Biographer to Appear in Whistler Documentary on PBS

Photo by University Relations

Daniel Sutherland

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Daniel E. Sutherland, whose biography of James McNeill Whistler was published earlier this year to positive reviews, will be featured in a forthcoming PBS documentary about the famous 19th century artist.

Sutherland, a Distinguished Professor of history at the University of Arkansas, is one of nine authorities on Whistler’s life and work who lent their expertise in the making of James McNeill Whistler & The Case for Beauty, which is scheduled for broadcast nationally on PBS affiliates, including the Arkansas Educational Television Network, at 8 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 12.

This evening, Monday, Sept. 8, Sutherland will be in Washington, D.C., to speak at a seminar, “James McNeill Whistler: Finding the Man and the Artist,” which will be hosted by the Smithsonian Institution and accompany a showing of the documentary. Lee Glazer, associate curator of American Art at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, will be the moderator.

Sutherland’s book, Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake, released in March by Yale University Press, is the first biography of the artist in more than two decades. There have been nearly 20 biographies of Whistler since he died in 1903, but Sutherland’s is the first to make extensive use of his private correspondence. 

Karen Thomas, the documentary’s award-winning producer, approached Sutherland in 2005 to act as a historical consultant on the film. As the project progressed, Thomas asked Sutherland to help shape the script — although Thomas did all the writing — and to appear on screen as someone with a comprehensive knowledge of Whistler.

Sutherland also accompanied Thomas and her film crew when they were shooting scenes for the film in England.

“It was fascinating to see how a filmmaker went about telling Whistler’s story, where the emphasis is on images, rather than on text,” Sutherland said. “It was also a daunting task — and at times tremendously frustrating — to cram Whistler’s life and work into 50 minutes.”

In his book, Sutherland describes the life of Whistler, who was born in Massachusetts in 1834 and followed his father as a cadet at West Point but who failed out of the academy at age 19. Whistler soon moved to Paris and embarked on a career as an artist in Europe. In 1871 he painted the famous Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, known colloquially as Whistler’s Mother.

Whistler, who produced 2,700 paintings, drawings, etchings and lithographs, became famous for producing inventive, non-traditional works of art, which “kept him a step ahead of his contemporaries,” Sutherland said.

“Whistler had a reputation as a ‘painter’s painter,’ someone who only another painter really understood. Other artists understood him and sympathized,” he said. “But that was a relatively small circle. He would destroy paintings for which people would have paid him a lot of money, because they didn’t match his image of what he was trying to do. In his ‘painter’s eye,’ he had a vision. He would demand 50 or 60 sittings for portraits. He would start and the sitter would come back the next day and see that the canvas was blank again. He just hadn’t captured what he wanted to do.”

While he privately doubted himself and became obsessed with artistic perfection, Whistler engaged in activities that cultivated a celebrated public life. In fact, Whistler was one of the people first referred to as a “celebrity” by newspapers in the late 19th century, Sutherland said. Whistler feuded with the eminent art critic John Ruskin, suing Ruskin in court for libel after a bad review. He had a public falling out with Oscar Wilde. He titled his autobiography The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.

“Whistler was one of the first modern artists to understand the value of publicizing themselves, how making his name known to the public was really going to make people more interested in his work,” Sutherland said. “He was a master at marketing in that way. He would often talk about himself in the third person, like a modern sports figure. It was a purposeful façade that he created.”

Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake is Sutherland’s ninth book, and his first biography of a single subject. He has edited or co-edited six other books. Nearly all of them have dealt with the Civil War or 19th century American society. His 2009 book, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War won the Tom Watson Brown Book Award of the Society of Civil War Historians and the Distinguished Book Award, given by the Society for Military History.