Grey and Silver–Liverpool

1. Glazer, Jacobson, McCarthy, Roeder, wall label, 2019:
This misty, monochromatic landscape is the first Whistler watercolor purchased by museum founder Charles Lang Freer. He perceived similarities with Whistler etchings that were already in his collection. Freer did not actually meet Whistler until he dropped by the artist's London studio in 1890. That encounter launched a thirteen year friendship based on mutual esteem and their shared ambition to secure a home for Whistler's art in the United States.

2. Lee Glazer, 2018:
Title Change: Grey and Silver–Liverpool is the title in the original receipt from Wunderlich to Freer upon purchase, as well as all exhibition inscriptions prior to its bequest to the Freer Gallery of Art in 1919, and original correspondences between Freer, Wunderlich, and Whistler. Grey and Silver–Liverpool is also its title in MacDonald's catalogue raisonné. It was first titled Grey and Silver. The Mersey in the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo; Burns A. Stubbs and David Curry subsequently published the work as Grey and Silver–The Mersey.

3. Lee Glazer, 2016:
Charles Freer acquired this watercolor on April 6, 1889 for $265 after seeing it at the 1889 presentation of "Notes-Harmonies-Nocturnes" at the Wunderlich Gallery in NY, and it was among the works listed by Herman Wunderlich in a letter to Whistler documenting sales from the exhibition. This was the first singular work by the artist to enter Freer's collection, and, as David Curry has noted, bears a close relationship to several etchings already purchased between 1887 and 1889. In 1892, Freer, who was eagerly awaiting the shipment of a group of color lithographs and more etchings of Venice, expressed in a letter to Beatrice Whistler, the artist's wife, an interest in acquiring another watercolor soon: "Is Mr Whistler doing any work in pastel this spring? I must have another some day to hang beside the extraordinary one I brought home with me two years ago - It is what we Americans call "great" - Also some day, I hope to have another water color - a companion for the Liverpool from the Wunderlich Exhibition - possibly I might be favored with a springtime landscape, showing the first flush and delicate tones of early spring, the new life, a resurrection thought you know - or perhaps this idea might be beautifully translated in a single figure in pastel - perhaps the same thought for each of the pictures, different of course in treatment as well as medium?" The request for a "springtime landscape" in watercolor morphed, over time, into the oil painting "Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Little Blue Girl."

This work has two titles: "Grey and Silver–The Mersey" and "Grey and Silver–Liverpool." The latter title, which appears in the Wunderlich catalogue as no. 11, is the one used by Margaret MacDonald in her 1995 catalogue raisonné; the former title, which was used in the Whistler memorial exhibitions of 1904 and 1905, seems to have been favored by Freer, and was published by Burns Stubbs in "Paintings, Pastels, Drawings, Prints....in the Freer Gallery of Art," Freer Gallery of Art Occasional Papers, Volume 1, no. 2, 1967, p. 18.

Margaret MacDonald (James McNeill Whistler: Drawings, Pastels and Watercolours. A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven: Yale, 1995), no. 913) dates the work to 1883–1885, and she suggests that it may have been exhibited at one or both of the Dowdeswell "Notes-Harmonies-Nocturnes" exhibitions of 1884 and 1886. The notation on the back ("No. 31y"/"No. 11y") is of the format typically used for works in those exhibitions, though the numbers don't always match the catalogue numbers. In this case, the watercolor was no. 11 in the 1889 Wunderlich show, but it does not appear as no. 31 in either of the London iterations of the exhibition. Neither of those catalogues include either of the titles connected to this work. Though there were several "Grey and Silver" watercolors on view, none can be definitively connected to F1889.3; the most likely match is "Grey Mist at Sea," no. 22 in the 1884 catalogue.