James McNeil Whistler

At this point our history must take a side trip to London. This portrait by Walter Greaves, shows J. M. Whistler, ( I have tried so hard to look like Whistler!, and I did, at least until my hair got sick) who was born in Lowell Massachusetts, about twenty miles from where I am sitting. Whistler later made his home and career in London.

He was eccentric, acid tongued, wildly talented and a dandy. He was fabulously clever, and his wit was famous in his day.
Whistlers father was an engineer and was in Lowell helping to build what was then the most advanced system of water driven mills in the world. The senior Mr. Whistler was hired to oversee railway construction for the Czar . James was schooled in the Imperial Academy and was drawing casts at eleven. Upon his fathers death of Cholera, Whistlers mother returns the family to Pomfret, Connecticut.

Whistler applies to, and is accepted to West Point. He lasted there for three years before leaving, evidently over failing chemistry. He supposedly answered in an oral exam, that silicon was a gas. Later he quipped "had silicon been a gas, I would be a general today". Here is this weeks odd little factoid, Whistlers drawing instructor at West Point was Robert Weir, father of the artist Alden J. Weir. In those days officers had to be taught drawing, there was no photography to accurately depict things, and officers would be called upon to both design and describe fortifications. Drawing was commonly taught in many schools in that century and it was perceived as a valuable skill and not just a nicety of social refinement.


After a stint as a marine surveyor, Whistler went to Paris and studied in the studios of Charles Gleyre. Gleyre was an exponent of black as the root of color harmony. Whistler used that idea many times in his paintings. Although he worked at about the same time as the Hudson River School, he was a generation ahead of them aesthetically.

Whistler was an irreverent partier, exchanging quips with Oscar Wilde and appearing in caricature in the popular magazine Punch. About art though, he was very serious and was a champion of art for arts sake.


He gave a series of famous lectures that were summarized, and mixed with his caustic letters in reply to his critics, in a book called The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. His ideas on art were highly developed and based partially on Japanese prints and partly on Velazquez and Rembrandt. Not only a painter, Whistler was a great etcher, one of history's best.


Whistler and Ruskin, the artist writer,critic who had such an influence on the art of the 19th century, became embroiled in an argument, and then a trial for libel, that although Whistler won, ruined him financially, as he was awarded only a farthing for damages. His arguments in court were summarized in the press and had an enormous influence on how the next generation of Victorians would think not only about painting but about beauty itself.


He developed a style of paintings that he called nocturnes, as he saw them as arrangements of harmonized colors comparable to the harmonies in music. These paintings were so thin as to almost be stained onto the canvas and they were ethereally delicate. These paintings were often based on gray, and some were based on a single tone that was woven through the whole. They were tonalist.

Here is a famous excerpt from that trial, with Whistler being examined by Sir John Holker, Ruskins Lawyer.

Holker: "What is the subject of Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket?"

Whistler: "It is a night piece and represents the fireworks at Cremorne Gardens

Holker: "Not a view of Cremorne?"

Whistler: "If it were A View of Cremorne it would certainly bring about nothing but disappointment on the part of the beholders. It is an artistic arrangement. That is why I call it a nocturne...."

Holker: "Did it take you much time to paint the Nocturne in Black and Gold? How soon did you knock it off?"

Whistler: "Oh, I 'knock one off' possibly in a couple of days - one day to do the work and another to finish it..."

Holker: "The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?"

Whistler: "No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime."

images from artrenewal.org and athenauem.org.