James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was an American-born painter and printmaker. He studied drawing in St. Petersburg and etching as a student at West Point. He immersed himself in Realism in Paris and embraced Aestheticism in London. He spent an extremely productive year in Venice from 1879-1880, before returning to London for much of the rest of his life. Well-known in his own time, Whistler worked prolifically across media and published polemics about the role of art in the modernizing world.

Dwarfism and kyphosis (hunched back) are some of the most common types of physical disabilities represented in the art and archaeology of many societies around the world. A number of historical documents and a diverse folklore describe individuals with dwarfism and kyphosis in cultures from Alaska, Africa, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Hawaii, Ireland, Iceland, India, Korea, Lithuania, the Netherlands, North America, Norway, Scandinavia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.