James McNeill Whistler: an American artist abroad.

• Author: Dorment, Richard

ON NOV. 2, 1855, 22-year-old James McNeill Whistler arrived in Paris, in time to catch the last two weeks of the Exposition Universelle's encyclopedic survey of contemporary French, British, and European painting. At the French Pavilion, he could saturate himself in the art of Eugene Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. At the British Pavilion, he saw the brilliantly colored paintings of William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. The artist who made the most immediate impression on Whistler, however, was Gustave Courbet, who, in the Pavilion du Realisme, defiantly was according himself his own retrospective.

Two years later, Whistler traveled from Paris to Manchester, England, to see the Att Treasures Exhibition, where about 1,000 Old Master paintings, including works by Diego Velazquez, Frans Hals, and Jan Vermeer competed for attention with 700 works of the British school. Whistler summed up the dangers of so all-embracing a visual education when, late in his life, he told his pupils that, in his youth, he found "no absolute definite facts, and ... fell in a pit and floundered."

Whistler floundered, in part, because his was no ordinary artistic background. Born in Lowell, Mass., in 1834, he lived in St. Petersburg, Russia--where his father worked as an engineer for the Czar--from 1843 to 1848 and took drawing lessons at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. On visits to London, he pored over Rembrandt's etchings in the collection of his brother-in-law Francis Seymour Haden, attended lectures at the Royal Academy, and saw Raphael's cartoons at Hampton Court. At 15, Whistler returned to New England and followed in his father's footsteps to West Point. There, he mastered the medium of watercolor and excelled at draftsmanship and French. A collection of prints from Renaissance masters, as well as contemporary prints by artists such as J.M.W. Turner, were available for studying and copying by the pupils. Dismissed from the Military Academy in 1854, he entered the office of the Coast Survey in Washington, where he acquired the thorough knowledge of etching techniques that formed the basis of his later development as an artist.

In Paris, he entered the atelier of the Swiss neo-classical painter Charles Gleyre. Through Gleyre's teaching methods, Whistler absorbed the French painting techniques of the 1830s--the controlled application of opaque pigments over a dark ground against which he later was to rebel, but never abandoned totally.

Whistler became friendly with a clique of young British art students, including Edward Poynter and George Du Maurier (later his colleagues on...