James McNeill Whistler was an American painter who worked mainly in London and Paris. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on July 11, 1834, and died in London on July 17, 1903.
His best known picture is the 1871 portrait of his mother, Whistler's Mother. In 1878 he also sued the critic John Ruskin for libel, that is, for damaging his name in print, and the jury awarded him a single farthing, a quarter of a penny.
Whistler believed a painting should work like music, through the harmony of its colors rather than the story it tells. So he gave his pictures musical titles, such as Symphony, Nocturne and Arrangement.
Behind those calm titles was a man who spent much of his life fighting with critics and patrons. In 1890 he collected the quarrels in a book he called The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.
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The fights came later. As a boy, James Abbott Whistler, as he was then named, lived in Russia: in 1843 his father, a civil engineer, took the family to St. Petersburg to help build the railway to Moscow. There the boy took drawing lessons at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in 1845 and 1846.
His father died in 1849, and the family went home to America. In 1851 Whistler entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, the army's school for officers.
Around that time he added his mother's maiden name, McNeill, to his own. He was top of his class in drawing but failed chemistry, and in 1854 the academy dismissed him.
His next job taught him a craft. Etching maps and plans for the US Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington bored him, but it showed him how an etching is made: a needle draws through wax on a metal plate, acid bites the lines into the metal, and the plate is inked and printed.
In 1855 he left for Paris, by way of England, to train as an artist, and in 1856 he joined the studio of the painter Charles Gleyre. In 1858 he toured northern France and the Rhineland, along the German Rhine, and etched what he saw.
Twelve of those plates became his first published set, the French Set, issued in Paris and London that same year.
Painting came next. In 1862 he signed a large portrait of a woman in white, standing on a wolf skin in front of a pale curtain, a lily in her hand. He showed it in London that year as The Woman in White.
The woman in white
The model for that white portrait was Joanna Hiffernan, an Irish immigrant with little standing in British society…
What You'll Discover
Who the woman in white really was.
Who sat in the chair when the model failed.
Why two peacocks fight on a wall.
What two days of work are worth.
Where he went with no house.