THE MAN WHISTLER

London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Good. 1952. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0354042246 Greycloth with bright black lettering on spine illustrations on upper cover. Foxing spots on cover. Slight bump to corners. No inscription. Creasing to a few page corners. Frontis portrait. A few spots to page tips. 198 pages clean and tight. Artist, dandy and wit, the cosmopolitan James McNeill Whistler was born in America, spent part of his childhood in Russia, and for three years was enrolled at West Point (the United States Military Academy). Failure in a chemistry examination ended his chances of becoming a soldier: 'If silicon had been a gas, I would have been a general,' he commented later. 'It is easier,' says Hesketh Pearson in this entertaining biography, 'to think of silicon as a gas than of Whistler as a soldier,' a judgement which his readers must endorse. Having learnt to etch with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and decorated the margins of his maps with cartoons and drawings, Whistler resolved to go to Paris to study art. Here he entered a world in which he was immediately at home. In 1859 he moved to London, where he would remain for most of the rest of his life. He made friends - and enemies - among eminent men of the day, Swinburne, Rossetti, Wilde and Ruskin. He was a painstaking artist, exhausting his sitters and suing Ruskin because of a derogatory remark about his painting - an action that brought a farthing in damages, notoriety and bankruptcy. As always in his fascinating biographies, Hesketh Pearson concentrates on the man behind the public figure. Whistler's life was seldom dull: it was puncuated with stormy love affairs, near riots in society, excursions to the Continent. He was a man who even in an age of eccentrics was considered unique, and whose wit produced more friction than that of anyone in the nineteenth century. .