The Lime-burner

A remarkable feat of rendering textural detail, James McNeill Whistler's The Lime-burner presents a ramshackle enclosed yard on the industrial shore of London's River Thames, a scene structured by a succession of receding spaces and light-and-dark contrasts beyond a timbered beam doorway. At the center of the image, standing casually posed and looking directly at the viewer, is the lime-burner, dressed in the vest and soft cap of a London workman. Several ladders are set against a light-colored wall behind him and on the right. The left background, at the end of the cluttered passageway, yields a partial view of the masts and rigging of ships moored on the River Thames, with the glimpsed silhouette of another, seated man barely discernable against the daylit river.

In the mid-nineteenth century, limehouses and lime-burners provided powdered lime (derived from limestone) that was poured into the Thames to reduce the stench of pollution caused by a daily influx of sewage; a short time after Whistler made this print, massive engineering projects improved the river's hygiene. The lime-burner who posed for this image was identified as "W. Jones" when Whistler displayed an impression of this print at London's Royal Academy exhibition in 1860. The image is at once a realistic scene of everyday life on London's industrial riverside and an artful frame-within-a-frame composition based on Whistler's careful study of old master and contemporary paintings. The artist's graphic virtuosity further transformed what viewers of his day probably regarded as an unsavory subject into a picturesque one.

In 1858, three years after he traveled from America to Paris to study art, Whistler published his first set of prints, known as the "French Set," which helped to launch his career. A year later, he moved to London, where he began a new series of etchings inspired by the crowded docklands and maritime life along the banks of the Thames. The Lime-burner is one of Whistler's finest intaglio prints included in "A Series of Sixteen Etchings of Scenes on the Thames and Other Subjects," more popularly called "The Thames Set," which was published in 1871. Also among that group was Rotherhithe (TF 1995.5), an outdoor London waterfront scene.

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