James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
GENERAL DESCRIPTION
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.