WHISTLER A Biography by Stanley Weintraub...

WHISTLER A Biography by Stanley Weintraub (Truman Talley Books/E. P. Dutton: $12.95)

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, “the one great artist to emerge from Victorian England,” was born in Lowell, Mass., reared in Russia and lived his adult life in England and in France. “Being an American in Europe . . . emphasized for Whistler his sense of belligerent alienation, of the artist in purposeful exile,” writes Weintraub.

Whistler’s life was marked by scandal, litigiousness and bankruptcy. His cohabitation with a model, Jo (Joanna Hiffernan), ended because they incurred the outrage of his Calvinist mother and--Weintraub posits--because Jo modeled nude for his former friend Gustave Courbet.

Whistler’s very paintings challenged conventional 19th-Century British realism. But it was the exhibit of Whistler’s “The Falling Rocket” that drew the harshest criticism from art critic John Ruskin: “I . . . never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Although the subsequent trial that Whistler filed for libel resulted in a ruling in Whistler’s favor, he was awarded only “one farthing”--a quarter of a penny.

An impressive, well-researched, entertaining narrative.