James McNeil Whistler
Whistler, although he liked to pose as an aristocratic Southern Gentleman later in life, was actually born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834. When he was nine, his father George Washington Whistler, a former Major who had forsaken the Army for a civilian career in Civil Engineering, accepted a commission from Tzar Nicholas I of Russia to build the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway Line. The family moved to St. Petersburg and, thanks to the Tzar, who saw to it that they were provided with every imaginable luxury, young Whistler suddenly found himself living life on a royal scale. He had a personal tutor for his lessons, learned to speak fluent French and also to skate on the Neva River, and developed a taste for flamboyant displays - military parades and firework displays at this stage. As he also showed a marked talent for art, he was admitted into the Imperial Art Academy and studied there until 1848. By this time, hard work and the harsh Russian Winter had contributed to the decline of his father's health, and his mother insisted they move to London. The move, unfortunately, did not help, and George Whistler died in April 1846. Mrs. Whistler took her only son back to America and he did the rest of his growing up there.
Parents, despite knowing their offspring well, sometimes still harbor strange aspirations for them. Whistler's mother wanted him to become a Church Minister. It was that or the Army - a career in Art didn't seem feasible to either of them at that stage. Anyway, Whistler decided he would rather take his chances with the West Point Military Academy than with God, and enrolled accordingly in 1851. The three years he was there he made an absolute nuisance of himself, rebelling against anything that remotely reeked of discipline and really not learning much. This last became especially apparent in a Chemistry test he appeared for and did not at all shine in. As he himself put it, "Had silicon been a gas, I would have been a major general". The people at West Point were not the sort to pass a golden opportunity when they saw one - rather than endanger Homeland Security at some future date, they discharged him now when they had the chance.
If the parting pained Whistler, he didn't grieve too long over it. He embarked in 1855 for Paris with the aim of becoming a painter. He began taking free art lessons at Charles Gleyre's Studio, came under the influence of the realistic work of Gustave Courbet, and befriended Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissaro, Fantin-Latour, Baudelaire, Proust (who characterized Whistler as the painter Elstir in his novel 'A la recherche A temps perdu'), and other French notables of the period. He became very easily recognizable around Paris - a slim, slight-built man, with a thick mop of curly hair and a penchant for broad-brimmed, beribboned straw hats, immaculate white suits, and highly polished patent leather shoes. And, of course, the ubiquitous monocle with which to peer sardonically at people - before slaying them, that is, with the razor-sharp wit. He had seized upon the idea of making an art of cultivating himself and so had become even more markedly eccentric. So much so that Degas, who could be pretty acerbic when he chose, said to him, "Visslair, you behave as though you had no talent."
After four years in Paris, Whistler decided to take a look at life across the channel and moved to London. He lived with his brother-in-law for a while, but they were not exactly compatible spirits and he soon found a studio for himself. In 1860, he participated in the Royal Academy Exhibition, showing his painting 'At the Piano', and became acquainted with the great British painter Sir John Millais, the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the writer Oscar Wilde, the poet Algernon Swinburne, and a host of other eminent artistic personalities. He also became enamored with both the River Thames and a beautiful red-headed Irish model called Joanna Heffernan, and both feature in some of his most famous paintings. The first remained a life-long love, the latter until 1867. He and Jo had lived together in a riverside house near Battersea Bridge until his mother arrived from America - then, so as not to shock the old lady's old-fashioned sensibilities, Jo was moved speedily out and more or less kept under wraps; not that this spared Mrs. Whistler, stumbling as she did upon the house-maid posing naked next. The final break with Jo though came after she modeled for Courbet in his famously erotic painting of lesbian lovers in 1866. Whistler, at this time, had been away in Chile, hoping to help the Chilean colonists in their rebellion against the Spanish Navy that was blockading Valparaiso Port - it could be that someone had heard of his West Point record, because they showed no desire to fight him in turn and in fact suspended hostilities right after his arrival. There was nothing for Whistler to do but paint some very good seascapes and take the next ship back home. Where, as mentioned, Jo's lesbian modeling upset him. He took the break rather hard and was, for a period, quite intolerable. However his work continued to improve and he even achieved some measure of financial stability. He studied Japanese prints, began collecting Chinese blue-and-white pottery, and painted the painting he's most known for, 'Whistler's Mother', which he himself called 'Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1' - purposely in order to upset the sentimental and pious Victorian notions regarding motherhood - the visual art experience, Whistler insisted, had to remain untainted by any kind of moral story-telling.
In 1875, Mrs. Whistler decided to return to America for health reasons and Whistler's new mistress Maud Franklin, another stunning red-head, moved in with him. This relationship was to last until 1886. Meanwhile Whistler, owing to his extraordinary behavior, was fast becoming one of the most talked about social personalities. He made news when he split with one of his foremost patrons, the millionaire Frederick Leyland. Leyland and his architect Thomas Jeckyll had commissioned Whistler to redecorate in an 'Oriental' fashion a dining room intended to display Leyland's Chinese and Japanese Porcelain collection. Whistler, plunging enthusiastically into the task, took it upon himself to apply thick coats of blue-green paint to the antique Cordovan leather wall-panels of the room - transforming them from something that had purportedly been salvaged from the Spanish Armada to something that resembled a Japanese enamel covered with gold-leaf peacocks. With his fine instinct for personal publicity, he also threw open the house to the Press, to his artist friends, and anyone else who might want to have a look. Leyland, not thrilled to find his precious leathers destroyed and his house turned into a circus, flew into a violent rage and refused to pay Whistler the agreed amount of 2000 guineas. He paid him instead only 1000 pounds. Whistler, no slouch when it came to quarrels, gave as good as he got in words - the 1000 pounds he avenged by painting two squabbling peacocks on the south wall, one haughtily rich representing Leyland and the other haughtily poor representing himself.
Losing Leyland's patronage affected his finances, but he was still looking for more trouble. In 1877 he sued the well-known art critic John Ruskin for referring to Whistler's painting 'Nocturne in Black and Gold;The Falling Rocket' in the July issue of 'Fors Clavigera' in the following terms - 'For Mr. Whistler's own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. 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'.
The trial, which took place a year later, was a hilarious affair, thanks to Whistler's hard-boiled wit and staunch defense of modern abstract painting. Whistler, never interested in perspective or realism, had been only interested in producing an harmony of color, light and patterns in the picture in question and said as much. When the Attorney-General expressed surprise that Whistler should ask for 200 Guineas for a painting he purported to have finished in two days, Whistler, to an overwhelming applause, retorted that no, he was asking that stiff price for the knowledge of a lifetime!
In the end however, although the verdict was given in Whistler's favor, he was awarded only one farthing for all the costly trouble. He had proved his point, but found himself bankrupt now. As was his won't, he became bankrupt in grand style. He threw a grand breakfast for his acquaintances before his property was seized by the bailiffs and then departed for Venice with Maud. She supported him for the next few months and he began studying etching. He exhibited these new works successfully in London in 1880 and, after a second exhibition was attended and admired by the Prince and Princess of Wales, he was once more on his way up. With renewed appreciation and social recognition came a new love - Beatrix 'Trixie' Godwin, the wife of his architect friend William Godwin - the two of them had separated amicably. After William Godwin's death and Maud's taking the same path as Jo, posing naked for the artist William Stottard, Whistler decided that his bachelor days were over and married Trixie.
The marriage, which took place on 11 August 1888, proved to be a very happy one. Trixie, an artistic sort herself, remained unfazed by Whistler's eccentricities, and adored him otherwise. After two years of married life came recognition from the Corporation of Glasgow, which bought his portrait of Thomas Carlyle for 1000 guineas, and from the French Government, which both bought the 'Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1' and conferred him with the Legion d'Honneur. The 1892 retrospective exhibition of his paintings was a grand success and made him more financially secure. He and Trixie were able to move to a new and luxurious Paris home, where Whistler almost got himself embroiled in another libel suit. This time against the writer George Du Maurier who caricatured him unflatteringly in his novel 'Trilby' as 'the idle apprentice, the King of Bohemia'. Whistler was fit to be tied, but in the end didn't sue. There were suddenly other pressing matters - Trixie had been diagnosed with cancer.
They moved back to England, to a house on Hampstead Heath, where she died in May 1896, leaving behind a completely devastated husband. He found it very difficult to cope and, in the seven years that remained to him, attempted to distract himself by engaging in further futile legal quarrels, complaining about his health having been ruined 'by living in the midst of English pictures', and traveling to far-off places like North Africa. The end came in July 1903, just after his 69th birthday.
References :
Whistler, The Great Artists, Volume 19, Marshall Cavendish Ltd., 1993.
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