BERKELEY, CA.- James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), the expatriate American artist, was a prolific and innovative painter, watercolorist, and printmaker. Throughout his lively career Whistler was known as a discerning collector of Japanese prints and as a quick-witted, sharp-tongued advocate of “art for art’s sake.” Whistler’s roots were in Realism, but his approach Modernist; his brand of Realism eschewed narrative and sentimentality and instead set the incidents and characters of the everyday into compositions determined by design, color, and tonal variation. For example, Whistler uses prosaic details to serve design and composition in numerous images of life along the Thames River, such as Rotherhithe (1860). Similarly, in his Venetian works, the minutiae of daily activity on the canals and lagoons