James McNeill Whistler and France

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Singletary
Leonardo ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Christopher Crouch ◽  
Hilary Taylor

Author(s):  
Andrew Glazzard

Charles Augustus Milverton, blackmailer of society women in the 1904 story that bears his name, is assumed by critics to be based on a real person – but which real person is open to doubt. The favourite is Charles Augustus Howell, a larger-than-life associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (whose members knew him as ‘Owl’), friend to James McNeill Whistler and Algernon Charles Swinburne, and one-time secretary to John Ruskin. However, it is by no means established that Howell was, in Lancelyn Green’s words, a ‘scoundrel and blackmailer’. He certainly seems to have fallen out with a lot of people, but the more outlandish stories about his life and death – Oscar Wilde may be the source for the claim that Howell was found dying outside a Chelsea public house ‘with his throat cut and a ten shilling piece between his clenched teeth’ – may be urban myths rather than actual facts: his death certificate, for instance, records that he died of pneumonia.


Leonardo ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 244
Author(s):  
Edward R. Pope ◽  
Andrew McLaren Young ◽  
Margaret MacDonald ◽  
Robin Spencer ◽  
Hamish Miles

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