James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American
painter and etcher, who assimilated Japanese art styles, made
technical innovations, and championed modern art. Many regard
him as preeminent among etchers.
Whistler was born on July 10, 1834, in Lowell,
Massachusetts. He entered the United States Military Academy at
West Point in 1851, did not do well in his studies, and left in
1854 to take a job as a draftsman with the U.S. Coast Survey.
One year later he left the United States and went to Paris, where
he became a pupil of the Swiss classicist painter Charles Gabriel
Gleyre. Formal instruction influenced him less, however, than
his acquaintance with the French realist painter Gustave Courbet,
other leading contemporary artists, and his own study of the great
masters and of Japanese styles.
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The French set, 1858:
The unsafe tenement |
In Paris, Whistler won recognition as an etcher
when his first series of etchings, Twelve Etchings from Nature
(commonly called The French Set), appeared in 1858. Soon after
he moved to London, where his paintings, hitherto rejected repeatedly
by the galleries of Paris, found acceptance. At the Piano was
shown by the Royal Academy of London in 1860. In 1863Symphony
in White No. 1: The White Girl (National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C.) won great acclaim in Paris. Thereafter exhibitions of his
work aroused increasing international interest, as did his flamboyantly
eccentric personality.
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Arrangement in Black and Grey
No. 1:
The Artist's Mother
Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
Three of Whistler's best-known portraits, Arrangement
in Black and Grey No. 1: The Artist's Mother (Musée d'Orsay, Paris),
Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Thomas Carlyle (1872-1874,
City Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow), and Harmony in Grey and
Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (Tate Gallery, London) were painted
around 1872.
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Nocturne: Blue and Gold,
Old Battersea Bridge
Tate Gallery London |
In 1877 he exhibited a number of landscapes done
in the Japanese manner; these paintings, which he called nocturnes,
outraged conservative art opinion, which did not understand his
avoidance of narrative detail, his layers of atmospheric color,
and his belief in art for art's sake. The English art critic John
Ruskin wrote a caustically critical article, and Whistler, charging
slander, sued Ruskin for damages. He won the case, one of the
most celebrated of its kind, but the expense of the trial forced
him into bankruptcy. Selling the contents of his studio, Whistler
left England, worked intensively from 1879 to 1880 in Venice,
then returned to England and resumed his attack on the academic
art tradition.
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The Venice Set, 1879-80:
The Traghetto |
In later years Whistler devoted himself increasingly
to etching, drypoint, lithography, and interior decoration. The
Thames series (1860), the First Venice series (1880), and the
Second Venice series (1881) heightened his standing as an etcher
and won him success when they were exhibited in London in 1881
and 1883.
The Peacock Room, which he painted for a private
London residence (begun 1876 and moved in 1919 to the Freer Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C.), is the most noteworthy example of his
interior decoration.
Toward the end of his life, when he lived in Paris, Whistler
came to be regarded as a major artist. He died in London on July
17, 1903.
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