James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was an American painter based principally in London and Paris whose radically tonal, atmosphere-first canvases placed him decades ahead of his time. Trained in Paris and deeply influenced by Velázquez and Japanese woodblock prints, he developed a style of extreme painterly economy — his nocturnes of the Thames in fog, his spare interior scenes, his delicate portraits — that stripped composition down to essentials of tone and color, often giving works musical titles like Nocturne in Blue and Gold or Symphony in White to signal that he was after an emotional rather than documentary truth. His famously litigious personality brought him into court against John Ruskin, whom he sued for libel after Ruskin dismissed his painting as "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face," and though he won only a farthing in damages, the trial made him a celebrity. His influence on Modernism — on the idea that art need answer only to its own formal laws — was profound and lasting.