James Whistler

James Whistler was born July 10, 1834, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to railroad engineer George Washington Whistler and his second wife, Anna McNeill. When his father took a contract to build Russia's first major railway, the family moved to St. Petersburg, where an eleven-year-old James enrolled at the Imperial Academy of Arts. His father died of cholera in 1849, and the family returned to America poorer. West Point admitted him in 1851 on a congressman's recommendation; Superintendent Robert E. Lee extended him what cadets remembered as considerable indulgence before finally dismissing him in 1854, after Whistler failed his chemistry examination. He tried government surveying next and was let go there too, for sketching mermaids in the margins of navigational charts.

In Paris from 1855, Whistler trained loosely under Charles Gleyre, absorbed the idea that line mattered more than color, and settled in London by 1859. He built a career on refusing to tell stories: his best-known works carry musical titles, Arrangement, Nocturne, Symphony, Harmony, insisting paint answered only to paint. Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, an austere 1871 portrait of his mother, became the one work the wider public actually loved despite him. For the shipping magnate Frederick Leyland he transformed a London dining room into Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room in 1876 and 1877, painting over Leyland's own leather wall hangings without full permission and billing him for it, a dispute so bitter Leyland never spoke to him again. Whistler settled most of his arguments the same way, in public and at volume.

In 1877 the critic John Ruskin accused Whistler in print of flinging a pot of paint in the public's face and charging two hundred guineas for it. Whistler sued for libel and won, in November 1878, a farthing, the smallest coin in circulation. Combined with the debts from building his elaborate Chelsea studio, the White House, the trial bankrupted him by May 1879; the house and his collections went to auction that September while he worked in Venice on commissioned etchings. He had, by then, fathered three children he never legitimized, one with a family maid, two with his mistress Maud Franklin, and married the widow Beatrix Godwin in near secrecy in 1888 rather than face Franklin's reaction. He also insisted, under oath at the Ruskin trial, that he would be born wherever he chose, and not in Lowell.

Whistler spent his last years increasingly frail; the art school he opened in 1898 closed in 1901 for lack of his attendance. He died in London on July 17, 1903, and left his estate to his sister-in-law Rosalind Birnie Philip, who spent her life defending his reputation and later gave his work to Glasgow University. His influence reached further than his income, shaping John Singer Sargent and a generation of American painters who followed him to Europe. The portrait of his mother, painted almost as an afterthought, became decades later a Depression-era postage stamp and a national shorthand for motherhood, attached forever to a man who spent his life trying to be known for anything else.

James Whistler's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl artwork
  Portrait of his mistress and model Joanna Hiffernan 1861
• Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 artwork
  Known universally as Whistler's Mother 1871
• Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket artwork
  The painting Ruskin attacked in print, triggering the 1878 libel trial 1874
• Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room artwork
  Now installed at the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery 1877
• Ten O'Clock speech
  Public lecture laying out his art-for-art's-sake philosophy 1885
• The Gentle Art of Making Enemies book
  Collected his letters, reviews, and courtroom exchanges 1890

• July 10, 1834 aged 0 Born in Lowell, Massachusetts
• 1843 aged ~9 Moves with his family to St. Petersburg, Russia Enrolls at the Imperial Academy of Arts at age eleven.
• 1854 aged ~20 Dismissed from West Point after failing chemistry
• 1861 aged ~27 Paints Symphony in White, No. 1
• 1871 aged ~37 Paints Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Whistler's Mother)
• November 1878 aged 44 Wins the Ruskin libel trial and is awarded one farthing
• May 1879 aged 44 Declared bankrupt; the White House and his collections are auctioned
• August 11, 1888 aged 54 Marries Beatrix Godwin
• July 17, 1903 aged 69 Dies in London

• Robert E. Lee 1807–1870
  Confederate commander whose military reputation and later commemoration became central to Civil War memory and the Lost Cause. dismissed by
• Henry James 1843–1916
  Novelist whose intricate explorations of consciousness and society bridged American and European literature. fictionalized by