Portrait of James Whistler

Walter Greaves met James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) in the early 1860s, when he and one of his brothers, Henry (1844-1904) met Whistler and showed him the sights of the River Thames. In 1863 Whistler took a house at Chelsea in Lindsey Row (no. 7), two doors away from where the Greaves' lived. Walter and his brother were the sons of a well-known Chelsea boat builder and waterman who was J. M. W. Turner's boatman. Both brothers would become Whistler's studio assistants (1863-65) and close friends. Walter would say of Whistler, "He taught us to paint and we taught him the waterman's jerk."<br>Greaves drew, painted and caricatured Whistler several times over the course of their friendship, which lasted for about twenty years. In the present sheet, Whistler sports a monocle, wears a fitted frock coat, and dons a dandyish hat. The pose is similar to Greaves' portrait of Whistler that probably dates to 1871 (exhibited Washington, D.C., National Portrait Gallery, In Pursuit of the Butterfly: Portraits of J.A.M. Whistler, 1995, no. 35), when Whistler was thirty-eight. Greaves was accused of claiming that unfinished works by Whistler were his own in an exhibition in 1911. His reputation was ruined consequently and he fell into financial distress.