James McNeill Whistler

James McNeill Whistler (1904) by Nancy Bell (1844-1933), the British art writer and translator who signed much of her work N. D’Anvers, is a pocket biography in Bell’s Miniature Series of Painters from George Bell & Sons. The publisher commissioned the book in 1902, while the artist was still living, and it reached print within a year of Whistler’s death in July 1903, making it one of the first separate accounts of the painter to appear. Whistler’s combative career, from the Nocturnes to the 1878 libel suit against John Ruskin that won him a single farthing in damages, was still fresh news, and Bell writes for general readers in the plain manner of her Elementary History of Art, the popular survey she had first issued in 1874. The volume remains a snapshot of Whistler’s reputation at the moment of his death. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.