"In November 1878, America's greatest painter sued England's greatest critic for a bad review. The painter won-but ruined himself in the process. The painter: James Abbot MacNeill Whistler, whose combination of incredible talent, unflagging energy, and relentless self-promotion had by that time brought him to the very edge of artistic preeminence. The critic: John Ruskin, Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University, whose four-decades' worth of prolific...

This biography of the great nineteenth-century American artist by art historian, Robin Spencer, includes 68 full-color reporoductions of works by Whistler and contemporaries.

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....

A collection of etchings by the American artist, with an introductory essay.

"Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change explores instances of what Whistler called his "shop game." David Park Curry's practiced eye offers us new means to understand many of Whistler's best-known works and some of his lesser-known materials. Deftly connecting the artworks to popular theater, fiction, and photography of the moment, Curry traces the artist's subtle nods toward his more reform-minded peers as they developed vocabularies to assess and...