James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903)

An instructive delight, which includes the artist-author's incisive testimony in his libel trial against Ruskin's condescending class-critique of Whistler as "cockney." Why, this trial ranks with the French assault on Flaubert for Madame Bovary (who won) and Baudelaire for Les Fleurs du Mal (who lost). Baronet Ruskin challenged the class of the artist, who in fact hailed from a new arguably higher class, that of international business and engineering. Whistler's father (who had died of cholera when he famously painted painted his mother) was an engineer moving from Lowell where the artist was born to Springfield, MA, to engineer the Boston to Albany railroad. From his success there, he was hired by the Czar to make the Moscow to St Petersburg line. Whistler famously considered St Petersburg his birthplace, with "I do not choose to be born in Lowell."
His education: Russia, West Point (to avoid his mother's preferred schooling toward English divinity), and France. Not bad for a Lowell and Springfield boy (like myself). He famously "flunked out" of West Point, then headed by Col. Robert E. Lee, and where his father had taught map making I think. After leaving he was employed making maps of the US coast.
I taught this at the Swain School of Design in the 90's, in New Bedford, in Herman Melville's sister's house, which was Swain's library. This delightful and instructive book, ranks among the best four or five ever written by an artist (Hello Vasari), but I am away from my shelf at the moment, must later add witty quotations.
From my shelf I now quote JMW, "Listen! There never was an artistic Period. There never was an Art-loving nation" (139). "This dreamer apart--was the first artist"(ibid.), whereas his antagonist Wilde says "an artist is not an isolated fact" (161). JMW talks of how ancient craftsmen making cups to drink from were artists, and people drank from them not because they were beautiful, but becasue there were none other. Then artists were replaced by manufactures, as with clothing, "Haphazard from their shoulders hang the garments of the hawker--combining in their person the motley of many manners with the medley of the mummers's closet"(154).
"False again, the fabled link between the grandeur of Art and the glories and virtue of the State, for Art feeds not upon nations, and peoples may be wiped from the face of the earth, but Art IS"(155).… (plus d'informations)