Who is James McNeil Whistler?

James McNeill Whistler was an American artist who was famous for painting striking portraits and dreamy landscapes in pale colours.

Whistler was born in Massachusetts, USA in 1834. As a little boy he was happiest when he was drawing, so his parents encouraged him to do the thing he loved the most.

When he was only eight, Whistler’s family moved to Russia. He started taking private art lessons and went to the very fancy sounding Imperial Academy of Arts. He studied very hard, read about the work of great artists and learnt lots of new painting techniques. Whistler was so talented that another artist told his mother he was a ‘genius’.

Sadly, when he was still a teenager, Whistler’s father died. His family had to move back to America and his dreams of working as an artist were put on hold. He decided to join the army, but being a soldier didn’t suit him at all! He failed his exams and was kicked out!

Next, he got a job drawing maps of the coast around the USA. Doesn’t that sound like the quite a fun job for an artist? In the end, he quickly got bored of the maps part, and spent too much time drawing sea monsters and mermaids in the oceans.

After struggling to find a job that he liked, Whistler finally moved to Paris to follow his dreams in 1855. He met lots of other artists, started to sell his work and develop his own style. He used a particular group of colours that he felt worked well together. He didn’t like to use bright or bold colours so he stuck to dark and pale shades. He believed in the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ which meant that art should be made to be nice to look at and not have any political, educational or even emotional meaning. What do you think about this idea? Do you think art needs a reason?

Whistler also started to use musical terms like ‘symphony’, ‘harmony’ and ‘composition’ to name his paintings and describe the way the different colours and composition worked together to create a whole, just like all the instruments in a piece of music.

After his time in Paris, Whistler moved to London. He made loads of friends and invited them to breakfast at his house on Sundays where they ate stacks of American-style pancakes with maple syrup. Yum!

In London, he painted lots of portraits of rich people and used his signature shades of muted colours. He also made the people he painted pose in positions that made very strong shapes against the pale backgrounds. Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (1872-4) is an oil painting of an eight-year-old girl in a white dress against a wall of different shades of greys and greens. But little Cicely was made to stand in that position for hours and hours while Whistler painted. Do you think you could stand in the same position for hours like that? No wonder she looks so cross!

Whistler’s most famous painting is actually one of the portraits he painted in London. It shows his mother from the side, sitting in a chair and staring towards the left of the frame. She is wearing a black dress and white cap which stands out against a grey wall. The colours and the bold shape of her dress all make it very obviously a painting by Whistler. He named it Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871) but, much to his annoyance, everyone just calls it ‘Whistler’s Mother’. He couldn’t understand why anybody cared who the picture was of because he just wanted them to have something beautiful to look at. Do you think the person in a portrait is important? Does it make you feel differently about who you see?

Not at all! Whistler still loved to paint the landscape around him and he painted many pictures of the River Thames in London. But he liked the calm quiet nighttime more than the busy, noisy and colourful day. Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (1872-5), shows a scene of the river by night. The colours in the picture are very pale to give the idea that it is lit by the moon. There are just a few patches of pale-yellow light in the windows of the buildings in the distance and the bridge looks like an enormous dark shadow rising out of the water. Have you ever tried to paint a picture of the night? How would you use colours to show that it was night and not day?

Whistler invented his own way of painting these pictures. He mixed his oil paint with other liquids to make it very thin and watery. He called this mixture his ‘sauce’. By brushing it onto the canvas in fast sweeps he made very thin layers of colour that give an almost spooky nighttime look.

Although it was very unique, not everybody liked Whistler’s style. Some people thought this his paintings looked unfinished and just not very good.

Not at all. Whistler continued to travel around Europe, sketching the places he saw and painting even more portraits and landscapes for the rest of his life. And he didn’t just choose his own way of using colours and shapes to make his pictures! He also made-up his own unique signature by turning his initials into the shape of a butterfly which you can still see fluttering across his work.

James McNeill Whistler was an artist who developed a unique style and who strongly believed in making art that was pleasing to look at. He made what he wanted, even when other people didn’t like it. His work still shows what a determined and rebellious artist he was.