The Embroidered Curtain

Made during a trip to Amsterdam in 1889, The Embroidered Curtain is among Whistler’s most intricately worked and fully realized etchings. Water fills the foreground of the image, above which rise shopfronts in the middle distance. The horizontals and verticals of the architecture compose a grid filled with minute surface details including a lace curtain, watery reflections, and picturesque vignettes of figures framed by doorways and windows. As if to signal his satisfaction with the plate, Whistler included his abstracted “butterfly monogram” in the circular window found in the upper left corner of this image.

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