Pierrot
James McNeill Whistler American
Not on view
In an old district of Amsterdam, Whistler represents two figures emerging from a shadowed workshop at the edge of a canal. Leaning against a slender post, a young man clad in an apron looks across the water as his female companion dips a cloth into it. The still, dark, reflective surface fills the foreground and doubles the forms, and the title, Pierrot, evokes a tragicomic commedia dell’arte character suggested by the pallor of the man’s face. The print belongs to a set the artist made in Amsterdam during a two-month stay in early fall 1889, following his summer marriage to Beatrice Philip, the widow of architect Edward William Godwin.
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