Artists

James McNeill Whistler Art Prints

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834–1903)

6 museum-quality prints of works by James McNeill Whistler, each made to order on archival paper and shipped to your wall.

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, trained in Paris in the atelier of Charles Gleyre, and settled in London in 1859, where the Thames supplied his subjects for decades — Grey and Silver: Old Battersea Reach (1863) dates from his first years in Chelsea. A leading proponent of “art for art’s sake,” he titled his pictures with musical terms — arrangement, symphony, harmony, nocturne — to emphasize tonal composition over narrative. The word “nocturne” itself was suggested by his patron Frederick Leyland around 1872, the year of Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Southampton Water.

For these night pictures, painted from memory in thinned washes of pigment he called “sauce,” Whistler was accused by John Ruskin of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”; he sued for libel in 1878 and won a farthing. Late seascapes such as Violet and Silver—The Deep Sea (1893) carry the nocturnes’ radical economy into daylight.