James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was born on 11 July 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of a railway engineer. At the age of nine he moved with his family to St Petersburg, where his father built the railway to Moscow and where he received his first drawing lessons. Back in the United States he entered West Point, but he did not finish the course and turned to art.
He settled in England, where he became one of the most original and controversial painters of his day. His night scenes, portraits and etchings were titled like music, as “arrangements” and “nocturnes”, and his Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, the portrait of his mother, now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. In 1877 the critic John Ruskin accused him of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” over his Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Whistler sued for libel and won, but the jury awarded him a farthing, and the cost of the trial led to his bankruptcy in 1879.
He then went to Venice, where he made etchings and pastels that restored his reputation. In 1888 he married Beatrix Godwin, who died in 1896. Whistler died in London on 17 July 1903.