James's interest in drawing, which had begun at the age of 4, greatly increased during the years in Russia and in 1845 he enrolled in a drawing course at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.
Gallery of James Whistler
In July 1851 James decided to enter the United States Military Academy at West Point, which his father had attended. At West Point he stood first in the drawing course but was deficient in chemistry. Because he constantly broke the rules, he accumulated 218 demerits and as a result was dismissed in 1854.
Career
Gallery of James Whistler
Arrangement in Gray: Portrait of the Painter (self portrait, c.1872), Detroit Institute of Arts
Gallery of James Whistler
Portrait of Whistler with Hat (1858), a self-portrait at the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
James's interest in drawing, which had begun at the age of 4, greatly increased during the years in Russia and in 1845 he enrolled in a drawing course at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.
In July 1851 James decided to enter the United States Military Academy at West Point, which his father had attended. At West Point he stood first in the drawing course but was deficient in chemistry. Because he constantly broke the rules, he accumulated 218 demerits and as a result was dismissed in 1854.
(After his disastrous run-in with John Ruskin, the greates...)
After his disastrous run-in with John Ruskin, the greatest critic of the previous generation, Whistler poured his thoughts and feelings about art into this lecture, which made him if anything more notorious, but was also widely admired for its insights and wit. It is reproduced here exactly as he had it printed, with an essay by the leading scholar Margaret MacDonald putting it into the context of Whistler's career and times.
Delphi Complete Paintings of James McNeill Whistler
(Delphi’s Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first...)
Delphi’s Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first digital e-Art books, allowing readers to explore the works of great artists in comprehensive detail.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American painter, etcher and lithographer, known for his paintings of nocturnal London, striking and stylistically advanced full-length portraits and brilliant etchings and lithographs.
Background
James Whistler was born on July 10, 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, United States. He was the son of Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler and George Washington Whistler, a railroad engineer.
In 1842 Czar Nicholas I of Russia invited Whistler's father to build a railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow and offered the princely salary of $12000 per year. In St. Petersburg the family lived luxuriously, with several servants.
In 1849 George Whistler died, and Mrs. Whistler returned to America with her sons, settling in Pomfret, Connecticut, United States.
Education
James's interest in drawing, which had begun at the age of 4, greatly increased during the years in Russia and in 1845 he enrolled in a drawing course at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.
In July 1851 James decided to enter the United States Military Academy at West Point, which his father had attended. At West Point he stood first in the drawing course but was deficient in chemistry. Because he constantly broke the rules, he accumulated 218 demerits and as a result was dismissed in 1854.
With a $350-a-year inheritance from his father, Whistler went abroad to study art. He arrived in Paris in 1855 and at once threw himself into the bohemian life of the French students. He spent two years in the atelier of Charles Gabriel Gleyre but learned little from his master, who came only once a week to give perfunctory criticism.
After an unsuccessful apprenticeship with the Winans Locomotive Works in Baltimore, Maryland, Whistler obtained a job in Washington, District of Columbia, at the United States National Geodetic Survey. He was always late, often absent and was the despair of his employer. However, he had the finest training in etching (the process of producing a design or a picture off a hard surface with the use of chemicals) and learned the basic principles of printmaking.
While copying in the Louvre in 1858, Whistler met Henri Fantin-Latour, who in turn introduced him to Alphonse Legros and other artists, including the great realist painter Gustave Courbet. In 1858 Whistler brought out Twelve Etchings from Nature, known as the French Set. The next year his first important painting, At the Piano, influenced by Fantin-Latour and Dutch seventeenth-century interiors, was rejected by the Paris Salon, although it was accepted by the Royal Academy in London, England in 1860.
Whistler settled in London, where he had relatives, but spent much time at an inn in Wapping, and his early Thames etchings and paintings were done in this area. He depicted people at ease in their own environment and his work never told a story or pointed a moral, which was very much against the trend of mid-Victorian England. The painter was already anticipating the concept of "art for art's sake".
Whistler's painting Wapping (1861) shows the influence of Courbet's realism. One of the figures in the foreground is the redheaded Irish beauty Joanna Hiffernan, known as Jo, who became both Whistler's model and mistress. He painted her as The White Girl (1862), standing in a white dress, against a white background, with her red hair over her shoulder. The figure is medieval in feeling with remoteness and an introspective gaze that place it close to the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Whistler knew their work. He had met Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1862 and was decidedly influenced by the Pre-Rapahelites at this time. Although The White Girl was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1862 and the Paris Salon of 1863, it was a sensation at the Salon des Refusés, admired by artists though laughed at by the public.
In 1863 Whistler leased a house in the Chelsea section of London, where he set up housekeeping with Jo. His mother arrived late that year and spent the rest of her life in England. Whistler became a collector of blue-and-white porcelain as well as Oriental costumes, in which he posed his models for such pictures as La Princess du Pays de la Porcelaine (1864). Despite the Oriental trappings, these paintings are essentially Victorian. Influenced by his friendship with Albert Joseph Moore, whose subjects were drawn from classical antiquity, Whistler did numerous classical subjects.
In 1871 Whistler published the sixteen etchings, Views of the Thames, known as the Thames Set. He also did a series of atmospheric paintings which he called nocturnes. James liked to go out on the river at twilight and was fascinated by the foggy or misty effects in the fading light. In putting these impressions on canvas from memory, he made use of the Japanese concept of space as a well-balanced design in which perspective plays no part. In the famous Arrangement in Grey and Black, the Artist's Mother (1872) Whistler composed the picture with disarming simplicity, keeping the Japanese concept of space in mind.
During 1877 Whistler exhibited several paintings, including Falling Rocket, a nocturne showing the mysterious and elusive effects of fireworks at night at Cremorne Gardens. It outraged John Ruskin, considered the arbiter of taste in England, and he wrote an insulting review of the exhibition. Whistler sued him for libel in what was the most sensational art trial of the century and was awarded farthing damages without costs. The trial ruined Whistler financially, and he had to sell the house which architect E. W. Godwin had just built for him and dispose of his porcelain collection.
Fortunately, the Fine Arts Society commissioned Whistler to do 12 etchings of Venice. He spent 14 months in Venice doing many etchings as well as small oils, watercolors, and pastels. His etching style was now completely changed. He treated his themes with the utmost delicacy, using a spidery line and lively curves, and he often wiped the plates to give tone. His Venetian work sold well and he was financially re-established.
Later, James took a house in London with Maud Franklin, who had replaced Jo as a model and mistress.
On the evening of January 31, 1885, Whistler delivered at Prince's Hall the "Ten O'Clock", his famous lecture summing up his theories of esthetics in beautifully polished prose. He mentioned the poetry that evening mists produce when "the tall chimneys become campanili and the warehouses are palaces at night".
In 1887 James concentrated on lithography. Drawing in the most spirited way, he used a stump as well as a pencil and obtained effects never achieved by a lithographer before him. Whistler had a great facility with watercolors and small oils which sometimes depicted the seaside or shop fronts in Chelsea. In portraiture he favored full-length standing poses, influenced by Diego Velázquez, and was more concerned with subtle tones and atmosphere than he was with exact likenesses.
Whistler founded an art school in 1898, but it was closed in 1901 because of his poor health and infrequent appearances. During his last years, he also maintained studios in both Paris and London.
(The Baronet the Butterfly; A Valentine with a Verdict)
2018
painting
The Coast of Brittany
(Also known as Alone with the Tide.)
A Fire at Pomfret
The Cobbler
Ingres, Roger Deliverant Angelique
Arrangement in Yellow and Grey
Head of a Peasant Woman
Old Woman with Rags
The Unsafe Tenement
The Kitchen
At the Piano
Black Lion Wharf
Man smoking a pipe
Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge
Portrait of Whistler with a Hat
Old Mother Gerard
Annie Haden
The Limeburner
The Thames in Ice
Rotherhithe
Harmony in Green and Rose: The Music Room
Blue and Silver - The Blue Wave Biarritz
The Last of Old Westminster
Symphony in White no.1: The White Girl Portrait of Joanna Hiffernan
Battersea Reach
Grey and Silver Old Battersea Reach
Battersea Reach from Lindsey Houses
Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen
Purple and Rose: The Lang Leizen of the Six Marks
Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl
The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (Sketch for Rose and Silver)
Blue and Silver Trouville
Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville
Crepuscule in Opal Trouville
The Beach at Selsey Bill
The Princess from the Land of Porcelain
The Sea
Variations in Flesh Colour and Green—The Balcony
Whistler in his studio
Nocturne - the Solent
Crepuscule in Flesh Color and Green: Valparaiso
Nocturne in Blue and Gold Valparaiso Bay
Sketch for Nocturne in Blue and Gold Valparaiso Bay
The Morning after the Revolution, Valparaiso
Symphony in Blue and Pink
Symphony in White, No. 3
Symphony in White and Red
The White Symphony: Three Girls
Variations in Blue and Green
Venus with Organist
Morning Glories
Sketch for "The Balcony"
Views
Quotations:
"It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait."
"I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring."
"If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible."
"You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe."
"The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell."
Membership
James was elected president of the Royal Society of British Artists on June 1, 1886.
In 1898 he became a charter member and the first president of International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers.
Royal Society of British Artists
,
United Kingdom
1884
Academy of Fine Arts
,
Germany
1884
Personality
James affected a posture of self-confidence and eccentricity. He often was arrogant and selfish toward friends and patrons. A constant self-promoter and egoist, the painter relished shocking friends and enemies. Though he could be droll and flippant about social and political matters, he always was serious about art and often invited public controversy and debate to argue for his strongly held theories.
Physical Characteristics:
Whistler had a distinctive appearance, short and slight, with piercing eyes and a curling mustache, often sporting a monocle and the flashy attire of a dandy.
Quotes from others about the person
"Whistler's Mother, Wood's American Gothic, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch's The Scream have all achieved something that most paintings - regardless of their art historical importance, beauty, or monetary value - have not: they communicate a specific meaning almost immediately to almost every viewer. These few works have successfully made the transition from the elite realm of the museum visitor to the enormous venue of popular culture." – Martha Tedeschi, author
"He did better than attract a few followers and imitators; he influenced the whole world of art. Consciously, or unconsciously, his presence is felt in countless studios; his genius permeates modern artistic thought." – Charles Caffin, American critic
"He worked with great rapidity and long hours, but he used his colours thin and covered the canvas with innumerable coats of paint. The colours increased in depth and intensity as the work progressed. At first the entire figure was painted in greyish-brown tones, with very little flesh colour, the whole blending perfectly with the greyish-brown of the prepared canvas; then the entire background would be intensified a little; then the figure made a little stronger; then the background, and so on from day to day and week to week, and often from month to month. And so the portrait would really grow, really develop as an entirety, very much as a negative under the action of the chemicals comes out gradually – light, shadows, and all from the very first faint indications to their full values. It was as if the portrait were hidden within the canvas and the master by passing his wands day after day over the surface evoked the image." – Arthur J. Eddy
Connections
Whistler married Beatrix Godwin, widow of an old friend, on August 11, 1888. The Whistlers moved to Paris in 1893 but 2 years later were back in England. Trixie, as his wife was called, died of cancer in 1896.
James Whistler had several illegitimate children from his mistresses.