The Fish Shop, Busy Chelsea (Fish Shop, Chelsea)

James McNeill Whistler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

After returning to London from Venice, Whistler made a number of prints devoted to the shop fronts of small vendors operating in old buildings. Here, the windows, awnings, and piled counters of Elizabeth Maunder’s fish shop on Cheyne Walk, near the artist’s Chelsea residence, are used to develop an abstracted pattern of lights and darks. Supported by the architecture, the horizontal arrangement is punctuated by pedestrians and shop assistants, some standing within shadowed doorways, others on the brightly lit sidewalk.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art