James McNeill Whistler (1834 to 1903) was an American painter who spent most of his working life in London and Paris. He is remembered for the 1871 portrait of his mother, formally titled Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 and known everywhere as Whistler's Mother, and for the 1878 libel trial in which he sued the critic John Ruskin and was awarded one farthing in damages.
Whistler held that a painting should be judged the way music is, by its harmony of tones rather than by the story it tells, and he gave his pictures musical titles such as Symphony, Nocturne and Arrangement to say so. The habit gave him his most famous canvas. It also gave him the lawsuit that cost him his house.
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Whistler's Mother began as a replacement. In the summer of 1871, in his studio at 2 Lindsey Row in Chelsea, Whistler was waiting for a young model who never came. His mother, Anna, who was living with him, wrote that he then asked her to sit instead. Some accounts say he first wanted a full length portrait with her standing, but she was 67 and could not stay on her feet that long, so she sat.
He wanted the picture looked at as a composition. In The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, the book he published in 1890, he wrote: "To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother, but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?" The public cared anyway. The canvas became Whistler's Mother, and in 1891 the French state bought it from him.
Seven years after the Mother, that same idea of what a picture is for put him in a courtroom. In 1877 the critic John Ruskin saw one of Whistler's night scenes at a London gallery and wrote that its painter was asking two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. Whistler sued him for libel.
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