George A. Lucas

Though he frequently posed as a southern gentleman from Baltimore, Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, and, together with Lucas, attended the West Point Military Academy. He later trained in Paris in the studio of Charles Gleyre, where he befriended the realists Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, as well as the future impressionists Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Henri Fantin-Latour. In 1859, Whistler moved to London, abandoned Realism, and developed his own tonalist style of painting that used muted colors and reflected the influences of Japanese art and of the art of Diego Velázquez (1599–1660).