Street in Old Chelsea

The white house with the pointed gable, just left of centre, is Mrs Elizabeth Maunder's fish shop at 72 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Around it stand a marine store and the shops of a tailor, a boot-maker, a chimney sweep and a plumber, the poorer end of the riverside street in a district where Whistler lived, at one address or another, for nearly 40 years. He probably painted it in the spring of 1884. He was then preparing a London exhibition made up almost entirely of very small pictures, and he told his dealer not to look for him at the studio, because he would be out on the Embankment painting away for dear life.

The panel measures about 13 by 23 centimetres. He used tiny brushes for the house fronts and the people on the pavement, and kept the foreground thin and smooth. If this is the panel he showed that year, as scholars suspect, it explains a reviewer's joke that Chelsea must be full of marionettes, since the figures on the bench seem to have no legs. Whistler came back to Maunder's in two etchings and a lithograph. The shop was pulled down in 1892, and it was in the house built on its site that Whistler died in 1903.