James Abbott McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, (1834-1903). US painter. He abandoned his career as a soldier to study art and from 1855 lived in Paris and London, where he developed a style of painting influenced by realism, impressionism, and oriental art. In 1877 Ruskin de-scribed Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Black and Gold as “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” and Whistler sued for libel. At the trial he was awarded a farthing in damages; he retaliated with the book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). Whistler supported the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ and was also well known as a wit.
