Walter Greaves

Walter Greaves met James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) in the early 1860s, when he and one of his brothers, Henry (1844-1904) met Whistler and showed him the sights of the River Thames. In 1863 Whistler took a house at Chelsea in Lindsey Row (no. 7), two doors away from where the Greaves' lived. Walter and his brother were the sons of a well-known Chelsea boat builder and waterman who was J. M. W. Turner's boatman. Both brothers would become Whistler's studio assistants (1863-65) and close friends. Walter would say of Whistler, "He taught us to paint and we taught him the waterman's jerk."
Greaves drew, painted and caricatured Whistler several times over the course of their friendship, which lasted for about twenty years. In the present sheet, Whistler sports a monocle, wears a fitted frock coat, and dons a dandyish hat. The pose is similar to Greaves' portrait of Whistler that probably dates to 1871 (exhibited Washington, D.C., National Portrait Gallery, In Pursuit of the Butterfly: Portraits of J.A.M. Whistler, 1995, no. 35), when Whistler was thirty-eight. Greaves was accused of claiming that unfinished works by Whistler were his own in an exhibition in 1911. His reputation was ruined consequently and he fell into financial distress.