Her father was a postmaster in a North Dakota prairie town. Her opinions were a reflection of the Victorian age. Anna, born in Wilmington, North Carolina, was a daughter of the antebellum South; she was the niece of a slave owner, and, through him, the cousin of a reported nine mixed-race children. She married George Washington Whistler, a West Point graduate and a brilliant civil engineer, and they had five sons, only two of whom, James and William, survived to adulthood.
Petersburg, Russia, where George served Tsar Nicholas I as the chief engineer of a rail line to Moscow, and the artistically precocious James, at age eleven, enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. In , George died, after a bout of cholera, and the family returned to America.
But he proved a feckless cadet—the superintendent, Robert E. Lee, liked but despaired of him—and he flunked out in his third year. He evinced no better discipline in government jobs as a geographical draftsman. Then, in , Whistler went to Paris and launched himself as an artist, a dandy, and a lover of women.
He was never less than esteemed in France, notably by poets and writers. The young Proust kept as a talisman a pair of gray gloves that Whistler had worn.
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