Soup for Three Sous (Soupe à trois sous)

For Whistler, there was no better subject matter for etching than the sights and personalities encountered in his daily life. Soup for Three Sousrecords some of the down-and-out denizens of a Parisian café frequented by the artist. Empty space seems to predominate, and the artist’s signature conspicuously positioned on a bare wall plays on the ambiguity between real and illusionistic space. The modernity of the print is central to an anecdote about its making, according to which a policeman approached Whistler in the café around midnight while he was working on this plate. When the policeman askedwhat he was doing, Whistler handed him the etching plate upside down, but “officialdom could make nothing of it.”