The Old Clothes Shop, Houndsditch

Whistler's 'Old Clothes Shop, Houndsditch' (1888) depicts a subject from London's East End — the Houndsditch area adjacent to the City of London was a center of the secondhand clothing trade, heavily identified with the Jewish commercial community that had settled in the area. Whistler's engagement with this subject reflects his interest in the visual character of working-class and immigrant commercial London alongside his more famous subjects of fashionable society and landscape. His small shop subjects document the visual richness of commercial street life without the social condescension that characterized much Victorian depiction of working-class environments.

Whistler applies his tonal harmony approach to the East End shop subject with the same aesthetic seriousness he brought to grand portraits and marines. The old clothes hanging in the shop window and spilling onto the street provide textural and chromatic interest within his characteristically restrained palette. His handling finds the visual harmony within the potentially chaotic accumulation of secondhand goods.