Page 12 - whistler

Charlotte Mason Picture Study Aid Whistler

James McNeill Whistler

from The Life of James McNeill Whistler, Volume 1 by Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell

Of the actual facts and incidents of Whistler’s early childhood there

are few to record. Mrs. Livermore, “K. L.,” who wrote to the Times

(August 28, 1903) to settle the dispute as to the place of Whistler’s

birth, lived many years in Lowell. She was a great friend of the
Whistlers, and was all her life “Cousin Kate” to Whistler and his

brothers. She was fourteen years older than Whistler, and she could

tell of his baby beauty, so great that her father used to say “it was
enough to make Sir Joshua Reynolds come out of his grave and paint

[James] asleep.” Mrs. Livermore dwelt especially on the child’s
Painter
beautiful hands “which belong to so many of the Whistlers – I

attribute them to his Irish blood.” When she returned to Lowell in
Birth: July 11, 1834
1836, from the Manor School at York, England, Mrs. Whistler’s son,
Lowell, Massachusetts
Willie, had just been born:

“As soon as Mrs. Whistler was strong enough, she sent for me to go
Death: July 17, 1903 and see her boy, and I did see her and her baby in bed ! and then I
London, England asked, ‘Where is Jemmie [or James], of whom I have heard so

much?’ She replied, ‘He was in the room a short time since, and I

Style: think he must be here still.’ So I went softly about the room till I

Impressionism/Realism saw a very small form prostrate and at full length on the shelf
(he is also credited with under the dressing-table, and I took hold of an arm and a leg and
placed him on my knee, and then said, ‘What were you doing, dear,
starting “tonalism”
under the table?’ ‘I’se drawrin’,’ and in one very beautiful little
(Kotynek and
hand he held the paper, in the other the pencil.”
Cohassey)
The drawing of a duck, lent to us by Mrs.
Livermore, is curiously firm and strong for

the child of four he was when he made it.

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