Art historians on both sides of the Atlantic claim James Abbott McNeil Whistler as fellow countryman, and each side with reasonable justification. American critics point out that he was American-born, and though he spent much of his life as an expatriate, he remained nonetheless an American who simply happened to live elsewhere. In attitude as well, he was, as E.P. Richardson suggests, American in his "quick receptivity to new ideas, and in his cleverness in improvising upon them." English critics, on the other hand, note that Whistler left the United States at age twenty-one, never to return. His most famous paintings and etchings were produced in England. What is more, in 1884 he was elected to membership in the prestigious Royal Society of British Artists, and even was the organization's president from 1886 to '88. In truth, the sum of his career belongs to no one nation, except, as Richardson finally concludes, "the new cosmopolitan world of art that he helped to create."

Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834. His father, George Washington Whistler, a retired army major and an engineer, in 1843 moved the family to Russia, where he had been retained by the government to oversee construction of the Moscow to St. Petersburg railway line, a six-year assignment. Young Whistler often visited the Hermitage Museum. He also took drawing and French lessons at the Imperial Academy of Science. (French was then the fashionable second language in Russia, and Whistler developed fluency.) Upon his father's death in 1849, the family returned to the United States. Two years later, Whistler, then seventeen, entered West Point (the father's alma mater). He studied there three years, including art classes with Robert W. Weir, but he never took to the military life. He was dismissed in 1854 for failing a chemistry course and for receiving more than the maximum allowable demerits.

That he wanted to become an artist, Whistler was then certain. In 1855 he sailed for France. He studied briefly in Paris with Charles Gabriel Gleyre, who was the teacher of Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, and he established friendships with painters Alphonse Legros and Henri Fantin-Latour. He also met Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, critic Theophile Gautier, and poet Charles Baudelaire. Whistler's earliest work in Paris was done in an objective-realist manner reflecting the strong influence of Courbet. A few years later he regretted having been so thoroughly seduced by realism. In a letter to Fantin-Latour he exclaimed:

"It is because that damned realism made an immediate appeal to my painter's vanity, sneering at old traditions, cried aloud to me with the assurance of ignorance: 'Long live Nature!"'

One may glimpse in this statement certain aspects of the artist's personality that often alienated others -- his egotism, biting wit, and sardonic outlook. As his reputation as a painter grew, so also did his notoriety as an eccentric, non-conformist, flamboyant character.

In 1859 Whistler moved to London, settling in the motley and free-spirited Chelsea district (though he continued to make periodic trips to the continent). Very soon thereafter his work evolved to the style for which he is best known -- an ethereal, tonal landscape imagery that emphasizes subjective feelings rather than objective details. Donelson F. Hoopes describes the effect as "nature seen through a veil." About 1860 Whistler had become interested in oriental art, with its typical decorative, flat patterning, refined pictorial activity, and understated rendering. Numerous paintings of the subsequent decade show persons clad in oriental costume or surrounded by oriental accoutrements. It was also at this time that he sought to adapt to visual art Baudelaire's conviction that "poetry has no other end but itself." Whistler in turn declared that subject matter was of little consequence to painting; what really counted was the way a picture was painted, the essence of an art-for-art's-sake approach. "As music is the poetry of sound, so painting is the poetry of sight," he stated confidently, "and the subject matter has nothing to do with the harmony of sound or of color." To stress this point, he additionally began in the 1860s titling many of his paintings by color scheme -- "Brown and Silver," "Blue and Gold ," etc. -- often in combination with the terms "arrangement," "symphony," and "nocturne," (then perhaps followed by the identification of the place or persons as a subtitle).

It was upon seeing one of the nocturne series, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875, Detroit Institute of Arts) displayed at London's Grovesnor Gallery in 1877 that critic John Ruskin was provoked to write: "I never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Whistler sued Ruskin for libel. The artist won the suit after an arduous and highly publicized trial, but was awarded just one farthing in damages. The ordeal turned into a personal tragedy; litigation costs forced him to bankruptcy. With a commission from a London gallery to produce a series of etchings, he retreated to Venice, where he worked nearly a year. In 1880 he returned to England to publish the etchings and to rebuild his career.

Though Whistler earlier had several mistresses, he did not wed until age fifty-two, in 1886, the same year he became president of the Royal Society. The ten-year marriage was generally happy, and it was a time of considerable creative output. In 1890 he published a compilation from correspondence and essays, titled The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Two years before, he had been elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and in 1892 he was made an officer of the Legion d'Honneur in France. When his beloved Trixie died of cancer in 1896, Whistler was grief stricken. For about two years after, he traveled widely in Europe and North Africa. Shortly following his return to a temporary residence in Paris in 1898, he became a charter member and first president of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers.

Whistler painted Gray and Gold: The Golden Bay in 1900, only three years before his death. The scene actually is at Dublin Bay in Ireland, where he had gone in August to visit close friends. Typical of his later landscape style, the rendering is mainly horizontal strips of alternating color in soft, creamy tones. From the placement of the small sailboat at right center, a sense of depth is imparted. Yet the study remains strongly two-dimensional, as pervading blue-greens in what is both sky and water appear equidistant from the viewer. For all its simplicity and quietude, lack of detail, reduced color intensity and contrast, and despite its small size, the painting conveys remarkable profundity and strength.