James McNeill Whistler

Fine Artist

• Born: July 10, 1834
• Birthplace: Lowell, Massachusetts
• Died: July 17, 1903
• Place of death: London, England

American painter

Aside from producing one of the most popular and best-known paintings in the world, Whistler developed an artistic style and ideas about the role of the artist that were to influence art and art criticism throughout the world.

Area of achievement Art

Early Life

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was born in Massachusetts, but he claimed a variety of other birthplaces. For example, in a 1878 libel trial in London in which he sued the famous art critic John Ruskin, he thought to add glamour to his case by claiming that he had been born in St. Petersburg, Russia. On other occasions, because of his family ties to the American South, he claimed Baltimore as his birthplace. He was, however mundane it might have seemed to him, actually born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of George Whistler, a respected and successful engineer of Irish-English descent who had been educated at West Point and who built railroads in the United States and in Russia for the czar. Anna McNeill, George Whistler’s second wife (his first died young), a member of a North Carolina family of Scottish lineage, was James’s mother and was to be the subject of his famous painting.

It was while living in Russia with his family that young Whistler first showed artistic leanings; he took drawing lessons at the Imperial Academy of Science. The Whistler family, at the height of its prosperity, traveled well and extensively in Europe. For extended periods, most of the family lived in England, while George Whistler was occupied with his work in Russia, where he died in his late forties.

Whistler’s family, now somewhat limited financially, returned to the United States, and Whistler, by then a young man, entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1851. A charming but willful and mischievous teenager, he made little attempt to conform to the disciplines of the academy and, in 1854, he was asked to leave. Through family connections, he was hired as a draftsman by the Winans Locomotive Works in Baltimore, but he was too eccentric in his working habits and had to withdraw. He moved on to a job with the United States Coast Survey in Washington, where he again fell afoul of the system and was forced to resign. He did, however, gain valuable experience in etching at the survey office, and it was to be one of his strengths as an artist.

At the age of twenty-one, Whistler left the United States to study in Paris. He was supposed to study at the respectable, conservative École des Beaux-Arts, but he became a student in the more informal atelier system, in which pupils worked with individual artists. He entered the raucous, improper world of the Parisian art students with enthusiasm and was soon a close friend of Gustave Courbet and Henri Fantin-Latour. He met and associated with all the young painters who were to become the leaders in the Impressionist movement.

In 1859, having finished his education as a student artist, Whistler moved from Paris to London, where he was determined to make his career and where he was to live, save for occasional absences, for the rest his life.

Life’s Work

In 1890, Whistler published a collection of his letters under the title The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. The title was no exaggeration, because his career had been one battle after another. England always had a difficult time with this upstart from the United States.

The English public had an established and confident taste for narrative pictures, usually of a high technical quality, when Whistler arrived in London. From the beginning, Whistler, influenced partly by his French experience and partly by his own natural gifts and inclinations, refused to paint moral tales of middle-class life or to follow the Pre-Raphaelites in creating an idealized medieval dreamworld, and he was not reluctant to make fun of painters who did so. Witty, acerbic, always saucily inclined to quarrel, he was not above punching his enemies. He fought in the streets, in the courts, and always in the newspapers and magazines, and he became one of the great “characters” of the world of English arts and letters.

What made him even more difficult to deal with, if one tried to do so, was his undependability as an artist, his maddening slowness, his too-common failure to deliver work, often long-since paid for. Smartly, if eccentrically, dressed, a neat slip of a man sporting a monocle, known for his series of mistresses and for never getting anything done, he had a difficult time financially. Influential figures such as Gabriel Rossetti befriended him, but he gained more enemies than friends.

If Whistler’s personality was wildly improper, his art was quite the contrary. His work was low-keyed, lacking in definition, often unrealistically flat, and he tended to use few colors. In France, he might have had an easier time of it as he might have been seen in the context of his associations with Courbet, Edgar Degas, and Édouard Manet. He was not, however, really an Impressionist, because he was interested in rendering not reality but the artist’s reaction to it. His paintings were, as the critics complained, meaningless, and Whistler happily agreed with that comment.

The French influence and Whistler’s longtime interest in Japanese and Chinese art fused with his own talent for seeing a work of art as independent of its source, as an arrangement of mass and color. He was trying to achieve pattern, tonality, feeling. His landscapes, often night scenes, puzzled the British, who could not accept the lack of detail, the muzzy, muted colors, the seemingly sloppy draftsmanship. Even his portraits looked fuzzy, and he often quarreled with his sitters since he would not give them an idealized mirror image. What things really looked like, or ideally looked like, was irrelevant to Whistler.

Whistler’s famous work, which everyone knows as “Whistler’s Mother,” was, in fact, called Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: The Artist’s Mother. As conservative as it seems, this painting was originally rejected by the Royal Academy in 1872, was accepted only by special arrangement, and was roundly derided by the critics. His titles for his paintings, which he called “nocturnes” and “arrangements” and numbered according to color groups, were original and confusing. When he did something well, he would do it in irritating ways. His famous Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room (1867-1877) was a masterpiece of interior decoration, but Whistler produced it in a way that permanently alienated his patron. Savaged unfairly by Ruskin in print, Whistler sued the critic and won, but the jury would give him only a farthing, and the case forced him into bankruptcy.

The Ruskin case did produce one of Whistler’s most famous comments upon the plight of the artist. He admitted that the painting commented upon by Ruskin had taken only a short time to paint. The lawyer questioning him suggested that the price that he had asked for it was high, given the time it took to produce. Whistler’s rejoinder was to become famous: “I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.”

This capacity to talk wittily about his art was to become an important part of Whistler’s reputation, and he was to defend himself and his ideas of art and the artists in print as well. His pamphlet Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics (1878), based in part on his experiences in the Ruskin trial, was a great success, and during the 1880’s, still very much an outsider and still a magnet for financial and legal trouble, he gradually became accepted by the British intelligentsia. In 1881, the famous painting of his mother was shown in Philadelphia and New York, although no major gallery in the United States or Europe owned a Whistler.

A following of young British artists started to develop around the painter during the mid-1880’s, and he often spoke in public in London with some considerable success. Even the students at the Royal Academy invited him to address them, and he was asked to speak at Cambridge University.

In 1891, the tide turned. The Corporation of the City of Glasgow purchased his fine portrait of the Scottish man of letters Thomas Carlyle, and more telling, the Louvre purchased his Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1, and France made him an Officer of the Legion of Honor. For the first time in his life, there was a sustained demand for his work at prices that allowed him to settle his debts and buy a home in Paris. In Great Britain, there was criticism of the fact that Whistler, that most estimable representative of British contemporary art, was not represented in the major galleries; art society in the United States also started to take him seriously.

Charles Freer, the Detroit locomotive manufacturer, became a friend of Whistler during the 1890’s and used his considerable fortune to collect slowly the works that were to be the basis for the finest collection of Whistler in the world, housed in an elegant gallery on the Mall in Washington and bearing Freer’s name, but holding the treasures of Whistler’s vision.

Financially secure, his reputation and popularity as a painter and as a spokesperson for the artist growing, Whistler continued to work sporadically through the decade, moving back and forth between London and Paris. He was no less inclined to quarrel than he had been when everyone rejected him in his youth, and he was continually in and out of the law courts and the gossip columns. For a time, he was involved, if only slightly, in an art school in Paris, and he never fully gave up working and sometimes finishing small portraits (sold at high prices). To the end, his charm and wit were in nervous balance with his zest for vindictive confrontation. He died in his studio in London one afternoon in 1903, while waiting for Charles Freer to take him for a drive.

Significance

It is, perhaps, best to consider Whistler as a cultural phenomenon whose work and influence went far beyond his skills as a painter. His fierce independence and his determination to do things his way in the face of sometimes damaging artistic, financial, and personal consequences may be seen as an example of the American abroad, a man refusing to be either patronized or instructed by his European betters. It is, however, unwise to put too much emphasis upon his American personality, because he himself was so little interested in his native country and spent most of his life fighting his way into the European artistic community. He was proud of his American birth, his southern family connections, and even his West Point education (he seemed conveniently to forget that he had been virtually expelled), but his world was European.

In that world, however, he showed eventually that it was unwise to take him for granted intellectually or artistically as the poor American cousin, and he made major contributions to the way in which the public was to look at art, producing in his own work and in his public statements ideas that were to undermine the proposition that art’s function was merely to mirror reality. He was, also, an important influence on the idea of “art for art’s sake,” and he showed that the artist had rights as well as obligations and was ready to fight for them.

Whistler’s interest in and use of French and Asian influences in his own work were to lead many young English artists out of the insularity of the British tradition in art. In literature, the Symbolist poets, many of whom he knew personally, were influenced by him, and aspects of his style can be seen later in the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, both American poets who chose to live and work in Europe in much the same way that Whistler had done. His use of musical terms as titles for his paintings came full circle in Claude Debussy, who admired him and whose style was in some ways a musical version of what Whistler was trying to achieve pictorially. The idea of “tone,” the attempt to express the deepest, most delicate emotional ambiguities, a concept that became so common in art at the end of the nineteenth century, owed much to Whistler’s quiet, dimly glowing paintings and to his combative declamations in the salons and law courts of London.

George du Maurier, an early friend, tried to include him as a character in the novel Trilby (1894), and Whistler enlisted the courts to get him out, but he lives on in novels by Henry James and Marcel Proust, who hardly had to fictionalize him.

Bibliography

Anderson, Ronald, and Anne Koval. James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth. London: J. Murray, 1994. Biography, recounting Whistler’s life and work. The authors describe how Whistler’s work was a bridge between British and French art and between traditional art and modernism.

Curry, David Park. James McNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces. New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2004. Eight essays analyze Whistler’s art, describing its influences and impact, and how Whistler combined his aesthetics with a flair for showmanship.

Fleming, Gordon. The Young Whistler, 1834-66. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978. An exploration of the early years, with considerable use of French materials, letters, critiques, and journals. Whistler was a proficient linguist, and his letters to and from French friends, including Fantin-Latour, are used extensively.

Gregory, Horace. The World of James McNeill Whistler. New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1959. Whistler is best understood in the labyrinthine context of his artistic and social connections. Gregory modestly eschews any attempt to be definitive, but he makes some sensitive points of connection between Whistler’s art and his peculiar personality. A lively account.

Pennell, E. R., and Joseph Pennell. The Life of James McNeill Whistler. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1908. The monumental biography by the husband and wife who became camp followers of Whistler in his last years. Essential reading, but highly prejudiced in Whistler’s favor. Good selection of pictures in monochrome.

Spalding, Frances. Whistler. New York: E. P. Dutton and Phaidon, 1979. A short, handy study with good photographs and excellent reproductions.

Spencer, Robin. James McNeill Whistler. London: Tate, 2003. An examination of Whistler’s art, describing how he was influenced by the poetry and literature of his time and by the British and French art scenes.

Sutton, Denys. Nocturne: The Art of James McNeill Whistler. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964. A good study of the development of his art, placing it and his ideas in the contemporary world.

Weintraub, Stanley. Whistler: A Biography. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1974. A graceful and entertaining retelling of the lunatic life of Whistler; as good as any novel.

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