James McNeill Whistler
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James Abbott McNeill Whistler (July 14, 1834 – July 17, 1903) was an American-born, British based painter and etcher.
Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in the United States. His father, George Washington Whistler, was invited to Russia in 1842 to build a railroad and James learned French in school while there. He also attended the United States Military Academy at West Point for several years. His departure from this academy 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.
He is best known for his nearly black-and-white full-length portrait of his mother, titled Arrangement in Gray and Black: Portrait of the Artist's Mother, but usually referred to as Whistler's Mother. Though American, Whistler lived and worked mainly in Britain and France.
Whistler's painting The White Girl (1862) caused controversy when exhibited in London and, later, at the Salon des Refusés in Paris. The painting epitomises 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, as recommended by the critic John Ruskin.
In 1878 Whistler sued Ruskin for libel after the critic condemned his painting [Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket], writing:
- 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 ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face
Friendly with various French artists, he illustrated the book Les Chauves-Souris with Antonio de La Gandara. He also knew the impressionists, notably Edouard Manet, and was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement.
Whistler shared his lover, Joanna Hiffernan, with Gustave Courbet, as a model. Historians speculate that Courbet's painting of her as L'Origine du monde led to the breakup of the friendship between Whistler and Courbet.
He was well-known for his biting wit, especially in exchanges with his friend Oscar Wilde. Both were figures in the café society of Paris at the turn of the 20th century. Whistler's famous riposte to Wilde's statement, "I wish I'd said that", "You will Oscar, you will", is sometimes attributed to Wilde himself, and may be apocryphal.
Whistler had two main proteges. Wilde is the most famous, but the other was impressionist painter Walter Sickert, who was later suspected of being Jack the Ripper. Whistler had a falling out with both Wilde and Sickert. He successfully sued Sickert in the 1890s over a minor legal issue in France. When Wilde was publicly acknowledged to be a homosexual in 1895, Whistler publicly mocked him. 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.
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".
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.
A gifted engraver, Whistler produced numerous etchings, lithographs and dry-points. His lithographs, drawings on the stone in many instances, and in others his drawings 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 St Germain in Paris, and Georgian churches in Soho and Bloomsbury in London.
He is buried at St Nicholas's Church in Chiswick, London.
Selected works
External links
Further reading
- James McNeil Whistler by Lisa N. Peters. ISBN 1880908700.
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