James Abbott McNeill Whistler Paintings

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James Abbott McNeill Whistler Biography

(1834-1903)
American-born painter and graphic artist, active mainly in England

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was born in in 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the third son of West Point graduate and civil engineer Major George Washington Whistler, and his second wife Anna Matilda McNeill. After brief stays in Stonington, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, the Whistlers moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Major served as an civil engineer for the construction of a railroad line to Moscow. James Abbott McNeill Whistler was aged nine when his family moved to Russia, and he spent several of his childhood years there, studying drawing at the Imperial Academy of Science.

Whistler greatly admired Dutch masters such as Jan Steen, Rembrandt and Ruysdael. In 1858 James Abbott McNeill Whistler artist visited Holland to view the Nightwatch. Indeed, he became a frequent traveller to the Netherlands, visiting The Hague, Dordrecht and Domburg and producing numerous etchings of one of his favorite cities: Amsterdam.
He achieved international notoriety when Symphony No. 1, The White Girl was rejected at both the Royal Academy and the Salon, but was a major attraction at the famous Salon des Refusés in 1863. Thereafter Courbet's influence waned, and Orientalism--and to a lesser extent classicism--became increasingly pronounced elements in his work. James Abbott McNeill Whistler maintained close ties with France during the London years, and painted at Trouville with Courbet, Daubigny, and Monet in 1865.
In 1866 James Abbott McNeill Whistler artist went to South America, where James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted seascapes in Valparaiso, Chile. After returning to Europe Whistler James Abbott McNeill commenced work on a series of monumental figure compositions for called the Six Projects (Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), that reflect the influence of the English artist Albert Moore. In 1869 Whistler began to sign Whistler paintings with a butterfly monogram composed of his initials. In 1872 James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted his well-known Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother, that was later acquired by the French government.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler art is in many respects the opposite to his often aggressive personality, being discreet and subtle, but the creed that lay behind it was radical. James Abbott McNeill Whistler believed that painting should exist for its own sake, not to convey literary or moral ideas, and the artist often gave Whistler paintings musical titles to suggest an analogy with the abstract art of music: `

Art should be independent of all claptrap-- should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it, and that is why I insist on calling my works "arrangements" and "harmonies".' James Abbott McNeill Whistler artist was a laborious and self-critical worker, but this is belied by the flawless harmonies of tone and color he created in Whistler paintings, which are mainly portraits and landscapes, particularly scenes of the Thames. No less original was Whistler painting as a decorative artist, notably in the Peacock Room (1876-77) for the London home of the Liverpool shipping magnate Frederick Leyland (now reconstructed in the Freer Gallery, Washington), where attenuated decorative patterning anticipated much in the Art Nouveau style of the 1890s. Whistler's Peacock Room, or Harmony in Blue and Gold (1876-1877, Freer Gallery of Art), done for Leyland, exerted a strong influence on the Aesthetic movement's interior design.

During the late 1880s and 1890s Whistler achieved recognition as an artist of international stature. Whistler paintings were acquired by public collections, Whistler James Abbott McNeill received awards at exhibitions, and Whistler James Abbott McNeill was elected to such prestigious professional associations as the Royal Academy of Fine Art, Munich. His portrait of Thomas Carlyle was bought by the Corporation of Glasgow in 1891 for 1,000 guineas and soon afterwards his most famous work, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother (1871), was bought by the French state (it is now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and James Abbott McNeill Whistler artist was made a member of the Légion d'Honneur. In 1898 James Abbott McNeill Whistler was elected president of the International Society of Sculptors, artists and Gravers.

Whistler paintings are related to Impressionism (although Whistler James Abbott McNeill was more interested in evoking a mood than in accurately depicting the effects of light), to Symbolism, and to Aestheticism, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler played a central role in the modern movement in England. His aesthetic creed was explained in his Ten O'Clock Lecture (1885) and this, and much else on art and society, was republished in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890).