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James McNeill Whistler is among the greatest of painters when you are in the mood for him and oddly daunting when you aren't. He was a radical dandy, who imbued the nuances of style with something like moral zeal. Taking him seriously, as he should be taken, requires a willed suspension of incredulity. After flunking out of West Point, in 1855, when he was twenty-one, he turned his back on America for good and abandoned himself to modish longueurs of London and Paris; he died a hundred years ago, in 1903. For him, the trivial--the just-so fall of a feather boa, say--bordered on the sublime. Some people dote on such socially charged arcana, which upholster Victorian ...