James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was an American-born painter and graphic artist, active mainly in England.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was born in in 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the third son of West Point graduate and civil engineer Major George Washington Whistler, and his second wife Anna Matilda McNeill. After brief stays in Stonington, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, the Whistlers moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Major served as an civil engineer for the construction of a railroad line to Moscow. James Abbott was aged nine when his family moved to Russia, and he spent several of his childhood years there, studying drawing at the Imperial Academy of Science.

He soon became an inveterate traveller. In 1848 he went to live with his sister and her husband in London, and after his father's death the following year the family returned to the United States and settled in Pomfret, Connecticut. Whistler enrolled in the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1851, where he excelled in Robert W. Weir's drawing class. He was dismissed from the academy in 1854 for "deficiency in chemistry", and after brief periods working for the Winans Locomotive Works in Baltimore, and the drawings division of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (he learnt etching as a US navy cartographer), resolved to become an artist and moved to Europe permanently in 1855.

Whistler settled in Paris first and moved to London in 1859, although often returning to France.  His further travels took him to South America, North America and back to Europe.

During the late 1880s and 1890s Whistler achieved recognition as an artist of international stature. His paintings were acquired by public collections, he received awards at exhibitions, and he was elected to such prestigious professional associations as the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. His portrait of Thomas Carlyle was bought by the Corporation of Glasgow in 1891 for 1,000 guineas and soon afterwards his most famous work, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother (1871), was bought by the French state (it is now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and he was made a member of the Légion d'Honneur. In 1898 he was elected president of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers.

His wife, whom he married in 1888 developed cancer and it is said that he stayed in Lyme Regis because it was helping his wife battle the illness.  He stayed at what is now The Royal Lion Hotel in Broad Street.  From a bay window in 1895, Whistler the artist spotted a grocer’s daughter Rose Rendall in the street, and decided to paint his ‘Little Rose of Lyme’.  He went out and told her he intended to paint her, whereupon she ran away, thinking he meant to paint her, like a house. After it was explained that he would paint a picture of her, he rewarded her with a doll from Paris, which is now shown in the Lyme Regis Museum.

"The Master Smith of Lyme Regis" is a portrait of the local blacksmith whose descendants still live in the town.

Whistler also made two "etchings" while staying in Lyme titled "The Little Steps" and "The Little Doorway".  It looks as if they were street scenes from either Coombe Street and/or The Marine Parade.

Both the Little Rose and 'The Master Smith of Lyme Regis', were bought by the Boston Museum where they currently reside.

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