Liverdun

Liverdun

James McNeill Whistler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Whistler visited Liverdun, a town on the Moselle, near the start of a summer Rhineland tour in 1858. He traveled by train between Nancy and Strasbourg, making sketches and a few etchings, including the present work. Here, old farm buildings frame a yard and establish what would become a favorite formal arrangement. Roofs and walls are punctuated with shadowed openings to create a play of lights and darks enlivened with the lightly etched forms of farm workers, ladders and a cart. A white cow walks out of the space at right, and broad expanses below and above suggest ground and sky. This composition was one included in "Douze eau-fortes d'apres Nature" (known as the "French Set"), the artist's first published work, issued in November 1858.


Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.