James McNeill Whistler (18341903), the expatriate American
artist, was a prolific and innovative painter, watercolorist,
and printmaker. Throughout his lively career Whistler was known
as a discerning collector of Japanese prints and as a quick-
witted, sharp-tongued advocate of art for arts sake. Whistlers
roots were in Realism, but his approach Modernist; his brand of
Realism eschewed narrative and sentimentality and instead set
the incidents and characters of the everyday into compositions
determined by design, color, and tonal variation. For example,
Whistler uses prosaic details to serve design and composition in
numerous images of life along the Thames River, such as
Rotherhithe (1860). Similarly, in his Venetian works, the
minutiae of daily activity on the canals and lagoons are
subsumed by the atmospheric effects of mist and fog. Whistler
approached portraits in the same vein, posing the figures in
vague flattened spaces where they blend into harmonious
environments of tone and color, composed interval