Whistler was the son of a railway engineer, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, but throughout his life he pretended to be a Southern gentleman. He was, in most imaginable ways, self-invented. Like West, he was irked by the low status America accorded its artists. His solution was not to attach himself to a court, as West did, but to depart for Paris and London and pretend to be a native aristocrat from an America he would never revisit. Perhaps his fixation on rank was impressed early: he was partly raised in Russia, where his father was designing the St. Petersburg-Moscow railway for Czar Nicholas I. A must-have book for art lovers and particularly fans of James McNeill Whistler.