Musings on Sketches, Artists, and Mosquito Nets

Abstract

Emerging Infectious Diseases • www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 20, No. 8, August 2014 1429 J Abbott McNeill Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on July 11, 1834. When he was 9 years of age, his family moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, and there he studied drawing at the Imperial Academy of Science. He later attended the United States Military Academy at West Point for 3 years, where he excelled in drawing classes. Because Whistler proved more adept at accumulating 218 demerits than at completing course work or complying with the disciplinary code, West Point Superintendent Colonel Robert E. Lee was obliged to dismiss the young cadet from the academy in 1854. After a short unhappy stint as a draftsman, Whistler briefly lived with the Winan family in Baltimore, Maryland, where, he “would also ruin all our best pencils, sketching not only on the paper, but also on the smoothly finished wooden backs of the drawing-boards. . . .” During the early 1850s, he began experimenting with techniques, themes, and subjects. Art researcher Nancy Dorfman Pressly wrote, “Drawing less from his imagination, he began to look more carefully around him, catching a moment of unguarded behavior or simply the amusing attitudes of people in everyday situations.” In 1855, Whistler moved back to Europe where he began to establish himself as a painter in Paris and London. He completed more than 500 paintings not only in oils, but also in pastels and watercolors. Among the best known of Musings on Sketches, Artists, and Mosquito Nets