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Whistler   /wˈɪslər/  /hwˈɪslər/   Listen
Whistler

noun
1.
United States painter (1834-1903).  Synonym: James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
2.
Someone who makes a loud high sound.
3.
Large North American mountain marmot.  Synonyms: hoary marmot, Marmota caligata, whistling marmot.
4.
Large-headed swift-flying diving duck of Arctic regions.  Synonyms: Bucephela clangula, goldeneye.
5.
Australian and southeastern Asian birds with a melodious whistling call.  Synonym: thickhead.






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"Whistler" Quotes from Famous Books



... Ibsen began to hold very much the position that Whistler was taking among painters and etchers in this country, that is to say the abuse and ridicule of his works by a dwindling group of elderly conventional critics merely stung into more frenzied laudation an ever-widening circle of youthful admirers. Ibsen repented, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... Piccirilli, contains pictures by Titian, Paul Veronese, Velasquez, Murillo, Van Dyck, Franz Hals, Rembrant, Daubigny, Corot, Diaz, Manet, Millet, Rousseau, Troyon, Constable, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Raeburn, Reynolds, Romney, Turner, and Whistler. The chief artistic feature of the interior decorations of the house, which, with the land upon which it is placed, cost, in round figures, five millions of dollars, is the famous series of Fragonard ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... this afternoon at Whistler's portrait of Carlyle at the Guildhall, and I find in both the same final art: that art of perfect expression, perfect suppression, perfect balance of every quality, so that a kind of negative thing becomes ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... Life, with much new matter added which was not available at the time of issue of the elaborate two-volume edition, now out of print. Fully illustrated with 97 plates reproduced from Whistler's works. Crown octavo. XX-450 pages, Whistler binding, deckle edge. $8.50 net. ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... has been expressed, not philosophically but with great liveliness, by Whistler in his Ten O'clock, and has had great influence both upon the thought of many people who care about art and upon the practice of artists. It is, put shortly, that the artist has no concern with the public whatever, nor the public with the artist. ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... Rothel, and the headwaters of Lake Mesantic. Some plain wooden armchairs were set against the walls that had been rough plastered and washed with burnt sienna brown. On them was hung an exquisite engraving—the Sistine Madonna and Child. There were also a few etchings, among them a copy of Whistler's The Thames by London Bridge, and a view of Niagara by moonlight. A mineral cabinet, filled to overflowing with fine specimens, extended the entire length of one wall. The pine floor was oiled and stained; large hooked rugs, genuine products ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... shaped like a level surfaced mound, and stood right up above the ordinary undulations of the moor, and Scarlett Markham whistled as he slowly climbed the other side, while high overhead, to turn the duet into a trio, there was another whistler in the shape of a speckled lark, soaring round and round as if he were describing the figure of a gigantic corkscrew, whose point was ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... Mr. Whistler, the artist, was at the dinner, but he did not attract me. Then there was a lady, over eighty years old, a Mrs. Stuart, who was Washington Irving's love, and she is said to have been his only love, and because of her he went unmarried to his grave. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... a whistler for breakfast," David assured her. "Fat as butter. He wouldn't eat now anyway. He is too much interested in the bear." She had finished, with a little sigh of content, when he asked: "What do you mean when ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood

... characteristically (ceux epars et prives d'architecture) of this long expected first volume of collected prose, Divagations, in which we find the prose poems of early date; medallion or full-length portraits of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Poe, Whistler, and others; the marvellous, the unique, studies in the symbolism of the ballet and the theatrical spectacle, comparatively early in date; Richard Wagner: reverie d'un Poete francais, Le Mystere dans les Lettres; and, under various titles, the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... of which we were speaking is not helped by any great use of this variety. A oneness of quality throughout the work is best suited to exhibit it. Masters of tone, like Whistler, preserve this oneness of quality very carefully in their work, relying chiefly on the grain of a rough canvas to give the necessary variety and prevent a deadness in the quality of ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... you which are the most famous American game birds, you may answer without hesitation, 'Bob White, Ruffed Grouse, and Woodcock'—the whistler, the drummer, and the sky dancer—all three good Citizens and ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues

... emotional sympathy for self is as true a part of art as sympathy for others; and a prejudice in favor of the good and bad of one personality against the virtue of many personalities. It may be that when a poet or a whistler becomes conscious that he is in the easy path of any particular idiom,—that he is helplessly prejudiced in favor of any particular means of expression,—that his manner can be catalogued as modern or classic,—that he favors a contrapuntal ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... of the particular form of wizardry practised so successfully by the celebrated Mrs. Whistler, one of whose names is, according to the Talmud, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... whistler; until the crunching of his feet could be heard upon the dead leaves. Rolf pushed the hair out of his eyes, and settled himself to watch with a sigh of almost ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... salvation for us among the Egyptians," she answered, panting for breath. "What they promise the Hebrews will be their ruin. The grass sowed by us withers where their feet touch it! And you, whose honest heart they deceive, are the whistler whom the bird-catcher uses to decoy his feathered victims into the snare. They put the hammer into your hand to rivet more firmly than before the chains which, with God's aid, we have sundered. Before my mind's eye I ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... triumph at having accomplished her purpose—at having forced his thoughts to leave his pet subject, himself, and center upon her. "I was thinking," said she reflectively, "what a brave whistler ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... Hartley what great talent he had. Huh! I soon cured him of that. 'Go right to it, son,' says I. 'Paint something you can sell for five hundred and I'll cover it with a thousand. Until then, not a red cent.' And inside of twenty-four hours he concluded he wasn't any budding Whistler or Sargent, and came asking what I thought he should tackle first. Eh? Think ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford

... grappling with each period brings one out almost inevitably into a fine serene certainty which cannot but have its effect on those who are younger. Ripe old age, cheerful, useful, and understanding, is one of the finest influences in the world. We hang Rembrandt's or Whistler's picture of his mother on our walls that we may feel its quieting hand, the sense of peace and achievement which the picture carries. We have no better illustration of the meaning of ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... exhibit it except under pressure of irritation—why he should hide his light under a bushel of ill-temper—I can't conceive. It is as though Patti wouldn't sing till her manager threw an egg at her, or as though Sir Frederick Leighton would only paint a picture after Mr. Whistler had broken his studio windows with a brick. Even the whistling oyster of London tradition would perform without requiring a preliminary insult or personal assault. But let us account everything good if possible; perhaps the Adorned C. only suffers from a modest dislike ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes

... The whistler must have felt my presence, for the air suddenly stopped in the middle of a bar. An unbounded curiosity seized me to know who the fellow could be. So I started in and finished ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan

... a survey of the more noticeable architectural and topographical features of London, which are indicating in no mean fashion the effect of Mr. Whistler's dictum: ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun

... no snow, no high winds, but a serene and pleasant atmosphere. Visits were received from Maj. Whistler and Lieut. Kingsbury. Conversation on the probable reception of the President's Message, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... houses, livery stables, ferry boats, and street cars. But to catch a fish or fire a pistol on Sunday is a $10 offense, and to look on at a game of chess is a $50 crime. However, the law does not punish whistling on Sunday, unless the whistler has spectators, then it is a $50 business for all concerned. To read Longfellow's Excelsior on Sunday to a parlor of company is a $50 crime. Reading Milton's Paradise Lost, or the American Declaration of Independence would also rank as criminal business, being an entertainment, and a party ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various

... to the left, but stopped in the middle of the room to study her as she stood framed in the doorway—a picture for Whistler. With pretty art and a woman's instinctive desire to please, she had placed the candle on a chair and assumed something of a pose. The mellow candle-light deepened the raven black of her hair, softened the tint of ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... upon the art of older nations. Besides Poe—who, though indigenous in ways too subtle for brief analysis, yet passed all frontiers in his swift, sad flight—the two American artists of widest influence, Whitman and Whistler, have been intensely American in temperament and in the special spiritual ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay

... Pre-Raphaelites another instance of the absolutely indefensible nature of many of the most beautiful propositions. And as a still more striking and remarkable case, take the onslaught made by Ruskin upon the works of Whistler. You will remember that a libel action ensued and that these pictures were gravely reasoned about by barristers and surveyed by jurymen ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... delightful hours in drifting about Chioggia itself, which is a kind of foretaste of Venice, although not like enough to her to impair the surprise. (But nothing can do that. Not all the books or photographs in the world, not Turner, nor Whistler, nor Clara Montalba, can so familiarize the stranger with the idea of Venice that the reality of Venice fails to be sudden and arresting. Venice is so peculiarly herself, so exotic and unbelievable, that so far from ever being ready for her, ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas

... Mrs. Fell all my English Books of Husbandry one excepted to her Daughter Mrs. Katherine Fell my Six Pieces of Silver Plate and six Silver spoons to Mrs. Iles my Gerards Herball To Mrs. Morris my Country Farme Translated out of French 4. and all my English Physick Books to Mr. Whistler the Recorder of Oxford I give twenty shillings to all my fellow Students Mrs of Arts a Book in fol. or two a piece as Master Morris Treasurer or Mr. Dean shall appoint whom I request to be the Overseer of this Appendix ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... Morgan. "Thought the girls never would let me stop. And father, too. Mother won't own up she's reconciled to my being in the Navy," and Whistler grinned suddenly. "But she listened to all I told them, too. She was just as eager to hear about ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson

... by Simonetta herself, wearing the blanched draperies and tragic pearls of the labyrinth he had made for her. Grimshaw offered no apologies. He was the uncrowned laureate and kings can do no wrong. He was painted by the young Sargent, of course, and by the aging Whistler—you remember the butterfly's portrait of him in a yellow kimono leaning against a black mantel? I, for one, think he was vastly amused by all this fury of admiration; he despised it and fed upon it. If he had been less ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... the garden steps. She was a much thinner and dimmer version of her sister. One seemed to see her pale cheeks, her dark eyes and hair, her small mouth, through mist, like a Whistler portrait. She moved very quietly, and her voice was low, and a little dragging. The young vicar of a neighbouring hamlet in the fells, who admired her greatly, thought of her as playing "melancholy"—in the contemplative Miltonic sense—to Lydia's "mirth." She was ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... ridiculously when we depart from the Greek standard. Your Whistler never achieved fame until he stopped reproducing bits of nature and devoted his ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy

... educational opportunity. And women, like men, will continue to get their "cultural backgrounds" in the great achievements of the whole race, where they can hold converse with Lincoln and Darwin and the makers of the Cologne Cathedral and George Meredith and Pasteur and Karl Marx and Whistler and Joan ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... years later, in Paris," goes on Steele. "I was dining in one of those big cafes—Maxime's, I think,—when I recognized him at the next table. He was telling a friend of a find he'd made in an old printshop,—a pencil sketch by Whistler. He collects such things, I believe. Well, this was something he wanted very badly; but he'd happened to be caught without cash enough to pay for it. So he'd asked the dealer to put it aside until next day. There was my chance. I know something about ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... chimney. The shaded Welsbach lights of the chandelier cast a dazzling luminance on the tea-table of snow and silver, while leaving the pictures in a gloom so discreet that not Ruskin himself could have decided whether these were by Whistler or Peter Paul Rubens. On either side of the marble mantelpiece were two easy-chairs of an immense, incredible capacity, chairs of crimson plush for Titans, chairs softer than moss, more pliant than a loving heart, more enveloping ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... remembers that Carlyle dismissed Herbert Spencer as a "never-ending ass." One remembers that Byron thought nothing of Keats—"Jack Ketch," as he called him. One remembers that the critics damned Wagner's operas as a new form of sin. One remembers that Ruskin denounced one of Whistler's nocturnes as a pot of paint flung in the face of the British public. In the world of science we have a thousand similar examples of new genius being hailed by the critics as folly and charlatanry. Only the other day a biographer of Lord Lister was ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... who had evidently arrived while I was in the next room appeared to be regarding Whistling Jim with some curiosity, and presently spoke to him, inquiring if he was the negro that played on the piano. Whistler replied that he could "sorter" play. "If you are Whistling Jim," I said, "play us a plantation tune. I heard a man say the other day that the finest tune he ever heard was one you played for him. It was something about 'My ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris

... contemplated doings. These kindergarten pictures I will endeavor to paint, not in that "over-the-head" verbosity or "under-the-feet" profundity and intricacy of the political economy pedant, which are as the canvases of the Whistler school to the masses; but rather will I use the brush of the artisan who in giving us our white fences, our gray cottages, and our green blinds sets off those things which make up the pictures the people really understand ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... WHISTLER renowned in the gibbering realms of Cocytus Drew it—and draws us along through ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various

... by much the same route to his sister's cottage, but did not attempt to conceal his movements. On the contrary, knowing that the sloop must have got clear of the harbour by that time, he went along the streets whistling cheerfully. He had been a noted, not to say noisy, whistler when a boy, and the habit had not forsaken him in his old age. On turning sharp round a corner, he ran against two men, one of whom swore at him, but ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne

... accomplish. Whether all these lines will be opened by 1862, it is impossible to predict; Russia has to feel its way towards civilisation. During the progress of the Moscow and St Petersburg Railway, a curious enterprise was determined on. According to the New York Tribune, Major Whistler, who had the charge of the construction of the railway, proposed to the emperor that the rolling-stock should be made in Russia, instead of imported, Messrs Harrison, Winans, and Eastwick, engineers of the United States, accepted a contract ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various



Words linked to "Whistler" :   signaller, flycatcher, Barrow's goldeneye, Old World flycatcher, Bucephala, duck, marmot, genus Bucephala, Pachycephala, genus Pachycephala, painter, true flycatcher, Bucephala islandica, signaler, whistle



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