James McNeill Whistler

Whistler was American, trained in Paris and spent his working life in London. He was expelled from West Point, and titled his paintings as though they were music — nocturnes, arrangements, harmonies — because he did not think a painting was obliged to be about its subject.

The Nocturnes are night scenes of the Thames reduced almost to flat bands of tone, with a few points of light and very little else. They are the closest thing in nineteenth-century Western painting to working on a near-black ground, and they were made under the direct influence of the Japanese prints then arriving in London and Paris.

Ruskin accused him of 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face'. Whistler sued for libel in 1878, won, and was awarded a farthing in damages with costs split — which bankrupted him.

Biography compiled from the artist's Wikidata entity and English Wikipedia article (linked above). Work-level facts — title, date, medium, dimensions, inscriptions, provenance — come from the catalogue record of the institution holding each print, cited on the individual work. Public domain status is asserted by the holding institution; Australian copyright independently verified as life + 70 years from the artist's Wikidata death date. Wikipedia ↗