James Abbott McNeill Whistler Prints Paintings

Visit Whistler, James for a larger selection of his art.

Gray and Black Portrait of the Artist's Mother Giclee Print

Venice Art Print

Mother and Child on a Couch Giclee Print

Nocturne: Palaces Giclee Print

Street in Saverne Giclee Print

At the Piano Giclee Print

Arrangement in Flesh Color and Grey: the Chinese Screen Giclee Print

The Shop Window Giclee Print

New York Bay Castle Clinton Giclee Print

Man Smoking a Pipe Giclee Print

Westgate Giclee Print

Variations in Violet and Green Giclee Print

Symphonie Orchestra Symphony Art Print

The Balcony Giclee Print

Whistler had been born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He was the first child of George Washington Whistler, a leading engineer, and Anna Matilda McNeill, who was his father's second wife. Years later during the Ruskin trial, Whistler laid claim to the more exotic location St. Petersburg, Russia as his place of birth. In following years, he would highlight his mother's link to Southern and Scottish ancestors, and represent himself as an destitute Southern blue blood however to what degree he genuinely empathized with the Southern effort in the American Civil War is uncertain.

When he was a boy, Whistler had been an emotional child given to displays of surliness and impudence, who following turns of sickness frequently lapsed into times of laziness. His parents found out in while he was young that sketching could subsided him and aided to center his attention.

Starting in 1842, his father had been hired to work for a railway system in Russia. Following a movie to St. Petersburg to be with his father a year after, the young Whistler took up private art classes, and later attended the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts by the time he was eleven. The future artist would abide by the conventional program of drawing with plaster casts and irregular living models, reveled in the environment with art discussions with elder peers, and delighted his parents through a first-class mark in his human anatomy classes. During 1844, Whistler would meet the celebrated Scottish painter Sir William Allan, who traveled to Russia for a commission to create series of paintings based on the life history of Peter the Great.

During 1847-8, Whistler's family lived for awhile time in London with family, with his father remaining in Russia. His brother-in-law Francis Haden, a doctor who had been as well a gifted painter, encouraged Whistler's pursuit of art and photography. Haden brought Whistler to see art collectors and attend lectures, as well as presented him a watercolor set with directions. Whistler had by that time been imagining career in art. He started to gather books on painting and analyzed other painters' methods. His father sadly died of cholera by the age of 49, so the Whistler family went back to the United States to his mother's home in Pomfret, Connecticut. Whistler's plans for an art career continued to be undefined and his future was unsure. The family existed frugally and coped on a modest income.

In his mother's hopes that Whistler would be a minister, she sent her son to Christ Church Hall School. As a student, he has been rarely lacking a sketchbook and had been well liked among his schoolmates for his caricature drawings. All the same, it proved definite that a profession in religion did not befit him, so Whistler put in an application with the United States Military Academy of West Point, a place his father had at one time been a drawing teacher, and other family members had gone to. With the power of his family name, and notwithstanding his intense nearsightedness coupled with ill health record, Whistler had been allowed in to the extremely exclusive institution. All the same, over the course of his three years with West Point, his grades had been scarcely adequate, and he had been a pitiful sight at drill and dress. Nicknamed Curly for his longer hair length that went past the school's rules, Whistler went against authority, spurted biting comments, and collected demerits. His primary achievement was acquiring some training in drawing as well as map making from the American artist Robert W. Weir. His exit out of West Point appears to be caused by a failed chemistry test, or so he personally stated afterward. Although a different anecdote hints misbehaving in his drawing class for the grounds of his departure.

Following his time at West Point, Whistler was employed as draftsman mapping out the total United States coast for military as well as maritime use. He discovered the work to be dull and was regularly tardy or did not show up. He passed a good deal of his free time playing pool and loafing around, was forever without money, and while charming, had little familiarity with women. When it was found out that Whistler was sketching sea serpents, mermaids, and whales upon the borders of the maps, he had been moved to the etching department for the U. S. Coast Survey. Even though he endured there merely two months, he was instructed in etching techniques that in the future become useful with his art career.

By this time, Whistler steadfastly determined that art was to be his future. Over a couple of months he resided in Baltimore with moneyed acquaintance Tom Winans, who as well supplied the artist with a studio as well as some money. Whistler made some important contacts in the art world as well as also sold a few early art works to Winans. He declined his mother's propositions for a different more pragmatic vocation and told her that with revenue of Winans, he was arranging to expand his art education in Paris. Whistler was to never go back to the United States.

Whistler traveled to Paris during 1855, leased a studio in the Latin Quarter, and soon assumed the lifestyle of a bohemian painter. Shortly, he acquired a French girlfriend, a dress maker called Héloise. He learned conventional art techniques for a brief time with the Ecole Impériale as well as in the atelier of Charles Gabriel Gleyre. Gleyre had been an avid advocate of the Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres art, and imprinted Whistler with two precepts that he applied for the remainder of his career: line is more crucial than color along with black is the underlying color of tonal concord. Twenty years afterward, the Impressionists would for the most part overrule this doctrine, shunning black and brown for "forbidden colors" and accentuating color above form.

Whistler favored self education, passing time replicating in the Louvre and relishing the café lifestyle. As letters from home described his mother's attempts at thriftiness, Whistler spent funds wantonly, sold little or naught during his initial year in Paris, and had been in constant debt. To alleviate the state of affairs, he took to producing and selling replicas he painted at the Louvre and at length relocated to less costly rooms. Fortunately, George Lucas, another rich friend, showed up in Paris assisted Whistler to steady his monetary situation for a long time. Despite fiscal relief, the winter during 1857 had been a hard one for the artist. His ill health, worsened by extravagant smoking and drinking, set him back.

Circumstances bettered over the summer of 1858. Whistler recuperated and took a trip with associate artist Ernest Delannoy across France and then to the Rhineland. He afterward created a set of etchings called "The French Set", with the assistance of French master printer Auguste Delâtre. In that year, he created his first self-portrait, titled "Portrait of Whistler with Hat", a gloomy and thickly delivered painting mindful Rembrandt van Rijn. However the occurrence of the most important outcome that year has been his friendship with fellow artist Henri Fantin-Latour. The two met at the Louvre. By him, Whistler had been brought in to the circle of Gustave Courbet, that included Carolus-Duran, who would later be an instructor of American painter John Singer Sargent, Alphonse Legros, along with Edouard Manet.

Likewise with this circle had been Charles Baudelaire, whose thoughts and concepts of "modern" art molded Whistler. Baudelaire challenged painters to audit the savagery of life and nature and present it dependably, averting the old subjects of mythology and allegory. Theophile Gautier, among the first to search translational elements among art and music, might have inspired Whistler to see art through musical terms.

Pondering the challenge of realism of his adopted group, Whistler created his first displayed painting, La Mere Gerard of 1858. He succeeded it by creating At the Piano during 1859 while in London, that he took for his home, while in addition to going to see friends in France on a regular basis. In the Piano is a portrait of his niece with her mother inside their London music room, an endeavor that distinctly revealed Whistler's skill and promise. The painting is unsentimental and displays effective contrasts in color. the daughter wears white while the mother is dressed in black clothing while, additional colors are closely maintained and held back in the style suggested by his instructor Gleyre. It was presented with the Royal Academy the ensuing year, as well as in several exhibitions in the future.

With a second piece set in the same music room, Whistler exhibited his innate tendency to design and novelty by devising a genre setting with odd structure and foreshortening. It later had been renamed Harmony in Green and Rose: The Music Room. Such art works of his likewise established Whistler's work formula, particularly in portraiture. A rapid beginning, major modifications, a time of negligence, later a last bustle to the complete the painting.

After having passed a year in London, in contrast to the 1858 French series, during 1860, Whistler created a different group of etchings titled Thames Set, in addition to a few early impressionistic paintings, which included The Thames in Ice. By this time, he had been starting to develop his process of tonal concord founded on a confined, planned palette.

During 1861, after getting back to Paris for awhile, Whistler created his first renowned painting, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. This painting is a portrait of the woman who was both the artist's his mistress as well as business manager, Joanna Hiffernan. It had been done as a unsophisticated exploration in white; nonetheless, other people viewed the piece otherwise. Art critic Jules Castagnary felt the piece was an allegory of a newly wed bride's lost innocence. Still others associated it with Wilkie Collins painting The Woman in White, a best-selling book of the period, or several different literary origins. Some people in England thought it a work in the Pre-Raphaelite style. In the picture, Hiffernan bears stands on a bear skin rug, which had been translated by a few to exemplify maleness and lust, as the bear's face gazes threateningly at the spectator. She bears a lily in her left hand. The painting had been declined for exhibit at the traditionalist Royal Academy although during 1863 it had been admitted to the Salon des Refusés of Paris, an event patronized by Emperor Napoleon III for the exhibit of art turned away from the Paris Salon exhibitions.