James Abbott McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1834 – 1903, was an American-born, British-based artist active during the American Gilded Age. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger for a tail. The symbol was apt, for it combined both aspects of his personality—his art was characterized by a subtle delicacy, while his public persona was combative. Finding a parallel between painting and music, Whistler entitled many of his paintings "arrangements", "harmonies", and "nocturnes", emphasizing the primacy of tonal harmony.
Beginning in 1842, his father, a prominent engineer, 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 Fine Arts at age eleven.
When Whistler was 15, his father died of cholera. The family moved to Connecticut. His art plans remained vague and his future uncertain. The family lived frugally and managed to get by on a limited income. Whistler was sent to Christ Church Hall School with his mother's hopes that he would become a minister. However, after it became clear that a career in religion did not suit him, he applied to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where his father had taught drawing, and other relatives had attended. He was dismissed for poor grades and insubordination. His major accomplishment was learning drawing and map making from American artist Robert W. Weir.
After West Point, Whistler worked as draftsman mapping the entire U.S. coast for military and maritime purposes. He found the work boring. 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.
Whistler arrived in Paris in 1855, rented a studio in the Latin Quarter, and quickly adopted the life of a bohemian artist. 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: line is more important than color and that black is the fundamental color of tonal harmony. the arrival in Paris of George Lucas, another rich friend, helped stabilize Whistler's finances for a while but, Whistler was in poor health.
Conditions improved during the summer of 1858. Whistler recovered and traveled with fellow artist Ernest Delannoy through France and the Rhineland. It was in 1863 that Whistler's created his first famous painting "Femme Blanche," now known as the "Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl." Nowadays it is hard to believe that it was rejected at the Salon. Such, however, was the case, though the painting, when shown at the Salon des Refuses, made a great sensation in the art world of Paris.
In 1859, after moving to London, he began a series of etchings of scenes along the River Thames, and by the mid 1860s began to incorporate oriental design and tonalities in his work. In 1877 Whistler exhibited a number of loosely painted, subtly hued landscapes called “nocturnes,” composed in layers of atmospheric color. These works outraged conservative art critics, who did not understand the lack of narrative detail and “form.” The English art critic John Ruskin wrote a caustically critical article, and Whistler, charging slander, sued Ruskin for damages. Whistler 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, in 1879–1880, Whistler made an extended trip to Venice, where he worked intensively on his etchings, a primary source of income for him. Throughout the following decades Whistler continued to work in his distinctive loosely painted, delicately hued, atmospheric style in oil, watercolor, and pastel, and to pursue his printmaking in Venice and in Holland. Successful retrospectives in 1889 and in 1892 reestablished his popularity with the British public as he came to be regarded as a major artist. He lived briefly in Paris again, but in 1895 returned to England, where he was elected President of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in 1898.
