Word: whistler
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...plays. He often signed his paintings with a butterfly armed with a scorpionlike tail. He inspired much of Trilby's demonic master villain, Svengali. His mistress-of-the-hour strutted nudely past his devout Episcopalian mother, neither one guessing that posterity would make James Abbott McNeill Whistler's mother the most renowned artist's model of all time...
...life-size," Whistler once said-and fewer still combine the gall, gallantry and genius with which Whistler fashioned a larger-than-life legend. Poet and Critic Horace (Amy Lowell) Gregory skirts the legend, feeling that many of the stories are in their anecdotage. He sacrifices color for perspective, but even a toned-down Whistler is no still life...
West Point Esthete. "I do not choose to be born at Lowell," said Massachusetts' James Whistler in later life, but he was, on July 10, 1834. The boy's father, a West Point engineer, shortly obliged him with a surrogate birthplace (St. Petersburg) by accepting Czar Nicholas I's commission to build a Moscow-to-St. Petersburg railroad. When the elder Whistler died in a cholera epidemic, James was old enough to enter West Point. In a chemistry exam, Cadet Whistler identified silicon as a gas, and West Point decided to do without him. "If silicon...
Nursing a bruised ego and a gift for sketching, the 21-year-old Whistler embarked for Paris and the studio of French Painter Gustave Courbet. From Courbet he acquired his early brush strokes, his first model-mistress, Eloise, and a point of view: "Beauty is truth." This creed spurred the art-for-art's-sake movement with which an entire generation of painters and writers thwacked at the Victorian taste for the didactic, the sentimental and the morally elevating. From London (where he moved in 1859), Whistler deployed his canvases like troops in this avant-garde campaign. The fury...
Under One Roof. With his monocle, his grey, lavender-tinted gloves, his white forelock setting off Italianate good looks, Whistler cultivated an exotic showmanship to mask self-doubts about his craft. The company he kept added a satanic touch by being mad, neurasthenic, and sexually deviate or profligate. The most colorful of the odd lot was Charles Augustus Howell. One of his exploits was to dig up the coffin of Elizabeth Rossetti by moonlight to retrieve a manuscript her grieving husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had buried with the body. Howell housed his wife, a bevy of artistically inclined mistresses...