While his father was building the Moscow-Saint Petersburg railroad, James A. McNeill Whistler studied art at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg. He spent three years at the U.S. Military Academy and several months making maps for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey before going to Paris in 1855 to study painting. Whistler produced works now hanging in the major museums of the world, although he perhaps is best known for his Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1, Portrait of the Artist's Mother. This work is known by a simpler title: Whistler's Mother.