Artist

James McNeill Whistler — the American who painted like a composer

1834, Lowell, Massachusetts — 1903, London

Aestheticism (art for art's sake)

Timeline

1834

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on July 11

1855

Leaves for Paris; never returns to the United States

1863

Symphony in White, No. 1 at the Salon des Refusés

1871

Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, portrait of his mother

1878

Libel suit against John Ruskin, won for one farthing

1892

Moves to Paris, 110 rue du Bac

1903

Dies in London on July 17

At the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, an old woman dressed in black sits in profile against a gray wall, her hands folded over a white handkerchief. The painting is titled Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, but everyone calls it Whistler’s Mother. In the United States it is one of the most familiar images there is: printed on a stamp, sent on tour from city to city, quoted and parodied endlessly. Yet it belongs to France, whose government bought it in 1891.

Its author, James McNeill Whistler, is a case apart. Born in Massachusetts in 1834, he left for Europe at twenty-one and never came back to America, though he kept his citizenship until he died. He got his education in Paris, built his career in London, and spent his last years between the two capitals.

A dandy, a polemicist and an eager litigant, he fell out with almost everyone. But he championed an idea that would matter to all of modern painting: a picture does not have to tell a story or teach a lesson; it is first of all a harmony of shapes and colors, like a piece of music.

From Lowell to St. Petersburg

James Abbott Whistler was born on July 11, 1834, in Lowell, a Massachusetts mill town. Only much later did he adopt McNeill, his mother’s maiden name, the name under which he is remembered.

His father, George Washington Whistler, was a railroad engineer. In 1843 he went to Russia to advise on the construction of the St. Petersburg–Moscow line, and the family followed. Young James spent five years there, learned the French he would speak all his life, and took drawing classes at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. When his father died in 1849, the family returned to America.

In 1851 he entered West Point, where he studied drawing with Robert W. Weir. It did not last: in 1854 he was dismissed for deficiencies in chemistry and discipline. He then found a job in the drawing division of the U.S. Coast Survey in Washington, D.C. There he learned to etch, a technique he never stopped practicing and one that made him among the most influential printmakers of his time.

In 1855 he sailed for Europe, determined to become an artist.

Bohemian Paris

Whistler reached Paris at the end of 1855. He enrolled at the École Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin, spent a short time in the studio of the Swiss-born painter Charles Gleyre, and passed long hours at the Louvre copying the old masters.

Above all, he made friends. With Henri Fantin-Latour and Alphonse Legros he founded the Société des Trois in 1858, a small mutual-support group of young painters. Through Fantin he entered the circle of Gustave Courbet, then the leader of Realism. That same year he published his first set of etchings, printed in Paris and known as the French Set.

In 1859 his painting At the Piano was rejected by the Salon, though Courbet admired it. That year Whistler settled in London. He never broke his ties with Paris: he returned often, exhibited there, and met Édouard Manet in the summer of 1861.

The Thames and the girl in white

In London Whistler eventually settled in Chelsea, on the banks of the Thames, which became one of his great subjects. His etchings of wharves and warehouses were noticed as far away as France: in 1862 Charles Baudelaire praised them.

Around the same time he painted Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, a full-length portrait of a young woman in a white dress before a white curtain. Rejected by the Royal Academy in 1862, then by the Paris Salon in 1863, the picture was shown at the Salon des Refusés, alongside Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and caused a stir.

The title has a story of its own. A critic was the first to call the picture a “symphony in white.” Whistler took up the idea and extended it to his whole output: his paintings became symphonies, harmonies, arrangements and nocturnes. It was his way of saying that painting, like music, needs no subject to move us.

Japan and the night

In the mid-1860s Whistler discovered Japanese art, then fashionable in Paris and London alike. At first he used its objects as props — fans, kimonos, porcelain — then adopted its principles: off-center compositions, flat areas of color, simplified space.

In 1866 he made an unexpected trip to Valparaíso, Chile. There he painted his first night scenes, views of the harbor at dusk. Back in London he developed the motif along the Thames: almost abstract nocturnal landscapes, painted in very thin paint, where the lights of the river pierce a blue haze.

It was his patron, the shipowner Frederick Leyland, who suggested in 1871 that he call them Nocturnes. The word, borrowed from music, perfectly suited pictures that describe almost nothing and suggest everything.

A model who never came

In the summer of 1871, a model failed to show up at Whistler’s studio. His mother, Anna Matilda Whistler, who was then living with him in London, agreed to sit in her place. She began standing, then, growing tired, sat down — and so the pose that made the picture famous was born. According to her own letters, the sittings lasted about three months.

The work was nearly rejected by the Royal Academy in 1872. It was finally accepted, and well hung according to Anna Whistler, but it was the last painting Whistler ever showed there.

The painter himself refused to see it as a sentimental portrait. The title he gave it, Arrangement in Grey and Black, says exactly what interested him: the geometry of the shapes, the rectangle of the framed picture on the wall, the profile, the muted harmonies. The public remembered only the mother.

The peacock and the lawsuit

In 1876 and 1877 Whistler turned Leyland’s London dining room into a blue-and-gold setting filled with peacocks, the Peacock Room. The quarrel over money that followed ended their friendship for good.

The next year John Ruskin, the most influential critic in England, savaged one of his Nocturnes. Whistler sued him for libel and won, in November 1878, but the jury awarded him only derisory damages and no costs.

It was a ruinous victory. In May 1879 Whistler was declared bankrupt, and his house, his works and his collections were sold at auction.

Venice and the “Ten O’Clock”

A commission from London’s Fine Art Society, for twelve etchings of Venice, rescued him. Whistler left for the lagoon in 1879 and stayed more than a year. He brought back some fifty etchings and more than ninety pastels — not the palaces and monuments, but the side canals, the alleys, the doorways, the reflections.

Back in London he slowly rebuilt his reputation. In 1885 he set out his ideas in a famous lecture, delivered at ten in the evening and known for that reason as the “Ten O’Clock.” In it he defended the independence of art from morality and even from nature itself. “Nature is very rarely right,” he declared: it is up to the artist to select and arrange.

The gentle art of making enemies

Whistler’s wit was as quick as his brush. He liked to exercise it at the expense of Oscar Wilde, twenty years his junior and for a time his friend and admirer. In November 1883, after the satirical magazine Punch imagined a conversation between the two men, Whistler published his reply in The World: “No, no, Oscar, you forget—when you and I are together, we never talk about anything except me.”

Another, even more famous retort is harder to pin down. Wilde, admiring one of the painter’s bons mots, is said to have wished he had said it himself. “You will, Oscar, you will,” Whistler supposedly replied. Quote Investigator, which traced its history, finds an early trace in a Boston newspaper as early as 1886, though in still-unsettled wording.

In 1890 Whistler gathered his letters, polemics and retorts into a book with a provocative title, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. He dedicated it to “The rare Few, who, early in Life have rid Themselves of the Friendship of the Many.” By then he signed his works with a stylized butterfly, sometimes armed with a sting.

Back to Paris

It was in France that Whistler found, late in life, the recognition he had been waiting for. On June 13, 1888, Claude Monet introduced him to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who translated the “Ten O’Clock” into French and brought him into the Symbolist circle. That same year Whistler married Beatrice Godwin, widow of the architect Edward William Godwin.

Mallarmé also worked to bring Whistler’s Mother into French collections. In 1891 the state bought the painting for the Musée du Luxembourg, reserved for living artists: a consecration for a painter so often ridiculed in England.

In 1892 the couple moved to Paris, to 110 rue du Bac. Whistler attended Mallarmé’s Tuesday gatherings on rue de Rome and painted in a Left Bank studio. He also painted himself several times, a dark, elegant silhouette: one of these self-portraits, Gold and Brown, bought by the American collector George W. Vanderbilt, of Biltmore fame, is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Paris was also the stage for his last great quarrel. In 1894 the English baronet Sir William Eden had commissioned a portrait of his wife. Unhappy with the price, a hundred guineas, and with the way it was paid, Whistler kept the picture and altered it. Eden took him to court in France. The courts eventually allowed the painter to keep the work, provided he returned the money, and Whistler was delighted to see French law recognize an artist’s right to decide the fate of his works. He told the story in a slim book with a mocking title, The Baronet and the Butterfly.

Beatrice fell ill and died in 1896. Whistler was deeply shaken. He kept working nonetheless, presided over a new international society of artists in London, and traveled again, to Algiers and Corsica, in 1901. He died in London on July 17, 1903.

America claims him back

Whistler had turned his back on the United States; the United States did not forget him.

The first to understand this was a Detroit industrialist, Charles Lang Freer, his friend and principal collector. In 1904 he bought the entire Peacock Room, then gave his collections to the federal government: the Freer Gallery of Art, which opened in Washington in 1923, holds the largest collection of Whistler’s work in the world.

Whistler’s Mother did the rest. When it entered the Louvre in 1925, it was the first American painting to join the collection. In 1932 France lent it to the United States for a tour that lasted about a year and a half, from New York to San Francisco, and drew enormous crowds. In May 1934 the U.S. Post Office turned it into a three-cent Mother’s Day stamp, printed in two hundred million copies — at the cost of a crop and an added vase of flowers that set many teeth on edge.

The image had escaped its author. The picture he meant to be abstract, a simple arrangement in gray and black, had become the symbol of American motherhood.

Where to see his work

Whistler’s work is spread across both sides of the Atlantic, much like his life.

In Paris

The Musée d’Orsay holds Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, Whistler’s Mother, which moved from the Musée du Luxembourg to the Louvre, and then to the Orsay in 1986.

In the United States

In Washington, the Freer Gallery of Art displays the Peacock Room alongside a vast collection of paintings, prints and drawings, while the National Gallery of Art holds Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl and several portraits. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Detroit Institute of Arts, which owns the Nocturne at the heart of the Ruskin trial, round out the picture.

In the United Kingdom

Tate Britain in London owns several Thames Nocturnes. In Glasgow, the Hunterian, the university’s museum, houses a major collection that came from the painter’s estate, inherited by his sister-in-law Rosalind Birnie Philip.