Gambling Salon at Baden-Baden

Using a free drawing technique that recalls Gavarni's handling of crowd scenes, Whistler here depicts one of Baden Baden's primary tourist attractions. The allure of the city's gambling tables had been described in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and Whistler adopted an illustrational mode. Always interested in formal porperties, however, Whistler reinforced his subject matter by centering the roulette wheel and calling attention to it with a large black form, probably a hanging lamp. A circular light space is ringed by heads-wheellike forms dominate even though we are aware that the table is rectangular. It is possible that Whistler later added the rich charcoal to the underlying pencil. On the verso are several pencil drawings.