Welcome to my site on James McNeill Whistler. Drum Roll........ It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to James McNeill Whistler's ( lost by the artist himself ) and now found his  "Portrait of William Merritt Chase," 1885, The Masher of the Avenues! This masterpiece along with another painting, "Harmony in Black, No 10,"  1885 are of two of the most important paintings in Whistler's oeuvre that have yet to be recognized by the Whistler scholars. This manuscript will reveal a plethora of information not only on James McNeill Whistler but on numerous artists who lived before, during and after his lifetime. James McNeill Whistler was a pivotal nineteenth century artist who contributed a prodigious endowment to modern art and a harbinger for abstract expressionism. Whistler was not only a prominent aesthetic painter who fastidiously studied art history, but also a writer on art, a teacher of art, an actor, an interior designer, product designer, fashion designer, a director of many exhibitions who independently reinvented the way we view art. The design of our museums and galleries is owed to Whistler. He recognized the important presentation of spacing and proper lighting as vital to the way the viewer reads paintings in exhibitions, museums and galleries.

The rich scholarship on Whistler  has already acknowledged his influence of Orientalism.  This 11 year research study and manuscript will identify and document the source of Whistler's influence from Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Durer, Hans Memling, Hans Hoblien The Younger, Lorenzo Lotto, Diego Velazquez, Titian, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, Rembrandt Van Rijn, Francisco Jose de Goya, Johannes Vermeer, Michael Sweerts,  Canaletto, Jean Antoine Watteau, Eugene Delacriox, and others. Whistler was quoted as stating that he wished to copy the ways and the means of the Old Masters. Contributions in this research disclose that Whistler was heavily influenced by the  Northern and Italian Renaissance and was a follower of Leon Battista Alberti's "On Painting," (Albertism) and Leonardo da Vinci's "Treatise On Painting." His students and colleagues acknowledged that he was inspired by the most important masterpieces. This manuscript will identify in Part II, thirty-seven Whistler paintings and the scope of his influences from the Old Masters wherein the oeuvre of Titian and Tintoretto's  is comparable to that of Velazquez and Rembrandt. Further research and study has made evident that Whistler's harmony of black and white, his presentation of contrasts, pictorial surface and compositional structure identify and document that he was a follower of Albertism and Leonardo's "Treatise on Painting." Many of Whistler's major paintings are constructions of Albertism's "musical consonances." This is identified and documented in Whistler's paintings, when he was quoted as saying that "the titles of my paintings have a specific meaning for the paintings." The title of Whistler's paintings begin with "Arrangement, Symphony, Harmony, Nocturne, Note, and Variation, these are all musical titles identifying his utilization of Alberti's musical consonances. 

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"France no more taught Whistler to paint than it taught him to etch. His masters were older and greater than the art of France."

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Arthur Jerome Eddy

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"To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano."

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James McNeill Whistler

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"Beauty is the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole."

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Leon Battista Alberti

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"It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait."

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James McNeill Whistler

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"What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, of the surface of the pool."

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Leon Battista Alberti

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"As music is the poetry of sound so is painting the poetry of site."

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James McNeill Whistler

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Manuscript is available for purchase on Lulu.com (Click on Buy the Book) or Amazon.com.

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