Documents associated with: etching exhibition
Record 24 of 41
System Number: 13899
Date: [March 1893][1]
Author: JW
Place: Paris
Recipient: Howard Mansfield[2]
Place: [New York]
Repository: New York Public Library
Call Number: Howard Mansfield Collection
Credit Line: Howard Mansfield Collection / Manuscripts and Archives Division / The New York Public Library / Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Document Type: ALS
'13 April 1893'
110 Rue du Bac, Paris
My dear Mr. Mansfield -
It is all right about the Sheridan Ford[3] & Mr Allan[4] business - we have heard since - and now have to thank you for all the trouble you took about it.
How very kind you have been about this Chicago matter[5]. I began several letters to tell you many things and mislaid them! However now I think that I had better at once enclose the list you have just made out for me - with the one or two alterations I have thought of.
Otherwise it is as complete as possible and far away more perfect than I could have made it myself.
Do write me a line to tell me how it all goes on.
Kennedy[6] will I understand be here in a day or two.
I hear that the picture collecting in England has been not very satisfactorily managed! And that as far as I am myself concerned a few only of my works have been obtained.
Mr. Untermeyer of New York has kindly volunteered to lend "The Falling Rocket[7]". I do wish you would see him and arrange for the picture to be sent to Chicago
The Fagans[8] passed through Paris the other day on their way to Japan. They dined with us and we talked of you. I wonder if you will come over this autumn. You will find the house and garden looking charming, and I will have a plate[9] ready for you.
With kindest regards from both of us[10] & a thousand thanks
Always Very sincerely yours,
J. McN. Whistler
This document is protected by copyright.
Notes:
1. [March 1893]
This letter was probably written late in March 1893. The date of receipt was noted in another hand as 13 April 1893.
2. Howard Mansfield
Howard Mansfield (1849-1938), New York lawyer, print collector [more].
3. Sheridan Ford
Sheridan Ford (1860-1922), poet, critic, politician and writer on art [more]. JW was worried about the publication of an unauthorised edition of JW's letters by Ford: Whistler, James McNeill, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, ed. Sheridan Ford, Paris, 1890.
4. Allan
Frederick Hovey Allen (1845-1926), congressional minister and writer on art [more].
5. Chicago matter
World's Columbian Exposition, Department of Fine Arts, Chicago, 1893. Mansfield had sent a list of etchings that could be shown in Chicago, 10 January 1893, #04000.
6. Kennedy
Edward Guthrie Kennedy (1849-1932), dealer with H. Wunderlich and Co., New York [more].
7. Falling Rocket
Samuel Untermyer (1858-1940), lawyer, capitalist and philanthropist [more], did not lend Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (YMSM 170).
8. Fagans
Louis Alexander Fagan (1845-1903), diplomat, writer on art, amateur artist, assistant in the Department of Engraving at the British Museum [more], and his wife Caroline Frances Fagan.
9. plate
Mansfield wrote several times asking JW to etch a plate to illustrate a proposed book on etching to be published by Dodd, Mead and Co.; see his letter to JW, 4 December 1891, #03996. JW never made the etching, and it was after JW's death that Mansfield published a book on his etchings (Mansfield, Howard,A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etchings and Dry-Points of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Chicago, 1909).
10. both of us
JW and Beatrix Whistler (1857-1896), née Beatrice Philip, artist [more].