James McNeill Whistler lived from 10 July 1834 to 17 July 1903. He was born in the United States, educated as an artist in France, and lived most of his adult life in England, settling in London in 1859.
He was initially greatly influenced by the realism of Gustave Courbet, but moved from both this and Impressionism into a distinctly personal style. In 1877 the art critic Ruskin said that Whistler was, with his painting Nocture in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face".
As well as his large canvases, Whistler produced numerous small oil paintings (some as tiny as three by five inches) of seascapes, landscapes, and interiors. One collector described these as "superficially, the size of your hand, but, artistically, as a large as a continent".
Colors Whistler often included in his palette were white, burnt sienna, yellow ocher, umber, raw sienna, cobalt blue, vermilion, venetian red, and black.
In his Ten O'Clock Lecture of 20 February 1885, Whistler wrote: "He [the artist] does not confine himself to purposeless copying, without thought, each blade of grass, as commended by the inconsequent, but, in the long curve of the narrow leaf, corrected by the straight tall stem, he learns how grace is wedded to dignity, how strength enhances sweetness, that elegance shall be the result."
Whistler "labored with pigments so thin as to be merely tinted turpentine". -- Writer John Updike (in "Whistler in the Dark", from Still Looking: Essays on American Art, p.95).
