James Abbott McNeill Whistler

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. Whistler's father was a civil engineer and his work took the family to Russia in 1842 where Whistler studied art and drawing at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. Following his father's death in 1849, the family moved back to the USA where Whistler applied to the United States Military Academy at West Point where he was tasked with copying from European engravings and topographical drawing. After being expelled, Whistler briefly worked as a draftsman mapping the entire U.S. coast for military and maritime purposes. This interlude in the drawing division of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey enabled him to learn the etching technique which proved so valuable later in his career.

In 1855, Whistler moved to Paris to further his art training, attending classes at the Ecole Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin in Paris and working briefly in the studio of Swiss painter, Charles Gleyre. In August 1858 during a tour of northern France, Luxembourg and the Rhineland, he produced his first set of etchings, Twelve Etchings from Nature. The success of the ‘French Set’ of etchings encouraged Whistler to move to London in 1859, where he produced twelve etchings of the River Thames and began to establish his technique of tonal harmony.

In 1895 at the peak of his career, Whistler's wife Trixie was ill with cancer so he came to Lyme for a few months so she could recover by the seaside and he could paint. They stayed at the Royal Lion Hotel and Whistler had a studio at the top of Broad Street, close to the blacksmith's forge owned by the Goviers. He painted Samuel Govier and his daughter as well as nine year old Rosa Rendell, the daughter of George John Rendall, a high class grocer at London House, Broad Street who became Mayor and Alderman of Lyme Regis.

The British Museum has fourteen lithographs produced in Lyme during the same period, including one of John Grove, the landlord of the Royal Lion Hotel at that time. There are several lithographs of the Govier forge featuring both George and Samuel Govier including The Good Shoe, The Sunny Smithy, The Master Smith, Father and Son, The Strong Arm and The Smith's Yard.