James Abbott McNeill Whistler

American, 1834–1903

BiographyWhistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on 11 July 1834. From ages nine to fourteen, he lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father was working as a civil engineer; he began his art studies there at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. After the death of his father in 1849, the family moved back to America. Whistler attended the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1852-54 and then worked briefly for the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, in Washington, D.C., where he learned to etch maps and topographical plans.

In 1855 Whistler went to Paris, where he studied at the Ecole Impériale Spéciale de Dessin, entered the studio of Charles Gleyre (1808-1874) in 1856, and copied paintings in the Louvre and Luxembourg museums. Forming many friendships with modern painters in both Paris and London, where he moved in 1859, Whistler's painting style was influenced by the realist work of Courbet and Manet, and the narrative painting of the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as the paintings of Vélasquez, Japanese decorative art and woodblock prints, and current optical theories. Whistler's paintings--small seascapes, landscapes, cityscapes, interiors, and mostly large-scale portraits--distill these varied influences into Nocturnes and Arrangements, luminous works whose subject lies primarily in the harmonious relationships of tone and color, rather than realistic description.

Whistler first became interested in printmaking when he encountered the prints of Hogarth and Rembrandt as a child in the home of his brother-in-law Francis Seymour Haden. His own oeuvre as a printmaker is large, innovative, and highly influential. His first published portfolio of etchings--Twelve Etchings from Nature (the so-called "French Set," published in Paris in 1858 and in London in 1859) includes a somewhat eclectic group of images executed in London and rural France, as well as scenes of Parisian life. The next, more coherent set--A Series of Sixteen Etchings of Scenes on the Thames and Other Subjects (the so-called "Thames Set")--is a rich portrait of the docks of the Thames as they existed in 1859. After making a few individual etchings in the early 1860s, Whistler stopped making prints until after the 1871 publication of the Thames Set. When he returned to etching, it was with a new-found sense of pictorial structure and tonalist vision, rather than the earlier attention to descriptive detail. The two Venice sets (drawn on the plates in 1879-80, see Main Text) that resulted are the apex of his printed oeuvre. Whistler went on to etch many individual prints in addition to the "Amsterdam Set" of 1889. He also learned lithography, making a series of lithotints in the 1870s and several sketchlike litho transfer prints (see Mother and Child, AMAM inv. 53.211) in the 1890s, including five ambitious color prints.