The Embroidered Curtain

James McNeill Whistler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Whistler and his new wife Beatrice traveled to Amsterdam in late August 1889, intending a brief stay, but remained for two months. Seventeenth-century buildings on the Palmgracht, near the couple’s hotel, are here used to create a moody, densely patterned image that recalls the artist’s finest Venetian etchings and pays tribute to Rembrandt. The curtain mentioned in the title was likely made of lace, but the artist used the word "embroidered" to call attention to his fascination with decorative patterning, supported here by the framework of the architecture. Women and children who stand in doorways and on the sidewalk by the canal melt into their surrounds.

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