Daniel Jerome Elwell
Date of birth: 22 June 1847
Place of birth: Gloucester, MA
Date of death: 27 December 1912
Place of death: Naples, Italy
Category: artist, sitter
Identity:
D. Jerome Elwell, son of Elisabeth and George Elwell, was a landscape and marine painter. His pastels of Venice, drawn in 1881, are sometimes mistaken for Whistler's, and his signature has been occasionally altered to look more like Whistler's butterfly. By 1886 he was back in Boston, and lived and worked mainly in that area.
Life:
Elwell was on friendly terms with Whistler throughout the 1880s and 1890s. In August 1900 Elwell travelled to Domburg in Holland with Whistler, staying there together for a week. In this year Elwell also sat to Whistler for his portrait, Portrait of Jerome Elwell y536.
Elwell exhibited at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1903.
Bibliography:
Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, and Joseph Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 2 vols, London and Philadelphia, 1908; Who Was Who in American Art, 1564-1975, 3 vols., Madison, CT, 1999; Johnson, J., and Anna Greutzner, Dictionary of British Artists 1880-1940, Woodbridge, 1980; Young, Andrew McLaren, Margaret F. MacDonald, Robin Spencer and Hamish Miles, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, New Haven and London, 1980.
