Walter Greaves (1846-1930)

Greaves and his brother Harry met Whistler in 1863 when he moved to 7 Lindsey Row, only two doors away from the Greaves’s house. Nearby neighbours included Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne. The brothers soon became enthralled with the cosmopolitan American, working as his studio assistants, buying his art supplies, and preparing his canvasses and pigments. Walter and Henry Greaves had begun painting at an early age, choosing local Chelsea views as their subject matter and often working and signing their pictures together. Walter focussed on the composition and Henry’s talent was in the details.

Walter Greaves later recalled that he ‘lost my head over Whistler when I first met him and saw his painting’, and as Gordon Fleming notes ‘Whistler’s domination over the brother’s was total. They even tried to look like him. they wore hats, ties and gloves like his, and they grew little moustaches’ (G. Fleming, James Abbott McNeil Whistler: A Life, New York, 1991, p. 100). Whistler also influenced Greaves’s technique away from a tight, detailed style to a much looser, bolder method.

The present portrait is a confident tribute by Greaves of his mentor. Whistler stands with an assertive stance, his piercing eyes looking directly out at the viewer. He embodies Sir John Lavery’s description of him: his ‘eyebrows were thick and black, his eyes sharp as needles – he had beautiful hands…and his general appearance was that of a small alert ringmaster, whip in hand’ (quoted by E. Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou: the Butterfly and the Bat, New York, 1995, p. 27).