James Abbott McNeill Whistler was born in in 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the third son of West Point graduate and civil engineer Major George Washington Whistler, and his second wife Anna Matilda McNeill. After brief stays in Stonington, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, the Whistlers moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Major served as an civil engineer for the construction of a railroad line to Moscow. Whistler was aged nine when his family moved to Russia, and he spent several of his childhood years there, studying drawing at the Imperial Academy of Science. He soon became an inveterate traveller. In 1848 he went to live with his sister and her husband in London, and after his father's death the following year the family returned to the United States and settled in Pomfret, Connecticut. He enrolled in the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1851, where he excelled in Robert W Weir's drawing class. He was dismissed from the academy in 1854 for deficiency in chemistry, and after brief periods working for the Winans Locomotive Works in Baltimore, and the drawings division of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (he learnt etching as a US navy cartographer), resolved to become an artist and moved to Europe permanently in 1855 .
Whistler settled in Paris first, where he studied at the Ecole Impriale et Spciale de Dessin, before entering the Acadmie Gleyre, founded by the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre ( 1808-1874 ). He made copies in the Muse du Louvre, acquired a lasting admiration for the work of Diego Velzquez, and became a devotee of the cult of the Japanese print and oriental art and decoration in general. Through his friend Ignace Henri Jean Thodore Fantin-Latour he met Gustave Courbet, whose Realism inspired much of his early work. The circles in which he moved can be gauged from Fantin-Latour's Homage to Delacroix, in which Whistler is portrayed alongside Baudelaire, Manet, and others. He quickly associated himself with avant garde artists, and was influenced by Courbet's realism, as well as the seventeenth century Dutch and Spanish schools. With Henri Fantin-Latour and Alphonse Legros, he founded the Socit des Trois . After Whistler's At The Piano (Taft Museum, Cincinnati) was rejected at the Salon of 1859 he moved to London, but often returned to France. His painting At the Piano was well received at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1860 and he soon made a name for himself, not just because of his talent, but also on account of his flamboyant personality. He was famous for his wit and dandyism, and loved controversy. His life-style was lavish and he was often in debt. He began work on a series of etchings. There Whistler was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and he befriended Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Sources: The Oxford Companion to Western Art, ed. Hugh Brigstocke, Oxford University Press, 2001.
From the guide to the Papers of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1834-1903, American-born painter and graphic artist, 1882-1903, (Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department)
