James McNeill Whistler: The Complete Story
James McNeill Whistler was the American dandy who tried to turn painting into music. He gave us the picture everyone calls Whistler's Mother, and one of the most famous courtroom fights in the history of art. Born in America but at home in London and Paris, he signed his canvases with a butterfly, called them Symphonies and Nocturnes, and spent his life insisting that a picture was about color and mood, not a story.
Whistler cared less about telling a story than about getting the colors to sing. That idea was so new it landed him in court.
Art for art's sake
Whistler had no patience for paintings that preached or told tales. Art, he said, should stand free of all claptrap. So he called his pictures Arrangements, Symphonies and Nocturnes, borrowing the language of music to insist that color and mood were the real subject.
Whistler's Mother
His best known work is not really called Whistler's Mother at all. He titled it Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, and meant it as a study in tone, his mother simply the shape that held the colors. The public adored it as an image of devotion, and it quietly became one of the most reproduced paintings in the world.
The trial over a pot of paint
When the powerful critic John Ruskin saw one of his misty Nocturnes, he accused Whistler of flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.
Whistler sued him for libel and won, but the jury awarded him a single farthing in damages and no costs. The case made his name and broke his bank, sending him into bankruptcy.
The Peacock Room
Hired to make small tweaks to a patron's dining room, Whistler instead covered the whole thing in blue and gold peacocks while the owner was away, then sent a large bill.
The furious patron paid only half, so Whistler painted two fighting peacocks into the design as a portrait of the quarrel. The entire room now sits in the Smithsonian in Washington.
How Whistler changed what a painting could be
Whistler dragged art toward the modern idea that a painting can be about beauty itself, not a sermon or a story.
Shaped by Courbet's realism and the flat design of Japanese prints, his night scenes influenced the Symbolists and the early abstractionists, and his sharp tongue made him a legend in two countries.
The butterfly and the wit
Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834 and spent his career in London and Paris, an American who never painted America.
He signed his work with a small butterfly, fought in public with anyone who crossed him, and gathered the feuds into a book he called The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. He died in London in 1903.
Where his Nocturnes and his Mother hang
The Tate in London holds his Chelsea nocturne, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington has another. His mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black, hangs at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.
Born in Lowell in 1834, a birthplace he tried to erase
James McNeill Whistler was born on 11 July 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town on the Merrimack River. His father, George Washington Whistler, was an engineer. His mother, Anna McNeill, would later sit for his most famous portrait.
Here is the odd part. For much of his life Whistler pretended he came from somewhere grander. He told people he was born in St Petersburg or Baltimore, and once snapped that he did not choose to be born in Lowell.
The truth is plain, and there is a nice twist to it. The birthplace he tried to hide now houses a museum in his honour, the Whistler House in Lowell, in the very building where he came into the world.
A childhood in imperial Russia
In 1843 the family moved to Russia. Tsar Nicholas I had hired George Whistler to build the railway between Moscow and St Petersburg, one of the largest engineering works in Europe at the time.
James was nine when he arrived. He spent about six years in St Petersburg, learning French, watching a grand imperial capital, and taking his first serious art lessons at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts.
Those years shaped both his eye and his manners. He returned to America speaking like a young European, with a taste for elegance he never lost. His father died of cholera in 1849, and the family came home with far less money than before.
Thrown out of West Point
In 1851 Whistler entered the United States Military Academy at West Point. His father had trained there, and the family hoped he would follow.
He was a poor fit. He loved the drawing classes under Robert Weir but ignored almost everything else. In 1854 he was dismissed, undone by a chemistry examination he could not pass.
He turned the failure into one of his best lines. Asked about it for years afterward, he liked to say that had silicon been a gas, he would have been a major general. It was the first sign of a habit that lasted a lifetime. When Whistler lost, he made a joke, and the joke often outlived the defeat.
The mapmaking desk that taught him to etch
Whistler is sometimes called a navy mapmaker. The real posting was the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington, a government office that charted the American coastline. He joined its drawing division in late 1854.
The job did not last. He was restless, often late, and could not resist sketching little heads and figures in the margins of official charts.
What he gained was priceless. The Survey taught him to etch, cutting fine lines into copper plates so maps could be printed. He kept that skill for the rest of his life. The bored young clerk who doodled on sea charts would become one of the finest etchers of the century.
Paris in 1855, and never home again
In 1855 Whistler sailed for Europe, aged twenty. He never lived in America again.
He settled first in Paris, in the years when Gustave Courbet and the Realists were arguing that art should show ordinary life honestly rather than flatter it. Whistler drank in that world, copied at the Louvre, and began to find his own voice.
In 1859 he crossed to London, and from then on he moved between the two cities. Paris gave him ideas and friends. London gave him patrons, the river he loved, and a stage for his quarrels. He became a rare thing, an American who belonged fully to neither country yet stood near the centre of art in both.
The Thames etchings, and a name ranked near Rembrandt
Whistler loved the Thames. Long before it appeared in his hazy night paintings, he walked the working docks of Wapping and Rotherhithe and recorded them in etchings.
The result was the Thames Set, published in 1871, full of barges, warehouses, and watermen caught with a few exact lines.
Etching was where his reputation stood highest in his own lifetime. Critics and collectors ranked him second only to Rembrandt among all the etchers who had ever lived. That is worth pausing on. The painter mocked in the press for his foggy Nocturnes was, on copper, held close to the greatest of the old masters.
Joanna Hiffernan, the woman in white
For much of the 1860s Whistler's model and companion was Joanna Hiffernan, a red haired Irish woman with a calm, steady presence.
She posed in 1861 and 1862 for the painting first shown as The White Girl and later renamed Symphony in White, No. 1. A young woman stands in a white dress against a white curtain, and the picture is less a story than a study in shades of one colour.
Rejected by the official Salon in Paris, it hung in the Salon des Refuses of 1863 and drew crowds. Hiffernan ran his household, managed his affairs, and modelled for the White Symphonies that followed. She was one of the most important people in his early career, and for years one of the least credited.
Bankrupt in 1879, the White House lost
Whistler was never good with money, and 1879 nearly finished him. He had won his libel case against the critic John Ruskin the year before, but the court awarded him a single farthing and split the costs.
The legal bills, on top of the lavish new home he had just built, left him ruined. In May 1879 he was declared bankrupt.
The home he lost was the White House on Tite Street in Chelsea, a plain white building designed for him by the architect Edward Godwin. It was sold at auction that September. Before the sale even closed, Whistler had left the country, carrying little but his talent and his debts, heading for Venice.
The Venice year that saved him
Venice saved him. The London dealers of the Fine Art Society offered him a commission for twelve etchings of the city, with an advance he badly needed.
Whistler went in 1879 meaning to stay three months and stayed more than a year. He worked constantly.
He came home with about fifty etchings and more than ninety pastels, along with a fresh way of seeing light on water and stone. The trip did more than clear some bills. It rebuilt his confidence and gave critics something new to admire. A man who had left London bankrupt and mocked returned with work that helped restore both his finances and his name.
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, Oscar Wilde, and a presidency
Whistler collected feuds the way others collect stamps. In 1890 he published The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, a book of his letters, insults, and courtroom exchanges, arranged to show him winning every argument.
His long duel of wit with Oscar Wilde runs through it. When Wilde admired one of Whistler's remarks and said he wished he had said it, Whistler shot back, You will, Oscar, you will, accusing his friend of borrowing his best lines.
There was a serious side too. From 1886 he served as president of the Society of British Artists and won it a royal charter. He resigned in 1888 after bitter rows, joking that the artists had left and the British remained.
Whistler, art for art’s sake, your questions
Who was James McNeill Whistler? An American painter who worked mainly in London and Paris.
When was he born? In Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834.
When did he die? In London, in 1903.
What is he famous for? Whistler's Mother and his Nocturnes.
What is the real title of Whistler's Mother? Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1.
Where can I see his work? The Musee d'Orsay holds the Mother; the Peacock Room is at the Smithsonian.
When and how did Whistler die? Whistler died on 17 July 1903 in London, at the age of sixty nine. His health had failed slowly for years, and he had lived quietly after the death of his wife. By the end he was famous across Europe and America, honoured by the museums and academies that had once laughed at his foggy river scenes.
Was Whistler married? Yes. In 1888 Whistler married Beatrix Godwin, an artist herself and the widow of his friend the architect Edward Godwin. It was a warm and happy marriage. When Beatrix fell ill with cancer, Whistler was devastated, and her death in 1896 broke something in him.
For me the farthing is the whole man. Whistler wore that single coin, the smallest in the realm, on his watch chain for the rest of his life. The lawsuit ruined him and made him immortal, which is about the most Whistler ending imaginable.
If Whistler's mood and mischief pulled you in, keep going:
Claude Monet, the other painter of misty water and evening light.
Gustav Klimt, another artist who made beauty itself the whole point.
7 Secrets Hidden in Famous Paintings, the hidden messages tucked inside pictures like his.