With A Great Deal of Dash

American card from around 1900 satirizing Aestheticism and the new (and scandalous) 'Impressionist' style of painting. (Though the jaunty canvas on the easel bears little resemblance to anything remotely Impressionist.) The artist caricatured here is James McNeill Whistler, the gifted expatriate American painter--long resident in London and Paris-- whose flowing Bohemian locks, society-mad ways, and close friendship with Oscar Wilde in the 1890s marked him as worthy of lampoon by righteous pillocks everywhere. He had the last laugh. A gorgeous painter.