1887, James McNeill Whistler, Courtyard -- National Museum of Asian Art (Washington)
From the museum label: Founded as an Augustinian priory in 1123, St. Bartholomew's numbered among the three oldest churches in London. A preservation society photographed its churchyard a decade before Whistler created his lithograph. Parts of the building occasionally served as commercial enterprises, including a blacksmith's shop and a printing shop. Whistler's image turned away from the church itself to capture the Cloth Fair's adjacent seventeenth-century buildings, where weavers and cloth merchants had been working for several centuries. Caught in shifting light and shadow, tilted tombstones convey the sense of time past and passing.
Link to other paintings from the exhibition Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change.
Link to other Whistler paintings.
1887, James McNeill Whistler, Courtyard -- National Museum of Asian Art (Washington)
From the museum label: Founded as an Augustinian priory in 1123, St. Bartholomew's numbered among the three oldest churches in London. A preservation society photographed its churchyard a decade before Whistler created his lithograph. Parts of the building occasionally served as commercial enterprises, including a blacksmith's shop and a printing shop. Whistler's image turned away from the church itself to capture the Cloth Fair's adjacent seventeenth-century buildings, where weavers and cloth merchants had been working for several centuries. Caught in shifting light and shadow, tilted tombstones convey the sense of time past and passing.
Link to other paintings from the exhibition Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change.
Link to other Whistler paintings.