Prints

Fine art print reproductions from original Whistler paintings can give you the opportunity to enjoy some of his most famous artworks in your own home.

The darker, reduced palette that the artist incorporated into some of his work may not be best suited to smaller art prints. Perhaps some of his brighter portraits would make more of an impact. The paintings section of this website features the main highlights from his entire career and is worth a browse for those looking to choose a Whistler print. The style of James Abbott McNeill Whistler is classed as Tonalism, though there are clear similarities with the work of the French Impressionists. That particular movement was named after one of Claude Monet's early works, a landscape scene titled Impression, Sunrise. There are many aspects of that painting within several Whistler landscape paintings, who preferred an abstract form with colour used for mood. Whistler may not have had the qualities of Monet but he was still a highly skilled operator and played his own role in the development of 19th century art.

These artistic developments were essential in order to get to enjoy some of the later art movements that appeared in the 20th century. Without the movement towards abstraction, we may then not have had some of the great paintings such as Pablo Picasso's Mediterranean Landscape. Surrealism pushed things on further and gifted us the likes of Rene Magritte's Son of Man plus Persistence of Memory and Elephants by Salvador Dali.

The simplicity of impressionism and tonalism is best served up with a similarly modest frame, perhaps a square, wooden one. The colour choice should be complementary to the print itself, which in the case of most of Whistler's paintings would be black or white. He was famed for making use of restricted palettes and enjoyed the challenge that this brought.