Here in two beautifully produced volumes is the first complete catalogue of Whistler's paintings ever published. This monumental work records in the fullest possible detail the history, provenance, and sources of all Whistler's known paintings, including many that were destroyed or have since disappeared, and includes full-page reproductions, many of them in color, of the paintings that are still extant.

The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler (2 vols.)

Arts & Photography

MacDonald, Margaret F.

SPENCER, ROBIN

Young, Andrew Maclaren

Miles, Hamlish

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Painter, etcher, draughtsman, lithographer, watercolourist, and author of critical essays and aphorisms, James McNeill Whistler had a tremendous influence on the art and aesthetics of his era. Born in Massachusetts in 1834, he settled in London when he was twenty-five years old and for the next four decades produced hundreds of highly acclaimed (and sometimes highly criticised) works. His prodigious output and proficiency, along with his eccentricities, polemics, and arguments with critics, won him wide recognition. This catalogue raisonne of Whistler's drawings, pastels and watercolours makes available many of his works that have never before been exhibited or published and vividly demonstrates the wide range of his art. His drawings reveal the everyday working out of his ideas and note the world as it passed by Whistler with vigour and humour. The pastels include sensitive portraits, vigorous studies of models in the studio, and detailed views of Venetian palaces. The watercolours, perhaps his finest works, catch the subtle colours of northern skies and ever-changing seascapes.

James McNeill Whistler: Drawings, Pastels and Watercolours: A Catalogue Raisonné (The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)

Individual Artists

Paul Mellon Centre BA

Costume and fashion were a lifelong obsession for James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). His exquisite depictions of women and the details of their clothing contributed to his career as one of the most accomplished and successful—if controversial—artists of the nineteenth century. This lavishly illustrated book focuses on fashion in Whistler’s art as a key to understanding his life and work and as a new means of exploring his relationship with women and his portraits of them. The book offers new insights into some of Whistler’s most beloved masterpieces in the context of art and fashion in the Victorian period. 
Illustrated with paintings, pastels, prints, and drawings by Whistler, the book also presents photographs of his sitters, contemporary costumes, works by other artists of the period, and artifacts from Whistler’s studio. These illustrations, with new material drawn from the Centre for Whistler Studies, illuminate the interaction between the artist and the women he portrayed during his fifty years in Paris and London—mistresses, family members, artists, actresses, aristocrats, and many others.

Whistler, Women, and Fashion

Ribeiro, Aileen

Galassi, Susan Grace

De Montfort, Patricia

<div>A fascinating look at the partnership of artist James McNeill Whistler and his chief model, Joanna Hiffernan, and the iconic works of art resulting from their life together "[A] lavish volume. . . . Illuminating. . . . MacDonald's deep research has . . .&nbsp;unearthed important new facts."--Gioia Diliberto, Wall Street Journal In 1860 James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and Joanna Hiffernan (1839-1886) met and began a significant professional and personal relationship. Hiffernan posed as a model for many of Whistler's works, including his controversial Symphony in White paintings, a trilogy that fascinated and challenged viewers with its complex associations with sex and morality, class and fashion, academic and realist art, Victorian popular fiction, aestheticism and spiritualism. This luxuriously illustrated volume provides the first comprehensive account of Hiffernan's partnership with Whistler throughout the 1860s and 1870s--a period when Whistler was forging a reputation as one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation. A series of essays discusses how Hiffernan and Whistler overturned artistic conventions and sheds light on their interactions with contemporaries, including Gustave Courbet, for whom she also modeled. Packed with new insights into the creation, marketing, and cultural context of Whistler's iconic works, this study also traces their resonance for his fellow artists, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edgar Degas, John Singer Sargent, and Gustav Klimt.&nbsp;&nbsp;</div>

The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler

In September 1879, James McNeill Whistler boarded the Venice-bound night train in Paris. He was forty-five years old and bankrupt. What was to be a three-month stay in the Italian city—long enough to complete a set of twelve etchings—stretched to fourteen months. When Whistler returned to London, he brought back over fifty magnificent etchings and a hundred pastels, far in excess of the original commission. In Palaces in the Night, Margaret F. MacDonald looks at this key period in Whistler's career, examining his unique vision of Venice and his development of the medium of etching. She shows how he reestablished himself in the art world of London and Paris, turning disaster and disgrace into profit and prestige. Lavishly illustrated with some of the most beautiful and intriguing images Whistler ever produced, this book provides a fascinating account of a pivotal period in the artist's long and complicated career. Whistler's aim was to restore both his fortune and reputation with the Venetian etchings. To that end he included views of familiar sights like the Riva degli Schiavoni and San Marco, but he also captured quiet backwaters, secret gardens, and lantern-lit windows that did not appear in any guidebook. His selection of views and compositions, plus the expressiveness of his line and printing, differentiated his work from that of others, and MacDonald shows the process by which Whistler selected, shaped, and edited his Venetian corpus. He drew figures in distinctively Italian costume, each an individual, moving, gesturing, and interacting with other real people. An appendix of Whistler's letters from Venice provides an entertaining account of his time there and also deepens the reader's understanding of how the city challenged and inspired him.

Palaces in the Night: Whistler in Venice

University of California Press

The catalog of the new Whistler exhibition--the largest since his death in 1903--reveals the range and variety of his work, showing him as a talented painter, printmaker, and designer and as a central figure in the Victorian art world.

James McNeill Whistler

Dorment, Richard

WHISTLER, James McNeill

Harry N.Abrams, Inc.

Whistler: The graphic work : Amsterdam, Liverpool, London, Venice : an exhibition organised by Thos. Agnew & Sons, London, the Walker Art Gallery, ... with the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976

Walker Art Gallery

In the 1860s and 1870s Whistler produced a body of work based on Battersea Bridge, London. Pivotal to his career, this beautiful group of paintings permits a detailed examination of his approach to composition, subject and technique. The earliest pieces, notably Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge, produced soon after his arrival in London, mark one of his most profound and successful challenges to the art establishment of the time and his influence on the aesthetics of the day. This comprehensive and handsomely illustrated study presents the definitive examples of Whistler's radical new approach to the time-honored subject of the city and river. The works reveal to us Whistler's world – the exhibitions, personalities, buildings, style and atmosphere which inform his art and root this American cosmopolitan securely in the ranks of noted artists inspired by London and the Thames.

An American in London: Whistler and the Thames

Philip Wilson Publishers

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