Lines and Colors art blog

Eye Candy for Today: Whistler etching of Wapping Warf

Wapping Warf, James McNeil Whistler
Wapping Warf, James McNeil Whistler

Original is roughly 6×9 inches (15x23cm). In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Use download or enlarge icons below image.

Another of Whistler’s stellar etchings of riverfront architecture and activity — a beautiful use of line and texture.


Comments

4 responses to “Eye Candy for Today: Whistler etching of Wapping Warf”

  1. Where do you get hold of such great painting details?

    1. Paul, If you follow through on the links I provide, you’ll generally find that my sources for the Eye Candy post images are resources for many more high-resolution art images. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has high-res images of most of it’s collection online, as does the Rijksmuseum and the National Gallery. For the latter two, you need to create a free account to download high-res images. The Google Art Project is a great source of zoomable images, many of which can be found as high-res downloadable versions on Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia’s selections for a given artist vary wildly in size and quality, but if you look at the file sizes you’ll find the high-res ones from Google Art Project (usually over 1MB in size). Also you can search Google Images, and use their Search Tools options to limit the search for images over a certain size (I set it for “Larger than 2 MP”).

  2. I’m trying to figure out the number of greys ( British spelling) in the etching.
    Two? Three?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_color_names#Shades_of_gray

    1. ælle, I’m not sure how you would calculate this, since there are no true grays in the image (no aquatinting) as far as I can tell; all of the apparent gray tones are created by hatching of lines. If I were to try to guess the number of apparent grays (areas of tonal value), I would guess 5 or 6.