Entré sur la Grande Promenade à Baden

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) · 1858

In mid-August 1858, Whistler left Paris on a sketching trip to Alsace-Lorraine and the Rhine, carrying pencils, watercolors, sketchbooks, etching needles, and copper etching plates in a knapsack on his back. He was accompanied by a young French artist named Ernest Delannoy. This comic sketch shows the artists arriving in the fashionable resort town of Baden-Baden, where their rough clothes and bohemian airs disrupted the idyll of bourgeois self-satisfaction. The drawing is on a double sheet of paper that has been removed from a sketchbook-leaving stitching holes down the middle of the image.