Prints of James McNeill Whistler

After failing a final exam in his cadetship at West Point Military Academy, then working briefly with the U.S. Coast Survey where he learnt to etch, Whistler left America in 1855 to study art in Paris. He never returned to his birthplace and spent his entire professional career as an artist in Europe at a most exciting period in the development of modern art.

Essentially an individualist and an outsider, Whistler nevertheless had close contact with many of the most famous artists of his day. He worked alongside the Realist, Courbet and shared the honours of the famous Salon des Refusés with Manet when their paintings were rejected for official exhibition in 1863. When he moved from Paris to London in the early 1860s, Whistler became a neighbour of the Pre-Raphaelite, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He knew Impressionists such as Monet and Degas. In a period when he wrote that he wished he had taken Ingres rather than Courbet as a model, he pursued a form of neo-classicism with the British artist Albert Moore, basing many graceful arrangements of nudes and draped figures on Hellenic Tanagra figurines. One of the more spectacular members of the Aesthetic movement, which developed in Great Britain in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Whistler came to believe in ‘art for art's sake.’ The kind of extravagant dandyism he and Oscar Wilde practised was parodied in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. His famous Peacock Room, which anticipated Art Nouveau and caused a furore in London for its outrageous disregard of his patron's brief, was not typical. The more subtle and austerely simple decors that he lived in himself and arranged as settings for his exhibitions, cut through the conventions of Victorian clutter to arrive at twentieth century interior design principles long before such innovators as the Glasgow school. In the later part of his life, Whistler came close to the French Symbolist poet, Mallarmé, and the circle of artists obeying the poet’s injunction to 'suggest rather than describe.’ Indeed, Mallarmé translated into French the famous ‘Ten o'clock’ lecture that Whistler first gave in 1885, which set out his artistic credo.

Always controversial and in later life argumentative in a way that cost him a number of friends, Whistler spent much time cultivating his public image. Indeed, one of the mysteries of his character is how works of such exquisite restraint issued from such a brash and aggressive personality. Against any unsympathetic critic or patron he conducted a virulent counter-offensive, often through the press. His most famous fight, and one which for a time damaged his professional reputation was with the great Victorian critic, John Ruskin. Whistler's lack of ‘finish,’ his vaunted aestheticism, his absence of social commitment and his apparently frivolous cult of the personality, made him appear devoid of the high seriousness Ruskin demanded before bestowing approval. After his Nocturne in black and gold: the falling rocket was exhibited in 1877, Whistler was accused of imposture, impudence and over-charging for ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.’ He sued Ruskin for libel, but although he ‘won’ the case, Whistler was awarded a mere farthing in consideration of the damage he had sustained. The order to pay his own legal costs helped bankrupt him and confirmed where the sympathies of the court actually lay.

In many respects Ruskin's criticism was unjust, for Whistler was in fact a perfectionist. Rarely satisfied with his own work, he was quite capable of stripping one of his endlessly-varied portraits down to bedrock and beginning again, to the dismay of long-suffering sitters. His portrait of his mother - now in the Louvre - is among his masterpieces. His insistence that it should be entitled An arrangement in grey and black thus drawing attention to its formal qualities rather than its subject matter, was precocious in the prevailing climate of anecdotal painting. Whistler may have deceived himself partly to make his point, for despite his disclaimers, the portrait betrays an affection for his mother, while the deceptive simplicity of the composition is essentially Puritan, as she was. Nevertheless, in insisting that pictures should be called ‘Arrangements,’ ‘Symphonies’ or ‘Nocturnes,’ Whistler emphasised their abstract qualities by musical analogy. The Nocturnes were his particular glory -subtle tone poems, based on water at night. In his later small and intimate seascapes and townscapes, strong horizontals and verticals prophetically foreshadow the geometric formalism of the twentieth century.

Whistler's Prints

While Whistler experienced ups and downs in his painting career, his reputation as a printmaker was established early. His biographer, another American artist, Joseph Pennell, thought quite simply he was the greatest etcher who ever lived.

Whistler arrived in France at a time when strenuous efforts were being directed towards establishing printmaking as an original rather than a reproductive art form. This influence was reinforced by contact with his brother-in-law, Francis Seymour Haden, a surgeon and gifted amateur etcher, who led a similar movement in England.

Whistler had not been long in France when he went on a tour with an artist friend. A dozen plates – of the places he visited, of indigent female workers, of a ferocious mistress nicknamed the ‘tigress’ and of two of the Haden children – were published as The French set. The title page showed Whistler wearing one of his extravagant hats and sketching among children. The great French printer, Delâtre, printed the plates in 1858. During the next few years, dividing his time between Paris and London, Whistler turned his attention to marvellously detailed studies of dockland areas downstream on the River Thames. This series of urban plates featured working people and riverside buildings seen against a background of shipping and rigging. The French poet and critic Baudelaire wrote in 1862 that in these Whistler had depicted the "profound and intricate poetry of a vast capital," In the following years single sheet portraits – of Annie Haden, of the artist himself, of his model and mistress Jo Hiffernan and of various members of the family of Leyland, his patron – show an increasing mastery of drypoint. In the 1870s, after a lull in printmaking activity, Whistler returned to etching the river again, following the decline of his fortunes after the Ruskin affair. The large scale Adam and Eve – a public house in Chelsea – heralded the changed style of his Venice etchings. But the artist was also reintroduced to lithography by the printer, Thomas Way.

Whistler had drawn a couple of lithographs before leaving America, but the prints he made in 1878 are his first serious essays. Several of them feature a painterly version of the technique called lithotint, which involves drawing in a liquid medium on the stone printing matrix. Early morning and The toilet – the former a misty riverscape, the latter an elegant portrait of Maud, who had supplanted Jo as model and mistress – were drawn for publication in the shortlived periodical Piccadilly.

The major event of 1879, following the declaration of his bankruptcy, was Whistler's commission from the Fine Art Society to go to Venice and make a dozen etchings in that city. Desperately poor and living on frugal Fine Art Society advances through one of the worst winters the city had had for a generation, Whistler stayed in Venice for over a year. The fifty remarkable plates he made there cemented his reputation as an etcher. Often vignetted so that they fade away towards the edges, the plates feature mysterious darkened doorways in which beggars sometimes stand, unlikely hovels festooned with rags, shipping reflected in the glacial lagoon and busy quays, bridges and waterways in which the depiction of people and gondolas are miracles of concision and abbreviation. Whistler's Venice took little account of typical tourist haunts and the artist did not bother to reverse his sketches on the plate so that they printed with topographical accuracy.

The Venice etchings were not printed by a professional printer, but either by the artist himself or by students under his supervision. It was at this time that he began trimming off the margins of his prints and leaving a tab to be signed with the butterfly compounded from his initials which he had used from the 1870s. Some of the subjects – Nocturne: Palaces, for example – have a minimum of line and a maximum of tone created by painting ink on the plate before printing in such a way that each impression from it was slightly different. How Whistler arrived at this method is not documented. However, a minor French etcher called Lepic had publicised similar experiments. There had been a resurgence of monotyping in the 1870s by Degas and others and a renewed interest in the great Dutch seventeenth century etcher, Rembrandt, who also practised a painterly form of printing. Whistler's early printer, Delâtre, was renowned for 'rétroussage' in which cloth is used to tease ink from the plates etched incision in order to enrich the subsequent print. Pissarro wrote that he would prefer to achieve such suppleness before the printing and there are signs in Whistler's failure to finish printing the promised edition that he found the method exhausting. However, his new style of drawing on the plate, the atmospheric sense and compositional devices he had learned from his study of Japanese art, plus the rich inking, together created his most original contribution to graphic art.

During the 1880s, Whistler travelled in Northern Europe, continuing to etch other cities including Brussels and Amsterdam. After his marriage to Beatrix Godwin in 1888, he took up lithography again, possibly because his wife was especially fond of it. In Paris in the 1890s he made his only foray into colour printing, then all the rage. Although most of the lithographs are linear, he softened his lines by use of the technique known as 'stumping' and created prints related to his painted Nocturnes by means of lithotint. He revived the draped figures of his neo-classical period and drew exquisite pictures of his wife and their friends, either in their leafy garden or the nearby park. As time went on he made endless small studies, which he both painted and printed, of backstreet city shops in which he found unexpected beauty. Perhaps the most moving prints of his later years however, are those drawn in 1896 as his wife lay dying, when, from a room at the Savoy Hotel, he looked once again up and down the River Thames. In 1890, in an interview with the Pall Mall Gazette, Whistler characterised his printmaking as having three main stages, the most recent of which was represented by the etching The embroidered curtan. This 1889 print of Amsterdam is a detailed frontal view of a building occupying the entire surface of the flattened pictorial space "First you see me at work on the Thames," he said to the Gazette reporter, "producing one of the famous series. Now, there you see the crude hard detail of the beginner. So far, so good. There you see, all is sacrificed to exactitude of outline. Presently, and almost unconsciously I begin to criticise myself and to feel the craving of the artist for form and colour. The result is the second state (Venice), which my enemies call inchoate and I call Impressionism. The third stage (Amsterdam) I have shown you. In that I have endeavoured to combine stages one and two. You have the elaboration of the first stage and the quality of the second."

Fleming. Gordon. The Young Whistler. London, Allen & Unwin, 1978

McLaren Young. Andrew. James McNeil Whistler. London, Arts Council of Great Britain. 1960.

McMullen, Roy. Victorian Outsider. London, Macmillan, 1974.

Sutton, Denys. Whistler, James McNeill. Paintings. Etchings, Pastels and Watercolours. London, Phaidon, 1966.

Whistler, James McNeill. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. London, William Heinemann, 1890. Paperback edition: New York, Dover Publications, 1967.