Square House, Amsterdam

These diaphanous etchings of dwellings show Whistler’s tendency to avoid the great architectural monuments normally shown in city views, and demonstrate a rather similar approach to portraying houses from two different European contexts. In The Balcony, from Whistler’s Venice etchings, he uses the symmetricality and flatness of the palazzo façade as a stage for the elegantly dressed woman in the doorway, a figure he reworked more than a dozen times. Toward the end of the same decade, Square House, Amsterdam finds Whistler applying much the same technique to a depiction of a house in the so-called “Venice of the North.” However, in lieu of the classicizing symmetry seen in the Venetian house, Whistler is taken by the irregular grid of the Dutch house façade; this ultimately offers a different sort of balance. Common to both, however, is the proximity of the canal below, which not only reflects the facades, extending the verticality of each, but also removes any semblance of architectonic support, causing these buildings of brick, stone, and wood to float in the air. Despite Whistler’s modernist sensibility of rendering the materiality of the city immaterial, certain aspects of his drawing technique may have been influenced by his study of preliminary drawings and etchings of Venice by his great vedutisti forebears, Canaletto and Guardi, an awareness hardly surprising in such an avid student of etching.

(Andrew C. Weislogel, “Mirror of the City: The Printed View in Italy and Beyond, 1450–1940,” catalogue accompanying an exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, curated by Andrew C. Weislogel and Stuart M. Blumin, and presented at the Johnson Museum August 11–December 23, 2012)