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This Day in Boston History
July 10th, 1843
New England's Southern Gentleman
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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.
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From the writers of iBoston.org |
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