Word: whistlerisms
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...Whistler was a very considerable artist, none the less so for being a self-invented man. Perhaps, like West a century before, he was irked by the low status of artists in America; his solution was not to attach himself to a court, as West did, but to pretend to be a native aristocrat. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, and partly raised in Russia, where his father, an engineer, was designing the St. Petersburg-Moscow railroad for Czar Nicholas I. Doubtless the Russian fixation on rank impressed him; in any case, he began to insist quite early...
...left for Paris the next year. Thus, although he liked to posture as a dashing Tidewater cavalier, Whistler never became an officer, let alone saw action in the Civil War. This insufficiency troubled him and accounts for a curious adventure he undertook in 1866, when he sailed from France to Chile--a long and grueling trip across the Atlantic and around the Horn--to be present at a Spanish naval blockade of the port of Valparaiso. By the end of the year he was back in Paris, with a few crepuscular seascapes but no honorable scars to show...
...then he had been out of his native land for 11 years. He would never return to it, though at the end of his life he still called America "my home," after almost a half-century of continuous expatriation. Nobody knows why; Whistler may not have been sure himself. He feared not being honored as a prophet in his own country, but in fact his work was eagerly sought by American collectors and portrait clients, some of whom were all but obsessed by it; the Detroit millionaire Charles Freer owned 40 of his paintings and hundreds of his drawings. Moreover...
...Whistler's Mother remains his most famous painting--up there in the peculiar grab bag of images that for one reason or another, usually unconnected with their quality as art, everyone knows, like the Mona Lisa and Grant Wood's American Gothic. The picture that made his reputation was earlier, and better. Painted in 1862, it is a portrait of his Irish lover, Jo Hiffernan, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. Shown in London first and then in Paris, it provoked a buzz of irrelevant interpretation. The expressionless young woman in virginal white, standing on a wolfskin with...
Shrewdly, Whistler kept just enough American quirks to make him look exotic to Europeans--while speaking to other Americans in a Franco-British accent. He liked buckwheat cakes and green corn, sweet potatoes and American cocktails; he had a flat American straw hat and a specimen of American invention, a horn gramophone, on which he would play Fourth of July orations to mystified French guests...