The Letters of James McNeill Whistler

The University of Glasgow has a site dedicated to James McNeill Whistler. To commemorate the centenary of his death, the site has posted over 1700 letters of his correspondence. They're accessible from the front page of the Whistler site at http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/index.htm.

Choose the correspondence link on the left side, and remember that this isn't finished yet; eventually the site will have about 8000 letters by Whistler. The front page of the correspondence section has information about the project, estimated dates of release of the rest of the letters, and a brief list of abbreviations and sources.

From the left side of the page you can search for letters by people, date, subject, works of art, exhibits, record number, or simple keyword. A simple keyword search for "squash" found two documents. From the search results page you can choose to list the documents or refine them with a second keyword search (as you may sometimes want to do -- a search for "mother" found 475 documents.)

Choosing to list the documents gives a simple search listing of the date of the letter, and who it was to/from. Clicking the more link provides additional information, including the full name of sender and recipient, identifying information, language, and the first words of the letter. Sometimes you'll get a search result that has a small letter-and-pen icon next to it. Click on that and you'll get a heavily-annotated (in a good way) transcript of the letter. One letter I looked at had 27 footnotes explaining various references in the letter.

In addition to the letters themselves, this site also contains lots of resource pointers for the study of Whistler, a variety of links, and a chronology of his "butterfly" signatures.

Posted to Aesthetics-Art-Artists