Whistler, James Abbot M'Neill, painter and etcher, born at Lowell, Massachusetts; studied military engineering at West Point (q.v.), and art at Paris, and settled at length as an artist in London, where he has exhibited his paintings frequently; has executed some famous portraits, in especial one of his mother, and a remarkable one of Thomas Carlyle, now the property of Glasgow Corporation; paintings of his exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery, London, provoked a criticism from Ruskin, which was accounted libellous, and as plaintiff he got a farthing damages, without costs; very much, it is understood, to his critic's disgust, and little to his own satisfaction, as is evident from the character of the pamphlet he wrote afterwards in retaliation, entitled “Whistler versus Ruskin: Art and Art Critics”; (b. 1834).
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Whigs * Whiston, William