PEN AND INK SKETCH, MADE AT WEST POINT.
On the death of the father, April 7th, 1849, the family returned to the United States and settled in Stonington, Conn., and young Whistler attended school at Pomfret, Conn. In 1851, seventeen years old, he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point and was enrolled as James McNeill Whistler, taking his mother's maiden name as a middle name. Like Poe, he does not seem to have been over-fond of a routine military career. No doubt something of the artist's temperament had awakened in him, and, like all young talents, he objected to regulated study, and tried to satisfy the vague aspirations of his unsettled consciousness with work that was more congenial to him.
He left West Point in July, 1854. The technical discharge was "deficiency in chemistry," but it was probably general unfitness for a career of discipline and exactness. Through some influence he received an appointment in the drawing division of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey at Washington, D. C., at the salary of $1.50 a day, but he resigned two months later. The government records show that he worked only six and a half days in January and five and three-quarter days in February. He apparently had no taste for map designing and bird's-eye views. It is said he paid more attention to the deliberate drawing of little trees and detail than to the typographic facts.
DRAWING MADE FOR THE UNITED STATES COAST AND GEODETIC SURVEY.
His military career had come to an end; he had to do something else, and he felt that he had to become an artist at any price. Money was not over abundant in the Whistler family, but there was sufficient to allow him a few years' leisure to study art wherever he chose, and so he went to Paris, and joined the youthful band of artists, who fought for modernism and a new technique, and the glory of the métier, with an enthusiasm, a bravery and devotion that has rarely been encountered. There he lived the regular student life for four years. He entered the atelier of Charles Gleyre, but only stayed for a short while. He preferred to look about for himself. At one time he and young Tissot made a copy of Ingres' "Angelique."
Whistler arrived in France shortly after the coup d'état. Paris was not then what she is to-day. None of the chain of boulevards around the centre of the town, not even the boulevard of St. Michael, which became the great thoroughfare for artists, were in existence in their present condition. But Whistler had come at the time when Paris was being reconstructed into one of the most beautiful cities of the world, and, when the Imperial régime unfolded its full splendour. Paris became intoxicated with its own beauty, and the social life blossomed forth in all its elegance and frivolity.