![1879, James McNeill Whistler, The Beggars - Winter [chalk and pastel] -- National Museum of Asian Art (Washington) | by R.M.Lenox](http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53359449682_c771ca09e9.jpg)
1879, James McNeill Whistler, The Beggars - Winter [chalk and pastel] -- National Museum of Asian Art (Washington)
From the museum label: Described by a newspaper journalist as "a sketch in which the smallest colouring relieves the black and grey," this drawing may have served as a study for an etching of the same subject. Beggars lurk in a shadowy passageway leading into a courtyard near the artist's Venetian lodgings. Here, Whistler identified neither the actual location nor the models, altering the figures several times as he worked through seventeen states of the related etching, The Beggars. By the seventeenth state, the adult figure at right had become an old woman.
Link to other paintings from the exhibition Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change.
Link to other Whistler paintings.
1879, James McNeill Whistler, The Beggars - Winter [chalk and pastel] -- National Museum of Asian Art (Washington)
From the museum label: Described by a newspaper journalist as "a sketch in which the smallest colouring relieves the black and grey," this drawing may have served as a study for an etching of the same subject. Beggars lurk in a shadowy passageway leading into a courtyard near the artist's Venetian lodgings. Here, Whistler identified neither the actual location nor the models, altering the figures several times as he worked through seventeen states of the related etching, The Beggars. By the seventeenth state, the adult figure at right had become an old woman.
Link to other paintings from the exhibition Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change.
Link to other Whistler paintings.