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James Abbott McNeill Whistler
(1834-1903)
James McNeill Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, USA, in 1834. He spent five years of his childhood (1843-1848) in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father, George Washington Whistler (1800-1849), a railroad engineer, was employed in the building of the St. Petersburg-Moscow railroad. The artist¡¯s mother, Anna Matilda McNeill, was a devout Christian, whom he admired all his life. In his early manhood he exchanged his middle name ¡®Abbott¡¯ for her maiden name ¡®McNeill¡¯. In St. Petersburg young James received his first art lessons in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and also learnt French.
In 1849, Major Whistler died and his wife decided to bring her family to their homeland, setting at Pomfret, Connecticut, where James attended the local school until, in 1851, he entered West Point, the famous military academy. West Point at the time was an exclusive school, to which cadets were selected by congressmen. No doubt that the fact that his father had trained at West Point secured Whistler¡¯s entry. Never becoming a military man, Whistler remembered the three years spent at the academy with affection. Among all subjects Whistler succeeded only in drawing, special difficulties were caused by chemistry, which at last became the reason of his ejection from the academy. ¡®Had silicon been a gas,¡¯ He later declared, ¡¯I would have been a general-major¡¯.
West Point was followed by a brief period of employment in the United States Geodetic and Coast Survey offices in Washington. In 1855, Whistler arrived in Paris, the artistic capital of Europe, with the intention of becoming an artist.
The art of Gustave Courbet (1819-77) attracted his attention and admiration, but in his choice of teacher Whistler was very conventional. After a short period at the ¨¦cole Imp¨¦riale et Sp¨¦ciale de Dessin, he enrolled at the studio of Charles-Gabriel Gleyre (1806-74). At Gleyre¡¯s, Whistler became part of the ¡®Paris Gang¡¯, a group of young English artists that included Edward Poynter (1836-1919), later president of the Royal Academy, Thomas Armstrong (1832-1911), Thomas Lamont (1826-98) and George du Maurier (1834-96).
In 1858, Whistler set out on a tour of Alsace-Lorraine and the Rhineland, during which he made a set of etchings Twelve Etchings from Nature, better known as the French Set. Praise of the work encouraged Whistler to continue etching. Between 1858 and 1863 he produced 80 plates, Rotherhithe (1860), among them. In 1859, Whistler set to work on his first major painting, At the Piano, his first masterpiece, which marked the end of his student years and the onset of artistic independence. The work was rejected by the Salon. The same year Whistler moved to London, which remained his base of operations until 1892. From ther.... |
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