James McNeill Whistler
American, 1834 - 1903
Source: ULAN
Whistler, James McNeill (11 July 1834-17 July 1903), artist, was born James Abbott Whistler in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of George Washington Whistler, a civil engineer, and his second wife, Anna Matilda McNeill. Between 1843 and 1848, the Whistler family lived in Russia, where Whistler's father was engaged on a railway project and where Whistler himself studied art with a student, A. O. Koritskii, and at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. After his father's death in 1849 the family returned to the United States. In 1851 Whistler entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, studying art under Robert W. Weir. Deficiencies in chemistry and discipline led to his expulsion in 1854. An interlude in the drawing division of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, Washington, D.C., provided training in etching, the basis of his future career. In 1855 he sailed for Europe to study art, and though he remained an American citizen, he never returned.
Whistler attended classes at the École Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin in Paris and at the studio of Charles Gleyre in 1856. He visited the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, England, in 1857, forming a lifelong passion for the Dutch masters and Diego Velasguez. In the Musée du Louvre, he met Henri Fantin-Latour and through him, Gustave Courbet, the leader of the realists. Whistler's first important painting, At the Piano (Taft Museum, Cincinnati), showing his half-sister Deborah Haden and her daughter at Francis Seymour Haden's London house, was rejected at the Paris Salon in 1859, but admired by Courbet. Around this time Haden showed Whistler his Rembrandt etchings and urged him to work from nature.
In August 1858 Whistler's tour of northern France, Luxembourg, and the Rhineland resulted in Twelve Etchings from Nature, dedicated to Haden and printed with Auguste Delâtre's help in Paris. His etchings hung at the Salon and Royal Academy in 1859. The success of the "French Set" encouraged Whistler to move to London, where he began twelve etchings of the river. In 1862 Baudelaire praised Whistler's depiction of contemporary city life in the "Thames Set," which was published in 1871. Whistler was now established at the forefront of an etching revival.
However, his love of color, fame, and money drew him to painting. A heavily realistic oil, La Mère Gérard (private collection), was his first Royal Academy exhibit in 1861. His second exhibit there, in 1862, was The Coast of Brittany (1861, Wadsworth Athenaeum) painted from nature but with brighter colors and thinner paint. Whistler's red-haired Irish mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, posed in a Thames-side conversation piece, Wapping (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), begun in 1860 and exhibited successfully at the Royal Academy in 1864. Bought by Thomas Winans, it was one of the first Whistlers exhibited in New York (1866).
Hiffernan also posed in Paris in 1861 for The White Girl (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Rejected by the Royal Academy in 1862 and the Salon in 1863, it was, with Manet's Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, the "succès de scandale" of the Salon des Refusés. Calling it a "Symphonie du blanc," Paul Mantz inspired its later title Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (Gazette des Beaux-Arts, July 1863). Whistler adopted such nomenclature publicly for Symphony in White, No 3 (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham University) at the Royal Academy in 1867.
In 1863 Whistler moved to Lindsey Row, on the Thames in Chelsea, where his neighbors included the Pre-Raphaelite D. G. Rossetti. He maintained contact with continental Europe, traveling to Amsterdam in 1863, posing with Manet and Baudelaire for Fantin's Hommage à Delacroix in 1864 and working with Courbet at Trouville in 1865. In 1866, avoiding family and political problems (the arrest of a friend, the Fenian John O'Leary), he traveled to Valparaiso, painting his first night scenes, including Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso Bay (Freer Gallery of Art).
In 1865, when the second "Symphony in White," The Little White Girl, was exhibited at the Royal Academy, Whistler met the English artist Albert Moore. Together they explored the ideals of "Art for Art's sake." Whistler began a series of paintings of classically draped women and flowers on a musical theme, now known as the Six Projects (Freer Gallery of Art) for the "Liverpool Medici," the shipowner F. R. Leyland. Leyland also bought La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (Freer Gallery of Art), one of several oriental subjects starring Whistler's own porcelain. Its conspicuous signature possibly led Whistler to develop his famous butterfly signature from his initials "JW" in about 1869.
After 1870 Whistler abandoned the Six Projects for portraits and night scenes, thinly painted in ribbon-like brushstrokes, with thin washes of paint like glazes, in which detail was subordinated to mood and mass. Leyland in 1872 suggested the title "Nocturnes" for such moonlights as Nocturne: Blue and Silver: Chelsea (Tate Gallery).
In 1871 Whistler painted a deeply felt portrait of his mother, restrained in color and severe in composition, showing her seated in profile against the studio wall, which is decorated only with a framed etching and an embroidered curtain. His affection for his mother was concealed by the title, which stressed the somber color harmony. In 1872 this Arrangement in Grey and Black barely escaped rejection and was the last painting he exhibited at the Royal Academy, yet it entered the Musée du Louvre twenty years later and became one of the most famous of American portraits. Seeing it, Thomas Carlyle agreed to pose for a second Arrangement in Grey and Black, an impressive psychological study and the first of Whistler's paintings to enter a public collection (in Glasgow, Scotland).
Whistler had parted from Hiffernan, who helped look after his illegitimate son, Charles Hanson, who was born in 1870 and whose mother was apparently Louisa Fanny Hanson, the parlormaid. Maud Franklin became Whistler's model and mistress. She stood in for his portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland, Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink (Frick Collection, New York), in which every decorative detail, from rug to dress, was designed by the artist. Leyland backed Whistler's first one-man exhibition at a Pall Mall gallery in 1874, where these portraits hung with etchings and pastels.
Whistler worked on a decorative scheme for Leyland's London house at 49 Princes Gate from 1876 until 1877. The dining room, originally designed by Thomas Jeckyll, was transformed into an all-embracing Harmony in Blue and Gold based on peacock motifs, which far exceeded Leyland's wishes. He paid half the 2000 guineas asked, and Whistler lost a patron. The "Peacock Room" has been reinstalled at the Freer Gallery of Art.
Whistler collaborated with Edward W. Godwin on a stand at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878, and he rashly commissioned Godwin to design the "White House" on Tite Street in London. As costs escalated, he pursued a lavish lifestyle, entertaining guests to Sunday breakfasts, becoming known as a dandy and wit. He also defended his aesthetic theories publicly. Writing to the World on 22 May 1878, regarding Nocturne: Grey and Gold--Chelsea Snow (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Univ.), he explained: "my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture . . . the picture should have its own merit, and not depend upon dramatic, or legendary, or local interest."
In the former Grosvenor Gallery in London, he exhibited Arrangement in Black and Brown: The Fur Jacket (Worcester Art Museum), a refined portrait of Maud, "evidently caught in a London fog," as Oscar Wilde wrote flippantly (1877). The influential art critic John Ruskin reviled Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (Detroit Institute of Arts), writing that he "never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face" (Fors Clavigera, 2 July 1877). Whistler sued for libel, justifying the price: "I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime." He won the case, won derisory damages (one farthing) without costs, and published Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics, his first brown paper pamphlet, in 1878.
The birth of a daughter to Maud in February 1879 compounded domestic problems. To raise money Whistler published etchings, including Old Battersea Bridge (Kennedy, no. 177), and helped by the printer Thomas Way, lithographs, such as The Toilet (Way, no. 6), a portrait of Maud. He painted expressive watercolors of Nankin porcelain for a catalog of Sir Henry Thompson's collection (1878). None of these measures sufficed. In May 1879 he was declared bankrupt, and his work, collections, and house were auctioned. He destroyed some paintings that he did not want to go to auction.
With a commission for a set of twelve etchings from dealers at the Fine Art Society in London, Whistler left for Venice, Italy. He stayed more than a year, producing fifty etchings and more than ninety pastels of back streets and canals, bead-stringers, and gondoliers. He joined Frank Duveneck and his students in the Casa Jankowitz, and he worked on etchings with Otto Bacher. Superb etchings like Nocturne (Kennedy, no. 184) were distinguished by a combination of delicate line with a surface tone of ink, producing effects akin to monotype.
In pastels like The Zattere: Harmony in Blue and Brown (Terra Foundation for the Arts) the subject was vignetted, or less detailed toward the edge of the sheet, brown paper complementing expressive line and jewel-like colors. Godwin noted that "the preciousness of the blue [was] created by the base of the brown" (British Architect, 4 Feb. 1881). These pastels had considerable influence on the Americans, particularly J. H. Twachtman, and on the Society of American Painters in Pastel founded in 1882.
Exhibited at the Fine Art Society in 1881, framed in three shades of gold, the room decorated in reddish-brown, greenish-yellow, and gold, the pastels were extensively reviewed. The etchings were shown in London in 1880 and 1883, and at Wunderlich's in New York in 1883 in an "Arrangement in White and Yellow," which greatly influenced later exhibition design. The catalog, designed by Whistler, maliciously quoted earlier reviews.
The first Venice set of twelve etchings was published in 1880 but printed by Whistler over twenty years. He printed the second set of twenty-six etchings (published by Messrs. Dowdeswell in 1886) within a year. Whistler etched but never published several later sets, including a "Jubilee Set" in 1887, a "Renaissance set" in France in 1888, and another "Renaissance set" in Amsterdam in 1889, which was "of far finer quality than all that has gone before--combining a minuteness of detail . . . with greater freedom and more beauty of execution than even the last Renaissance lot can pretend to" (letter to M. Huish, Glasgow Univ. Library).
In the 1880s Whistler traveled widely in England and continental Europe, and his work was exhibited in Europe and the United States. The first watercolor he exhibited in New York (at the Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition in 1883) was Snow, painted in Amsterdam in 1882 (private collection). In 1884 he painted seascapes in St. Ives with his pupils, the Australian born Mortimer Menpes and the Englishman Walter Sickert. In 1885 he was in Holland arguing with W. M. Chase. Watercolors like Variations in Violet and Grey--Market Place, Dieppe (private collection) were shown beside those of the impressionists at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1883 and 1887. "His little sketches show fine draftsmanship," wrote Camille Pissarro in May 1887; "he is a showman, but nevertheless an artist" (J. Rewald, Camille Pissarro, Letters to Lucien Pissarro [1943]). He traveled between London, Paris, and Dieppe. In 1899 he painted Belle-Ile, and in 1900, with an American friend Jerome Elwell, he painted Domburg.
Whistler alternated between small paintings, only five by eight inches in size, and full-length portraits of actors and aristocrats, children and collectors. Edouard Manet introduced him to the art critic Théodore Duret, who agreed to pose, as an experiment, in modern evening dress, carrying (for color's sake) a pink cloak (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Duret mediated between Whistler and the aristocratic Lady Archibald Campbell, who was refusing to pose, and thus saved Arrangement in Black: La Dame au Brodequin Jaune, for his retrospective at the Goupil Gallery in 1892 and the Chicago Columbian Exhibition in 1893 (Philadelphia Museum of Art).
Another Arrangement in Black, the portrait of the violinist Pablo de Sarasate on stage (1884), illustrated Whistler's views, as stated in his "Propositions," that flesh should be painted "low in tone" and that the model should "stand within the frame." Exhibited in London, Hamburg, Paris, and finally in 1896 in Pittsburgh, it was bought by the Carnegie Institute, the first American public collection to acquire his work. Exhibiting at international exhibitions in Antwerp, Brussels, Paris, Munich, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dublin, Glasgow, and St. Petersburg, he earned medals and honors.
In 1885 Whistler delivered the "Ten O'Clock" lecture in Princes Hall (published 1888), an eloquent exposition of his views on art and artists. Stéphane Mallarmé translated it into French and introduced Whistler to the symbolist circle in Paris. Extensive correspondence and subjects like Purple and Gold: Phryne the Superb!--Builder of Temples (Freer Gallery of Art) document their growing friendship.
In 1886 the Society of British Artists in London, in need of rejuvenation, risked electing Whistler as president. He set out autocratically to reform the society, revamping the galleries, designing a "velarium" (a sheet of thin material hung across the center of a room) to soften the light and direct it on the pictures, rejecting substandard pictures, and inviting foreigners like Waldo Storey and Claude Monet to exhibit. The society revolted, and he was forced to resign in June 1888.
Meanwhile, pastels, oils, drawings, and watercolors--like the atmospheric Nocturne in Grey and Gold--Piccadilly (National Gallery of Ireland) hung in three one-man exhibitions of "Notes"--"Harmonies"--"Nocturnes" at Messrs. Dowdeswell in 1884 and 1886 and at Wunderlich's in New York in 1889. This gave Americans like Howard Mansfield, Howard Whittemore, and Charles L. Freer their first chance to buy Whistlers.
In 1888 Whistler married Beatrice, the widow of E. W. Godwin; they moved to Paris in 1892. An artist and designer, Beatrice worked beside him, encouraging pastels and lithographs of young models, like the Pettigrew sisters. Some of his finest lithographs, like The Duet (Way, no. 64) of 1894, show Beatrice at home in 110 rue du Bac in Paris; the most poignant, By the Balcony and The Siesta (Way, nos. 122, 124), were drawn as she lay dying of cancer during his lithography exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1895. She died in 1896. Her young sister, Rosalind Birnie Philip, became Whistler's ward and inherited his estate.
Whistler published a collection of letters, pamphlets, and "Propositions" on art, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890; 2d ed., 1892). Each document includes one of Whistler's distinctive butterfly monograms drawn with a stinging tail. His Eden versus Whistler: The Baronet and the Butterfly, a Valentine with a Verdict (1899) recorded a lawsuit against Sir William Eden in 1898, which resulted in a change to French law giving artists control over their work.
In 1898 Whistler was elected first president of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers. Joseph Pennell, Whistler's friend and future biographer, was an active and argumentative committee member. Independent artists from Europe and the United States were invited to send work to their exhibitions in 1898, 1899, and 1900, but academicians--even J. S. Sargent--were discouraged. The exhibitions were sparely hung, coherent, and effective. Whistler's own exhibits were modest, fluidly painted panels like Green and Silver--The Great Sea (Hunterian Art Gallery) and severely geometrical shopfronts like Gold and Orange--The Neighbours (Freer Gallery of Art).
Whistler directed operations from Paris, where with the sculptor Frederick MacMonnies he supervised an academy at 6 Passage Stanislas run by his model, Carmen Rossi, from 1898 until 1901. American students included Carl Frieseke and the British painter Gwen John, who later posed for Rodin's memorial to Whistler (Musée Rodin, Paris).
By 1901 Whistler's health was failing. Convalescing, he filled books with sketches of Algiers and Corsica. His last portraits--of Freer, the gambler Richard Canfield (private collection), George W. Vanderbilt (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and Dorothy Seton (A Daughter of Eve, Hunterian Art Gallery)--were painted with the forceful brushwork and thin paint, strong characterization, and subtle color that were typical of his work. In his last self-portrait (Hunterian Art Gallery) the pose was based on Velasquez's portrait of Pablo de Valladolid in the Prado. In 1900 it hung in the American section of the Paris Universal Exposition, but he reworked it until his death in London. Painted with nervous flickering brushwork, serious and introspective, it is a deeply moving work.
Whistler's influence on printmaking was particularly strong. He was one of the finest etchers of the century and a leading figure in the etching and lithography revival. His emphasis on the importance of color harmony, rather than subject, had a lasting influence, and the simplicity of his interior and exhibition designs had an immediate impact on both sides of the Atlantic.
Bibliography
The major collection of Whistler's manuscripts and works of art is in the University of Glasgow, which received the bulk of his estate through his sister-in-law Rosalind Birnie Philip. The Centre for Whistler Studies at the University of Glasgow is preparing an edition of Whistler's 11,000 letters. The other principal collections are the E. R. and J. Pennell Collection in the Library of Congress and the Freer Gallery of Art, both in Washington, D.C. The principal bibliography is Robert H. Getscher and Paul G. Marks, J. McN. Whistler and J. S. Sargent (1986). Since then, important excerpts from writings by and about Whistler have been published by Robin Spencer, Whistler: A Retrospective (1989); Joy Newton, La Chauve-souris et le papillon: Correspondance Montesquiou-Whistler (1990); Nigel Thorp, Whistler on Art: J. McN. Whistler: Selected Letters and Writings (1994); and Linda Merrill, With Kindest Regards: The Correspondence of Charles Lang Freer and J. McN. Whistler (1995). The fullest biographies are by his fellow artists Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler (1908) and The Whistler Journal (1921). Recent publications include Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (1992), and a readable biography, R. Anderson and A. Koval, J. McN. Whistler: Beyond the Myth (1994). Whistler's household is described by M. F. MacDonald, Whistler's Mother's Cookbook (1995) and Beatrice Whistler, Artist and Designer (1997). The illustrated oeuvre catalog are Thomas R. Way, Mr. Whistler's Lithographs: The Catalogue (1905); Edward G. Kennedy, The Etched Work of Whistler (1910); Mervyn Levy, Whistler Lithographs: An Illustrated Catalogue Raisonné (1975); Andrew McLaren Young et al., The Paintings of J. McN. Whistler (1980); and Margaret F. MacDonald, J. McN. Whistler: Drawings, Pastels and Watercolours (1995). Specialized books include Katharine A. Lochnan, The Etchings of J. McN. Whistler (1984); Robert H. Getscher, J. A. McN. Whistler: Pastels (1991); and Deanna M. Bendix, Diabolical Designs: Paintings, Interiors, and Exhibitions of J. McN. Whistler (1995). Major recent exhibition catalogs include Richard Dorment and Margaret F. MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler, with contributions by Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Ruth Fine, and Geneviève Lacambre, Tate Gallery, London; Musée d'Orsay, Paris; and National Gallery, Washington (1995-1996); Edgar Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat, the Frick Collection, New York (1995); and J. F. Heijbroek and M. F. MacDonald, Whistler and Holland, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (1997).
Margaret F. MacDonald
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Margaret F. MacDonald. "Whistler, James McNeill";
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American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
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