On this day, the artist James McNeil Whistler was born in Lowell. He was raised in Russia for most of his first six years, where his father was designing the St. Petersburg-Moscow railway for Czar Nicholas. On the death of his father (1849) the family returned to America. Whistler would enroll in West Point and be discharged for failing chemistry.

Whistler worked briefly in Washington etching maps for the Coast Guard. He began a studio in Boston but became discouraged at the limited prospects for artists in America. So he set off for Paris pretending to be a southern gentleman born of American aristocracy, a facade he would maintain the rest of his life.

Whistler was accepted by the artists of Paris as no American before him. And though brilliant and vane, he and his friends in Paris: Courbet, Manet, Degas, and Monet would reshape the artist's vision of the modern world, and their role in it.