Whistler, James McNeill

Whistler, James McNeill (1834–1903), artist.Although James Whistler lived abroad his entire adult life, he became well‐known in the United States as a publicist for the Aesthetic movement. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler entered West Point Military Academy in 1851. At age twenty‐one, he left to study art in Paris. Moving to London in 1859, he settled in Chelsea, an artists’ enclave, in 1863. The White Girl (1862), rejected by the French Salon and shown instead in the scandalous Salon des Refusés, established Whistler's avant‐garde reputation.

Whistler called his paintings “arrangements” and “harmonies” to highlight their abstract qualities; like music, his compositions omit subject and moral judgment. Arrangement in Gray & Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother (1871) thus reminds the viewer that the subject is Whistler's aesthetic sensibility. Critic John Ruskin attacked Nocturne in Black & Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875), inspired by fireworks at Cremorne Gardens, for precisely this lack of an intelligible subject. Whistler's libel suit against Ruskin netted only a farthing in damages, but his account of the trial, Art and Art Critics (1878), enhanced his fame.

In his “Ten o'clock Lecture” at the Royal Academy in 1885, Whistler presented his controversial view that the only purpose of art is to create beauty. He expressed this philosophy by borrowing from Japanese art simple, asymmetrical design; shallow space; and bright pattern. In 1876, Liverpool shipowner Frederick Leyland commissioned him to design his London dining room as a showcase for Leyland's collection of Asian porcelain and Whistler's paintings. The resulting Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, filled with blue and white porcelain as well as blue, green, and gold pattern on all surfaces, possessed a unified aesthetic achieved through the artist's complete control of an environment. By 1890, Whistler and his ideas had won wide acceptance in Europe and America. In 1904, the Peacock Room was bought by American railroad supplier Charles Freer, a connoisseur of Asian art whose collection, donated to the nation, is displayed at Washington's Freer Gallery.
See also Painting: To 1945.

Bibliography

Ronald Anderson , James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth, 1994.
Richard Dorment and and M.F. MacDonald , James McNeill Whistler, 1994.

Wendy J. Katz