McNeills of Skye, many of whom emigrated to North Carolina after the Jacobite rising of 1745. In 1842 Major Whistler, the boy's father, was appointed engineer to the railway then about to be built from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and in the following year summoned his wife and family to Russia, where they settled in St. Petersburg. In 1846 Whistler was put to a school kept by one Jourdan, but in 1849 he left Russia for good. Major Whistler died in the spring of that year, and his widow, with her boys, returned to America. There she settled in Pomfret, Connecticut, and sent her son to a school kept by an alumnus of West Point who had turned parson. In 1851, after two years at this school, Whistler entered the Military Academy at West Point, where he remained for three years. He distinguished himself in drawing, but failed in other subjects and had to leave.
His next occupation was on the United States coast and geodetic survey, which gave him a useful training in accurate drawing and the technique of etching. After a year of the survey, he finally adopted art for his career. In the summer of 1855 he went to Paris, provided with a yearly income of 350 dollars. He entered the studio presided over by Charles Gleyre, to whom Paul Delaroche had bequeathed his pupils when he ceased to teach. In Paris he lived the regulation life of a student on a small income, living well one week, put to all sorts of shifts the next. To his companions, who included du Maurier, Poynter, Thomas Armstrong, and Val Prinsep, he appeared to be the reverse of industrious. He soaked in knowledge and skill, nevertheless, and became a fine draughtsman, a painter who could produce the results he aimed at, and a master of etching. His life in Paris was varied by excursions into other parts of France, during which he was never idle. In 1858 he published a set of thirteen etchings known as ‘The French Set,’ the material for which had been mostly gleaned in eastern France the year before, or in 1856. At this time he was influenced by the principles of Courbet and Lecoq de Boisbaudran, by the practice of Rembrandt, Hals, and Velazquez, and, no doubt, by the companionship of more young French painters whom he found sympathetic: Fantin-Latour and Legros chief among them. He copied many pictures in the Louvre, mostly in fulfilment of commissions from American friends. The first original picture done in Paris was ‘Mère Gerard’ (now owned by the executors of A. C. Swinburne), which was soon followed by ‘The Piano Picture’ or ‘At the Piano.’ The latter was rejected by the Salon jury of 1859, and this may have had something to do with the nibblings at London by which it was immediately followed. He spent some months in the English capital in 1859, renewing friendships made abroad and making new ones, and laying the foundations of a notoriety which was in time to blossom into fame. He stayed with his half-sister, Mrs. Francis Seymour Haden, and practised etching with his brother-in-law, the two exerting a mutual influence one upon the other. Whistler first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859, sending two ‘etchings from nature.’ In 1860 his ‘At the Piano’ was accepted at the Royal Academy and bought by an academician, John Phillip [q. v.]; it now belongs to Mr. Edmund Davis. In the same exhibitions were shown two dry-point portraits and three etchings. This modest success probably confirmed him in the intention to settle in London, which was practically his domicile from 1860 till his death.
During his first twelve months in London he was chiefly occupied with a series of sixteen etchings of the scenery and life of the Thames, including ‘The Pool,’ ‘Thames Police,’ and ‘Black Lion Wharf.’ He was much at Wapping, and etched the life of the neighbourhood and its framing. The chief pictures of the same period were ‘The White Girl,’ ‘The Thames in Ice,’ and ‘The Music Room.’ In 1861 he visited France again, painting on the coast of Brittany. A year later he travelled as far as Fuentarrabia on a journey to Madrid which was never completed. In 1863 he took his first London house, 7 Lindsey Row, now 101 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. There he was joined by his mother, who had left America on the outbreak of the civil war. During these years he sent regularly to the Royal Academy, where his pictures met with quite as good a reception as a man of original genius, who was opening up a new walk in art, had any right to expect. Chief among them were ‘On the Thames,’ ‘Alone with the Tide,’ and ‘The Last of Old Westminster.’ During these years he also drew for some of the illustrated periodicals, contributing two drawings to ‘Good Words’ in 1862, and four to ‘Once a Week’ in the same year. It was about this time that Whistler became strongly affected by the example of the Japanese. For years his work bore much the same relation to Japanese art as all
