Millbank

James McNeill Whistler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sharply receding mooring posts and a high embankment at right direct our eye toward distant warehouses and a church in Lambeth, on the south bank of the Thames. This effect, together with the cropped form of a massive barge at lower left, and spatial leaps in the foreground, echo devices found in Japanese woodblock prints. Whistler selected this image to advertise an 1861 exhibition of his etchings held by the print dealer Edmund Thomas at 39 Old Bond Street. A decade later, Ellis & Green published it in A Series of Sixteen Etchings of Scenes on the Thames and Other Subjects (the "Thames Set").

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