The Artist Formerly Known As Whistler

When James Whistler was two years old, he was asked why he’d disappeared from company and hidden under a table. ‘I’s drawrin,’ he replied. He started as he meant to go on. Daniel E. Sutherland’s well-appointed new biography of the American-born painter — whom Henry James described as a ‘queer little Londonised Southerner’ — keeps the attention there, making its central emphasis Whistler’s ferocious single-mindedness in the making of his art.

The striking thing is how much the other aspects of him — Whistler the rebel, Whistler the public combatant, Whistler the philanderer, the dandy, the show-off, the semi-delinquent father, the wit and conversationalist — fed into that rather than distracting from it. His dedication to art did not entail a retreat from the world but, rather, an energised engagement with it.

Whistler in this account seems both worldly and unworldly in different ways. He was hopeless with money and despite that, or only in part because of it, he was very interested in getting it. Dedicated to art for art’s sake, he was also dedicated to money for art’s sake. Even if that occasionally meant, as he said, making some money grinding out portraits of ‘the heads of blokes’ and ‘their pet ballet dancers’. Or, less conventionally, getting involved in an abortive scheme to sell steam-powered torpedo boats to Mexico and Peru for use against the Spanish naval blockade.

Whistler was extraordinarily modern in the way he marketed himself as an artist. As Sutherland puts it, ‘he saw no difference between the creation and promotion of art’. He was, to bring in the cliché, determined to create the taste by which his work would be enjoyed, and that meant not only selling his art but creating himself as a singular artistic personality and promulgating his theories of art as a pamphleteer and lecturer.

He made himself a brand, signing himself — The Artist Formerly Known As Whistler? — with a butterfly logo.