But Bohemia was defined first - at least for Americans - by expatriate painters like John Singer Sargent who spent much time in Europe.

While living in Paris, Stein became close friends with an American expatriate painter named William Edwards Cook, who was born in Independence in 1881.

The dazzling Village Street, West Indies, by Montréal's James Wilson Morrice (1865-1924), is a fine work by this most celebrated of Canada's expatriate painters.

He exhibited at the Rose Rabow Gallery in San Francisco 1959-1977, and was associated with expatriate painters Gordon Onslow-Ford and other artists who coalesced around the space.

"Whistler was a great late-19th-century expatriate painter, and like Sargent and Cassatt, he appeals to both types of buyers," said Paul R. Provost, head of Christie's American paintings department.

Although 13 years his junior he remained close to his older brother, the noted American expatriate painter, Charles Sprague Pearce.

He traveled through France, at one point visiting the black expatriate painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, and had a solo show in Paris within his first year.

As a music student in Rome in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Hattie Bishop became close friends with Anita Vedder, daughter of the American expatriate painter, Elihu Vedder.

Whistler's works, including this one, had attracted a number of imitators and a number of similarly posed and restricted colour palette paintings soon appeared particularly by American expatriate painters.

But first, a major retrospective by the American expatriate painter and sculptor Margo Price opened today in the wake of some last-minute publicity.