Art Institute of Chicago

Early Morning

James McNeill Whistler

Date

1878

Medium

Lithotint with scraping, on a prepared half-tint ground, in black on cream wove proofing paper

Culture

United States

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Whistler experimented with the expressive potential of lithography, and in the case of his rare lithotints, he applied washes of ink directly to the stone to create veils of pigment. The result is a nuanced representation of light and fog, as is seen in these evocations of life on London’s Thames River. At the time he produced these prints, Whistler was involved in a lawsuit with the famed English art critic John Ruskin, who had argued that the abstraction of one of Whistler’s painted Nocturnes defied the unwritten laws of aesthetics. Despite the notoriety—and bankrupting cost—of the legal case, Whistler persisted in his exploration of abstraction.

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