Hooded Male Head (from Sketches on The Coast Survey Plate)

Hooded Male Head (from Sketches on The Coast Survey Plate)

James McNeill Whistler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Whistler made his first etchings while employed as a draftsman at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington, D.C., between 1854 and 1855. A staff member taught him the technique and supplied him with a copper plate, on which he etched topographic renderings of coastlines, then sketched freely drawing figures. This fragment represents a Spanish hidalgo, or minor nobleman, and likely was intended as a self-portrait. It was trimmed from a printed proof and given to given to Thomas Winans, a friend in Baltimore who financed Whistler's move to Paris in 1855, allowing him to pursue an artistic career. Winans mounted the fragment in an album of Whistler's early work that his descendants gave to the Museum.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hooded Male Head (from Sketches on The Coast Survey Plate)Hooded Male Head (from Sketches on The Coast Survey Plate)Hooded Male Head (from Sketches on The Coast Survey Plate)Hooded Male Head (from Sketches on The Coast Survey Plate)Hooded Male Head (from Sketches on The Coast Survey Plate)

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.