Nocturne: Dance House

James McNeill Whistler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Densely etched and deeply inked, this work is among Whistler’s finest late etchings. The illuminated windows belong to a tenement that backs onto the Zeedijk canal in Amsterdam’s red-light district. As in his Venetian twilight subjects from the previous decade, Whistler focused on a confluence of water, crumbling architecture, and reflected light but here heightened the darkness and sense of abstraction. In 1890, the artist’s "Amsterdam Set" was exhibited by the dealer Robert Dunthorne in London, then in New York at the Grolier Club.

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