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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 École Impériale et Spéciale 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 there Whistler made frequent visits abroad. In 1861, he started to work on Symphony in White No.1: The White Girl. The model was his mistress, Jo. Symphony in White No.1 came closest in mood to Pre-Raphaelitism. Later, in 1863, Whistler became acquainted with the Pre-Raphaelite group.

In 1866, Whistler traveled to South America where the Chileans were engaged in a war against Spain, he kept a journal of naval and military developments but avoided involvement in any fighting.

In 1877, Whistler began to paint a series of ‘Nocturnes’ based on the Thames views at night. One of his most famous works in this series in Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge, originally called ‘Moonlights’. His patron, Frederick Leyland, an enthusiastic pianist, suggested the term ‘Nocturne’. Whistler replied, ‘I can’t thank you too much for the name Nocturne as the title for my Moonlights. You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics, and consequent pleasure to me; besides it is really so charming, and does so poetically say all I want to say and no more than I wish.’
Critics were outraged. John Ruskin, when seeing Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket and other night scenes at the opening exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, broke out in print: ‘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 Ruskin for libel and won the trial. Whistler was awarded a farthing damages; his feelings on the subject are embodied in the Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890).

In the meantime Whistler started, in 1876, the decoration of the famous Peacock Room in the London house of his patron, Frederick Leyland. In the end, the artist and the patron quarreled bitterly over the room, and the quarrel grew into deep hatred. The loss of Leyland as a patron and the effect of Ruskin’s harsh criticism left Whistler in a bad financial position. In 1879, Whistler was declared bankrupt and left for Venice for the next 14 months. During that stay in Venice, he produced four oils, many etchings and almost 100 pastels.

Aside from portraits, Whistler was much occupied in the 1880s with small seascapes in watercolor and in oil. Gray and Silver: Mist - Lifeboat.

After two successful one-exhibitions at Dowdeswells in 1884 and 1886, Whistler’s reputation steadily began to mount. In 1884, he was invited to become a member of the Society of British Artists and two years later was elected its president.

In 1886, Whistler painted Harmony in Red: Lamplight. Portrait of Mrs. Beatrice Godwin. Her husband died in 1886 and two years later she became Whistler’s wife. The daughter of the sculptor John Bernie Philip, she was also an artist in her own right and Whistler frequently turned to her for advice while painting his portraits. With Beatrice, Whistler moved to Paris in 1892. She died four years later, in 1896. In the lithograph The Siesta Mrs. Beatrice Whistler is shown already mortally ill.

Meanwhile Whistler’s reputation had soared. In 1891, Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1: The Artist’s Mother was acquired by the French State and that same year Glasgow Corporation paid a thousand guineas for the Portrait of Thomas Carlyle. Having exhibited at several important international exhibitions, Whistler was awarded honors by Munich, Amsterdam and Paris.

Whistler died in 1903 in London.

“James McNeill Whistler’s position in the history of British art is as paradoxical as his personality: flamboyant dandy and wit, he was also a serious craftsman, tirelessly dedicated to the perfection of his art. Having learned much from his French and English contemporaries, he nevertheless emerged as an isolated figure who attracted followers but established no leading style.”

Symphony in White No.1: The White Girl. The model for the picture was Whistler’s mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, called Jo. For a few years, this beautiful, red-haired Irishwoman managed Whistler’s affairs, keeping his house and assisting him with the sale of his work. To give herself respectability, she called herself Mrs. Abbott; her drunken father also referred to Whistler as ‘me son-in-law’. She sat for many of his pictures, including Caprice in Purple and Gold No 2 - The Golden Screen. Wapping Purple and Rose: The Lange Lijzen of the Six Marks. Symphony in White No 2: The Little White Girl. and others.
Whistler introduced Jo to Courbet, who also responded to her beauty and painted her combing her hair in The Beautiful Irish Girl, of which four versions exist, one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Later, in 1866, she posed as one of the two nude women in Courbet’s Sleepers (Petit Palais, Paris), a fact that may have contributed to Whistler’s decision to break with her.
By 1869, Jo had been replaced by Louisa Fanny Hanson, about whom little is known except that the following year she bore Whistler a son (christened Charles James Whistler Hanson) and then disappeared, leaving the son to be adopted and raised by Jo.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl. Caprice in Purple and Gold No 2 - The Golden Screen. Wapping Purple and Rose: The Lange Lijzen of the Six Marks. Symphony in White No 2: The Little White Girl.

Frederick Leyland was a self-made Liverpool ship-owner, wealthy and influential. He generously patronized contemporary artists, including a number of Whistler’s friends, and for this earned the nickname the ‘Liverpool Medici’. Leyland was fond of collecting art and music, on his return home at night he would practice scales on the piano.
Whistler was first introduced to Leyland by Rossetti.
Since the autumn of 1869, Whistler was a regular visitor at Leyland’s manor house, Speke Hall , eight miles from Liverpool, where his interest in etching revived and he executed plates of Liverpool docks and of Leyland’s family. Full-length portraits of both husband and wife were commissioned and work continued on these in both Liverpool and London: Arrangement in Black: Portrait of F. R. Leyland. and Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland. The good relations turned to bitter hatred over the decoration of the famous Peacock Room. Since then Whistler painted 3 pictures satirizing Leyland: The Gold Scab. The Loves of the Lobsters and Mount Ararat, have not survived.
Whistler probably intended all three paintings to be in his studio when Leyland and the creditors made an inspection of his house in 1879. The Gold Scab shows Leyland as a hideous peacock sitting on Whistler’s White House, playing the piano.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Arrangement in Black: Portrait of F. R. Leyland. Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland. Speke Hall. Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room. The Gold Scab.

Harmony in Green and Rose: The Music Room. The picture was first called The Morning Call. The scene is set in the music room of the home of Whistler’s half-sister Deborah and her husband Francis Seymour Haden. It shows Deborah’s image, reflected in the mirror to the left, her daughter Annie, and, standing in riding dress, Isabella Boott, a niece of Kirk Boott, the founder of Lowell, Massachusetts, who had first invited Whistler’s father to Lowell in 1834. Isabella’s eldest sister had married Haden’s younger brother. Whistler’s mother gave the picture to her daughter-in-law, Julia, the wife of Whistler’s half-brother George.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Harmony in Green and Rose: The Music Room.

Rose and Silver: The Princess from the Land of Porcelain. The model for the picture was Christine Spartali, daughter of a rich Greek merchant, later the Greek Consul-General in London, Michael Spartali. The picture was bought by Frederick Leyland for the dining room in his London house. Leyland had the dining room remodeled by the architect Thomas Jeckyll. The room was to hold his collection of blue and white porcelain. Whistler did not like Jeckyll’s work, which, to his taste, did not harmonize with The Princess and, at Leyland’s permission, modified the walls. After Leyland’s death, both The Princess and the Peacock Room itself were acquired by the American collector Charles Lang Freer, and can now be seen reassembled in the Freer Gallery in Washington.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Rose and Silver: The Princess from the Land of Porcelain.

Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander. Cicely Alexander was the second daughter of the London banker and art collector W.C. Alexander. Her father was the first to buy a nocturne, and he commissioned Whistler to paint portraits of his two daughters, both of which are now in the Tate Gallery. Whistler designed the dress for the portrait.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Harmony in Gray and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander.

Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother. Whistler took three months, over the summer of 1871 to complete this portrait of Anna Matilda McNeill. In November 1891, the portrait was bought by France largely thanks to Whistler’s French friends, Duret, Mallarmé, and Roger Marx. Whistler’s most famous work became a universal symbol of motherhood, in its representation on a stamp to commemorate Mother’s Day in America in 1934.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother.

Maud Franklin, the daughter of a cabinetmaker and upholsterer, was born in Bicester, near Oxford, on 9 January 1857. In the late 1870s, she posed to Whistler for several etchings and portraits, including Arrangement in White and Black. She had two daughters by Whistler, one, Ióne, probably born in 1877, a second, registered as Maud McNeill Whistler Franklin, born on 13 February 1879. Maud accompanied Whistler to Venice in 1879-80. She painted herself in the manner of her lover. After Whistler married Beatrice Godwin in 1888, Maud lived in Paris. She married an American, Richard H. S. Abbott, and lived near Cannes until her death, probably in 1941. She refused Whistler’s biographers to give any information concerning her relationship with him.
Arrangement in White and Black, c. 1876 – portrait of Maud Franklin.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Maud Franklin. Arrangement in White and Black.

Arrangement in Brown and Black: Portrait of Miss Rosa Corder. The artist Rosa Corder was the mistress of the art dealer and entrepreneur Charles Augustus Howell and the mother of his son. Howell assisted Whistler in selling his artwork, particularly his prints, in the late 1870s.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Arrangement in Brown and Black: Portrait of Miss Rosa Corder.

Arrangement in Black; The Lady in the Yellow Buskin - Portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell. Janey Sevilla Callander of Craigforth, Stirling, and Ardkingglass, Argyll, married the second son of the eighth Duke of Argyll in 1869. Her patronage significantly assisted Whistler’s position in London society after his return from Venice in 1880. In her turn, Lady Archibald was much influenced by Whistler’s color theories, as expressed in her book Rainbow Music or The Philosophy of Harmony in Colour-Grouping, published in 1886. Whistler painted three portraits of her.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Arrangement in Black; The Lady in the Yellow Buskin - Portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell.

Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Brown: Portrait of Arthur J. Eddy. The Chicago lawyer Arthur J. Eddy was an early collector of cubist and abstract art. He commissioned his portrait from Whistler in 1893, and it was painted in six weeks in his Parisian studio, 1894.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Brown: Portrait of Arthur J. Eddy.

Miss Rosalind Birnie Philip Standing. Rosalind, the daughter of the sculptor John Birnie Philip, was 22 when her elder sister Beatrice, Whistler’s wife, died in 1896. Whistler then made her his ward and executrix; she acted as his secretary until his death in 1903. Thereafter she became something of a jealous guardian of Whistler’s memory. She presented an important group of paintings and drawings to the University of Glasgow in 1935, and followed this, in 1955 and 1958, with a bequest which consisted of the rest of the Whistler estate , including some 6000 letters, ledgers, books, catalogues, etc. She posed for several drawings and lithographs by him, as well as five paintings, three of which are now in the Hunterian Art Gallery.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Miss Rosalind Birnie Philip Standing.

Portrait of Charles Lang Freer. Charles Lang Freer was born in Kingston, New York, in 1856. In partnership with Colonel Frank J. Hecker he founded the Peninsular Car Works in Detroit, which produced railway rolling stock. After the American Car and Foundry Company he was able to retire from business in 1900, and devote himself exclusively to art collecting. He began to collect Whistler’s etchings in 1887, and after meeting Whistler in 1880, set out, with single-minded determination and the appropriate financial resources, to form the largest single collection of his work anywhere. He was known principally as a pioneering collector of the art of the Far East and Asia; his friendship with Whistler was instrumental in influencing the formation of his taste. On his death in 1919 he bequeathed to the American nation his Oriental and Whistler collections – comprising some 70 oil paintings, and works in other media, including The Peacock Room – together with paintings by Whistler’s American contemporaries. They are now displayed in the Freer Gallery of Art, in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, which opened to the public in 1923.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Portrait of Charles Lang Freer.

Thomas Carlyle  (1795-1881) is a Scottish historian, essayist and intellectual, born in Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire. He was educated at Ecclefechan village school, Annan Academy and Edinburgh University, where he studied arts and mathematics. After graduating in 1813 he worked as a teacher. In 1818, Carlyle returned to Edinburgh and engaged himself with private tutoring and translations of different authors from German and French. In 1826, he married Jane Baillie Welsh and started to write articles and essays for the Edinburgh Review. In 1834, the Carlyles moved to London, where Thomas spent the rest of his life. Here he completed The French Revolution (1837), On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), Past and Present (1843), a six-volume History of … Frederick the Great (1858-65), The Early Kings of Norway (1875) et al. In 1866 he was installed as lord rector of Edinburgh University. He was buried at his own wish in Ecclefechan.
See: James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Arrangement in Gray and Black No.2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle.
 

Bibliography:
Whistler, by Robin Spencer. Studio Editions. London. 1990.
Whistler, by Frances Spalding. Phaidon Press Ltd. 1994.
Whistler's Venice by Alastair Grieve. Yale Univ Pr, 2000.
James McNeil Whistler by Lisa N. Peters. Todtri Productions Ltd, 1998.
Palaces in the Night: Whistler in Venice by Margaret F. MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler. University of California Press, 2001.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler: Pastels by James McNeill Whistler, James Abbott McNeil, Robert H. Getscher (Introduction). George Braziller, 1991.
Whistler and Holland by Margaret F. MacDonald, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Jan Frederik Heijbroek. Waanders Pub, 1999.
Whistler on Art: Selected Letters and Writings of James McNeill Whistler by James McNeill Whistler, Nigel Thorp (Introduction). Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.