Walter Greaves, who began life as the son of a Chelsea boat builder and was initially trained as a shipwright and boatman, was a painter, etcher, and topographical draftsman. As an artist he was essentially self-taught until the early 1860s, when he and his brother Henry (1844-1904) met James Abbott McNeil Whistler (1834-1903). They became Whistler's pupils, studio assistants, advisers on Thames topography, and friends for nearly two decades. Walter's earliest oil paintings are charming in their naiveté, and he produced a significant number of etchings and drawings of views in Chelsea. Under Whistler's direct tutelage, Greaves painted his most inspired pictures, "Nocturnes" or "Moonlights," in imitation of his master's most successful landscape inventions. Their relationship cooled in the 1890s, and Greaves lapsed into obscurity until rediscovered by William Marchant, owner of the prestigious Goupil Galleries. Marchant organized a major Greaves retrospective in 1911, but rather than advance the impoverished artist's reputation, it precipitated a vitriolic exchange in the press between Marchant and Whistler's biographer and champion, Joseph Pennell, who accused Greaves of deception and plagiarism. In true Whistlerian fashion, Marchant countered with an eighty-page pamphlet, A Reply to an Attack Made by One of Whistler's Biographers on a Pupil of Whistler Mr. Walter Greaves (London, 1911), but neither this elaborate defense nor the public support Greaves received from Whistler's most successful student, Walter Sickert (1860-1942), could sustain the Greaves revival. The artist died destitute as a Poor Brother of London's Charterhouse.
