Perhaps the chief infirmity of Whistler’s make-up was his lack of patience. Nature had endowed him with a bright, alert mind that flashed and scintillated but wavered perhaps in continuity of purpose. It was a true-enough American mind in that at first it balked at effort and sought to vault over obstacles by bursts of speed or sudden inspiration. The average American believes more in inspiration than in work, though as applied directly to Whistler we must not push that point too far. There were periods when he labored hard but there was no prolonged patience, no calm philosophy of enduring and biding his time. As a boy he would never submit entirely to education, and as a young man the rigor of studio-training fretted him. He took as much of each as pleased him and let the rest go. He resented guidance and resisted discipline as more or less of a restraint on individuality. The story of his birth, family, and early education is told minutely in the excellent biography by the Pennells.[11] From their account it appears that Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834. He was reported to have been born in Baltimore, and he did not deny the report. “If any one likes to think I was born in Baltimore, why should I deny it? It is of no consequence to me.” His parents were refined, educated people, the best that the United States at that time was capable of producing. His father was a West Point graduate, a major in the United States army, and, at the time of Whistler’s birth, an engineer, building locks and canals at Lowell. In 1843 the whole Whistler family went to Russia, where the father had been called by the Czar to build the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. In St. Petersburg the children were carefully tutored, especially in such polite learning as the languages and the arts. Whistler was already drawing in a boyish way, and was no doubt receiving impressions of art from various sources. In 1847 he was in England for the summer with his mother, and again in 1849 he went there for the winter because his health could not stand the Russian climate. In the latter year his father died, and shortly thereafter Mrs. Whistler, with the children, returned to America. Whistler the boy was sent to school at Pomfret, and his mother records that he was still “an excitable spirit with littler perseverance,” and had “habits of indolence.” [11] _The Life of James McNeill Whistler_, by E. R. and J. Pennell, Philadelphia, 1911.