Primary Sources

The Library of Congress has many primary source materials by and about the artist James McNeill Whistler. Materials from the pictorial collections include original drawings, etchings, prints, lithographs, dry points, photographs, and more. In addition, the Pennell-Whistler collection includes correspondence, articles, and other papers documenting the life and work of Whistler.

View ALL digitized versions of Whistler's drawings
The Library of Congress acquired this set of Whistler drawings primarily from Joseph and Elizabeth Robins Pennell, with subsequent purchases through the Pennell Fund. The other master drawings came from many different sources, including the Gardiner Greene Hubbard Collection (gift in 1898) and the George Lothrop Bradley Collection (bequest in 1919).
View additional works by James McNeill Whistler
This link provides to all of Whistler's works digitized by the Library of Congress, including etchings, prints, lithographs, dry points, photographs, and more.

Selected Original Whistler Drawings

James McNeill Whistler, artist. Whistler's butterfly. [between 1890 and 1892]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

James McNeill Whistler, artist. Merit its own reward, or, The best man leads off the squad. [1852]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

James McNeill Whistler, artist. Study for self-portrait, half-length, facing slightly right, with coat drapped over shoulder. [between 1898 and 1900]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Additional Primary Sources on James McNeill Whistler

The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are included when available.

Pennell Collection of Whistlerania
Published/Created: 1850-1930, bulk 1880-1920.
The Joseph and Elizabeth Robins Pennell Collection of Whistleriana was presented to the Library in 1917. All nonmanuscript items from the Pennell gift are kept in the Prints and Photographs Division. The collection includes catalogs documenting exhibitions at which Whistler showed his work, reproductions of Whistler's paintings, biographical photographs, books, and pamphlets. The Pennells donated most of the 300 Whistler lithographs, etchings, and drypoints recorded in the fine prints card catalog and listed in American Prints in the Library of Congress: A Catalog of the Collection, (Baltimore: Published for the Library of Congress by the Johns Hopkins Press, 1970) compiled by Karen F. Beall and others. Also in the collection are twenty original pen and pencil sketches.
Pennell-Whistler Collection
Published/Created: 1597-1937
View finding aid for the collection
Correspondence, lectures, drafts of books and articles, clippings, and other papers of Joseph Pennell, his wife Elizabeth Robins Pennell, and James McNeill Whistler documenting their careers as artists and authors as well as the artistic climate and mores of the period.
The gentle art of making enemies : as pleasingly exemplified in many instances, wherein the serious ones of this earth, carefully exasperated, have been prettily spurred on to unseemliness and indiscretion, while overcome by an undue sense of right by James McNeill Whistler
Call Number: ND237.W6 A3 1924
Published/Created: 1924