James McNeill Whistler

American expatriate who became one of the most influential and combative artistic personalities of the Victorian era, arguing — before almost anyone else — that a painting's aesthetic value was entirely independent of its subject matter. Born in Massachusetts, raised partly in Russia where his father worked as an engineer, trained briefly at West Point and then in Paris (where he met Courbet and absorbed the Realist method), Whistler settled in London in 1859 and spent the rest of his career there, with extended periods in Paris and Venice. The paintings he is most remembered for — the Nocturnes, dark and misty studies of the Thames at night; the Arrangements, portraits of extreme compositional economy; the Peacock Room, a complete decorative interior — were made in the service of a single sustained argument: that painting is an arrangement of colour and tone, not a story or a description. He gave his works musical titles to make the point explicit. Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871), known as 'Whistler's Mother,' is a study in tonal harmony that happens to contain his mother; the subject is the arrangement. This position, elaborated in his Ten O'Clock Lecture of 1885, was one of the founding arguments of aesthetic formalism. The Ruskin libel suit of 1878 — in which Whistler sued John Ruskin for calling his Nocturne in Black and Gold a 'pot of paint flung in the public's face' — was one of the most public art-critical controversies of the century. Whistler won, but the jury awarded him a single farthing in damages, and the costs of the trial contributed to his bankruptcy. He recovered, spent time in Venice producing etchings that were immediately recognized as masterworks, and continued arguing about aesthetics until his death in 1903.