James Abbott Whistler was born [on July 11] in 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the third son of West Point graduate and civil engineer Major George Washington Whistler, and his second wife Anna Matilda McNeill. After brief stays in Stonington, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, the Whistlers moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Major served as an engineer for the construction of a railroad line to Moscow. Whistler studied drawing there at the Imperial Academy of Science. In 1848 he went to live with his sister and her husband in London, and after his father’s death the following year the family returned to the United States and settled in Pomfret, Connecticut. Whistler enrolled in the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1851, where he excelled in Robert W. Weir’s drawing class. He was dismissed from the academy in 1854, and after brief periods working for the Winans Locomotive Works in Baltimore, and the drawings division of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, resolved to become an artist…
FROM http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/artist-info.1974.html

Victoria Thorne: Whistler’s Bridges and Those Boys on the Bank~
http://design.victoriathorne.com/2012/08/whistlers-bridges-and-those-boys-on-bank.html
Portrait of the Artist’s Mother~
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/search/commentaire/commentaire_id/portrait-of-the-artists-mother-2976.html
The Extraordinary Life of Whistler’s Mother~
http://theconversation.com/the-extraordinary-life-of-whistlers-mother-42027

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