Facts about Whistler
Whistler's influence was significant, and has been the subject of museum exhibitions and publications.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (July 11, 1834 – July 17, 1903) was an American-born, British-based painter and etcher.
The published communications between Freer and Whistler reveal how Whistler's interest in those collecting his work in his native country (the United States) transitioned over many decades.
Historians speculate that Courbet's erotic painting of her as L'Origine du monde led to the breakup of the friendship between Whistler and Courbet.
Whistler's belief that art should concentrate on the arrangement of colors led many critics to see his work as a precursor to abstract art.
At the Ruskin trial, Whistler claimed Russia as his birthplace: "I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell," he declared.
Once, after he had suffered a heart attack, a Dutch newspaper incorrectly reported Whistler dead.
Mathews took Whistler's Tonalism to San Francisco, spawning a broad use of that technique among turn of the century California artists.
A trip to Venice in 1880, to create a series of etchings not only reinvigorated Whistler's finances, but also re-energized the way in which artists and photographers interpreted the city.
When Wilde was publicly acknowledged to be a homosexual in 1895, Whistler openly mocked him.
Leyland subsequently commissioned the artist to decorate his dining room; the result was Whistler's Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, now in the Freer Gallery of Art.
Whistler had a significant influence upon Arthur Frank Mathews, whom Whistler met in Paris, in the late 1890s.
The house in which he was born is now preserved as the Whistler House Museum of Art.
Famous protйgйs included Oscar Wilde and impressionist painter Walter Sickert; Whistler fell out with both Wilde and Sickert.
Whistler is best known for the nearly monochromatic full-length figure titled Arrangement in Gray and Black: Portrait of the Artist's Mother, but usually referred to as Whistler's Mother.
Whistler took to signing his paintings with a stylized butterfly, possessing a long stinger for a tail.
The symbol was apt, for Whistler's art was characterized by a subtle delicacy, in contrast to his combative public persona.
A supremely gifted engraver, Whistler produced numerous etchings, lithographs, and dry-points.
Whistler's painting The White Girl (1862) caused controversy when exhibited in London and, later, at the Salon des Refusйs in Paris.
Whistler's lover and model for The White Girl, Joanna Hiffernan, also posed for Gustave Courbet.
Whistler published two books which detailed his thoughts on life and art: Ten O'Clock Lecture (1885), and The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890).