James McNeill Whistler
The aesthete of colour harmony.
Whistler was an American in London and Paris who gave his paintings musical titles such as Arrangement in Grey and Black. He sued a critic for libel.
James McNeill Whistler was born in 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the United States. His father was an engineer who worked on the railway between St Petersburg and Moscow, and James spent several years of his childhood in Russia, where he took drawing lessons. He was admitted to the West Point military academy but was dismissed. He then worked for a time as a map engraver, where he learned the technique of etching.
In 1855 he travelled to Paris, where he studied and became friends with Courbet and the young realists. In 1859 he moved to London, which remained his base for the rest of his life. His Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862), now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, was rejected by the Paris Salon and was shown in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés.
Whistler held that a painting should be a harmony of colour and form, not a story. He therefore gave his works musical titles such as symphony, arrangement and nocturne. His best-known work, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871), is a portrait of his mother. It is in the Musée d'Orsay. He was strongly influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, with their simple compositions and flat surfaces. He also decorated the famous Peacock Room, which is now in the Freer Gallery in Washington.
Whistler was witty, vain and combative. The critic John Ruskin wrote that with one of his night scenes Whistler had flung a pot of paint in the public’s face. Whistler sued him for libel in 1878. He won but was awarded only a farthing, the smallest coin, in damages, and the legal costs bankrupted him. He later collected his polemical writings in the book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. He signed his works with a stylised butterfly.
In 1888 he married Beatrice Godwin, who died in 1896. Whistler died in London in 1903. He was one of the first to argue that art exists for its own sake, and he influenced both the Aesthetic Movement and early abstract art.