Return to Top 50 Homepage

JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER
(American, 1834-1903)
Limehouse, 1878
Lithotint on chine collé
6 7/8 x 10 9/16”
Gift of Ross W. Sloniker 1947.2.1

One of the most celebrated American artists of the nineteenth century, Whistler—a painter, printmaker, designer, and collector—was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. At the age of nine he moved with his family to St. Petersburg, Russia, where he began the first of many art lessons. In 1848 the young Whistler moved again, to Bristol, England. On holidays spent in London, he attended lectures at the Royal Academy and, through the connections of his brother-in-law, moved in sophisticated circles of art collectors and enthusiasts. Whistler returned to America in 1851 to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point. Here, he continued to pursue his artistic interests by attending courses offered by the American painter Robert W. Weir. He left West Point in 1854, and a year later, Whistler sailed for Europe. For the rest of his life, he lived as an expatriate, alternating his time between London and Paris. A contemporary of the Impressionists, Whistler was among the first Westerners to be influenced by the artistic traditions of Japan. A strong advocate of the Aesthetic Movement, Whistler developed an approach that made little distinction between fine and decorative art.

Whistler was an extremely controversial artist, and his experimental paintings emphasized color, line, and form rather than subject matter. He explained that the identity of the sitter was irrelevant in his most famous work, Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1, popularly known as “Whistler’s Mother.” His notion that art is a design—an arrangement of forms—before it is a description of a person or place was a radical notion that anticipated twentieth-century abstraction. In Limehouse, Whistler exploited the compositional devices of flat tone and loose line in this scene of the dockyard at Limehouse in London. The artist created this lithotint—a printing process that simulates watercolor by applying ink washes on a specially prepared lithograph stone—while floating down the Thames on a barge.