Friends and Family

Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He was the eldest son of Major George Washington Whistler [link – Key figures], a railway engineer, and his second wife Anna Matilda McNeill [link – Key figures]. He had four brothers: William, Kirk, Charles and John. However, the youngest three died in childhood. William became a doctor. Whistler also had two step-brothers, George and Joseph, and one step-sister, Deborah [link – Key figures]. It was Deborah and her husband Francis Seymour Haden [link – Key figures] who Whistler stayed with in London in the 1850s.

Whistler spent part of his childhood in St Petersburg in Russia where his father was working on the railways. In 1851 he attended the United States Military Academy, West Point, and then joined the drawing division of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington, DC, where he learnt to etch.

In Paris, where he went to study art in 1855, he became friendly with the sculptor Charles Drouet [link – Key figures, Works on Paper/Prints/GLAHA 46745] and the British artists Edward Poynter [link – Key figures], Thomas Armstrong [link – Key figures] and George Du Maurier [link – Key figures]. They lived a wild life in Paris, and Du Maurier later wrote a novel called Trilby, which was based on this time and his friendship with the group of artists around Whistler.