Description: Condition A. Original colour lithograph from "Twelve Portraits" published
by William Heinemann, London 1899.

Presented in 16 x 20 in. acid free, archival museum mat, with framing labels. Ready to frame. Shipped boxed flat via Fedex.
Certificate of Authenticity.
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James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
was an American artist, wit and society figure, who lived for most of his life in London and Paris. He trained as an artist in Paris in the studio of Charles Gleyre but his early work was inspired by the paintings of the Realist painter Gustave Courbet and by the work of older masters such as Velázquez, Rembrandt, and Thomas Gainsborough. Later he absorbed the influences of Japanese and classical art to create works that were decorative and virtually subjectless. He was one of the central figures in the Aesthetic Movement. He was a man who liked to live his life in the public eye and was very concerned about his personal appearance and the critical reception of his paintings. (www.mr-whistlers-art.info/)

"One of the two most famous portraits in William Nicholson's oeuvre and an icon amongst portraits of Whistler. Along with this portrait of Whistler it was his study of Queen Victoria which first made him famous.

Nicholson did this image just after his
association with James Pryde as The Beggarstaff Brothers had come to an end. But his revolutionary approach to design which marked the Beggarstaff posters, found further expression in the small-scale woodcuts on which he then concentrated.

William Nicholson's woodblock prints of the 1890's were amongst the most revolutionary British print images of the era. They used a treatment of form, with a stylized simplification of shape, and a handling of perspective and picture space which had had no precedent in British art. Influences of Japanese art, and a parallel thinking to, if not a direct knowledge of, the ideas of Toulouse Lautrec and of the Nabis painters in Paris at the same period can certainly be felt, although there is no record that Nicholson had actually studied either at this date." (Weston)