Word: whistler
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...discussing nothing but it. Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. ... Its aim? To do a series of 24 portraits in lithograph. . . . He was 21 years old. He wore spectacles that flashed more than any pair ever seen. He was a wit. He was brimful of ideas. He knew Whistler. He knew Edmond de Goncourt. He knew everyone in Paris. He knew them all by heart. He was Paris in Oxford...
...most famed modern U. S. painters were both expatriates.* James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was born in Lowell, Mass. He studied unsuccessfully at West Point. A job in Washington, in the U. S. Coast & Geodetic Survey, got him interested in etching. He went to Paris to study art, never returned to the U. S. Before he died he was at the top of his profession...
...many tales told of Whistler's egotism, belligerent wit, publicity-seeking dandyism, Biographer Laver reproduces a ruthless cross-section, adds a few to the collection. Though the expatriate Whistler never wholly succeeded in acclimatizing himself in England, though he always regarded the British as Philistines, called them "the Islanders," Laver gives an instance of how super-English Whistler became on the question of money. He once presented a bill for 2.000 guineas. His client thought the price excessive; the bill was finally settled for £1,000. But to Whistler "the difference between a pound and a guinea...
Though no one now regards Whistler as a dilettante, it is true that in portrait-painting he was a good beginner, finished about a dozen of the hundreds of portraits he began. Once he took so long over a child-portrait "that whole families sat for it from the eldest to the youngest . . . until the original sitter returned from America, the mother of five children, to find the painting still unfinished...
Biographer Laver's picture is lively, sympathetic, allots Painter Whistler a place in the sun which would not have satisfied his subject, but which seems to fit his subject's shadow...