An advocate of "art for art's sake," American-born painter James McNeill Whistler valued the beauty found in everyday life. He was a leading figure in the 19th-century Aesthetic Movement as it evolved in Victorian England, ultimately transforming Americans' ideas of art's purpose.

His highly-influential 1871 oil-on-canvas "Arrangement in Grey and Black" (Musée d'Orsay), dubbed by early onlookers as "Whistler's Mother," was quite literally, to the artist, what his own title stated. He wrote: "Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?"

On view at the Colby College Museum of Art, in Waterville, Maine, is The Search for Beauty: Whistler and His Time. This exhibition presents Whistler in the context of his American contemporaries and followers whose work exemplifies the search for beauty that characterized the Aesthetic Movement.

The exhibition draws on the remarkable gift of 201 Whistler prints, and other works, promised to Colby in 2007 by Peter Lunder, the former Dexter Shoe Company president, and his wife, Paula, who live in Maine, and have homes in Palm Beach and Boston.

The Lunders assembled one of the nation's largest private collections of American art. Their extraordinary gift of nearly 500 works by such American masters as Georgia O'Keeffe, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Sol LeWitt, William Merritt Chase, George Inness, and Edward Hopper, once valued in excess of $100 million, helped position Colby as a leading center for the study of American art.

The Whistler exhibition runs through January 2, 2011. Winslow Homer, Will Barnet, and Sharon Lockhart will also be on view in Colby's summer exhibitions.