James McNeill Whistler Prints

About James McNeill Whistler

James McNeill Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in July 1834, spent part of his boyhood in St Petersburg, where his father was building a railway, and was dismissed from West Point before going to Paris in 1855 to study in the studio of Charles Gleyre. He moved to London in 1859 and lived in Chelsea from 1866, painting the Thames at dusk in the near-monochrome pictures he called Nocturnes and titling his portraits as if they were music. Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, the portrait of his mother painted in 1871, was bought by the French state in 1891 and hangs in the Musée d'Orsay. In 1877 the critic John Ruskin accused him of flinging a pot of paint in the public's face over Nocturne in Black and Gold; Whistler sued, won a farthing in damages in November 1878 and was bankrupted by the costs, then went to Venice for fourteen months to make etchings. He signed his work with a butterfly and decorated the Peacock Room for the shipowner Frederick Leyland in 1876 to 1877. He died in London in July 1903. Whistler argued that a painting should be an arrangement of tones before it was a picture of anything, and his quiet greys, blues and golds hang exactly as he intended: as calm.