Feast of Darks

Christine Stansell

  • Whistler, Women and Fashion by Margaret MacDonald and Susan Grace Galassi et al
    Yale, 243 pp, £35.00, May 2003, ISBN 0 300 09906 1
  • Whistler and His Mother: An Unexpected Relationship by Sarah Walden
    Gibson Square, 242 pp, £15.99, July 2003, ISBN 1 903933 28 5

The most notorious American painter of the late 19th century, a dandy who used his gift for showmanship and his Paris education to make himself the prototype Victorian aesthete, James McNeill Whistler had started out as a dutiful son, following his father to West Point before turning his back on the Army to pursue the artist’s life in Paris. He arrived there in 1855, at the height of the craze for the vie de bohème, and like many other young men, found the newly minted bohemian identity an easy way to ratify a genius that had yet to find expression in real work.

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