Whistler's 'Portrait of himself'

Described by the influential nineteenth-century art critic Roger Marx as 'the engraver of curiosity par excellence', Henri-Charles Guérard  (1846-97)  was one of the most skilled and inventive French printmakers of his day. It was to Guérard that the painter Edouard Manet - who was himself an outstanding technician - turned whenever he needed help making etchings, no doubt owing to Guérard's expertise as a professional printmaker as well as to his innovative approach to the medium. He reacted to a broad array of artistic styles and worked in a variety of print techniques, testing the boundaries of each. Particularly noteworthy in this regard are his works that respond to the nineteenth-century vogue for Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts, which embody some of the artist's most original expressions. He was married to Eva Gonzales, herself an artist and a model and friend of Manet, who died in childbirth in 1883. A printmaker's printmaker, Guérard was friendly with contemporary practitioners in that dazzling age of creativity, including Félix Bracquemont, Félix Buhot and Jules Cheret.

This undated print reproduces James McNeill Whistler's self-portrait painted in oil and now in the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (1856-7). This dates from Whistler's early 20s, well before his rise to fame, but clearly an aesthetic force to be reckoned with. A combination of drypoint, etching, aquatint and roulette, the print is a dazzling display of Guérard's technical skills. As if this is not enough, below the main image is a small etched portrait of a bearded man wearing a hat - the elder Whistler, a witty depiction which stops short of being a caricature. In other states of the print we just see Whistler's highly stylised, Japanese-influenced butterfly monogram below the image - this indeed is far more common.

In 1883, Guérard made an accomplished print after Whistler's Portrait of the Artist's Mother, which was commissioned for publication in the Gazette des beaux-arts, the most widely read French journal on the arts. Though it doubtlessly helped circulate the painting's image to a French audience, the notoriously prickly Whistler later dismissed the print, preferring to control the authorship of such images more directly.

See:

Art Institute of Chicago, http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/140684

New York Public Library, 'A Curious Hand: The Prints of Henri-Charles Guérard', https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/curious-hand-prints-henri-charles-guerard-1846-1897

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art   April 2018