James McNeill Whistler

Whistler was born James Abbott Whistler in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of George Washington Whistler, a US Army engineer. In 1843 the family moved to Saint Petersburg, where the elder Whistler had been engaged by Tsar Nicholas I to help build the Moscow-Saint Petersburg railway; he died of cholera there in 1849, and the family returned to the United States. Whistler entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1851 and was dismissed in 1854 after failing a chemistry examination, a failure he later turned into a joke about the value of silicon.

In 1855 he moved to Paris and studied intermittently in the atelier of Charles Gleyre, made copies in the Louvre, and formed an admiration for Velazquez that never left his own tonal painting. The Paris years put him among Courbet, Manet and Degas rather than among the Academy painters, and it was in early manhood, around this period, that he dropped his middle name Abbott in favour of his mother's maiden name, becoming James McNeill Whistler.

Whistler's titles are the clearest statement of his position: he called his pictures Arrangements, Harmonies, Symphonies and Nocturnes rather than portraits or views, insisting that a painting's subject was secondary to its formal relations of tone and colour. He set this out publicly in the Ten O'Clock lecture, delivered at Prince's Hall, London, on 20 February 1885, in full evening dress at the hour named in the title. The lecture argued that art exists for its own perfection and has no duty to instruct or moralise, and it became a founding text of Aestheticism in England.

The lecture crossed to Paris in translation. Stephane Mallarme, whom Whistler had met at Monet's studio in 1888, translated it as Le Ten O'Clock de M. Whistler, publishing it first in the Revue Independante in May 1888 and then as a separate pamphlet the same year. Whistler was also a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and of Algernon Charles Swinburne, who wrote an ekphrastic poem, Before the Mirror, in response to one of his Symphony in White paintings; Whistler had the poem lettered onto the frame, a device he had taken from Rossetti's own practice of pasting verse to his frames.

Whistler was collecting Chinese blue-and-white porcelain in London by the 1860s, part of a wider vogue among Aesthetic circles that contemporaries called Chinamania; he frequented the Paris shop La Porte Chinoise with Rossetti in search of fans, screens, textiles and porcelain, and objects from these purchases recur as props in his paintings of the period. His draughtsmanship for other collectors survives in print: he supplied the illustrations, executed by the autotype process, for A Catalogue of Blue and White Nankin Porcelain Forming the Collection of Sir Henry Thompson, published in London in 1878.

The clearest fusion of this material with his painting is La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, showing the Anglo-Greek sitter Christina Spartali posed in a kimono-derived robe in front of a Chinese-style screen, a deliberate blending of Japanese costume and Chinese decorative sources rather than an ethnographic record of either. The picture was painted to hang over the fireplace of Frederick Leyland's London dining room, the room that became the Peacock Room.

In 1876 the shipping magnate Frederick Leyland asked Whistler to advise on the colour scheme for the dining room at 49 Prince's Gate, London, designed around La Princesse and Leyland's collection of blue-and-white porcelain, in a room whose woodwork and shelving had already been designed by the architect Thomas Jeckyll. While Leyland was away, Whistler's involvement grew far beyond advice: he covered almost every surface in a scheme of gold and blue peacock patterns over Spanish leather, working for months and calling the result a gorgeous surprise.

Leyland refused to pay the two thousand guineas Whistler asked, writing that Whistler should not have committed him to such expenditure without warning, and settled on half the sum, which he then paid in pounds rather than guineas. The difference is a genuine insult and not a rounding error: a guinea was worth twenty-one shillings against the pound's twenty, so paying in pounds shorted Whistler by roughly a shilling on every pound of the reduced fee. Whistler's retaliation is in the room itself. He returned, without permission, and painted two more peacocks confronting each other on the shutter facing La Princesse, one built from coins in its plumage and the other with silver shillings scattered at its feet, and titled the panel Art and Money; or, the Story of the Room. The two men never reconciled. After Leyland's death in 1892 the American collector Charles Lang Freer bought the room's contents and eventually the room's fittings themselves, installed the Peacock Room in his Detroit house, and bequeathed the whole to the Smithsonian Institution in 1906, where it remains, with La Princesse restored to its place over the fireplace.

Painted in 1871 and shown at the Royal Academy in 1872, the portrait of Whistler's mother Anna McNeill Whistler came within, by Whistler's own account, a hair's breadth of rejection by the Academy's hanging committee, and it was the last work he ever submitted there. Whistler exhibited it under the title Arrangement in Grey and Black, insisting in an 1878 interview that its interest as a picture of his mother was a private matter and asking rhetorically what the public should care about the sitter's identity; the now-familiar subtitle, Portrait of the Painter's Mother, was added later to satisfy exactly the audience he was needling.

The French state bought the painting in 1891, and it entered what is now the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, the only major Whistler to enter a national collection in his own lifetime. Its later career as a universal emblem of motherhood, reproduced on a US postage stamp and endlessly parodied, is a reception history Whistler did not live to see and would very likely have found beside the point of the picture he painted.

In the July 1877 number of his periodical Fors Clavigera, John Ruskin reviewed the Grosvenor Gallery's summer exhibition and wrote of Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, priced at two hundred guineas: 'I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.' Whistler sued for libel, claiming 1,000 pounds in damages.

The case was heard before Baron Huddleston at the Court of Exchequer on 25 and 26 November 1878. Ruskin, too unwell to appear, was represented by witnesses including Edward Burne-Jones, who testified that the Nocturne was deficient in form and composition. Under cross-examination by the Attorney-General, Sir John Holker, Whistler was asked how long it had taken him to 'knock off' the picture; he answered that the actual painting took a day, with a second day to finish it. Holker pressed: 'The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?' Whistler's reply became the most quoted line to come out of a British courtroom in the nineteenth century: 'No; I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.'

The jury found for Whistler and awarded damages of one farthing, the smallest coin in circulation, with no order as to costs. Ruskin resigned his Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Oxford within the month, telling the university dean that the professorship was a farce if it had no right to condemn as well as to praise. Whistler's own legal costs ran past 1,000 pounds, and combined with the debts run up building his Tite Street house, they bankrupted him in May 1879.

Whistler had commissioned the architect Edward William Godwin to build him a studio house at 35 Tite Street, Chelsea, known as the White House, completed in 1878. Declared bankrupt in May 1879, he was forced to vacate it; it was sold at auction on 18 September 1879 to the critic Harry Quilter, a man Whistler particularly despised. Secondary accounts of the sale price disagree sharply, some giving a figure close to what Whistler had spent building it and at least one giving a figure an order of magnitude higher; the University of Glasgow's own catalogue essay on the bankruptcy, the most careful account available, states the fact of the sale and the buyer's name but gives no price at all, so no figure is asserted here.

Whistler's effects, including paintings, were sold at Sotheby's, London, on 12 February 1880. What survived the bankruptcy did so by scattering: some canvases had already been deposited as loan collateral with the print dealer Jane Noseda and later with H. Graves and Co., including the Falling Rocket itself and the portrait of his mother; others went informally to his brother William McNeill Whistler or to the framemaker Thomas Way, some of which were only settled and returned as late as 1896. Glasgow's own account of the episode is candid about its limits: it is not clear which canvases were destroyed, which were rescued or hidden, and which eventually found their way back to Whistler or, after his death, to his executrix.

Whistler left for Venice within the year on a commission from the Fine Art Society to produce a set of etchings, a trip that both rebuilt his reputation and his finances and produced some of the etched work now most sought after by collectors.

Whistler's printmaking is a parallel career to the painting, not a sideline. His early plates of London and the Thames, including Black Lion Wharf, date from 1859 and were gathered with fifteen others into the portfolio Sixteen Etchings of Scenes on the Thames, known as the Thames Set, published in 1871. The standard catalogue for a century was Edward G. Kennedy's The Etched Work of Whistler, 1910, which numbered 442 plates plus a four-plate appendix. The University of Glasgow's Whistler Etchings Project, launched online in 2012 under Margaret F. MacDonald, Grischka Petri and Joanna Meacock, revised the corpus upward to 490 plates on the basis of new documentary and technical research, adding previously unrecorded sheets and correcting dates and subjects.

Individual sheets trade at a wide range depending on state, paper, and Whistler's own hand-wiping of the plate, which he varied deliberately from impression to impression as a form of artistic printing; one specialist dealer's current stock lists run from roughly 1,750 US dollars for a modest late impression to 12,500 US dollars for a rare drypoint, figures given here as an indicative dealer range rather than an auction record, and flagged as such.

Around 1869 Whistler began developing a monogram from his initials J and W into a stylised butterfly, its body forming the J and its wings the W, a device he arrived at by studying the potters' marks on the Chinese and Japanese ceramics he collected and by his general interest in the ideographic signatures used on East Asian art. The butterfly evolved over three decades, gaining antennae, wing veins and eventually a scorpion-like sting in the tail on letters where Whistler meant to be combative; he placed it deliberately as a compositional element within each picture rather than as a signature tucked into a corner, and he extended it to the frames he designed for his own paintings, which he treated as continuous with the work itself.

Whistler ran nothing resembling the production workshop of an earlier master. His closest documented pupil was Walter Sickert, who left the Slade School of Fine Art in 1882 to work as Whistler's studio assistant through most of the 1880s, chiefly helping to print etching plates and absorbing Whistler's technical habits; the two painted together at Saint-Ives and later in Dieppe. Sickert went on to found his own independent practice and, eventually, the Camden Town Group, and his early etchings are close enough to Whistler's in handling that the master-pupil relationship is visible in the plates themselves rather than only in biography. Because Whistler's assistants worked as personal studio help rather than as paid hands executing his designs at scale, the attribution problems that dog earlier workshop-based painters largely do not arise here; the open question with Whistler's corpus is provenance and loan history during the bankruptcy years, not authorship.

Whistler married Beatrix Godwin, the widow of the architect who had designed the White House, on 11 August 1888. She died of cancer on 10 May 1896, and her younger sister Rosalind Birnie Philip, who had been living with the couple, became Whistler's ward and, on his death in 1903, his executrix. Birnie Philip gave the core of the Whistler and Beatrix Whistler collection to the University of Glasgow in stages: a first gift of major paintings, prints, pastels and drawings; a second gift of roughly six thousand letters, ledgers, books, catalogues and press cuttings; and a bequest, on her own death in 1958, of the residue of Whistler's studio contents, further paintings and works on paper, manuscripts, books and a large holding of prints.

That gift is now the core of the Hunterian's Whistler collection, one of the largest single holdings of his work anywhere, and it underwrites both of the standard modern catalogues: the University of Glasgow's online paintings catalogue, successor to the 1980 printed catalogue raisonne by Andrew McLaren Young, Margaret F. MacDonald, Robin Spencer and Hamish Miles, and the 2012 online etchings catalogue. A reader checking an unfamiliar Whistler attribution today is, in practice, checking it against an archive assembled by his own family rather than against a foundation or an authentication board, because no such board exists for this artist.

The Falling Rocket's own sale history is the clearest single thread through the market. Whistler priced it at 200 guineas at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, the price Ruskin mocked; it toured mortgaged and unsold through Paris, New York, Edinburgh and Brussels between 1883 and 1890 at an asking price of 300 guineas; Whistler recovered it and sold it to the New York collector Samuel Untermyer in 1892 for 840 pounds. The Untermyer estate sold it at Parke-Bernet, New York, on 10 May 1940 for 7,500 US dollars to the bookseller and dealer Charles Sessler; it passed through Knoedler's and then Scott and Fowles before Dexter M. Ferry Jr. bought it for the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1946 for 10,000 US dollars, where it remains.

At the top of the market, Harmony in Grey: Chelsea in Ice sold at Christie's, New York, on 25 May 2000, lot 10, for 2,600,000 US dollars, a figure the auction catalogue and the University of Glasgow's own record of the sale both report as a single total rather than as hammer and premium separately, which this record flags rather than silently resolving. The painting was subsequently given to Colby College Museum of Art by Peter and Paula Lunder in 2013.

Whistler's corpus is unusually well policed for a nineteenth-century painter, because the family archive that underwrites the catalogues never left institutional custody, but real gaps remain in the record consulted for this page and none of them have been smoothed over here.