James McNeill Whistler

James McNeill Whistler sued John Ruskin for calling one of his paintings a pot of paint flung in the public face, won a farthing, and was bankrupted by the costs. He was born in Massachusetts, spent part of his childhood in St Petersburg where his father was building a railway, failed out of West Point, and settled in London and Paris. His argument was that a painting is an arrangement of colour and form and not a story or a moral, which is why he titled portraits Arrangement in Grey and Black - including the one of his mother, now the most famous American painting in France. The Nocturnes, dark near-abstract views of the Thames, are what provoked Ruskin in 1877, and the trial two years later was a public argument about whether art needed finish and labour: asked whether he charged two hundred guineas for two days' work, Whistler answered that he asked it for the knowledge of a lifetime. He won the case and lost the money, sold his house, and went to Venice to make etchings that restored his fortunes. He was famously quarrelsome, wrote The Gentle Art of Making Enemies collecting his own feuds, and sued or insulted most of his friends including Oscar Wilde. He is buried in Chiswick. The portrait of his mother was bought by the French state in 1891, the first Whistler in a public collection anywhere. The Peacock Room, an interior he decorated without his patron s permission and at ruinous cost to their friendship, is now installed in Washington. He signed his work with a butterfly monogram that acquired a sting.

• Lived: 1834 CE – 1903 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist