James whistler is an american artist although the majority of егэ

UDC 7.072.2

Вестник СПбГУ. Искусствоведение. 2017. Т. 7. Вып. 1

T. F. Verizhnikova

JAMES WHISTLER AND ANNA OSTROUMOVA-LEBEDEVA IN PARIS, 1899: THE STORY OF AN ARCHIVE DOCUMENT

Repin State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture of St. Petersburg, 17, Universitetskaya nab., St. Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation

Some relatively unknown aspects of history and art on the turn of XIX-XX century as well as creative connection between James Abbot McNeil Whistler and A. P. Ostroumova-Lebedeva has been analysed. This perspective has practically never been used in academic research practice before. The perception of Whistler’s painting in Russia has been specified based on an estimation of his creative work mentioned in the letters and critical publications of V. A. Serov, I. E. Grabar, A. N. Benua, and I. E. Repin. The sources attributed to the period of Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s studies at Whistler’s Parisian studio are listed. For the first time, material from Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s archive deposited in the Russian National Library Manuscript Department has been published. This material is of great academic interest in the context of Russian and global art history. Whistler’s manuscripts published here, the only ones known in Russia, are a unique testament to his creative activities in Paris. Refs 10. Figs 5.

Keywords: Whistler, Ostroumova-Lebedeva, art of the turn of the century, Russian art, West-European art.

Т. Ф. Верижникова

УИСТЛЕР И ОСТРОУМОВА-ЛЕБЕДЕВА.

ПАРИЖ, 1899 ГОД: ИСТОРИЯ ОДНОГО АРХИВНОГО ДОКУМЕНТА

Санкт-Петербургский государственный академический институт живописи, скульптуры и архитектуры имени И. Е. Репина,

Российская Федерация, 199034, Санкт-Петербург, Университетская наб., 17

Проанализированы малоизвестные аспекты истории искусства рубежа Х1Х-ХХ веков, творческие связи Дж. Э. М.-Н. Уистлера и А. П. Остроумовой-Лебедевой. Избранный ракурс рассмотрения ранее практически не фигурировал в научной традиции. Уточнены особенности восприятия живописи Уистлера в России на примерах оценки его творчества в письмах и критических публикациях В. А. Серова, И. Э. Грабаря, А. Н. Бенуа, И. Е. Репина. Приведены источники по периоду обучения Остроумовой-Лебедевой в парижской мастерской Уистлера. Впервые публикуются материалы из архива Остроумовой-Лебедевой, хранящиеся в отделе рукописей Российской национальной библиотеки. Эти материалы представляют большой научный интерес в контексте российского и мирового искусствознания. Опубликованы единственные в России рукописи Уистлера, уникальное свидетельство его деятельности в Париже. Библиогр. назв. 10. Ил. 5.

Ключевые слова: Уистлер, Остроумова-Лебедева, искусство рубежа веков, русское искусство, западноевропейское искусство.

© Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет, 2017 DOI: 10.21638/11701/spbu15.2017.105 87

«I do not imped you to grow your own, I do not want to impose you my own. I only aspire to give everyone the surest means to identify your own tendencies…»

James Abbott McNeill Whistler «Proposition»

«Here, I shall get the school, here, I shall stand firmly on my own feet, here, I shall assimilate the certain principles of art <.> I shall go through it all. Shall absorb a concepts of Whistler, his proposition. «

Anna Petrovna Ostroumova-Lebedeva «Autobiographical Notes»

In the history of the 19th and 20th centuries art, the heritage of James Whistler (18341903) and Anna Petrovna Ostoroumova-Lebedeva (1871-1955) are in different ranges but their names sound in a common register of the highest professionalism.

Ways of the great artist, a citizen of the United States of America, who worked the most part of his life in England and France, and the outstanding Russian artist from St. Petersburg have crossed in 1899. It was in Paris art studio, where Whistler had taught. This crossing has become for Ostroumova-Lebedeva the reference point of increasing artistic maturity, and for Whistler it was the point of mastery and pedagogical success. And perhaps also the start point of his childhood memories on the banks of the Neva, where he made his first steps in the art.

In 1855, leaving his home country to study in Paris studio of the famous Charles Gley-re (1806-1874) (together with Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley), Whistler said: «I told my family that I am going to Paris. Nobody objected. Yes, all this has already started with Petersburg’s times» [1, p. 33]. Indeed, both the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, where James Whistler was a private pupil of drawing classes at age eleven, and home lessons with art teacher Alexander Koritsky (1818-1866), in those time a student at the Academy, have had a profound influence on him and has become a classic foundation for the artist who discovered then other facets of art.

According to documents, Whistler family appear in the capital of the Russian Empire in 1842, engineer Major George Washington Whistler was invited by the Corps of Communications Engineers (on the order of the Emperor Nicholas I) for design and construction of the railway ‘St. Petersburg — Moscow’. This railway line was supposed to be the first of such large-scale in Russia, the earliest line ‘St. Petersburg — Tsarskoe Selo’ had local importance, as linking the capital with the summer Imperial residence.

Whistler family lived in Russia from 1842 to 1849 years. And, although the Petersburg period of the artist’s life is well studied, there are two episodes of those time which are not reflected in previous publications: the address of the family residence and the reason for the invitation of Koritsky as a home teacher of drawing (the materials are being prepared for publication).

In winter 1898-1899’s, Anna Petrovna, then still Ostroumova (after her marriage in 1905 she will be Ostroumova-Lebedeva) went to Paris for the improvement and deepening of art education, the foundations of which were obtained in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, in studio of the famous Ilya Repin (1844-1930).

The choice of the French capital for the vivifying contact with alluring novelty of contemporary art certainly was a personal decision of the young artist. But it also reflected

a general tendency for young artistic forces of Russia — to expand their landmarks in the art, personally to see and understand, accept or reject a new forms and ideas of nowadays.

The powerful stream of Russian artists rushes in the world recognized center of arts, which was seeted by multitude of currents and trends, but at the same time remain a traditional forge of workmanship.

Parisian artistic environment was exuberated by Russian talents. «New faces appear in the studio, the Russian and French poets and writers: Konstantin Balmont, Valeriy Bryusov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Alexei Tolstoy, Alexander Anichkov, Ivan Strannik, Victor Hoffman, Nikolay Gumilyov, Peter Boborykin, Maxim Kovalevsky, Alexander Mersereau, Rene Gil, Sadna Levy, Gan River, Romain Rolland, Alexis Merodak-Jeannot and many others. Of the artists in this period were regular visitors: Nikolai Dosekin, Boris Matveyev, Aleksander Shervashidze, Alexander Benois, Stepan Yaremich, Alexander Yakimchenko, Margarita Sabashnikova, Nicholas Tarhov, Antonina Westfalen…», — Elizabeth Krugliko-va remembers, whose studio on the Buassonad street was one of the centers of attraction of Russian youth [2, p. 99].

A numerous studios of the city were crowded with students from Russia and Anna Ostroumova organically entered in a magical and creative atmosphere of discipleship, which was penetrated by modern impulses. But the choice of her future master, which Anna made, was exceptional: Ostroumova, only one of the Russian colleagues of her generation, became a student of Whistler. At that time he taught at the «Academy of Carmen».

What was behind such unusual decision? After all, the work of this outstanding artist in the end of 19th century was little known in Russia and enjoyed a modest success, which was interspersed with stinging criticism. Panting of Whistler was for the first time presented in St. Petersburg exhibition of the English and German watercolors, which was organized by Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) in 1897, in the halls of Baron Stieglitz. Then, it was at the exhibition of painting and sculpture in 1899 also under the auspices of Diaghilev in the premises of the magazine «Mir iskusstva».

Even among the leading masters of Russian art was not unanimity in the perception of his painting. «On the question of what he thoughts about Whistler, Valentin Serov (1865-1911) replies: «I do not know him. In London, I saw something that was not very interesting, but the best is allegedly in America, where I had not been» [3, p. 145].

Konstantin Somov (1869-1939) was more blunt about to expose of 1897 he said: «Whistler, smart aleck, sent blots and sells them for a thousands. As portrait he calls two or three smears in ‘soft tones’, that is all. However, these smears are piquant» [5, p. 58].

Sergei Diaghilev was upheld the completely opposite view, describing the exhibition of the British and German watercolors: «As the great English painter Whistler, despite the fact that his works are some few and they do not give an idea about this major artists, yet his little pastel and charming watercolor portrait we seem to be almost the best things at the exhibition. Technique and amazing harmony of colors can be seen even in these small things» [5, p. 63].

Later in 1905, Alexander Benois (1870-1960) describing the painting of Whistler, considered that «.when you read in the catalog the occurrence date of the best works of Whistler, you can not believe your eyes: but to write like this only now, but this is the last word of fashion and even snobbery, a true «modern-style» painting» [6, p. 48].

Perhaps only Repin has perceived the art of Whistler reticently, but highly objectively. He highlights the work of Whistler, describing his impressions of the Paris exhibition

of the Salon of Champ de Mars, and generally believing that «It is a market of what you want» [7, p. 425]. The Russian painter, with his special sense of true art, gives the deep characteristic of Whistler as the master of subtle psychological portrait and almost impressionistic forms of expression. «There are many good portraits. I particularly liked the one — the work of an Englishman Whistler. He represents a full length figure of the passionate sportsman, dressed around a gray: stockings, which are adhesiving lean legs, in cap, which is barely covering the restless head; this young man is full of diverse sport <.> And now, still in a state of all previous deeds inertia, he passionately thinks what else would be invent to surprise his friends who has long time considered him as the first in all the exploits and adventures of fun» [7, p. 424].

The opinion of the famous Russian master was a natural expression of the very essence of «true living artist», as Alexander Benois called him rightly [8, p. 629]. The nature of Repin was opened for everything new in all gradations, but only on the basis of high professional mastery. This talant of the outstanding artist-teacher by powerful flow projected on his students and eventually created a wide variety of artistic personality, always forming a special artistic outlook. From the studio of Repin went out totally different artists which later formed the glory of Russian art: Konstantin Somov, Fyodor Malyavin, Ivan Bilibin, and many others.

Anna Ostroumova-Lebedev was also fully experienced the charm and force of the Repin-teacher talent in the years of study at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. It was from Repin she finds out about Whistler and has inspired by the idea to get in his Paris studio, «I want to get into the studio of Whistler. It is called the» Academy of Carmen». This is American artist, the greatest European master, Repin said to us a lot about him, and said that higher him in Europe is not artist today. In Luxembourg, I just saw a single his thing — a «Portrait of the master» is really a marvelous thing. And now I have a terrible desire to enter to him and to paint there..», — she admits [9, pp. 141-142].

In early January 1899, Anna was admitted to the «Academy of Carmen», the studio of Whistler which has located in Stanislas passage, near the Montparnasse Boulevard. She was convinced that: «Whistler is the greatest European master, and if they find out at the academy, that I am learning from him, all will go crazy with envy» [9, p. 146].

Among the many art schools of Paris «Academy Carmen» firmly held the position of a highly professional, but not overly expensive educational establishment, even despite of the teaching there the famous Whistler. «Classes are from eight in the morning until noon. I shall pay the thirty-five francs and ten francs, ‘pour enter’…», — she mentions [9, p. 144]. For comparison, the tuition fees:

«I. «Colarossi Academy» — Daytime classes: 16 francs a month (for gentlemen) and 20 francs (for ladies).

II. «The Academy Julian» — a full course of painting and sculpture: 31 francs a month (for gentlemen) and 60 francs (for ladies).

III. «School of painting and drawing» of professors Pierre Bonnard and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes — daytime classes: 100 francs a month (ladies and gentlemen)» [10, p. 75].

The memories of the classes in the Whistler studio is one of the most important parts of the «Autobiographical Notes» by Ostroumova-Lebedeva. On these pages, full of deep emotions, discloses a excitements, doubts, searching of the young artist, and above all there is the image of the Whistler — teacher. Here the atmosphere of studio and the process of unique artistic style birth had transferred very authentically. It could hardly be

done more deeply, truly and thinner than the Russian student did it herself; it remains only to look into the amazing mirror of the era and personality of the outstanding Russian master of fine art with admiration and respect.

However, it should be focused on one episode from the memoirs by Anna Ostrou-mova-Lebedeva which has direct relevance to the topic of this article. Among the students of Whistler’s studio the American women were prevailed, and of course the English language sounded in lectures, conversations, instructions of the Master and student’s communication with each other. It is inevitable that Ostroumova-Lebedeva felt lonely: «I am, to my chagrin, did not understand their language, as I did not know in English, and not participated in their common talks» [9, p. 145]. But she spoke French perfectly, and very soon it was taken into consideration by Whistler: «Today, he had a long talk with his Americans, sitting on the edge of podium, and then came to me (I was standing on the sidelines and nothing understanding) and, to my surprise, he gave me a paper, where had written in French his previous ‘conference’ (lecture). It is surprisingly carefully! This sheet I shall keep as a shrine..» [9, p. 149].

This «shrine» really exists. It is located in the archive of Anna Petrovna Ostroumo-va-Lebedeva in the Russian National Library (NLR, F. 1015, d. 1156). This article is the first publication of this material. The document consists of four sheets and numbered sequentially throughout, but it is abstracted from the real sequence of the papers appearance in the hands of the Russian student of Whistler. It is clear from correlation of the chronology of the sheets with the chronology of the facts which were reflected in the «Autobiographical Notes». Therefore, the author on the basis of the analytical correlation will use its own numbering, leaving the archives in brackets.

Sheet N 1 (N 4, NLR) of «Proposition», written by Whistler in English, by his typical graceful and, at the same time, sure, solid handwriting. It is precisely this text, with its refined line graphic of letter’s contours which Ostroumova-Lebedeva could not read.

Sheet N 2 (N 3, NLR) of «Proposition», written by typical Whistler handwriting in French, especially for his student from Russia. The text contains many inscriptions, by light blue pencil. Ostroumova-Lebedeva who knew French perfectly, has corrected inaccuracies of Whistler’stranslation from English.

Sheet N 3 (N 1, NLR) of «Proposition», printed in French by hectograph method with editing of Ostroumova-Lebedeva. After the text, at the bottom of the page there is the famous monogram «butterfly of Whistler». Further, the note in Russian, by hand of Ostroy-mova-Lebedeva: «It handed me by Whistler in his studio of M-me Rossi in 1899 — January, 27th, after the end of classes. It contains a brief summary of his previous conference and Whistler translated it for me in French. A. O»

This sheet is folded into four, on its back there is another record of Ostroumova-Lebedeva: «The principles of art made by famous Whistler in his studio when I was his student in 1899. A. Ostroumova-Lebedeva».

Sheet N 4 (N 2, NLR) of «Proposition», also printed in French by hectograph method identical to sheet № 3 but without inscriptions.

On the back of the other Whistler’s conference sheet in French, by hand of Ostrou-mova-Lebedeva (the same handwriting as on the sheet № 3). In the text there are translations of some words in Russian, placed over the French ones. For example: «bessozatel’no», «propisyvat’ «, «sokrashchennyy», «preuvelichennyy», «vdolbit’ v golovu» (Original spelling is kept).

1. «Propositions», the autobiographical text of Whistler in English (N 4; NLR)

Particular importance of the archival document is undoubtedly:

I. Sheets N 1 and N 2, these are the only manuscripts of Whistler in Russia.

II. Sheet N3is a rare evidence of the activity of Whistler-teacher in Paris.

III. All of the sheets are the documentary evidence of the particular episode, which was described by Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva that is the living history.

Paris in 1899 left a deep trace in the life of Anna Petrovna Ostroumova: «What a happy time! Everything was so interesting and new for me <.. .> life went between work and entertainment — quickly and brightly. Everything was perceived with extreme sharp-

92

2. «Propositions», the autobiographical text of Whistler in French, with editing of Ostroumova-Lebedeva (N 3; NLR)

ness», — as she always remembered [9, p. 154-155]. And Whistler’s studio was destined to become the symbol of this «happy time».

Here are some Whistler’s thoughts from his French abstracts, which he made especially for Anja Ostroumova, many of them sound like the aphorisms and eloquently speak about their author… Later she translated them into Russian:

«A picture is finished when all traces of efforts to achieve the result can not be seen»; «To say about a picture in her praise that in it is visible a large and serious work, it is like saying that the picture is not finished»;

93

W At/- яАлы ^ÎJM- TTfi^ .¿V -Гчфу

tCC.^-r it. н^аСЦ- к , .

4c-м i-i^iii*, ……….< At ¿ялн^ A-J iL

«» J—-‘- lï A^fct

^ ‘Л — .

•C’atfùaXZL A^S /’drf _ ^ ^

J.t-.-.. fi. ΗL «¿MvJ / П f yj .гЛ. /f

Jt i-ir it^ù: f r- eU Zrtt^+b.

/ {

^ A» A- 4<L4 <C A at’

_ ¡J M»

^ff^tûM. V /¿W fu yOfcUjit _.

ГАгЪМ _ i-Ut^^ Д /»Х^ч/ц^ _

i . Л /irf«., .«.„ Л. — J- — . . .

3. «Proposition», printed in French by hectograph method with editing of Ostroumova-Lebedeva (N 1; NLR)

«Diligence in art is necessity, but it is not a virtue, and visible his traces in work there is a drawback, but it is not a virtue is a sign of a lack of work, as only work can destroy the traces of the work»;

«A work of Master does not smell of sweat, not reminiscent of effort and from the beginning is already completed»;

«A work which is fulfilled by only one perseverance, will remain forever as unfinished monument of goodwill and stupidity»;

«.. .I can not teach you the art, it can be comprehended just alone or can not be comprehend at all..»;

4. «Proposition», printed in French by hectograph method with editing of Ostroumova-Lebedeva (N 1 — sheet back; NLR)

«You have to pay attention to the significant are typical features of nature and omit the thousands of shades which our eye sees <…> Most importantly — it is necessary to give the impression of the subject of reality, placing it in the space»;

«The Master is recognized when he is able to paint deep planes»;

«The real master is one who knows from the beginning what will be at the end of his work»;

«When any student has achieved good results, he did not deserve a praise. When he was first, who has noticed the error, he did not deserve reproach. A true student’s success was consisted in the mastering of art technique, his craft».

95

5. «Proposition», printed in French by hectograph method with editing of Ostroumova-Lebedeva. The same as N 3, but without notes (N 2; NLR)

On sheet back is the handwritten text in french: the record of another Whistler’s conference, by hand as Ostroumova-Lebedeva (compare with corrections on the sheet N 3) with translation of certain words in Russian (N 2 — sheet back; NLR)

Finally Ostroumova-Lebedeva admits: «He has talked a lot and taught us, but I am, unfortunately, not all recorded in those time, and not all sheets of his printed conferences was kept by me» [9, p. 149, 150, 151].

96

References

1. Uistler Dzhems Mak Neil’. Iziashchnoe iskusstvo sozdavat’ sebe vragov [Whistler James McNeil. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies]. Predislovie Predislovie E. A. Nekrasova. Moscow, Iskusstvo Publ., 1970. 287 p. (In Russian)

2. Kruglikova E. S. Iz vospominanii [The Memories]. Maksimilian Voloshin — khudozhnik. Sbornik ma-terialov [Maksimilian Voloshin — the painter]. Comp. R. I. Popova. Moscow, Sovetskii khudozhnik Publ., 1976. 237 p. (In Russian)

3. Ul’ianov N. P. Vospominaniia (1889-1903) [The Memories (1889-1903)]. Valentin Serov v vospomi-naniiakh, dnevnikakh i perepiske sovremennikov. V2 t. T. 1 [Valentin Serov in the memories, the diaries and the correspondence of the contemporaries. In 2 vols. Vol. 1]. Leningrad, Khudozhnik RSFSR Publ., 1971. 487 p. (In Russian)

4. Somov A. Pis’mo A. N. Benua [Peterburg], nachalo marta 1897 goda [Letter to A. N. Benya [Peterburg], early March 1897 of the year]. Konstantin Andreevich Somov. Pis’ma. Dnevniki. Suzhdeniia sovremennikov [Konstantin Andreevich Somov. The Letters. The Diaries. The opinions of the contemporaries]. Sost., vstup. stat’ya i primech. Iu. N. Podkopaeva, A. N. Sveshnikova. Moscow, Iskusstvo Publ., 1979. 642 p. (In Russian)

5. Sergei Diagilev i russkoe iskusstvo: Stat’i, otkrytyepis’ma, interv’iu. Perepiska. Sovremenniki o Diagileve: V 2 t. T. 1 [Sergej Dyagilev and the Russian art: The articles, the open letters, the interview. The correspondence. The contemporaries about Dyagilev: in 2 vols. Vol. 1]. Sost., avt. vstup. st. i komment. I. S. Zil’bershtein, V. A. Samkov. Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo Publ., 1982. 496 p. (In Russian)

iНе можете найти то, что вам нужно? Попробуйте сервис подбора литературы.

6. Benua A. Vystavka Uistlera [The Exhibition of Whistler]. Iskusstvo, 1905, no. 8, P. 48-54. (In Russian)

7. Repin I. E. Pis’ma ob iskusstve (1893-1894). Pis’mo X [The letters about the Art (1893-1894). The letter X]. Repin I.E. Dalekoe blizkoe [Far away closer]. Leningrad, Khudozhnik RSFSR Publ., 1986. 482 p. (In Russian)

8. Benua A. N. Moi vospominaniia: v piati knigakh. T. 1. Knigi pervaia, vtoraia, tret’ia [My memories in the five books. V. 1. Book one, two, three]. Moscow, Nauka Publ., 1993. 711 p. (In Russian)

9. Ostroumova-Lebedeva A. P. Avtobiograficheskie zapiski. V 3 t. T. 1-2 [The Autobiographical notes. In 3 vols. Vol. 1-2]. Sost., avt. vstup. st. i primech. N. L. Priimak. Moscow, Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo Publ., 1974. 630 p. (In Russian)

10. Le Voyage de Paris: Les Americains dans les ecoles d’ art, 1868-1918. Paris, Ministere de la culture, de la communication, des grands travaux et du Bicentenaire, Reunion des musees nanionaux, 1990. 85 p.

For citation: Verizhnikova T. F. James Whistler and Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva in Paris, 1899: The Story of an archive document. Vestnik SPbSU. Arts, 2017, vol. 7, issue 1, pp. 87-97. DOI: 10.21638/11701/spbu15.2017.105

Received: 01.11.2016 Accepted: 29.12.2016

Контактная информация

Верижникова Татьяна Филипповна — кандидат искусствоведения, профессор; t.verizhnikova@gmail.com

Verizhnikova Tatyana F. — PhD (Art History), Professor; t.verizhnikova@gmail.com

James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Arrangement in Gray: Portrait of the Painter (self portrait, c. 1872), Detroit Institute of Arts
Born	James Abbott Whistler July 11, 1834 Lowell, Massachusetts, US
Died	July 17, 1903 (aged 69) London, England, UK
Nationality	American
Education	United States Military Academy, West Point, New York
Known for	Painting
Notable work	Whistler’s Mother
Movement	Founder of Tonalism
Spouse(s)	Beatrice Godwin ​ ​ (m. 1888; died 1896)​
Parent(s)	George Washington Whistler Anna McNeill Whistler
Awards	1884, elected honorary member, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, Bavaria, Germany 1892, made an officer of the Légion d’honneur, France 1898, charter member and first president of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers

James Abbott McNeill Whistler RBA (; July 11, 1834 – July 17, 1903) was an American painter active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom. He eschewed sentimentality and moral allusion in painting and was a leading proponent of the credo «art for art’s sake». His signature for his paintings took the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger for a tail.^[1] The symbol combined both aspects of his personality: his art is marked by a subtle delicacy, while his public persona was combative. He found a parallel between painting and music, and entitled many of his paintings «arrangements», «harmonies», and «nocturnes», emphasizing the primacy of tonal harmony.^[2] His most famous painting, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871), commonly known as Whistler’s Mother, is a revered and often parodied portrait of motherhood. Whistler influenced the art world and the broader culture of his time with his theories and his friendships with other leading artists and writers.

Early life[edit]

New England[edit]

James Abbott Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on July 11, 1834,^[4][5][6] the first child of Anna McNeill Whistler and George Washington Whistler, and the brother of Confederate surgeon Dr. William McNeill Whistler. His father was a railroad engineer, and Anna was his second wife. James lived the first three years of his life in a modest house at 243 Worthen Street in Lowell.^[7] The house is now the Whistler House Museum of Art, a museum dedicated to him.^[8] He claimed St. Petersburg, Russia as his birthplace during the Ruskin trial: «I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell.»

The family moved from Lowell to Stonington, Connecticut in 1837, where his father worked for the Stonington Railroad. Three of the couple’s children died in infancy during this period.^[7] Their fortunes improved considerably in 1839 when his father became chief engineer for the Boston & Albany Railroad,^[10] and the family built a mansion in Springfield, Massachusetts, where the Wood Museum of History now stands. They lived in Springfield until they left the United States in late 1842.^[11] Nicholas I of Russia learned of George Whistler’s ingenuity in engineering the Boston & Albany Railroad, and he offered him a position in 1842 engineering a railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and the family moved to St. Petersburg in the winter of 1842/43.^[12]

Whistler was a moody child prone to fits of temper and insolence, and he often drifted into periods of laziness after bouts of illness. His parents discovered that drawing often settled him down and helped focus his attention.^[13] In later years, he played up his mother’s connection to the American South and its roots, and he presented himself as an impoverished Southern aristocrat, although it remains unclear to what extent he truly sympathized with the Southern cause during the American Civil War. He adopted his mother’s maiden name after she died, using it as an additional middle name.^[12]

Russia and England[edit]

Beginning in 1842, his father was employed to work on a railroad in Russia. After moving to St. Petersburg to join his father a year later, the young Whistler took private art lessons, then enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Arts at age eleven. The young artist followed the traditional curriculum of drawing from plaster casts and occasional live models, revelled in the atmosphere of art talk with older peers, and pleased his parents with a first-class mark in anatomy.^[14] In 1844, he met the noted artist Sir William Allan, who came to Russia with a commission to paint a history of the life of Peter the Great. Whistler’s mother noted in her diary, «the great artist remarked to me ‘Your little boy has uncommon genius, but do not urge him beyond his inclination.’»^[15]

In 1847–1848, his family spent some time in London with relatives, while his father stayed in Russia. Whistler’s brother-in-law Francis Haden, a physician who was also an artist, spurred his interest in art and photography. Haden took Whistler to visit collectors and to lectures, and gave him a watercolour set with instruction. Whistler already was imagining an art career. He began to collect books on art and he studied other artists’ techniques. When his portrait was painted by Sir William Boxall in 1848, the young Whistler exclaimed that the portrait was «very much like me and a very fine picture. Mr. Boxall is a beautiful colourist… It is a beautiful creamy surface, and looks so rich.»^[16] In his blossoming enthusiasm for art, at fifteen, he informed his father by letter of his future direction, «I hope, dear father, you will not object to my choice.»^[17] His father, however, died from cholera at the age of 49, and the Whistler family moved back to his mother’s home town of Pomfret, Connecticut. His art plans remained vague and his future uncertain. The family lived frugally and managed to get by on a limited income. His cousin reported that Whistler at that time was «slight, with a pensive, delicate face, shaded by soft brown curls… he had a somewhat foreign appearance and manner, which, aided by natural abilities, made him very charming, even at that age.»^[18]

West Point[edit]

Whistler was sent to Christ Church Hall School with his mother’s hopes that he would become a minister. Whistler was seldom without his sketchbook and was popular with his classmates for his caricatures.^[20] However, it became clear that a career in religion did not suit him, so he applied to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where his father had taught drawing and other relatives had attended. He was admitted to the highly selective institution in July 1851 on the strength of his family name, despite his extreme nearsightedness and poor health history.^[21] However, during his three years there, his grades were barely satisfactory, and he was a sorry sight at drill and dress, known as «Curly» for his hair length which exceeded regulations. Whistler bucked authority, spouted sarcastic comments, and racked up demerits. Colonel Robert E Lee was the West Point Superintendent and, after considerable indulgence toward Whistler, he had no choice but to dismiss the young cadet. Whistler’s major accomplishment at West Point was learning drawing and map making from American artist Robert W. Weir.

His departure from West Point seems to have been precipitated by a failure in a chemistry exam where he was asked to describe silicon and began by saying, «Silicon is a gas.» As he himself put it later: «If silicon were a gas, I would have been a general one day».^[22] However, a separate anecdote suggests misconduct in drawing class as the reason for Whistler’s departure.^[23]

First job[edit]

After West Point, Whistler worked as draftsman mapping the entire U.S. coast for military and maritime purposes.^[24] He found the work boring and he was frequently late or absent. He spent much of his free time playing billiards and idling about, was always broke, and although a charmer, had little acquaintance with women.^[25] After it was discovered that he was drawing sea serpents, mermaids, and whales on the margins of the maps, he was transferred to the etching division of the U.S. Coast Survey. He lasted there only two months, but he learned the etching technique which later proved valuable to his career.

At this point, Whistler firmly decided that art would be his future. For a few months he lived in Baltimore with a wealthy friend, Tom Winans, who even furnished Whistler with a studio and some spending cash. The young artist made some valuable contacts in the art community and also sold some early paintings to Winans. Whistler turned down his mother’s suggestions for other more practical careers and informed her that with money from Winans, he was setting out to further his art training in Paris. Whistler never returned to the United States.^[26]

Art study in France[edit]

Whistler arrived in Paris in 1855, rented a studio in the Latin Quarter, and quickly adopted the life of a bohemian artist. Soon he had a French girlfriend, a dressmaker named Héloise.^[27] He studied traditional art methods for a short time at the Ecole Impériale and at the atelier of Marc Charles Gabriel Gleyre. The latter was a great advocate of the work of Ingres, and impressed Whistler with two principles that he used for the rest of his career: that line is more important than color and that black is the fundamental color of tonal harmony.^[28] Twenty years later, the Impressionists would largely overthrow this philosophy, banning black and brown as «forbidden colors» and emphasizing color over form. Whistler preferred self-study and enjoying the café life.
While letters from home reported his mother’s efforts at economy, Whistler spent freely, sold little or nothing in his first year in Paris, and was in steady debt.^[29] To relieve the situation, he took to painting and selling copies from works at the Louvre and finally moved to cheaper quarters. As luck would have it, the arrival in Paris of George Lucas, another rich friend, helped stabilize Whistler’s finances for a while. In spite of a financial respite, the winter of 1857 was a difficult one for Whistler. His poor health, made worse by excessive smoking and drinking, laid him low.^[30]

Conditions improved during the summer of 1858. Whistler recovered and traveled with fellow artist Ernest Delannoy through France and the Rhineland. He later produced a group of etchings known as «The French Set», with the help of French master printer Auguste Delâtre. During that year, he painted his first self-portrait, Portrait of Whistler with Hat, a dark and thickly rendered work reminiscent of Rembrandt. But the event of greatest consequence that year was his friendship with Henri Fantin-Latour, whom he met at the Louvre. Through him, Whistler was introduced to the circle of Gustave Courbet, which included Carolus-Duran (later the teacher of John Singer Sargent), Alphonse Legros, and Édouard Manet.

Also in this group was Charles Baudelaire, whose ideas and theories of «modern» art influenced Whistler. Baudelaire challenged artists to scrutinize the brutality of life and nature and to portray it faithfully, avoiding the old themes of mythology and allegory.^[31] Théophile Gautier, one of the first to explore translation qualities among art and music, may have inspired Whistler to view art in musical terms.

London[edit]

Reflecting the banner of realism of his adopted circle, Whistler painted his first exhibited work, La Mere Gerard in 1858. He followed it by painting At the Piano in 1859 in London, which he adopted as his home, while also regularly visiting friends in France. At the Piano is a portrait composed of his niece and her mother in their London music room, an effort which clearly displayed his talent and promise. A critic wrote, «[despite] a recklessly bold manner and sketchiness of the wildest and roughest kind, [it has] a genuine feeling for colour and a splendid power of composition and design, which evince a just appreciation of nature very rare amongst artists.»^[33] The work is unsentimental and effectively contrasts the mother in black and the daughter in white, with other colors kept restrained in the manner advised by his teacher Gleyre. It was displayed at the Royal Academy the following year, and in many exhibits to come.

In a second painting executed in the same room, Whistler demonstrated his natural inclination toward innovation and novelty by fashioning a genre scene with unusual composition and foreshortening. It later was re-titled Harmony in Green and Rose: The Music Room. This painting also demonstrated Whistler’s ongoing work pattern, especially with portraits: a quick start, major adjustments, a period of neglect, then a final flurry to the finish.^[33]

After a year in London, as counterpoint to his 1858 French set, in 1860, he produced another set of etchings called Thames Set, as well as some early impressionistic work, including The Thames in Ice. At this stage, he was beginning to establish his technique of tonal harmony based on a limited, pre-determined palette.

Early career[edit]

In 1861, after returning to Paris for a time, Whistler painted his first famous work, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. The portrait of his mistress and business manager Joanna Hiffernan was created as a simple study in white; however, others saw it differently. The critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary thought the painting an allegory of a new bride’s lost innocence. Others linked it to Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, a popular novel of the time, or various other literary sources. In England, some considered it a painting in the Pre-Raphaelite manner.^[36] In the painting, Hiffernan holds a lily in her left hand and stands upon a bear skin rug (interpreted by some to represent masculinity and lust) with the bear’s head staring menacingly at the viewer. The portrait was refused for exhibition at the conservative Royal Academy, but was shown in a private gallery under the title The Woman in White. In 1863 it was shown at the Salon des Refusés in Paris, an event sponsored by Emperor Napoleon III for the exhibition of works rejected from the Salon.^[37]

Whistler’s painting was widely noticed, although upstaged by Manet’s more shocking painting Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. Countering criticism by traditionalists, Whistler’s supporters insisted that the painting was «an apparition with a spiritual content» and that it epitomized his theory that art should be concerned essentially with the arrangement of colors in harmony, not with a literal portrayal of the natural world.

Two years later, Whistler painted another portrait of Hiffernan in white, this time displaying his newfound interest in Asian motifs, which he entitled The Little White Girl. His Lady of the Land Lijsen and The Golden Screen, both completed in 1864, again portray his mistress, in even more emphatic Asian dress and surroundings. During this period Whistler became close to Gustave Courbet, the early leader of the French realist school, but when Hiffernan modeled in the nude for Courbet, Whistler became enraged and his relationship with Hiffernan began to fall apart. In January 1864, Whistler’s very religious and very proper mother arrived in London, upsetting her son’s bohemian existence and temporarily exacerbating family tensions. As he wrote to Henri Fantin-Latour, «General upheaval!! I had to empty my house and purify it from cellar to eaves.» He also immediately moved Hiffernan to another location.^[41]

Mature career[edit]

Nocturnes[edit]

In 1866, Whistler decided to visit Valparaíso, Chile, a journey that has puzzled scholars, although Whistler stated that he did it for political reasons. Chile was at war with Spain and perhaps Whistler thought it a heroic struggle of a small nation against a larger one, but no evidence supports that theory.^[41] What the journey did produce was Whistler’s first three nocturnal paintings—which he termed «moonlights» and later re-titled as «nocturnes»—night scenes of the harbor painted with a blue or light green palette. After he returned to London, he painted several more nocturnes over the next ten years, many of the River Thames and of Cremorne Gardens, a pleasure park famous for its frequent fireworks displays, which presented a novel challenge to paint. In his maritime nocturnes, Whistler used highly thinned paint as a ground with lightly flicked color to suggest ships, lights, and shore line. Some of the Thames paintings also show compositional and thematic similarities with the Japanese prints of Hiroshige.^[43]

In 1872, Whistler credited his patron Frederick Leyland, an amateur musician devoted to Chopin, for his musically inspired titles.

I say I can’t thank you too much for the name ‘Nocturne’ as a title for my moonlights! You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics and consequent pleasure to me—besides it is really so charming and does so poetically say all that I want to say and no more than I wish!^[44]

At that point, Whistler painted another self-portrait and entitled it Arrangement in Gray: Portrait of the Painter^[45] (c. 1872), and he also began to re-title many of his earlier works using terms associated with music, such as a «nocturne», «symphony», «harmony», «study» or «arrangement», to emphasize the tonal qualities and the composition and to de-emphasize the narrative content.^[44] Whistler’s nocturnes were among his most innovative works. Furthermore, his submission of several nocturnes to art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel after the Franco-Prussian War gave Whistler the opportunity to explain his evolving «theory in art» to artists, buyers, and critics in France.^[46] His good friend Fantin-Latour, growing more reactionary in his opinions, especially in his negativity concerning the emerging Impressionist school, found Whistler’s new works surprising and confounding. Fantin-Latour admitted, «I don’t understand anything there; it’s bizarre how one changes. I don’t recognize him anymore.» Their relationship was nearly at an end by then, but they continued to share opinions in occasional correspondence.^[47] When Edgar Degas invited Whistler to exhibit with the first show by the Impressionists in 1874, Whistler turned down the invitation, as did Manet, and some scholars attributed this in part to Fantin-Latour’s influence on both men.^[48]

Portraits[edit]

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 fragmented the French art community. Many artists took refuge in England, joining Whistler, including Camille Pissarro and Monet, while Manet and Degas stayed in France. Like Whistler, Monet and Pissarro both focused their efforts on views of the city, and it is likely that Whistler was exposed to the evolution of Impressionism founded by these artists and that they had seen his nocturnes.^[49] Whistler was drifting away from Courbet’s «damned realism» and their friendship had wilted, as had his liaison with Joanna Hiffernan.^[50]

Whistler’s Mother[edit]

By 1871, Whistler returned to portraits and soon produced his most famous painting, the nearly monochromatic full-length figure entitled Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, but usually referred to as Whistler’s Mother. A model failed to appear one day, according to a letter from his mother, so Whistler turned to his mother and suggested that he do her portrait. He had her stand at first, in his typically slow and experimental way, but that proved too tiring so the seated pose was adopted. It took dozens of sittings to complete.^[51]

The austere portrait in his normally constrained palette is another Whistler exercise in tonal harmony and composition. The deceptively simple design is in fact a balancing act of differing shapes, particularly the rectangles of curtain, picture on the wall, and floor which stabilize the curve of her face, dress, and chair. Whistler commented that the painting’s narrative was of little importance, yet the painting was also paying homage to his pious mother. After the initial shock of her moving in with her son, she aided him considerably by stabilizing his behavior somewhat, tending to his domestic needs, and providing an aura of conservative respectability that helped win over patrons.^[51]

The public reacted negatively to the painting, mostly because of its anti-Victorian simplicity during a time in England when sentimentality and flamboyant decoration were in vogue. Critics thought the painting a failed «experiment» rather than art. The Royal Academy rejected it, but then grudgingly accepted it after lobbying by Sir William Boxall—but they hung it in an unfavorable location at their exhibition.^[53]

From the start, Whistler’s Mother sparked varying reactions, including parody, ridicule, and reverence, which have continued to today. Some saw it as «the dignified feeling of old ladyhood», «a grave sentiment of mourning», or a «perfect symbol of motherhood»; others employed it as a fitting vehicle for mockery. It has been satirized in endless variations in greeting cards and magazines, and by cartoon characters such as Donald Duck and Bullwinkle the Moose.^[54] Whistler did his part in promoting the picture and popularizing the image. He frequently exhibited it and authorized the early reproductions that made their way into thousands of homes.^[55] The painting narrowly escaped being burned in a fire aboard a train during shipping.^[53] It was ultimately purchased by the French government, the first Whistler work in a public collection, and is now housed in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

During the Depression, the picture was billed as a «million dollar» painting and was a big hit at the Chicago World’s Fair. It was accepted as a universal icon of motherhood by the worldwide public, which was not particularly aware of or concerned with Whistler’s aesthetic theories. In recognition of its status and popularity, the United States issued a postage stamp in 1934 featuring an adaptation of the painting.^[56] In 2015, New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote that it «remains the most important American work residing outside the United States.»^[57] Martha Tedeschi writes:

Whistler’s Mother, Wood’s American Gothic, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch’s The Scream have all achieved something that most paintings—regardless of their art historical importance, beauty, or monetary value—have not: they communicate a specific meaning almost immediately to almost every viewer. These few works have successfully made the transition from the elite realm of the museum visitor to the enormous venue of popular culture.^[58]

Other portraits[edit]

Other important portraits by Whistler include those of Thomas Carlyle (historian,1873), Maud Franklin (his mistress, 1876), Cicely Alexander (daughter of a London banker, 1873), Lady Meux (socialite, 1882), and Théodore Duret (critic, 1884). In the 1870s, Whistler painted full-length portraits of F.R. Leyland and his wife Frances. Leyland subsequently commissioned the artist to decorate his dining room (see Peacock Room below).

Whistler had been disappointed over the irregular acceptance of his works for the Royal Academy exhibitions and the poor hanging and placement of his paintings. In response, Whistler staged his first solo show in 1874. The show was notable and noticed, however, for Whistler’s design and decoration of the hall, which harmonized well with the paintings, in keeping with his art theories. A reviewer wrote, «The visitor is struck, on entering the gallery, with a curious sense of harmony and fitness pervading it, and is more interested, perhaps, in the general effect than in any one work.»^[60]

Whistler was not so successful a portrait painter as the other famous expatriate American John Singer Sargent. Whistler’s spare technique and his disinclination to flatter his sitters, as well as his notoriety, may account for this. He also worked very slowly and demanded extraordinarily long sittings. William Merritt Chase complained of his sitting for a portrait by Whistler, «He proved to be a veritable tyrant, painting every day into the twilight, while my limbs ached with weariness and my head swam dizzily. ‘Don’t move! Don’t move!’ he would scream whenever I started to rest.»^[61] By the time he gained widespread acceptance in the 1890s, Whistler was past his prime as a portrait painter.^[62]

Technique[edit]

Whistler’s approach to portraiture in his late maturity was described by one of his sitters, Arthur J. Eddy, who posed for the artist in 1894:

He worked with great rapidity and long hours, but he used his colours thin and covered the canvas with innumerable coats of paint. The colours increased in depth and intensity as the work progressed. At first the entire figure was painted in greyish-brown tones, with very little flesh colour, the whole blending perfectly with the greyish-brown of the prepared canvas; then the entire background would be intensified a little; then the figure made a little stronger; then the background, and so on from day to day and week to week, and often from month to month. … And so the portrait would really grow, really develop as an entirety, very much as a negative under the action of the chemicals comes out gradually—light, shadows, and all from the very first faint indications to their full values. It was as if the portrait were hidden within the canvas and the master by passing his wands day after day over the surface evoked the image.^[63]

Printmaking[edit]

Whistler produced numerous etchings, lithographs, and dry-points. His lithographs, some drawn on stone, others drawn directly on «lithographie» paper, are perhaps half as numerous as his etchings. Some of the lithographs are of figures slightly draped; two or three of the very finest are of Thames subjects—including a «nocturne» at Limehouse; while others depict the Faubourg Saint-Germain in Paris, and Georgian churches in Soho and Bloomsbury in London.

The etchings include portraits of family, mistresses, and intimate street scenes in London and Venice.^[65] Whistler gained an enormous reputation as an etcher. Martin Hardie wrote «there are some who set him beside Rembrandt, perhaps above Rembrandt, as the greatest master of all time. Personally, I prefer to regard them as the Jupiter and Venus, largest and brightest among the planets in the etcher’s heaven.» He took great care over the printing of his etchings and the choice of paper. At the beginning and end of his career, he placed great emphasis on cleanness of line, though in a middle period he experimented more with inking and the use of surface tone.

Butterfly signature and painting settings[edit]

Whistler’s famous butterfly signature first developed in the 1860s out of his interest in Asian art. He studied the potter’s marks on the china he had begun to collect and decided to design a monogram of his initials. Over time this evolved into the shape of an abstract butterfly. By around 1880, he added a stinger to the butterfly image to create a mark representing both his gentle, sensitive nature and his provocative, feisty spirit. He took great care in the appropriate placement of the image on both his paintings and his custom-made frames. His focus on the importance of balance and harmony extended beyond the frame to the placement of his paintings to their settings, and further to the design of an entire architectural element, as in the Peacock Room.^[46]

The Peacock Room[edit]

Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room^[69] is Whistler’s masterpiece of interior decorative mural art. He painted over the original paneled room designed by Thomas Jeckyll (1827–1881), in a unified palette of brilliant blue-greens with over-glazing and metallic gold leaf. Painted in 1876–1877, it is now considered a high example of the Anglo-Japanese style. Frederick Leyland left the room in Whistler’s care to make minor changes, «to harmonize» the room whose primary purpose was to display Leyland’s china collection. Whistler let his imagination run wild, however: «Well, you know, I just painted on. I went on—without design or sketch—putting in every touch with such freedom … And the harmony in blue and gold developing, you know, I forgot everything in my joy of it.» He completely painted over 16th-century Cordoba leather wall coverings first brought to Britain by Catherine of Aragon that Leyland had paid £1,000 for.

Having acquired the centerpiece of the room, Whistler’s painting of The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, American industrialist and aesthete Charles Lang Freer purchased the entire room in 1904 from Leyland’s heirs, including Leyland’s daughter and her husband, the British artist Val Prinsep. Freer then had the contents of the Peacock Room installed in his Detroit mansion. After Freer’s death in 1919, The Peacock Room was permanently installed in the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The gallery opened to the public in 1923.^[71] A large painted caricature by Whistler of Leyland portraying him as an anthropomorphic peacock playing a piano, and entitled The Gold Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre^[72] – a pun on Leyland’s fondness for frilly shirt fronts – is now in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Ruskin trial[edit]

In 1877 Whistler sued the critic John Ruskin for libel after the critic condemned his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Whistler exhibited the work in the Grosvenor Gallery, an alternative to the Royal Academy exhibition, alongside works by Edward Burne-Jones and other artists. Ruskin, who had been a champion of the Pre-Raphaelites and J. M. W. Turner, reviewed Whistler’s work in his publication Fors Clavigera on July 2, 1877. Ruskin praised Burne-Jones, while he attacked Whistler:

For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay [founder of the Grosvenor Gallery] ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.^[73]

Whistler, seeing the attack in the newspaper, replied to his friend George Boughton, «It is the most debased style of criticism I have had thrown at me yet.» He then went to his solicitor and drew up a writ for libel which was served to Ruskin.^[74] Whistler hoped to recover £1,000 plus the costs of the action. The case came to trial the following year after delays caused by Ruskin’s bouts of mental illness, while Whistler’s financial condition continued to deteriorate.^[75] It was heard in the Exchequer Division of the High Court on November 25 and 26, 1878 before Baron Huddleston and a special jury.^[76] Counsel for John Ruskin, Attorney General Sir John Holker, cross-examined Whistler:

Holker: «What is the subject of Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket?»

Whistler: «It is a night piece and represents the fireworks at Cremorne Gardens.»

Holker: «Not a view of Cremorne?»

Whistler: «If it were A View of Cremorne it would certainly bring about nothing but disappointment on the part of the beholders. It is an artistic arrangement. That is why I call it a nocturne. …»

Holker: «Did it take you much time to paint the Nocturne in Black and Gold? How soon did you knock it off?»

Whistler: «Oh, I ‘knock one off’ possibly in a couple of days – one day to do the work and another to finish it …» [the painting measures 24 3/4 x 18 3/8 inches]

Holker: «The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?»

Whistler: «No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.»^[77]

Whistler had counted on many artists to take his side as witnesses, but they refused, fearing damage to their reputations. The other witnesses for him were unconvincing and the jury’s own reaction to the work was derisive. With Ruskin’s witnesses more impressive, including Edward Burne-Jones, and with Ruskin absent for medical reasons, Whistler’s counter-attack was ineffective. Nonetheless, the jury reached a verdict in favor of Whistler, but awarded a mere farthing in nominal damages, and the court costs were split.^[78] The cost of the case, together with huge debts from building his residence («The White House» in Tite Street, Chelsea, designed with E. W. Godwin, 1877–8), bankrupted him by May 1879,^[79] resulting in an auction of his work, collections, and house. Stansky^[80] notes the irony that the Fine Art Society of London, which had organized a collection to pay for Ruskin’s legal costs, supported him in etching «The Stones of Venice» (and in exhibiting the series in 1883), which helped recoup Whistler’s costs.

Whistler published his account of the trial in the pamphlet Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics,^[81] included in his later The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890), in December 1878, soon after the trial. Whistler’s grand hope that the publicity of the trial would rescue his career was dashed as he lost rather than gained popularity among patrons because of it. Among his creditors was Leyland, who oversaw the sale of Whistler’s possessions.^[82] Whistler made various caricatures of his former patron, including a biting satirical painting called The Gold Scab, just after Whistler declared bankruptcy. Whistler always blamed Leyland for his financial downfall.^[83]

Later years[edit]

After the trial, Whistler received a commission to do twelve etchings in Venice. He eagerly accepted the assignment, and arrived in the city with girlfriend Maud, taking rooms in a dilapidated palazzo they shared with other artists, including John Singer Sargent.^[85] Although homesick for London, he adapted to Venice and set about discovering its character. He did his best to distract himself from the gloom of his financial affairs and the pending sale of all his goods at Sotheby’s. He was a regular guest at parties at the American consulate, and with his usual wit, enchanted the guests with verbal flourishes such as «the artist’s only positive virtue is idleness—and there are so few who are gifted at it.»^[86]

His new friends reported, on the contrary, that Whistler rose early and put in a full day of effort.^[87] He wrote to a friend, «I have learned to know a Venice in Venice that the others never seem to have perceived, and which, if I bring back with me as I propose, will far more than compensate for all annoyances delays & vexations of spirit.»^[88] The three-month assignment stretched to fourteen months. During this exceptionally productive period, Whistler finished over fifty etchings, several nocturnes, some watercolors, and over 100 pastels—illustrating both the moods of Venice and its fine architectural details.^[85]
Furthermore, Whistler influenced the American art community in Venice, especially Frank Duveneck (and Duveneck’s ‘boys’) and Robert Blum who emulated Whistler’s vision of the city and later spread his methods and influence back to America.

Back in London, the pastels sold particularly well and he quipped, «They are not as good as I supposed. They are selling!» He was actively engaged in exhibiting his other work but with limited success. Though still struggling financially, he was heartened by the attention and admiration he received from the younger generation of English and American painters who made him their idol and eagerly adopted the title «pupil of Whistler». Many of them returned to America and spread tales of Whistler’s provocative egotism, sharp wit, and aesthetic pronouncements—establishing the legend of Whistler, much to his satisfaction.

Whistler published his first book, Ten O’clock Lecture in 1885, a major expression of his belief in «art for art’s sake». At the time, the opposing Victorian notion reigned, namely, that art, and indeed much human activity, had a moral or social function. To Whistler, however, art was its own end and the artist’s responsibility was not to society, but to himself, to interpret through art, and to neither reproduce nor moralize what he saw. Furthermore, he stated, «Nature is very rarely right», and must be improved upon by the artist, with his own vision.^[92]

Though differing with Whistler on several points, including his insistence that poetry was a higher form of art than painting,^[93] Oscar Wilde was generous in his praise and hailed the lecture a masterpiece:

not merely for its clever satire and amusing jests … but for the pure and perfect beauty of many of its passages … for that he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting, in my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs.

Whistler, however, thought himself mocked by Oscar Wilde, and from then on, public sparring ensued leading to a total breakdown of their friendship, precipitated by a report written by Herbert Vivian.^[94][95] Later, Wilde struck at Whistler again, basing the murdered artist in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray after Whistler.^[96]

In January 1881, Anna Whistler died. In his mother’s honour, thereafter, he publicly adopted her maiden name McNeill as a middle name.^[97]

Whistler joined the Society of British Artists in 1884, and on June 1, 1886, he was elected president. The following year, during Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, Whistler presented to the Queen, on the Society’s behalf, an elaborate album including a lengthy written address and illustrations that he made. Queen Victoria so admired «the beautiful and artistic illumination» that she decreed henceforth, «that the Society should be called Royal.» This achievement was widely appreciated by the members, but soon it was overshadowed by the dispute that inevitably arose with the Royal Academy of Arts. Whistler proposed that members of the Royal Society should withdraw from the Royal Academy. This ignited a feud within the membership ranks that overshadowed all other society business. In May 1888, nine members wrote to Whistler to demand his resignation. At the annual meeting on June 4, he was defeated for re-election by a vote of 18–19, with nine abstentions. Whistler and 25 supporters resigned,^[98] while the anti-Whistler majority (in his view) was successful in purging him for his «eccentricities» and «non-English» background.^[99]

With his relationship with Maud unraveling, Whistler suddenly proposed to and married Beatrice Godwin (also called ‘Beatrix’ or ‘Trixie’), a former pupil and the widow of his architect Edward William Godwin. Through his friendship with Godwin, Whistler had become close to Beatrice, whom Whistler painted in the full-length portrait titled Harmony in Red: Lamplight (GLAHA 46315).^[100] By the summer of 1888 Whistler and Beatrice appeared in public as a couple. At a dinner Louise Jopling and Henry Labouchère insisted that they should be married before the end of the week.

The marriage ceremony was arranged; as a member of Parliament, Labouchère arranged for the Chaplain to the House of Commons to marry the couple. No publicity was given to the ceremony to avoid the possibility of a furious Maud Franklin interrupting the marriage ceremony. The marriage took place on August 11, 1888, with the ceremony attended by a reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette, so that the event received publicity. The couple left soon after for Paris, to avoid any risk of a scene with Maud.

Whistler’s reputation in London and Paris was rising and he gained positive reviews from critics and new commissions. His book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies was published in 1890 to mixed success, but it afforded helpful publicity.

In 1890, he met Charles Lang Freer, who became a valuable patron in America, and ultimately, his most important collector.^[105] Around this time, in addition to portraiture, Whistler experimented with early colour photography and with lithography, creating a series featuring London architecture and the human figure, mostly female nudes.^[106] He contributed the first three of his Songs of Stone lithographs to The Whirlwind a Neo-Jacobite magazine published by his friend Herbert Vivian.^[107] Whistler had met Vivian in the late 1880s when both were members of the Order of the White Rose, the first of the Neo-Jacobite societies.^{[citation needed]} In 1891, with help from his close friend Stéphane Mallarmé, Whistler’s Mother was purchased by the French government for 4,000 francs. This was much less than what an American collector might have paid, but that would not have been so prestigious by Whistler’s reckoning.^[108]

After an indifferent reception to his solo show in London, featuring mostly his nocturnes, Whistler abruptly decided he had had enough of London. He and Trixie moved to Paris in 1892 and resided at n° 110 Rue du Bac, Paris, with his studio at the top of 86 Rue Notre Dame des Champs in Montparnasse.^[110] He felt welcomed by Monet, Auguste Rodin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and by Stéphane Mallarmé, and he set himself up a large studio. He was at the top of his career when it was discovered that Trixie had cancer. They returned to London in February 1896, taking rooms at the Savoy Hotel while they sought medical treatment. He made drawings on lithographic transfer paper of the view of the River Thames, from the hotel window or balcony, as he sat with her.^[111] She died a few months later.

In 1899, Charles Freer introduced Whistler to his friend and fellow businessman Richard Albert Canfield, who became a personal friend and patron of Whistler’s. Canfield owned a number of fashionable gambling houses in New York, Rhode Island, Saratoga Springs and Newport, and was also a man of culture with refined tastes in art. He owned early American and Chippendale furniture, tapestries, Chinese porcelain and Barye bronzes, and possessed the second-largest and most important Whistler collection in the world prior to his death in 1914. In May 1901, Canfield commissioned a portrait from Whistler; he started to pose for Portrait of Richard A. Canfield (YMSM 547) in March 1902. According to Alexander Gardiner, Canfield returned to Europe to sit for Whistler at the New Year in 1903, and sat every day until May 16, 1903. Whistler was ill and frail at this time and the work was his last completed portrait. The deceptive air of respectability that the portrait gave Canfield caused Whistler to call it ‘His Reverence’. The two men were in correspondence from 1901 until Whistler’s death.^[113] A few months before his own death, Canfield sold his collection of etchings, lithographs, drawings and paintings by Whistler to the American art dealer Roland F. Knoedler for $300,000. Three of Canfield’s Whistler paintings hang in the Frick Museum in New York City.

In the final seven years of his life, Whistler did some minimalist seascapes in watercolor and a final self-portrait in oil. He corresponded with his many friends and colleagues. Whistler founded an art school in 1898, but his poor health and infrequent appearances led to its closure in 1901. He died in London on July 17, 1903, six days after his 69th birthday.^[115] He is buried in Chiswick Old Cemetery in west London, adjoining St Nicholas Church, Chiswick.^[116]

Whistler was the subject of a 1908 biography by his friends, the husband and wife team of Joseph Pennell and Elizabeth Robins Pennell, printmaker and art critic respectively. The Pennells’ vast collection of Whistler material was bequeathed to the Library of Congress.^[117] The artist’s entire estate was left to his sister-in-law Rosalind Birnie Philip. She spent the rest of her life defending his reputation and managing his art and effects, much of which eventually was donated to Glasgow University.^[118]

Personal relationships[edit]

Whistler had a distinctive appearance, short and slight, with piercing eyes and a curling mustache, often sporting a monocle and the flashy attire of a dandy.^[119] He affected a posture of self-confidence and eccentricity. He often was arrogant and selfish toward friends and patrons. A constant self-promoter and egoist, he relished shocking friends and enemies. Though he could be droll and flippant about social and political matters, he always was serious about art and often invited public controversy and debate to argue for his strongly held theories.

Whistler had a high-pitched, drawling voice and a unique manner of speech, full of calculated pauses. A friend said, «In a second you discover that he is not conversing—he is sketching in words, giving impressions in sound and sense to be interpreted by the hearer.»^[120]

Whistler was well known for his biting wit, especially in exchanges with his friend and rival Oscar Wilde. Both were figures in the Café society of Paris, and they were often the «talk of the town». They frequently appeared as caricatures in Punch, to their mutual amusement. On one occasion, young Oscar Wilde attended one of Whistler’s dinners, and hearing his host make some brilliant remark, apparently said, «I wish I’d said that», to which Whistler riposted, «You will, Oscar, you will!» In fact, Wilde did repeat in public many witticisms created by Whistler. Their relationship soured by the mid-1880s, as Whistler turned against Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement. When Wilde was publicly acknowledged to be a homosexual in 1895, Whistler openly mocked him. Whistler reveled in preparing and managing his social gatherings. As a guest observed:

One met all the best in Society there—the people with brains, and those who had enough to appreciate them. Whistler was an inimitable host. He loved to be the Sun round whom we lesser lights revolved … All came under his influence, and in consequence no one was bored, no one dull.^[121]

In Paris Whistler was friends with members of the Symbolist circle of artists, writers and poets that included Stéphane Mallarmé^[122] and Marcel Schwob.^[123] Schwob had met Whistler in the mid-1890s through Stéphane Mallarmé they had other mutual friends including Oscar Wilde (until they argued) and Whistler’s brother-in-law, Charles Whibley.

In addition to Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, and Courbet, Whistler was friendly with many other French artists. He illustrated the book Les Chauves-Souris with Antonio de La Gandara. He also knew the Impressionists, notably Édouard Manet, Monet, and Edgar Degas. As a young artist, he maintained a close friendship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His close friendships with Monet and poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who translated the Ten O’Clock Lecture into French, helped strengthen respect for Whistler by the French public.^[124] Whistler was friendly with his fellow students at Gleyre’s studio, including Ignace Schott, whose son Leon Dabo Whistler later would mentor.

Whistler’s lover and model for The White Girl, Joanna Hiffernan, also posed for Gustave Courbet. Historians speculate that Courbet used her as the model for his erotic painting L’Origine du monde, possibly leading to the breakup of the friendship between Whistler and Courbet. During the 1870s and much of the 1880s, he lived with his model-mistress Maud Franklin. Her ability to endure his long, repetitive sittings helped Whistler develop his portrait skills.^[121] He not only made several excellent portraits of her but she was also a helpful stand-in for other sitters.Whistler had several illegitimate children, of whom Charles Hanson is the best documented.^[126] After parting from his mistress Joanna Hiffernan, she helped to raise Whistler’s son, Charles James Whistler Hanson (1870–1935),^[127] the result of an affair with a parlour maid, Louisa Fanny Hanson.^[128] Whistler had two daughters by his common law mistress Maud Franklin: Ione (born circa 1877) and Maud McNeill Whistler Franklin (born 1879).^[129] She sometimes referred to herself as ‘Mrs. Whistler’, and in the census of 1881 gave her name as ‘Mary M. Whistler’.

In 1888, Whistler married Beatrice Godwin, (who was called ‘Beatrix’ or ‘Trixie’ by Whistler). She was the widow of the architect E. W. Godwin, who had designed Whistler’s White House, and the daughter of the sculptor John Birnie Philip^[132] and his wife Frances Black. Beatrix and her sisters Rosalind Birnie Philip^[133] and Ethel Whibley posed for many of Whistler’s paintings and drawings; with Ethel Whibley modeling for Mother of pearl and silver: The Andalusian (1888–1900).^[128] The first five years of their marriage were very happy, but her later life was a time of misery for the couple, due to her illness and eventual death from cancer. Near the end, she lay comatose much of the time, completely subdued by morphine, given for pain relief. Her death was a strong blow Whistler never quite overcame.^[134]

Legacy[edit]

Whistler was inspired by and incorporated many sources in his art, including the work of Rembrandt, Velázquez, and ancient Greek sculpture to develop his own highly influential and individual style. He was adept in many media, with over 500 paintings, as well as etchings, pastels, watercolors, drawings, and lithographs.^[135] Whistler was a leader in the Aesthetic Movement, promoting, writing, and lecturing on the «art for art’s sake» philosophy. With his pupils, he advocated simple design, economy of means, the avoidance of over-labored technique, and the tonal harmony of the final result. Whistler has been the subject of many major museum exhibitions, studies, and publications. Like the Impressionists, he employed nature as an artistic resource. Whistler insisted that it was the artist’s obligation to interpret what he saw, not be a slave to reality, and to «bring forth from chaos glorious harmony».

During his life, he affected two generations of artists, in Europe and in the United States. Whistler had significant contact and exchanged ideas and ideals with Realist, Impressionist, and Symbolist painters. Famous protégés for a time included Walter Sickert and writer Oscar Wilde. His Tonalism had a profound effect on many American artists, including John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Henry Salem Hubbell and Willis Seaver Adams (whom he befriended in Venice). Another significant influence was upon Arthur Frank Mathews, whom Whistler met in Paris in the late 1890s. Mathews took Whistler’s Tonalism to San Francisco, spawning a broad use of that technique among turn-of-the-century California artists. As American critic Charles Caffin wrote in 1907:

He did better than attract a few followers and imitators; he influenced the whole world of art. Consciously, or unconsciously, his presence is felt in countless studios; his genius permeates modern artistic thought.

During a trip to Venice in 1880, Whistler created a series of etchings and pastels that not only reinvigorated his finances, but also re-energized the way in which artists and photographers interpreted the city—focusing on the back alleys, side canals, entrance ways, and architectural patterns—and capturing the city’s unique atmospherics.

In 1940 Whistler was commemorated on a United States postage stamp when the U.S. Post Office issued a set of 35 stamps commemorating America’s famous Authors, Poets, Educators, Scientists, Composers, Artists, and Inventors: the ‘Famous Americans Series’.

The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Patience pokes fun at the Aesthetic movement, and the lead character of Reginald Bunthorne is often identified as a send-up of Oscar Wilde, though Bunthorne is more likely an amalgam of several prominent artists, writers, and Aesthetic figures. Bunthorne wears a monocle and has prominent white streaks in his dark hair, as did Whistler.

Whistler was the favorite artist of singer and actress Doris Day. She owned and displayed an original etching of Whistler’s Rotherhithe, and two of his original lithographs, The Steps, Luxembourg Gardens, Paris and The Pantheon, from the Terrace of the Luxembourg Gardens.^[136]

The house in which Whistler was born is now preserved as the Whistler House Museum of Art. He is buried at St Nicholas Church, Chiswick.

Honors[edit]

Whistler achieved worldwide recognition during his lifetime:

• 1884, elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
• 1892, made an officer of the Légion d’honneur in France.^[137]
• 1898, became a charter member and first president, International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers.

A statue of James McNeill Whistler by Nicholas Dimbleby was erected in 2005 at the north end of Battersea Bridge on the River Thames in the United Kingdom.

Gallery[edit]

Auction records[edit]

On October 27, 2010, Swann Galleries set a record price for a Whistler print at auction, when Nocturne, an etching and drypoint printed in black on warm, cream Japan paper, 1879–80 sold for $282,000.^[139]

See also[edit]

• John Wharlton Bunney
• Western painting

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). «Whistler, James Abbott McNeill» . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Cookson, Brian (2006), Crossing the River, Edinburgh: Mainstream, ISBN 978-1-84018-976-6, OCLC 63400905
• Snodin, Michael and John Styles. Design & The Decorative Arts, Britain 1500–1900. V&A Publications: 2001. ISBN 1-85177-338-X
• Anderson, Ronald; Koval, Anne (1995). James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth. New York, NY.: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 978-0-7867-0187-2. OCLC 613244627.
• Hardie, Martin (1921). The British School of Etching. London: The Print Collectors Club.
• Pennell, Joseph; Pennell, Elizabeth Robins (1911). The Life of James McNeill Whistler (5th ed.). London: William Heinemann.
• Peters, Lisa N. (1996). James McNeil Whistler. New York, NY: Smithmark. ISBN 978-0-7651-9961-4. OCLC 36587931.
• Sutherland, Daniel E. (2014). Whistler, A Life for Arts Sake. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-13545-9..
• Spencer, Robin (1994). Whistler. London: Studio Editions. ISBN 1-85170-904-5.
• Weintraub, Stanley (1983). Whistler. New York, NY: E.P. Dutton. ISBN 0-679-40099-0.

Primary sources[edit]

• «George A. Lucas Papers». The Baltimore Museum of Art. Archived from the original on April 19, 2015.
• Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (3rd ed, Puttnam, New York, 1904 [2]

Further reading[edit]

• Bendix, Deanna Marohn (1995). Diabolical Designs: Paintings, Interiors, and Exhibitions of James McNeill Whistler. Washington D.C. The Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-415-5.
• Cox, Devon (2015). The Street of Wonderful Possibilities: Whistler, Wilde & Sargent in Tite Street. London: Frances Lincoln. ISBN 9780711236738.
• Curry, David Park (1984). James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art. New York: W. W. Norton and Freer Gallery of Art. ISBN 9780393018479.
• Denker, Eric (2003). Whistler and His Circle in Venice. London: Merrell Publishers. ISBN 1-85894-200-4.
• Dorment, R and MacDonald, M. F. (1994). James McNeill Whistler. London: Tate Gallery.ISBN 1-85437-145-2.
• Fleming, G. H. (1991). James Abbott McNeill Whistler: A Life. Adlestrop: Windrush. ISBN 0-900075-61-9.
• Fleming, G. H. (1978). The Young Whistler, 1834–66. London: Allen and Unwin. ISBN 0-04-927009-5.
• Glazer, Lee, et al. (2008). James McNeill Whistler in Context. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.ISBN 978-0-934686-09-9.
• Glazer, Lee and Merrill, Linda, eds. (2013). Palaces of Art: Whistler and the Art Worlds of Aestheticism. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press. ISBN 978-1-935623-29-8.
• Gregory, Horace (1961). The World of James McNeill Whistler. London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0-04-927009-5.
• Grieve, Alastair (1984). Whistler’s Venice. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08449-8.
• Heijbroek, J. E. and MacDonald, Margaret F. (1997). Whistler and Holland. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. ISBN 90-400-9183-8.
• Levey, Mervyn (1975). Whistler Lithographs, Catalogue Raisonne. London: Jupiter Books.
• Lochnan, Katherine A.(1984). The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-03283-8.
• MacDonald Margaret F. (2001). Palaces in the Night: Whistler and Venice. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23049-3.
• MacDonald, Margaret F., ed. (2003). Whistler’s Mother, An American Icon. Aldershot: Lund Humphries. ISBN 0-85331-856-5.
• MacDonald, Margaret F., Galassi, Susan Grace and Ribeiro, Aileen (2003). Whistler, Women, & Fashion. Frick Collection/Yale University. ISBN 0-300-09906-1.
• MacDonald, Margaret F., and de Montfort, Patricia (2013). An American in London, Whistler and the Thames. London: Philip Wilson Publishers. ISBN 978-1-78130-022-0.
• MacDonald, Margaret F., et al. (2020). The Woman in White Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler. Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art and London: Royal Academy of Arts/ Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-25450-1.
• Merrill, Linda (1992). A Pot of Paint; Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin. Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-300-0.
• Merrill, Linda (1998). The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography. Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art / Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07611-8.
• Merrill, Linda, and Ridley, Sarah (1993) The Princess and the Peacocks; or, The Story of the [Peacock] Room. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, in association with the Freer Gallery of Art. ISBN 1-56282-327-2.
• Merrill, Linda, et al. (2003) After Whistler: The Artist and his Influence on American Painting. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10125-2.
• Munhall, Edgar (1995). Whistler and Montesquiou. Paris: Flammarion. ISBN 2-08013-578-3.
• Pearson, Hesketh (1978) [1952]. The Man Whistler. London: Macdonald and Jane’s. ISBN 0-354-04224-6.
• Petri, Grischka (2011). Arrangement in Business: The Art Markets and the Career of James McNeill Whistler. Hildesheim: G. Olms. ISBN 978-3-487-14630-0.
• Robins, Anna Gruetzner (2007). A Fragile Modernism, Whistler and his Impressionist Followers. Yale University Press.ISBN 978-0-300-13545-9.
• Spencer, Robin (1991). Whistler: A Retrospective. New York: Wing Books. ISBN 0-517-05773-5.
• Stubbs, Burns A. (1950). James McNeill Whistler: A Biographical Outline Illustrated from the Collections of the Freer Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
• Sutherland, Daniel E. and Toutziari, G. (2018). James McNeill Whistler. Yale University Press.ISBN 978-0-300-20346-2.
• Thompson, Jennifer A. (2017). «Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (cat. 1112).» In The John G. Johnson Collection: A History and Selected Works, edited by Christopher D. M. Atkins. A Philadelphia Museum of Art free digital publication. ISBN 978-0-87633-276-4.
• Twohig, Edward (2018). Print REbels: Haden – Palmer – Whistler and the origins of the RE (Royal Society of Painter-Printmaker) by Edward Twohig RE. ISBN 978-1-5272-1775-1. Published by the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in London, in May 2018.
• Taylor, Hilary (1978). James McNeill Whistler. London: Studio Vista. ISBN 0-289-70836-2.
• Weintraub, Stanley (1974). Whistler: A Biography. New York: Weybright and Talley. ISBN 0-679-40099-0.
• Young, MacDonald, Spencer, Miles (1980). The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler. Yale University Press.ISBN 0-300-02384-7.

External links[edit]

• 111 artworks by or after James Abbott McNeill Whistler at the Art UK site
• Works by James McNeill Whistler at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about James McNeill Whistler at Internet Archive
• Works by James Abbott McNeill Whistler at Open Library
• The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, Glasgow University Edited by M.F.MacDonald, P.de Montfort, N. Thorp.
• Catalogue raisonné of the etchings of James McNeill Whistler by M.F. MacDonald, G. Petri, M. Hausberg, J. Meacock.
• James McNeill Whistler: The Paintings, a Catalogue Raisonné, University of Glasgow, 2014 by M.F. MacDonald, G. Petri.
• James McNeill Whistler exhibition catalogs
• The Freer Gallery of Art which houses the premier collection of Whistler works including the Peacock Room.
• An account of the Whistler/Ruskin affair
• Whistler House Museum of Art official web site
• Works by James Abbott McNeill Whistler at University of Michigan Museum of Art
• Rudolf Wunderlich Collection of James McNeill Whistler Exhibition Catalogs at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Texts on Wikisource:
  • «James McNeill Whistler,» poem by Florence Earle Coates
  • «Whistler, James Abbott McNeill». The New Student’s Reference Work. 1914.
  • «Whistler, James Abbott McNeill». Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
• The Whistler Society, London. Founded 2012.
• Jennifer A. Thompson, «Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (cat. 1112)» in The John G. Johnson Collection: A History and Selected Works, a Philadelphia Museum of Art free digital publication.

Thanks for your patience. Our site is undergoing an important update at this time. We’ll be back shortly.

Sincerely,
The Britannica Team

Disclaimer

American Aesthetic Painter and Engraver

1834 — 1903

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based painter and etcher. Averse to sentimentality in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo «art for art’s sake». He took to signing his paintings with a stylized butterfly, possessing a long stinger for a tail. The symbol was apt, for Whistler’s art was characterized by a subtle delicacy, in contrast to his combative public persona. Finding a parallel between painting and music, Whistler titled many of his works ‘harmonies’ and ‘arrangements’.

Whistler was born to George Washington Whistler, a prominent engineer, and Anna Matilda McNeill in Lowell, Massachusetts. Beginning in 1842 his father was employed to work on the railroad in Saint Petersburg, Russia. After moving to Saint Petersburg, the young Whistler enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and also learned French. At the Ruskin trial (see below), Whistler claimed Russia as his birthplace: «I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell,» he declared. After the death of his father in 1849, James Whistler and his mother moved back to her hometown of Pomfret, Connecticut.

He attended local school and then transferred to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where his father had once taught drawing. His departure from West Point seems to have been due to a failure in a chemistry exam; as he himself put it later: «If silicon were a gas, I would have been a general one day.» In European society, he later presented himself as an impoverished Southern aristocrat, although to what extent he truly sympathized with the Southern cause during the American Civil War remains unclear.

Whistler is best known for the nearly monochromatic full-length figure titled Arrangement in Gray and Black: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, but usually referred to as Whistler’s Mother. The painting was purchased by the French government and is housed in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Whistler’s Mother

Whistler’s painting The White Girl (1862) caused controversy when exhibited in London and, later, at the Salon des Refusés in Paris. The painting epitomizes his theory that art should essentially be concerned with the beautiful arrangement of colors in harmony, not with the accurate portrayal of the natural world.

The White Girl: 1862

In the 1870’s Whistler painted full length portraits of F.R. Leyland and his wife. Leyland subsequently commissioned the artist to decorate his dining room; the result was Whistler’s Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, now in the Freer Gallery of Art. The room was designed and painted in a rich and unified palette of brilliant blue-greens with over-glazing and metallic leaf, and is considered a high example of the Anglo-Japanese style. The painting was inspired by the blue and white china copied in watercolor for Sir Henry Thompson’s catalogue, and from the porcelain both he and Leyland collected.

F.R. Leyland: 1870

Mrs Frances Leyland: 1871-73

Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room (1876-77)

Artist and patron quarreled so violently over the room and the proper compensation for the work that their relationship was terminated. At one point, Whistler gained access to Leyland’s home and painted two fighting peacocks meant to represent the artist and his patron; one holds a paint brush and the other holds a bag of money. The entire room was later purchased by industrialist and aesthete Charles Lang Freer, and installed in his collection. The published communications between Freer and Whistler reveal how Whistler’s interest in those collecting his work in his native country (the United States) evolved over many decades.

Charles Lang Freer: 1902

In 1877 Whistler sued the critic John Ruskin for libel after the critic condemned his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Whistler exhibited the work in the Grosvenor Gallery that year alongside Edward Burne-Jones and others, and was reviewed by Ruskin in his publication Fors Clavigera on the July 2nd, 1877. Ruskin praised Burne-Jones, while he attacked Whistler:

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1874)

«For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay (founder of the Grosvenor Gallery) ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.»

The case came to trial the following year and was heard at the Queen’s Bench of the High Court from November 25th to 26th 1878. The lawyer for John Ruskin, Attorney General Sir John Holker, and cross examined Whistler:

Holker: «What is the subject of Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket?»

Whistler: «It is a night piece and represents the fireworks at Cremorne Gardens.»

Holker: «Not a view of Cremorne?»

Whistler: «If it were A View of Cremorne it would certainly bring about nothing but disappointment on the part of the beholders. It is an artistic arrangement. That is why I call it a nocturne….»

Holker: «Did it take you much time to paint the Nocturne in Black and Gold? How soon did you knock it off?»

Whistler: «Oh, I ‘knock one off’ possibly in a couple of days — one day to do the work and another to finish it…»

Holker: » The labor of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?»

Whistler: «No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.»

Though suing for one thousand pounds plus costs, Whistler won a mere farthing in nominal damages. The cost of the case, together with huge debts from building his residence, «The White House» in Tite Street, Chelsea, (designed with E. W. Godwin, 1877-8) bankrupted him by May 1879 despite his despairing commercial ventures, resulting in an auction of his work, collections and house. Stansky notes the irony that the Fine Art Society of London, which had organized a collection to pay for Ruskin’s legal costs, supported him in etching «The Stones of Venice» (and in exhibiting the series in 1883) to recoup himself. He published his account of the trial in the pamphlet Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics in December 1878, soon after the trial.

«The White House» in Tite Street, ChelseaCirca 1877: The ‘White House’, Tite Street, Chelsea, London, former home of American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The house was designed by architect Edward William Godwin and built in 1877. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

After the Ruskin trial, everything he mentioned or wrote about his work, and especially everything he told his biographers was done in a way in which he could dissociate himself from the English school of painting. His main purpose was to lose any relations he had with the couple of enemies he had made among the Royal Academicians, and the artists who he had been close to during the 1860’s. Despite his attempts to give the notion that he did not belong to any school, he is without a doubt one of the few Victorian painters who is known for revitalizing the ‘grand manner’ of British painting.

A supremely gifted engraver, Whistler produced numerous etchings, lithographs, and dry-points. His lithographs, some drawn on stone, others drawn directly on «lithographie» paper, are perhaps half as numerous as his etchings. Some of the lithographs are of figures slightly draped; two or three of the very finest are of Thames subjects — including a «nocturne» at Limehouse; while others depict the Faubourg Saint-Germain in Paris, and Georgian churches in Soho and Bloomsbury in London. The etchings include portraits of family, mistresses, and intimate street scenes in London and Venice.

Etchings and Lithographs of WhistlerAfternoon Tea: 1897Afternoon Tea is a double portrait of Whstler’s mother-in-law, Frances Birnie Philip, and her daughter, Ethel Whibley.

Annie: 1897Annie Haden was the eldest daughter of Whistler’s half-sister, Deborah and the famous etcher, Sir Francis Seymour Haden. At the time of this etching, she would have been about 9 or 11 years old.

Annie Seated: 1858One of the most charming of Whistler’s early etchings, this portrait study of Annie Haden was etched around 1859. The etching is not to be found among the Twelve Etchings from Nature, having only been available as an independent print. Annie Haden was the eldest daughter of Whistler’s half-sister, Deborah and the famous etcher, Sir Francis Seymour Haden. At the time of this etching, she would have been about 10 or 12 years old.

Billingsgate: 1859For many centuries Billingsgate was the main wharf for the mooring of fishing vessels and landing their cargoes. Corn, malt, salt and fish were landed as early as the 13th century. In 1699 an Act of Parliament was passed making it «a free and open market for all sorts of fish whatsoever». Until the 19th century, fish was sold from stalls and sheds around the dock at Billingsgate. As trade increased, the first purpose-built Billingsgate Market building was built on Lower Thames Street in 1850. Billingsgate is associated with the famous London fish market.

Cadogan Pier: 1859Cadogan Pier was built in the nineteenth century, by Lord Cadogan. In the shadow of Albert Bridge, and opposite Battersea Park, it is one of London’s best moorings.

Fulham: 1879Printed on the full sheet of antique cream paid paper countermarked ‘1804’. Signed with the butterfly in the plate and in pencil.

The Lime-Burner: 1859In the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1859, this etching was described as » W. Jones, lime-burner, Thames Street (943).» When published in» A Series of Sixteen Etchings of Scenes on the Thames and Other Subjects by James Whistler» it was entitled (9) The Lime-Burners.

Old Hungerford Bridge: 1861Old Hungerford Bridge is one of two footbridges on either side of the Charing Cross railway bridge across the river Thames. This linked the south bank with Hungerford Market on the north side. Whistler probably etched the plate in the winter of 1860, when the Brunel Bridge was being demolished to make way for Charing Cross railway bridge.

The suspension chains, some of which are shown being taken down, were re-used to complete Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, also designed by Brunel. This etching anticipates Whistler’s move to an aesthetic approach, concentrating on simple lines and shapes to convey the scene. He has included a number of different river craft: steamboats, Thames barges, lighters and a hay barge. Figures can be seen working high up on the bridge.

Rotherhithe: 1860Rotherhithe was made on the balcony of the Angel Inn at Rotherhithe, looking northwest toward the City; the dome of St. Paul’s is visible on the horizon at the far left.

Seymour Standing Under a Tree: 1856-57Seymour Standing Under a Tree is a portrait of Arthur Charles Haden, brother to Annie, and the son of Whistler’s brother-in-law, the famous etcher, Sir Francis Seymour Haden. Whistler, with Haden, pioneered a new style of etching that broke away from the Victorian tradition of highly finished narrative prints in which etched work filled the entire frame of the image. These two men are considered to have been the prime force behind the British Etching Revival.

Thames Police (Wapping Wharf): 1859Crowded with old riverside buildings of Wapping, the viewpoint is taken from the water’s edge, looking at masts of sailing ships on the left and a row of river craft anchored on the right. The small skiffs, or rowing boats, of the Marine Police are shown pulled up on the shore at Wapping Wharf. Whistler has shown the old timber frame buildings, brick and stone work, ships’ masts, old boats and river shoreline.

Thames Warehouses: 1879A very rich impression printed on tissue laid paper with full margins.

Vauxhall Bridge: 1861Vauxhall Bridge crosses the River Thames in central London.

La Vieille aux Loques: 1858From the French Set (Douze Eaux-Fortes d’après Nature.) A very rich impression on pale blue laid paper with full margins and a partial Strasbourg Lily countermark.

Whistler’s influence was significant, and has been the subject of museum exhibitions and publications. A trip to Venice in 1880 to create a series of etchings not only reinvigorated Whistler’s finances, but also re-energized the way in which artists and photographers interpreted the city. His tonalism had a profound effect on many American artists, including John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase. Famous protégés included Oscar Wilde and impressionist painter Walter Sickert; Whistler fell out with both Wilde and Sickert. He successfully sued Sickert in the 1890’s over a minor legal issue in France. When Wilde was publicly acknowledged to be a homosexual in 1895, Whistler openly mocked him. Another significant influence was upon Arthur Frank Mathews, whom Whistler met in Paris in the late 1890’s. Mathews took Whistler’s Tonalism to San Francisco, spawning a broad use of that technique among turn of the century California artists.

Once, after he had suffered a heart attack, a Dutch newspaper incorrectly reported Whistler dead. He wrote to the newspaper, saying that reading his own obituary induced a «tender glow of health».

The operetta Patience pokes fun at the Aesthetic movement, and the lead character of Reginald Bunthorne is often identified as send-up of Oscar Wilde. In reality Bunthorne seems to be an amalgam of several prominent artists, writers and Aesthetic figures. Bunthorne wears a monocle and has prominent white streak in his dark hair, as did Whistler.

Whistler published two books which detailed his thoughts on life and art: Ten O’Clock Lecture (1885), and The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). He was, in turn, the subject of a contemporaneous biography by a friend: the printmaker Joseph Pennell collaborated with his wife Elizabeth Robins Pennell to write The Life of James McNeill Whistler, published in 1908.

Whistler’s belief that art should concentrate on the arrangement of colors led many critics to see his work as a precursor of abstract art.

The house in which he was born is now preserved as the Whistler House Museum of Art. He is buried at St Nicholas’s Church in Chiswick, London.

Whistler achieved worldwide recognition during his lifetime. In 1884 he was elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 1892 he was made an officer of the Legion d’Honneur in France and he became a charter member and first president of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, & Gravers in 1898.

Various Works of James Abbott McNeill Whistler:
These are not necessarily in any thematic or chronological order.At the Piano: 1858-59«At the Piano», Whistler’s first major work, reflects the bourgeois environment in which he was raised. Yet the standard subject matter of the drawing room piano is dynamized by the composition. Whistler consciously imitated the optical effect provided by the stereoscopes popular during his day. Note the two definitively separate focal points of mother and daughter; it is impossible to focus on both simultaneously. The shallow pictorial depth pulls the viewer into the canvas, which exaggerates this stereoptical effect. It feels almost as if you were holding a book so close to your face that you can’t read the words.

A Shop: 1884-90

An Orange Note: Sweet Shop (1884)

Annabel Lee: ca 1890ANNABEL LEE
Edgar Allan Poe

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we
Of many far wiser than we
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide,
I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Arrangement in White and Black — Portrait of Miss Rosa Corder: 1876The artist Rosa Corder was the mistress of the art dealer and entrepreneur Charles Augustus Howell and the mother of his son. Howell assisted Whistler in selling his artwork, particularly his prints, in the late 1870’s.

Arrangement in Yellow and Grey — Portrait of Effie Deans: 1877Effie Deans is one of the central characters in The Heart of Midlothian, a novel by Sir Walter Scott, written in 1818. Effie had been imprisoned on a false charge: accused of having killed her illegitimate child. When an angry crowd stormed the goal, she had an opportunity to escape. But Effie decided to stay. Prison seemed a better prospect than a life of freedom with a tarnished reputation.

At the time Whistler painted this portrait a play based on the story of Effie Deans was running at the Albion Theatre in London. Whistler may well have seen the play and been inspired by Effie’s tragic fate.

Quote from Sir Walter Scott: «She sunk her head upon her hand and remained seemingly unconscious as a statue.» The woman’s personality and posture reflect the sentiment of the quotation. Whistler added the text some years after completing the picture at the buyer’s request.

The Old Battersea Bridge (Another View): 1859

Caprice in Purple and Gold No 2 — The Golden Screen: 1864

Chelsea Houses: ca 1880-87

Chelsea Wharf: 1875In Grey and Silver: Chelsea Wharf, the tenements and factories on the distant Battersea shoreline are transformed into a fantasy of spires and domes. A few diagonal spars enliven the quiet geometry of masts and hulls, docks and passersby.

The subtle tonal scheme is composed entirely of muted variations on the complementary colors of blue and orange. Whistler stated, «As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight.» In other words, various musical notes relate to a dominant key, just as various colors relate to a unifying hue in painting.

Cremorne Gardens No 2: ca 1872-77

Cremorne Lights: 1872

Grey and Gold: Snow in Chelsea (1876)

Grey and Silver: Battersea Beach (1863)

Harmony in Blue and Silver: 1865

Harmony in Green and Rose: The Music RoomPortrait of Miss Constance Macdonald Gilchrist (1865-1946), depicted in costume as she would have appeared on the stage of the Gaiety Theatre, in the skipping-rope dance. The rope swings over her head as she steps forward with her right leg. She wears a light brown dress and satin boots with high heels.

Quoted From: Horizon Information Portal

Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (1873)Cicely Alexander was the second daughter of the London banker and art collector W.C. Alexander. Her father was the first to buy a nocturne, and he commissioned Whistler to paint portraits of his two daughters, both of which are now in the Tate Gallery. Whistler designed the dress for the portrait.

Harmony in Red Lamplight: 1886

Harmony in Yellow and Gold: The Gold Girl Connie GilchristPortrait of Miss Constance Macdonald Gilchrist (1865-1946), depicted in costume as she would have appeared on the stage of the Gaiety Theatre, in the skipping-rope dance. The rope swings over her head as she steps forward with her right leg. She wears a light brown dress and satin boots with high heels.

Quoted From: Horizon Information Portal

Head of a Peasant Woman: 1855-58

Head of Old Man Smoking: ca 1858

Joanna Hiffernan: ca 1860

La Belle de Jour: ca 1885

London Bridge: 1885

Maud Franklin: ca 1875Maud Franklin, the daughter of a cabinetmaker and upholsterer, was born in Bicester, near Oxford, on 9 January 1857. In the late 1870’s, she posed to Whistler for several etchings and portraits, including ‘Arrangement in White and Black’. She had two daughters by Whistler, one, Ióne, probably born in 1877, a second, registered as Maud McNeill Whistler Franklin, born on 13 February 1879. Maud accompanied Whistler to Venice in 1879-80. She painted herself in the manner of her lover. After Whistler married Beatrice Godwin in 1888, Maud lived in Paris. She married an American, Richard H. S. Abbott, and lived near Cannes until her death, probably in 1941. She refused Whistler’s biographers to give any information concerning her relationship with him.

Miss Rosalind Birnie Philip Standing: ca 1897Rosalind, the daughter of the sculptor John Birnie Philip, was 22 when her elder sister Beatrice, Whistler’s wife, died in 1896. Whistler then made her his ward and executrix; she acted as his secretary until his death in 1903. Thereafter she became something of a jealous guardian of Whistler’s memory. She presented an important group of paintings and drawings to the University of Glasgow in 1935, and followed this, in 1955 and 1958, with a bequest which consisted of the rest of the Whistler estate, including some 6000 letters, ledgers, books, catalogues, etc. She posed for several drawings and lithographs by him, as well as five paintings, three of which are now in the Hunterian Art Gallery.

Mother of Pearl and Silver: The_Andalusian (1888-1900)

Mrs Charles Wibley Reading: 1894

Nocturne Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (ca 1872-75)This painting is dominated by Battersea Bridge, with Chelsea Old Church and the lights of the newly built Albert Bridge just visible in the background. The Thames has long signified the condition and power of London.

Whistler, however, does not portray the riverside crowded with factories, warehouses, wharves and mills, but the atmospheric effects of the water in the evening. He wrote ‘when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry… tall chimneys become campanili (bell towers) and the warehouses are palaces in the night and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairy land is before us’.

Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso Bay (1866)

Nocturne in Blue and Silver: 1871-72

Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon Venice (1879-80)

Nocturne in Gray and Gold: Westminster Bridge (ca 1871-1874)

Nocturne in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux (1881-1882)

Nocturne Trafalgar Square Chelsea Snow: 1876

Pink Note: The Novelette (1884)The expressiveness of Whistler’s brushwork is evident in this watercolor. He suggested the fall of the curtains through vertical sweeps of the brush and the carpet using horizontal strokes. The unmade bed was painted using dabs and streaks of color. Whistler concentrated attention on some areas of the picture, leaving others only roughly suggested. For example, the face of the girl absorbed in her book and the picture and fans above the fireplace were very delicately painted, while the little table was left undefined. The paper shows through here, showing how little worked this area was. Whistler’s pictures were criticized at the time because of their apparent lack of finish. However, Whistler cleverly used the bare paper to give white highlights rather than using white paint. His varied brushstrokes also gave the picture a vibrancy and freshness.

Portrait of Arthur J Eddy: 1894The Chicago lawyer Arthur J. Eddy was an early collector of cubist and abstract art. He commissioned his portrait from Whistler in 1893, and it was painted in six weeks in his Parisian studio, 1894.

Portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell: 1882-84Janey Sevilla Callander of Craigforth, Stirling, and Ardkingglass, Argyll, married the second son of the eighth Duke of Argyll in 1869. Her patronage significantly assisted Whistler’s position in London society after his return from Venice in 1880. In her turn, Lady Archibald was much influenced by Whistler’s color theories, as expressed in her book Rainbow Music or The Philosophy of Harmony in Color-Grouping, published in 1886. Whistler painted three portraits of her.

Portrait of Miss Milly Finch: ca 1885

Portrait of Miss Rosa Corder: ca 1876The artist Rosa Corder was the mistress of the art dealer and entrepreneur Charles Augustus Howell and the mother of his son. Howell assisted Whistler in selling his artwork, particularly his prints, in the late 1870’s.

Portrait of Theodore Duret: 1883Theodore Duret (1838-1927), heir to a firm of Cognac dealers, was a collector, orientalist, and art critic. An early champion of Courbet, Manet, and the Impressionists, he was introduced to Whistler by Manet. He posed for this portrait in 1883 at Whistler`s London studio at 13 Tite Street. At Duret`s request, Whistler painted him in full evening dress, but Whistler suggested that he hold a pink domino, an addition necessary to the decorative arrangement of the composition. Whistler worked on the portrait over a long period of time, even though the finished work ultimately looks like a rapid sketch. Acclaimed when exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1885, it was ranked by many as the best portrait of Duret painted by any of the great Realist artists of the period.

Portrait of Thomas Carlyle: 1873Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) is a Scottish historian, essayist and intellectual, born in Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire. He was educated at Ecclefechan village school, Annan Academy and Edinburgh University, where he studied arts and mathematics. After graduating in 1813 he worked as a teacher. In 1818, Carlyle returned to Edinburgh and engaged himself with private tutoring and translations of different authors from German and French. In 1826, he married Jane Baillie Welsh and started to write articles and essays for the Edinburgh Review. In 1834, the Carlyle’s moved to London, where Thomas spent the rest of his life. Here he completed ‘The French Revolution’ (1837), ‘On Heroes’, ‘Hero Worship and the Heroic in History’ (1841), ‘Past and Present’ (1843), a six-volume History of … ‘Frederick the Great’ (1858-65), ‘The Early Kings of Norway’ (1875) et al. In 1866 he was installed as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University. He was buried at his own wish in Ecclefechan.

Portrait of Whistler with Hat: 1858

Self Portrait: 1895-1900

Symphonie in White No 2 (1864)This picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1865 as ‘The Little White Girl’. It shows a young woman, dressed in white, leaning against a mantelpiece and gazing dreamily into a mirror. She is captured in a moment of deep contemplation. Her face is reflected in the mirror and silhouetted against a seascape, reinforcing the dream-like atmosphere. The reflected image is sad and careworn, and one is tempted to draw some kind of link with the wedding ring so prominently displayed on her left hand. Whistler may also have intended to evoke Velasquez’s Rokeby ‘Venus’ (National Gallery, London), where the reflection of the woman’s face is similarly at odds with her own idealized image.

The poet Swinburne was so inspired by Whistler’s picture that he composed a verse ballad, ‘Before the Mirror’, in response. It was intended to complement, rather than explain the picture:

Glad, but not flushed with gladness,
Since joys go by;
Sad, but not bent with sadness,
Since sorrows die;
Deep in the gleaming glass
She sees all past things pass,
And all sweet life that was lie down and lie.

(Algernon Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, London 1866)

Whistler was delighted with the poem and had it printed on gold paper and pasted onto the frame. In this way he hoped to reinforce the picture’s theme of reverie and regret.

The model for the picture was Whistler’s mistress, Jo Hiffernan, and the location the house that they shared in Lindsey Row, Chelsea. She is holding a Japanese fan of the type made for the European market. Whistler was fascinated by Japanese art and culture and collected Japanese objects from an early date. The fan, the red pot and blue and white vase on the mantelpiece, and the spray of pink azalea not only give the picture a Japanese feel, they provide brilliant color notes against the neutral background of black, white and cream. Pictures hanging in the room are reflected in the mirror, their frames creating a series of right angles which are echoed by the fireplace and the mirror itself, dividing and compartmentalizing the picture like a Japanese print.

Symphony in Blue and Pink: ca 1870

Symphony in Grey and Green: The Ocean (1866-72)

Symphony in White No 3 (1866)The model was his red-haired Irish mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, who posed in Paris in 1861 for ‘The White Girl’, later called Symphony in White, No. 1: ‘The White Girl’ (YMSM 38). Rejected by the Royal Academy in 1862, it hung in a London gallery. In the first of many published letters, Whistler denied that it represented Wilkie Collins’s ‘Woman in White’ but simply represents a girl dressed in white in front of a white curtain’ (Athenaeum, 5 July 1862). Rejected also by the Paris Salon in 1863, it was, with Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the ‘succès de scandale’ of the Salon des Refusés. Paul Mantz in the Gazette des Beaux Arts (July 1863) called it a ‘Symphonie du blanc’. Whistler adopted this nomenclature publicly for Symphony in White, No. 3 (YMSM 61) at the Royal Academy in 1867.

Symphony in White No 3 (1866)The model was his red-haired Irish mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, who posed in Paris in 1861 for ‘The White Girl’, later called Symphony in White, No. 1: ‘The White Girl’ (YMSM 38). Rejected by the Royal Academy in 1862, it hung in a London gallery. In the first of many published letters, Whistler denied that it represented Wilkie Collins’s ‘Woman in White’ but simply represents a girl dressed in white in front of a white curtain’ (Athenaeum, 5 July 1862). Rejected also by the Paris Salon in 1863, it was, with Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the ‘succès de scandale’ of the Salon des Refusés. Paul Mantz in the Gazette des Beaux Arts (July 1863) called it a ‘Symphonie du blanc’. Whistler adopted this nomenclature publicly for Symphony in White, No. 3 (YMSM 61) at the Royal Academy in 1867.

The Artist’s Studio: ca 1865The ‘Artist’s Studio’ is one of Whistler’s first Japanese-inspired compositions. He portrayed an elongated figure dressed in oriental costume, and included blue and white porcelain in the background. He used a model who posed for many of his paintings. He depicted himself, wearing the long-sleeved waistcoat in which he usually painted, holding the small palette with raised edges to keep the liquid pigment from running off.

The Balcony: 1864-70

The Beach at Selsey Bill: 1865

The Blue Wave Biarritz: 1862

The Coast of Brittany: 1861

The Duet: ca 1878

The Gold Scab: 1879The Gold Scab shows Leyland as a hideous peacock sitting on Whistler’s White House, playing the piano.

The Grey House: 1889

The Hotel Courtyard Dieppe: 1885

The Lange Lijzen of the Six Marks: 1864The model for the picture was Whistler’s mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, called Jo. For a few years, this beautiful, red-haired Irishwoman managed Whistler’s affairs, keeping his house and assisting him with the sale of his work. To give herself respectability, she called herself Mrs. Abbott; her drunken father also referred to Whistler as ‘me son-in-law’. She sat for many of his pictures, including ‘The Lange Lijzen of the Six Marks’.

The Last of Old Westminster: 1862

The Little Blue Girl: 1894-1901

The Little Rose of Lyme Regis: 1895When James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) visited Lyme in 1895 he was established as a famous, if controversial, painter. He painted two famous portraits here, ‘Little Rose of Lyme Regis’ and ‘The Blacksmith of Lyme Regis’ and made a dozen lithographs. He frightened little Rose Rendall at first by saying he was going to paint her; but rewarded her for posing for him by the gift of a doll from Paris.

The Master Smith of Lyme Regis: 1895The American-born painter James McNeill Whistler, working in London and Paris, used to come and stay in Lyme, especially since its sea air seemed to be ease his wife Beatrix’s cancer. («Trixie» was the widow of the architect E. W. Godwin, who built Whistler’s house; she married Whistler in 1888, and died of the cancer five years later.) He made many sketches and, in 1895, two notable portraits, «The Master Smith of Lyme Regis» and «The Little Rose of Lyme Regis» (which had also been the name of a Lyme ship three centuries earlier). Whistler’s little rose was Rose Rendall, small daughter of a Broad Street grocer. He saw her from a window of the Royal Lion, and went out and told her he intended to paint her. Think what would happen to him if he did that nowadays! What happened then was that she ran away, thinking he meant to apply a coat of paint to her, like a doll. (I know at least one other person who had the same reaction when told, at the age of four, that she was going to be painted.) After it was explained to Rose that he would paint a picture of her, he rewarded her with a doll from Paris, which is now shown in the Lyme museum.

The Princess from the Land of Porcelain: 1864The model for the picture was Christine Spartali, daughter of a rich Greek merchant, later the Greek Consul-General in London, Michael Spartali. The picture was bought by Frederick Leyland for the dining room in his London house. Leyland had the dining room remodeled by the architect Thomas Jeckyll. The room was to hold his collection of blue and white porcelain. Whistler did not like Jeckyll’s work, which, to his taste, did not harmonize with ‘The Princess’ and, at Leyland’s permission, modified the walls. After Leyland’s death, both ‘The Princess’ and the ‘Peacock Room’ itself were acquired by the American collector Charles Lang Freer, and can now be seen reassembled in the Freer Gallery in Washington.

The Staircase Note in Red: 1880

The Thames in Ice: 1860

Three Girls: 1868

Valparaiso: 1866Responding to the Spanish occupation of the Peruvian-owned Chincha Islands in 1864, the South American countries of Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador formed an alliance with Peru against Spain. In February 1866 Whistler left London for South America, in order to assist the Chilean cause. When he arrived in Chile on 12 March a squadron of six Spanish ships was blockading the country’s main harbor, Valparaiso. In order to protect their own nationals and act as a neutral, peacekeeping force, the British, American and French governments had sent out their own fleets, which were also present. On 27 March the Spanish announced their intention to bombard the city. Although outraged by this act of aggression, the British, American and French fleets had no option but to withdraw. Whistler’s picture almost certainly records the beginning of their withdrawal, on the evening of 30 March. The following day the Spanish bombarded the city, by which time Whistler had fled to the hills on horseback.

Whistler painted three other canvases in Valparaiso depicting the prelude or aftermath to the hostilities. According to Eddy, he completed this picture ‘at a single sitting, having prepared his colors in advance. From this, we can gather that he was working from memory and that the overall effect was more important than accuracy of detail. We know from contemporary accounts that the Americans sent one iron-clad turreted ship and five steamers, and that the French and British fleets included frigates and gunboats. Despite this, Whistler has depicted mainly sailing ships, some of which have started to unfurl their sails, ready to move towards the open sea. The only clearly visible flag is the French tricolor in the centre of the composition, silhouetted against the gathering violet and purple clouds. Comparisons have been drawn with Manet’s early marine views of 1864-5, and especially his depiction of the Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama (186.

When it was exhibited at the French Gallery in London in 1867 the picture was well received. The critic writing for the Athenaeum commented on the way in which Whistler had given ‘an aspect of sleepy motion to the vessels, and…conveyed to the spectator the rolling, seemingly breathing, surface of the sea with a power that is magical’.

Variations in Pink and Grey Chelsea: 1871

Venetian Scene: 1879

Wapping: 1861

Winter Evening: 1880

The Arabian

The Red Glove

The Rose Scarf

Violet and Silver: A Deep Sea

Arrangement in Black No 3: Sir Henry Irving as Philip II of Spain

This page is the work of Senex Magister

Return to Pagina Artis

Return to Bruce and Bobbie’s Main Page.