James McNeill Whistler

An innovative painter and printmaker, James McNeill Whistler explored abstract qualities of atmosphere, color, and line in his landscapes and portraits. Although arguably the most famous American artist of his day, Whistler spent most of his life in Europe. In Paris and London, he dominated avant-garde artistic circles and heightened his celebrity through his wit and self fashioning. Joseph Edgar Boehm sculpted this bust in 1872, the year Whistler exhibited his now famous Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1871) at the Royal Academy in London.