Hooded Male Head (from Sketches on The Coast Survey Plate)
James McNeill Whistler American
Not on view
Whistler made his first etchings while employed as a draftsman at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington, D.C., between 1854 and 1855. A staff member taught him the technique and supplied him with a copper plate, on which he etched topographic renderings of coastlines, then sketched freely drawing figures. This fragment represents a Spanish hidalgo, or minor nobleman, and likely was intended as a self-portrait. It was trimmed from a printed proof and given to given to Thomas Winans, a friend in Baltimore who financed Whistler's move to Paris in 1855, allowing him to pursue an artistic career. Winans mounted the fragment in an album of Whistler's early work that his descendants gave to the Museum.
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