Soupe à trois sous

James McNeill Whistler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The title of this print translates as soup for three pennies and indicates that the men shown sit in a cheap café or bar (notes left by Whistler suggest it is the Café des Pieds-Humides ('Café of the Wet Feet') in Paris). Soon after making this etching, Whistler moved to London, took lodgings south of Tower Bridge, then recorded a similar scene in an etching titled "Longshore Men"). Black bottles on the tables here, near men who slouch or sleep, evoke the addictive properties of alcohol and the signature, etched at upper center on an otherwise unadorned wall, reads like a fragment of graphiti.

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