CAMPANILE AT LIDO - October 23, 1879

“What appears 'slight' is the evident outcome of much thought, the scribble has no scribbling in it, and the colour is often attained by interweaving other colours, and breaking it all in lovely though measured spray over the brown or grey field.” - Edward William Godwin

In the Spring of 1879, The Fine Art Society, London, offered James McNeil Whistler a commission to travel to Venice to produce a set of twelve etchings depicting the city. Financially bankrupt at the time, Whistler agreed and signed an agreement with the gallery on September 9, 1879.

On September 20th, Whistler arrived in Venice. Poverty stricken, he sought out the cheapest lodgings in the Sestieri of Dorsoduro and San Polo. The American artist Ross Turner recalled visiting Whistler on the Rio San Barnaba, where Whistler had a “small house with a garden,” though it is not clear if this was where Whistler first lived. Turner also remembered Whistler having a studio nearby in the Ca’ Rezzonico, an enormous and run-down studio building.

Whistler spent the first month “wandering the narrow streets of Venice, becoming acclimated to the unique environment of the lagoon city.” On at least one occasion he rode in a gondola to the Fondamenta Nove, located on Venice’s northern shore. On October 20, 1879, Maud Franklin joined Whistler in Venice.

Three days later, on October 23rd, 1879, Maud wrote to George Lucas in Paris: “We are just off to the Lido. Oh, isn’t this a lovely place and such a lovely day too.” Whistler and Maud made the day trip to the Lido by local waterbus. They disembarked at the landing located near the church of Santa Maria Elisabetta. From there, it is a short walk to the back of the Church of Santa Maria Elisabetta, where Whistler found a small square that backed onto the church and began his second inscribed extant Venetian pastel, Campanile at Lido. Whistler inscribed the Campanile at Lido, “No. 3.”

It is known Whistler left London with “a supply of small sheets of rough, toothy brown paper, excellent for pastels.” This suggests he was calculating producing pastels for an exhibition even before he left London. “At some point early on, Whistler must have begun to create pastels that he intended to sell” as he “undoubtedly saw his pastels as a business proposition.”

It is proposed that the reason Whistler began to inscribe pastels numerically is because he intended these works to be separate from his other pastels. By numbering a selection of them, he could keep a loose inventory of works he intended to include in future exhibitions. The first two important Venetian pastels he inscribed, The Cemetery (“No. 2”) and Campanile at Lido (“No. 3”), were not only the very first autonomous landscape pastels Whistler produced in Venice, but as importantly, the first he produced in his oeuvre to date. Until that point, the very few landscape pastels he did were color studies and not independent works of art. For the first time, in Venice “his pastels do not focus on figures but on scenes of Venice. When he returned to London and took up pastels again, the women return [as subjects]. ... After Venice, he created no more pastels of [landscape] scenes....”

Whistler continued to inscribe pastels numerically during his time in Venice. In all, he numbered a total of twenty-five pastels and included twenty-one of these in the 1881 exhibition of Venice Pastels at The Fine Art Society, including the first two extant inscribed pastels, The

Cemetery (“No. 2”) and Campanile at Lido (“No. 3”).15 The pastels Whistler inscribed are not always consecutive and he omitted or removed several possible inscription numbers at different intervals, as well as using the same number twice (as evidenced by “No. 11”).

Of the twenty-one inscribed pastels included in The Fine Art Society exhibition, all are in museum collections with the exception of The Giudecca - Winter; grey & blue (“No. 23”) and Campanile at Lido (“No. 3”). Further, of the entire group of fifty-three pastels included in the Venice Pastels exhibition, only eight are in private hands, including Campanile at Lido. Campanile at Lido has no history after The Fine Art Society exhibition of 1881 and had disappeared from view until it surfaced in 1980 in the London sale at Sotheby's. This one-hundred-year hiatus—plus the forty years since the Sotheby's sale—has meant the pastel has been sequestered for nearly a hundred and forty years. The third known Venetian pastel, Campanile at Lido is an important early Venetian work and one that Whistler found important enough to inscribe and keep safe between silver paper during his time in Venice.

Text by Michael Owen, Owen Gallery