Artists & Designers

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.

Frederic Edwin Church was one of the most celebrated American landscape painters of his time, and his legacy continues into the present. Church was born in Hartford, Connecticut to a wealthy family that used their connections to establish Hudson River School landscape painter Thomas Cole as Church’s mentor.