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Born on 14 July 1816: Edward Matthew
Ward, English painter who died on 15 January 1879. — His parents encouraged his early interest in art. He was sent to a number of art schools, including that of John Cawse [1779–1862], before gaining entry to the Royal Academy Schools in 1835. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1834 with Adelphi Smith as ‘Don Quixote’. In 1836 he went abroad for further study, visiting Paris and Venice on the way to Rome, where he spent three years. His first work of any consequence was Cimabue and Giotto, which he sent back to the Royal Academy show of 1839. On the way back to England at the end of that year Ward visited Munich to learn the technique of modern fresco painting in order to take part in the competition to decorate the Palace of Westminster, but his cartoon, Boadicea (1843), was unsuccessful. However, in 1852 he was commissioned to produce eight pictures for the Palace of Westminster, on subjects drawn from the English Civil War, the best of which is the Last Sleep of Argyll (1860s) in the Commons Corridor of the Houses of Parliament. He was the husband of Henrietta Mary Ada Ward [01 Jun 1832 – 12 Jul 1924]. — Photo of Ward — LINKS — Marie Antoinette Listening to the Act of Accusation, the Day Before her Trial (74x61cm) — Sir Thomas More's Farewell to his Daughter (110kb) — Scene from David Garrick (75x96cm) — Doctor Johnson in the Ante-Room of the Lord Chesterfield Waiting for an Audience, 1748 (1845, 106x139cm) — The Disgrace of Lord Clarendon, after his Last Interview with the King - Scene at Whitehall Palace, in 1667 (1846, 53x74cm) _ Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon [1609-1674] was Lord High Chancellor to Charles II, who was one of England's most colorful and profligate kings. Clarendon was dismissed both as a result of Charles's general neglect of national affairs and because of a court conspiracy against him. The break between the two men took place on 30 August 1667. In this picture, Clarendon is seen leaving the King's palace at Whitehall. The back of Charles can be seen in the distance. Members of the court look on, rejoicing in Clarendon's fall. — The South Sea Bubble, a Scene in 'Change Alley in 1720 (1847, 130x188cm) _ Ward took his inspiration for this picture from a passage in Lord Mahon's History of England (1837), which described the impact of the speculative boom of 1720 known as the South Sea Bubble. This was a brief period of wild financial speculation, when virtually any scheme, which gullible investors thought could make money, was eagerly seized upon. It was followed by a collapse. The artist's wife noted that Ward, in all his pictures, pointed to some particular moral. In choosing this subject, Ward clearly had in mind the Railway Mania of 1844-1845, which, like the South Sea Bubble, collapsed with many fortunes lost. |
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Died on 14 July 1939: Alphonse
(Alfons Maria) Mucha, Czech Art
Nouveau painter, illustrator, poster artist, and designer, born on 24
August 1860. ^top^ — Trained at Art Academies in Prague and Munich. Settled in Paris in 1890 where he was one of the chief creators of the Art Noveau style. Noted for his posters of idealized female figures. — He embodied turn-of-the-century art. A wealthy patron enabled him to study at the Munich Academy, then, in 1887, at the Académie Julian. He was an illustrator for several magazines and newspapers. In 1894, his first poster for Sarah Bernhardt won him considerable renown. In 1904 he went to the United States. In 1911 he returned to Prague to devote himself to an oeuvre celebrating the epic of Slav history. Mucha's fame was owed to his very personal style of drawing, which was both elegant and supple, giving a slender, sophisticated vision of Woman. His taste for curved and intertwined forms combined with a wild proliferation of plant life was expressed in some of the most celebrated posters of his time. — Frederic Milton Grant was a student of Mucha. — Photo of Mucha — LINKS — Self-portrait (1907, 44x28cm) — Heraldic Chivalry (89x136cm; 1531x2000pix, 557kb) — Jaroslava (1920, 60x73cm) — Autumn (1896; 1605x814pix, 280kb) — F. Champenois Imprimeur-Editeur (1897, 73x55cm) — Fruit (1897, 66x44cm) — Monaco Monte Carlo (1897, 108x75cm) — Dance (1898, 60x38cm) — Salammbô (1896, 39x22cm) — La Dame aux Camélias (1896, 207x72cm) — Pevecké Sdruzeni Ucitelu Moravskysk (1911, 109x80cm) — Flower (1897, 66x44cm) — Nestlé's Food for Infants (1897, 72x35cm) — La Samaritaine (1897, 173x58cm) — Chocolat Masson (Manhood) (1897, 30x22cm) — Job (1898, 139x93cm) _ détail — Design for a Ten Pound Banknote (1919, 11x19cm) — Biscuits Lefèvre-Utile (1896, 60x43cm; 1640x1186pix, 568kb) _ détail — Lefèvre-Utile (1903, 53x72cm) _ détail — L'Estampe Moderne, Numero I (May 1897, 41x31cm) — Design for Moët~Chandon Champagne label (21x13cm) — Design for a fan (1899, 26x17cm) |
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Born on 14 July 1862: Gustav Klimt,
Austrian Art
Nouveau painter and draftsman who died on 06 February 1918. — Klimt was the son of an Austrian jeweler. From the age of fourteen to twenty he studied at the School of Plastic Art in Vienna. From the age of eighteen, he, his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch undertook commissions for decorative works. In 1897 he became the first President of the Vienna Sezession. Influenced first by Makart, he turned away from him after a trip to Vienna where he discovered Byzantine mosaics. In 1912, he withdrew from the Sezession and became President of the Austrian National Union of Artists. In 1917, he was granted an honorary professorship at the Viennese Academy. From his early works, Klimt caused uproar. His works were frequently taken down; the Nazis burnt some of them. His technique is fairly classical, but his subjects were scandalous; naked girls mingle with skeletons, sexuality expressed in all its forms. Ornament is all-pervasive in his work; from this background the bodies struggle to the surface. He was witness to the decadence of an entire society and the fantastic world that his paintings occupy testify to this by their collection of sex and death, while the audacity and freedom of his graphic style foreshadow modern art. — A leading exponent of Art Nouveau, Klimt is considered one of the greatest decorative painters of the 20th century. His depictions of the femme fatale and his drawings treating the theme of female sexuality have assured him a place in the history of erotic art. He is remembered for his role in the formation of the Vienna Secession, the radical group of Austrian artists of which he became the first president in 1897, and also for the frequent scandals and protests that marked his later career. These contrast strikingly with the public and official approval that marked him out as a young artist of promise, even before he graduated from the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule in 1883. — Gustav Klimt first made himself known by the decorations he executed (with his brother and their art school companion F. Matsch), for numerous theatres and above all (on his own this time) for the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where he completed, in a coolly photographic style, the work begun by Makart. At the age of thirty he moved into his own studio and turned to easel painting. At thirty-five he was one of the founders of the Vienna Secession; he withdrew eight years later, dismayed by the increasingly strong trend towards naturalism. The coruscating sensuality of Klimt's work might seem in perfect accord with a society which recognized itself in those frivolous apotheoses of happiness and well-being, the operettas of Johann Strauss and Franz Léhar. Nothing could be further from the truth. Far from being acknowledged as the representative artist of his age, Klimt was the target of violent criticism; his work was sometimes displayed behind a screen to avoid corrupting the sensibilities of the young. His work is deceptive. Today we see in it the Byzantine luxuriance of form, the vivid juxtaposition of colors derived from the Austrian rococo - aspects so markedly different from the clinical abruptness of Egon Schiele. But we see it with expectations generated by epochs of which his own age was ignorant. For the sumptuous surface of Klimt's work is by no means carefree. Its decorative tracery expresses a constant tension between ecstasy and terror, life and death. Even the portraits, with their timeless aspect, may be perceived as defying fate. Sleep, Hope (a pregnant woman surrounded by baleful faces) and Death are subjects no less characteristic than the Kiss. Yet life's seductions are still more potent in the vicinity of death, and Klimt's works, although they do not explicitly speak of impending doom, constitute a sort of testament in which the desires and anxieties of an age, its aspiration to happiness and to eternity, receive definitive expression. For the striking two-dimensionality with which Klimt surrounds his figures evokes the gold ground of Byzantine art, a ground that, in negating space, may be regarded as negating time - and thus creating a figure of eternity. Yet in Klimt's painting, it is not the austere foursquare figures of Byzantine art that confront us, but ecstatically intertwined bodies whose flesh seems the more real for their iconical setting of gold. — Ubaldo Oppi was a student of Klimt. — Photo of Klimt — a different Photo of Klimt — LINKS — The Pianist and Piano Teacher Joseph Pembauer (1890, 69x55cm) — Pallas Athene (1898, 75x75cm) — Sonja Knips (1898, 145x145cm) — Fable (1883, 85x117cm) — Auditorium in the Old Burgtheater, Vienna (1888, 82x92cm) — Idyll (1884, 50x74cm) — Portrait of a Lady _ Frau Heymann? (1894, 39x23cm) — A Field of Poppies (662x200pix, 47kb) — Two Girls with Oleander (129x549cm; 293x700pix, 70kb) — Sketch for the Allegory Junius (1896, 42x31cm) detail (650x650pix, 139kb) — The Three Ages of Women (1905, 178x198cm; 717x722pix, 129kb) — Die Tänzerin (1918; 700x446pix, 106kb) — Expectation (1000x617pix, 141kb) — Fulfillment (1000x623pix, 138kb) — Malcesin (933x1000pix, 261kb) — Hope I (1903; 700x253pix; 34kb) _ 9-months pregnant nude — Hope II (1908, 110x110cm; 550x544pix, 65kb) _ 9-months pregnant in colorful dress, bare-breasted, the woman bows her head and closes her eyes, as if praying for the safety of her child. Peeping out from behind her stomach is a death's head, sign of the danger she faces. At her feet, three women with bowed heads raise their hands, presumably also in prayer — although their solemnity might also imply mourning, as if they foresaw the child's fate. Why, then, the painting's title? Although Klimt himself called this work Vision, by association with Hope I, it has become known as Hope II. There is a richness here to balance the woman's gravity. Klimt was among the many artists of his time who were inspired by sources not only within Europe but far beyond it. He lived in Vienna, a crossroads of East and West, and he drew on such sources as Byzantine art, Mycenean metalwork, Persian rugs and miniatures, the mosaics of the Ravenna churches, and Japanese screens. In this painting the woman's gold-patterned robe—drawn flat, as clothes are in Russian icons, although her skin is rounded and dimensional — has an extraordinary decorative beauty. Here, birth, death, and the sensuality of the living exist side by side suspended in equilibrium. . — Tree of Life (1909) Central section (700x511pix, 97kb). Pattern for the Stoclet Frieze. — Schubert at the Piano (1899, 150x200cm; 484x700pix, 94kb) _ Garden Path with Chickens (1916; 687x700pix, 153kb) _ Hygieia, detail (1000x657pix, 122kb) from Medicine (1907) _ Schubert at the Piano, Garden Path with Chickens, Medicine, and also Musik II, were destroyed by fire in 1945. These, and many other important Klimt paintings, had been evacuated for safekeeping during World War II to the Schloss Immendorf in Austria. Retreating SS troops set fire to the castle to prevent it falling into enemy hands. It was the most significant artistic loss suffered by Austria in the Second World War. _ Hygieia can be seen in the lower center of the monochrome photograph of Medicine (700x465pix, 100kb) — Judith I (1901, 1629x871pix, 466kb) _ Judith was an Old Testament Jewish heroine. In the deuterocanonical Book of Judith, she is portrayed as a widow who made her way into the tent of Holofernes, general of Nebuchadrezzar, cut off his head, and so saved her native town of Bethulia. — Danae (1908; 670x700pix, 136kb) _ In Greek mythology Danaë was the mother of the Greek hero Perseus and the daughter of Acrisius, king of Argos in the Pelopennese. It had been foretold that her son would cause the death of Acrisius, so he locked her in a bronze tower. But Zeus visited her as a shower of golden rain and Perseus was conceived. The king banished the mother and son by locking them in a chest which he then cast out to sea. Later, seeing Perseus as an obstacle to his love for Danaë, King Polydectes sent him to fetch the head of the Gorgon Medusa. The gods aided Perseus, and he slew Medusa. Fleeing from the other Gorgons, Perseus was refused aid by Atlas who was turned into a stone mountain by Medusa's head. On his way home, Perseus rescued Andromeda and married her. Later, while competing in a discus contest, Perseus accidentally killed Acrisius, thus fulfilling the prophecy. _ Danae, seemingly underwater, thighs drawn up. Gold and silver seminal flow rising between her legs. Very erotic. The legend concerns her mating with Zeus in the form of a gold shower, to conceive Perseus, which is depicted here. The eroticism is highly intentional: the red hair, etc. The small black rectangle is Klimt's reduction of maleness to an abstract symbol. |
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Died on 14 July (or 08 Oct) 1455: Antonio
Pisanello (or Pisano) di Puccio, Italian artist born in
1395 before 27 November. — Italian painter, draftsman, and medallist, who was the last and most brilliant artist of the ornate, courtly International Gothic style. Originally named Antonio Pisano, he studied under Gentile da Fabriano, whose graceful, detailed style he inherited. Pisanello produced paintings, frescoes, drawings, and portrait medallions for the courts of Milan, Rimini, Naples, Mantua, Ferrara, and Verona. His well-known small painting, Princess of the House of Este (1443), exemplifies his style; it shows a woman in profile against a tapestrylike floral background and is characterized by elegant long lines, clear colors, and exquisite drawing of details. His frescoes, such as his masterpiece Saint George and the Princess (1438), show to the greatest extent his precise and loving representation of the natural details of human figures, animals, flowers, and objects. His numerous drawings are also fastidiously detailed, and in some of them, particularly those of female nudes, he achieves a strength of three-dimensional modeling that establishes an important link between the Gothic and Renaissance styles. — Pisanello è fra i grandi talenti del Rinascimento; ma non potrebbe dirsi affatto ch’egli ruppe col passato. Egli non ha la vigorosa inquietudine d’un innovatore; ma una raffinatezza, una preziosità, da ultimo rampollo d’un nobile lignaggio. L’evoluzione artistica dette nell’opera di Pisanello lo specchio ideale d’un prodotto parallelo dell’evoluzione sociale: la cavalleria, ormai al tramonto nell’interpretazione dei singoli oggetti del mondo naturale, non restò forse addietro a nessun contemporaneo, di qualsiasi parte del mondo. Dipinse uccelli come soltanto i giapponesi. I suoi bracchi e levrieri, i suoi cervi, non la cedono neppure a quelli dei Van Eyck. Il suo posto, approssimativamente, è fra i tardi miniaturisti medievali franco-fiamminghi; i Limbourg da una parte, e dall’altra i Van Eyck — LINKS — Ginevra d'Este (1434, 43x30cm) Eseguito nei primi anni del rapporto di Pisanello con Ferrara, il dipinto mostra l’effigie di profilo di una giovane dama, identificata con Ginevra d’Este, sorella di Leonello. Sulla manica dell’abito della dama appare infatti l’impresa estense con il vaso biansato con le ancore, mentre il rametto di ginepro appuntato sull’abito è un chiaro richiamo al suo nome. La presenza della siepe di aquilegie e garofani sullo sfondo, simboli rispettivamente di fertilità, e di amore e matrimonio, e della farfalla, che può assumere la medesima valenza simbolica, ha condotto all’ipotesi che si tratti di un ritratto matrimoniale, eseguito poco prima delle nozze di Ginevra con Sigismondo Malatesta, nel 1434. Ma la valenza simbolica delle aquilegie, interpretabili anche come simbolo di dolore e morte, ha fatto anche ipotizzare una possibile esecuzione del ritratto dopo la tragica morte di Ginevra. L’identificazione dell’effigiata con Ginevra non è comunque unanimemente accettata, alcuni studiosi hanno infatti riconosciuto nella dama un ritratto di Margherita Gonzaga, figlia di Gianfrancesco e moglie di Leonello d’Este dal 1435 al 1439. — Madonna col Bambino e i santi Antonio abate e Giorgio _ (47x29cm) La tavola, l’unica firmata tra le poche rimasteci di Pisanello, raffigura, nella parte superiore, la Vergine all’interno di un clipeo di luce. Nella parte inferiore, sullo sfondo di un’impenetrabile foresta, appaiono i santi Antonio abate e Giorgio, entrambi accompagnati dagli animali accomunati al loro culto: il maiale e il drago. Nei tratti di san Giorgio, perfettamente abbigliato secondo la moda cavalleresca dell’epoca e con una grande cappello di paglia in testa, è stato talvolta riconosciuto il ritratto del giovane Leonello d’Este. Infatti, secondo alcuni studiosi, l’opera deve essere identificata con la tavola raffigurante la Madonna citata in una lettera di Leonello d’Este del 1432. Non tutti concordano però sulla datazione, che è stata da molti posticipata al quinto decennio del secolo, considerando il dipinto l’ultima tavola nota di Pisanello. — Visione di sant'Eustachio _ Visione di sant’Eustachio 1435-1440 circa tempera su tavola; 65 x 53 Londra, National Gallery Il soggetto del dipinto, la miracolosa visione del crocifisso tra le corna di un cervo apparsa all’ufficiale dell’esercito di Traiano Eustachio durante una battuta di caccia nel bosco, offre a Pisanello l’occasione di impiegare tutte le sue straordinarie capacità di pittore del mondo naturale. Tra tutte le sue opere, infatti, la tavola di Londra è quella per la quale sono conservati il maggior numero di disegni preparatori, che ritraggono dal vero soprattutto i numerosi animali. Anche in questo caso, com’era accaduto per il San Giorgio di Verona, Eustachio appare perfettamente abbigliato secondo i dettami della contemporanea moda da caccia. — Cicogna (1435, 19x21cm) Eccezionale disegnatore, Pisanello riprodusse sovente nei suoi fogli varie specie di animali, seguendo in ciò la pratica dei maestri lombardi. Già Giovannino de Grassi e Michelino da Besozzo avevano infatti mostrato una predilezione per la raffigurazione dal vero del mondo naturale, in particolare animale, che Pisanello deve aver approfondito durante il suo soggiorno a Pavia. Egli si recò nella città lombarda per eseguire la decorazione del castello visconteo, ricordata dalle fonti, ma di cui non rimane alcuna traccia, se non nella successiva produzione del pittore. La Cicogna, messa in relazione da alcuni studiosi con il Sant’Eustachio della National Gallery di Londra, mostra affinità tecniche con i fogli preparatori agli affreschi eseguiti in Sant’Anastasia a Verona. — Madonna della quaglia _ Madonna della quaglia 1420 circa Verona, Museo Civico di Castelvecchio Si tratta della prima opera nota di Pisanello, in cui sono evidenti i legami con l’opera di Michelino da Besozzo, Gentile da Fabriano e i massimi esponenti del “gotico internazionale”. Le affinità maggiori si scorgono con la Madonna del roseto del museo di Castevecchio a Verona, variamente attribuita a Michelino o a Stefano da Verona. Anche la Madonna della quaglia di Pisanello appare in un rigoglioso giardino, sullo sfondo di un roseto, attributo tradizionale della Vergine. I due cardellini rimandano alla crocifissione di Cristo, occasione in cui, secondo la tradizione, si sarebbero macchiati di rosso, mentre la quaglia è simbolo di resurrezione. — San Giorgio, la principessa e il drago _ (1438, affresco, 223x620cm) L’affresco è ciò che rimane di una più ampia decorazione eseguita da Pisanello nell’arco di ingresso della cappella Pellegrini nella chiesa domenicana di Sant’Anastasia a Verona. Le scene perdute raffiguravano l’uccisione del drago da parte di san Giorgio e sant’Eustachio, mentre l’affresco superstite mostra il momento in cui san Giorgio giunge nei pressi della città libica di Silena e si imbatte nella figlia del re, destinata a essere sacrificata a un terribile drago che terrorizzava i cittadini. La storia è narrata nella Legenda aurea di Jacopo da Varagine ed è resa con dovizia di particolari da Pisanello, che, in accordo con la tradizione tardo-gotica, trasforma san Giorgio in un cavaliere del suo tempo e dissemina la composizione di ricercati particolari decorativi. Si conoscono parecchi disegni preparatori alla composizione, tra cui un foglio per le figure degli impiccati, con ogni probabilità preso dal vero. — Saint George and the Princess of Trebizond, detail (1430) — Emperor Sigismund (1432) — La lussuria — Studio per la Decollazione del Battista — Madonna col Bambino e i santi Antonio abate e Giorgio — Ginevra d’Este — Visione di sant’Eustachio — Torneo cavalleresco — Ritratto di Leonello d’Este — Medaglia di Leonello d’Este — Medaglia di Alfonso V d’Aragona |
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Born on 14 July 1834: James
Abbott McNeill Whistler, US painter and etcher who lived
mostly as an expatriate and died on 17 July 1903 in London. 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. He is noted for his paintings of nocturnal London, for his striking and stylistically advanced full-length portraits, and for his brilliant etchings and lithographs. An articulate theorist about art, he did much to introduce modern French painting into England. His most famous work is Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: The Artist's Mother (1872); popularly called Whistler's Mother. Author of Ten O'Clock Lecture (1885) and The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). — A caricature of Whistler — Whistler's students included Gwen John, Walter Greaves, Mortimer Menpes, Lawton Parker, David Ericson, and Harper Pennington. — Whistler assimilated Japanese art styles, made technical innovations, and championed modern art. Many regard him as preeminent among etchers. Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He entered the United States
Military Academy at West Point in 1851, did not do well in his studies,
and left in 1854 to take a job as a draftsman with the U.S. Coast Survey.
One year later he left the United States and went to Paris, where he became
a pupil of the Swiss classicist painter Charles Gabriel Gleyre. Formal
instruction influenced him less, however, than his acquaintance with the
French realist painter Gustave Courbet, other leading contemporary artists,
and his own study of the great masters and of Japanese styles. |
| — US-born Whistler was active mainly in England. He spent several of his childhood years in Russia (where his father had gone to work as a civil engineer) and was an inveterate traveller. His training as an artist began indirectly when, after his discharge from West Point Military Academy for `deficiency in chemistry', he learnt etching as a US navy cartographer. In 1855 he went to Paris, where he studied intermittently under Gleyre, made copies in the Louvre, acquired a lasting admiration for Velázquez, and became a devotee of the cult of the Japanese print and oriental art and decoration in general. Through his friend Fantin-Latour he met Courbet, whose Realism inspired much of his early work. The circles in which he moved can be gauged from Fantin-Latour's Homage to Delacroix, in which Whistler is portrayed alongside Baudelaire, Manet, and others. He settled in London in 1859, but often returned to France. His At the Piano (1859) was well received at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1860 and he soon made a name for himself, not just because of his talent, but also on account of his flamboyant personality. He was famous for his wit and dandyism, and loved controversy. His life-style was lavish and he was often in debt. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Oscar Wilde were among his famous friends. Whistler's art is in many respects the opposite to his often aggressive personality, being discreet and subtle, but the creed that lay behind it was radical. He believed that painting should exist for its own sake, not to convey literary or moral ideas, and he often gave his pictures musical titles to suggest an analogy with the abstract art of music: “Art should be independent of all claptrap — should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it, and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies’.” He was a laborious and self-critical worker, but this is belied by the flawless harmonies of tone and color he created in his paintings, which are mainly portraits and landscapes, particularly scenes of the Thames. No less original was his work as a decorative artist, notably in the Peacock Room (1877) for the London home of the Liverpool shipping magnate Frederick Leyland, where attenuated decorative patterning anticipated much in the Art Nouveau style of the 1890s. In 1877 Ruskin denounced Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket , accusing him of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public's face’, and Whistler sued him for libel. He won the action, but the awarding of only a farthing's damages with no costs was in effect a justification for Ruskin, and the expense of the trial led to Whistler's bankruptcy in 1879. His house was sold and he spent a year in Venice (1879-1880), concentrating on the etchings — among the masterpieces of 19th-century graphic art — that helped to restore his fortunes when he returned to London. He made a happy marriage in 1888 to Beatrix Godwin, widow of the architect E.W. Godwin, with whom Whistler had collaborated, but she died only eight years later. In his fifties Whistler began to achieve honors and substantial success. His portrait of Thomas Carlyle was bought by the Corporation of Glasgow in 1891 for 1000 guineas and soon afterwards his most famous work, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother (1871), was bought by the French state and he was made a member of the Légion d'Honneur. — A key figure in British aestheticism and international modernism, Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. His father was a civil engineer who accepted a position on the Russian railroad in 1842, and Whistler began his art training in St. Petersburg. In 1851 he entered the US Military Academy at West Point, from which he was expelled in 1854 for deficiency in chemistry. Later that year he accepted a position in the drawing division of the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, Washington DC, staying only a few months. He moved to Paris for further art training, including a period in the studio of the neoclassical painter Charles Gleyre. In September of 1857, he visited the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, where he saw works by Velázquez, as well as contemporary British painters. In 1858 he became friends with Henri Fantin-Latour and the two artists, along with Alphonse Legros, formed the Société des Trois. Whistler settled in London in 1859 and began work on his ‘Thames Set’ of etchings. |
| During
the winter of 1861-1862, Whistler returned to Paris, where he painted Symphony
in White, No. I: The White Girl. This painting was rejected for
the Royal Academy exhibition of 1862, but The Coast of Brittany
and The Thames in Ice were accepted. That summer he met Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and the critic Algernon Swinburne, and in late December he moved
to Chelsea. In 1863 The White Girl was rejected by the Paris Salon
and exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, where it drew much attention. In 1864 Whistler began his Japonisme inspired works, including Symphony in White, No.2: The Little White Girl which was exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year. In late 1865 he went to the seaside town of Trouville, where the French painter Gustave Courbet was also working. He continued painting seascapes at Valparaiso, Chile, in March 1866, returning to England later that year. In the spring of 1867 Symphony in White, No.3, the first of his works to be exhibited with a musical title, was shown at the Royal Academy. Over the next three decades he produced a number of portraits, including Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother. In the early 1870s he began his series of ethereal landscapes entitled Nocturnes. Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket caused a controversy when exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877: the critic John Ruskin accused Whistler of insolence for charging “two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.” Whistler responded by charging Ruskin with libel. The ensuing trial of November 1878 involved many of the major figures of the Victorian art world: William Powell Frith and Edward Burne-Jones testified on Ruskin's behalf, while Albert Moore and William Michael Rossetti supported Whistler. Whistler won the trial and was awarded one farthing in damages. In September 1879, Whistler went to Venice, commissioned by the Fine Art Society to produce a set of etchings. He returned to London in November 1880, where he exhibited his Venetian prints and pastels in a series of exhibitions at the Fine Art Society. He met his pupil and assistant Walter Sickert in 1882. In 1884 he was made a member of the Society of British Artists, elected president in June 1886 and resigned in June 1888. In the 1880s and 1890s, he exhibited widely in Europe, including the Société des XX, Brussels, and the International Kunst-Ausstellung, Munich. He married Beatrice Godwin in August 1888, abandoning his mistress Maude Franklin, with whom he had a child in 1879. He was awarded the ribbon of Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur in September 1889. In 1890, he met Charles Freer, who formed an important collection of Whistler's work. In 1891 the Corporation of Glasgow acquired the portrait of Carlyle, which became the first of Whistler's paintings to be purchased by a public collection. In 1898 he was elected president of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers. Whistler received numerous awards at international exhibitions in the last decade of his life. — James Abbott McNeil Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of an army officer who had become an engineer and traveled widely in the exercise of his profession. From 1842 to 1849, the family lived mostly in St. Petersburg, Russia. Whistler took his first at lessons at the Academy of Fine Arts there. On the death of his father in 1849, Whistler went back to America. In 1851 he enrolled at West Point Military Academy, but three years later he was dismissed (He failed chemistry). He worked for some time in Washington for the United States Coast and Geodetic Service, in which he received a useful training in etching. In 1855 he left America, never to return, and went to Paris to study art under Gleyre. There he knew Courbet, Manet, Monet, Degas, and Fantin-Latour. The Pre-raphaelite movement was well under way when the Salon des Refusés took place in 1863. One of the most detested pictures in that exhibition was Whistler's The White Girl. The painting, which Whistler preferred to call Symphony in White No.1 is one of the fine pictures of nascent impressionism, and there is no good explanation as to why Whistler at this point abandoned Paris to continue his career in England. Certainly it was not because he was wounded by the reception of The White Girl or because he feared a good fight. For the rest of his life he was one of the liveliest scrappers in London. Without adopting Pre-Raphaelitism he became a fixture in the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic circle and that of the younger men, like Oscar Wilde, who carried Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism on into the 1890's with even more precious and immensely more sophisticated variations. He knew the poet Swinburne and the novelist and critic George Moore, he became a great dandy and famous wit, a bright figure among the creative talents and their admiring circle who continued the Pre-Raphaelite revolt against the materialism and stuffiness of the Victorian age. |
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an impressionist, Whistler never adopted the broken strokes and the sunlit
effects developed by his former French associates. He worked instead more
and more in a muted palette of grays and blacks, softly blended, painting
the misty tonalities of evening or gray days, sometimes flecked or splashed
with red or golden lights, with strong reference to Japanese prints or Oriental
ink-wash drawings with there simplification and their subtle, colorless
gradations. Ruskin, who had understood Turner's art when he was a young
man, was unable to accept Whistler's now that he was an aging professor.
He was so infuriated by Whistler's Falling Rocket, Nocturne in Black
and Gold, a picture which might have delighted Turner, that he wrote,
“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,
as much for the sport of it as for any reason, and after a well-publicized
trial was awarded damages of one farthing. Poor Ruskin suffered a mental
breakdown the following year (1878) and for the remaining miserable twenty-two
years of his life was removed from the critical scene while Whistler continued
to send up rockets. In Venice from 1879 to 1880, he produced a series of pastels and etchings. The prints, which have the shimmering light of the city for their subject, are an original contribution to graphic art. When Whistler returned to London he was gradually able to sell his work, but the encounter with Ruskin had bankrupted him and he returned a bitter man and the less pleasant, caustic side of his nature emerged. He had always been vain and opinionated, considering the artist to be above normal criticism. Now his doctrine “art for art's sake” became an obsession. The style of his wit resembled that of his much younger acquaintance Oscar Wilde, though in a more barbed and personal vein. Whistler painted comparatively little in the last 20 years of his life. In 1888 he married Mrs. Godwin, a friend he had long admired. For some years they lived in Paris. The Portrait of the Artist's Mother was bought for the French nation in 1891. Whistler was made an officer of the Legion of Honor, and one of his lectures called "Ten o'Clock" was translated into French. Two years after his wife's death in 1896, he opened the short-lived Academie Whistler in Paris. By 1902, a sick man, he began to destroy the drawings and paintings he thought unsatisfactory. He died in London in 1903. — Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. 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 [1819-1877] 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 [1806-1874]. 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 [1826-1898] and George du Maurier [1834-1896]. 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. |
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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, such as 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. — LINKS — Arrangement in Yellow and Grey: Effie Deans (1878) — Symphony in White N.1: The White Girl _ The model for this 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 four very slightly different versions, of which here are two: Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl (1865; 919x1103pix, 119kb), Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl (1865, 54x65cm; 564x679pix, 54kb). Later she posed as one of the two nude women in Courbet’s Sommeil (1866; 733x1105pix), which 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. — Symphony in White N.2: The Little White Girl — Symphony in White N.3: The Two White Girls — Rose et Argent: La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine _ The model for the picture was Christine Spartali, daughter of a rich Greek merchant, later the Greek Consul-General in London, Michael Spartali. — Symphony in Grey and Green: The Ocean — Wapping (Wapping is an area of London E~1 bordering on the Thames, where there used to be docks) — Valparaiso — The Thames in Ice — The Sweet Shop — At the Piano — Nocturne in Black and Gold: Falling Rocket — Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander _ Cicely Alexander was the second daughter of the London banker and art collector W.C. Alexander, who commissioned Whistler to paint portraits of his two daughters. Whistler designed the dress for the portrait. — Arrangement in Grey and Black Nº 2: Thomas Carlyle — 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 the US in 1934. — Pierrot (1889) — The Pier: A Grey Note (1884, 9x15cm) — The Gold Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre (The Creditor) (1879, 187x140cm) _ Frilthy? William Powell Frith was one of the witnesses against Whistler in the Ruskin trial. — 100 prints at FAMSF . |
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