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Title: Recollections and impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler
Author: Eddy, Arthur Jerome
Language: English
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OF JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER ***
RECOLLECTIONS AND IMPRESSIONS
OF
JAMES A. McNEILL WHISTLER
[Illustration]
RECOLLECTIONS AND
IMPRESSIONS
OF
JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER
BY
ARTHUR JEROME EDDY
AUTHOR OF “DELIGHT: THE
SOUL OF ART,” ETC.
[Illustration]
PHILADELPHIA _&_ LONDON
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903
BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
Published November, 1903
_Electrotyped and Printed by
J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, U. S. A._
_To L. O. E._
_This Sixteenth Day of September
Nineteen Hundred and Three_
[Illustration]
FOREWORD
[Illustration: text decoration]
Most of what is contained herein has been collected from time to time
within the past ten years and jotted down for use in certain lectures on
Whistler and his art. The lectures were, as is this book, a tribute to
the great painter.
The reminiscences are mostly personal. Many of the anecdotes--though
perhaps equally familiar to others--were had from the artist’s own lips.
The views concerning his art, whether right or wrong, were formed while
watching him at work day after day, and after many interviews in which,
now and then, he would speak plainly concerning art. At the same time
not so much as a thought must be attributed to him unless expressly
quoted.
The biographical data--just sufficient to furnish a connecting thread
and aid in the appreciation--have been gathered from casual sources, and
are, no doubt, subject to incidental corrections.
Only when a duly authorized “life and letters” is published by those who
have access to the material that must exist will the great artist be
known by the world as he really was--a profoundly earnest, serious,
loving, and lovable man.
Meanwhile, those who believe in his art must--like the writer--speak
their convictions for what they are worth.
CONTENTS
[Illustration: text decoration]
I
PAGE
Why he never Returned to America--Tariff on Art--South
America--Valparaiso 15
II
A Family of Soldiers--Grandfather founded Chicago--Birth--St.
Petersburg--West Point--Coast Survey--His
Military Spirit 25
III
An American--The Puritan Element--Attitude of England
and France--Racial and Universal Qualities
in Art--Art-Loving Nations 47
IV
Early Days in Paris and Venice--Etchings, Lithographs,
and Water-Colors--“Propositions” and “Ten
o’Clock” 79
V
Chelsea--The Royal Academy--“Portrait of His
Mother”--“Carlyle”--Grosvenor Gallery--The
“Peacock Room”--Concerning Exhibitions 109
VI
The Ruskin Suit--His Attitude towards the World and
towards Art--“The Gentle Art of Making Enemies”--Critics
and Criticism 140
VII
Supreme as a Colorist--Color and Music--His Susceptibility
to Color--Ruskin and Color--Art and Nature 173
VIII
The Royal Society of British Artists--In Paris once
more--At Home and at Work 217
IX
Portrait-Painting--How he Differed from his Great
Predecessors--The “Likeness”--Composition of
Color--No Commercial Side--Baronet _vs._ Butterfly 244
X
The School of Carmen--In Search of Health--Chelsea
once more--The End 277
Index 289
ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration: text decoration]
PAGE
WHISTLER _Frontispiece._
From a sketch by Rajon
CREPUSCULE IN FLESH COLOR AND GREEN; VALPARAISO 22
HARMONY IN GRAY AND GREEN. PORTRAIT OF MISS
ALEXANDER 50
THE LANGE LEIZEN--OF THE SIX MARKS--PURPLE
AND ROSE 58
PLATE MADE WHILE IN THE EMPLOY OF THE GOVERNMENT
AT WASHINGTON, 1854-55 88
ARRANGEMENT IN GRAY AND BLACK. PORTRAIT OF
THE PAINTER’S MOTHER 114
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK. LA DAME AU BRODEQUINE
JAUNE 120
ARRANGEMENT IN GRAY AND BLACK. PORTRAIT OF
THOMAS CARLYLE 122
NOCTURNE, BLACK AND GOLD. THE FALLING
ROCKET 140
BLUE AND SILVER; BLUE WAVE, BIARRITZ 174
LITTLE ROSE, LYME REGIS 274
SYMPHONY IN WHITE, NO. II. THE LITTLE WHITE
GIRL 282
“_This man, who took no joy in the ways of his brethren--who cared
not for conquest, and fretted in the field--this designer of quaint
patterns--this deviser of the beautiful--who perceived in Nature
about him curious curvings, as faces are seen in the fire--this
dreamer apart, was the first artist._”--WHISTLER’S “Ten o’Clock.”
RECOLLECTIONS AND IMPRESSIONS
OF
JAMES A. McNEILL WHISTLER
[Illustration]
_I_
_Why he never Returned to America--Tariff on Art--South
America--Valparaiso._
Now that the end has come and the master is no more, the scattered
sheaves of stories and anecdotes, of facts and fancies, of recollections
and impressions may be gathered together from the four quarters, and the
story of his work be told,--not in detail, not in sequence, for some one
will write his life, but in fragmentary fashion as the thoughts occur.
* * * * *
For the better part of his life Whistler fought the prejudices of all
Europe and of his own country.
He once said, with a tinge of bitterness in his tone:
“The papers in America seem content to publish second-hand whatever they
find about me in English journals that is mean and vindictive or that
savors of ridicule. Aside from the hopeless want of originality
displayed in echoing the stupidities of others, what has become of that
boasted love of fair play? Even the phlegmatic Englishman takes the
part of a fellow-countryman against many--quite regardless; but the
American press--bully like--leans to the side of the bully and weakly
cries, bravo! whenever the snarling pack on this side snaps at the heels
of an American who mocks them at the doors of their own kennels.
“One would think the American people would back a countryman--right or
wrong--who is fighting against odds; but for thirty years they laughed
when the English laughed, sneered when they sneered, scoffed when they
scoffed, lied when they lied, until,--well, until it has been necessary
to reduce both nations to submission.”
For a time he worked without a word, then:
“But when France--in all things discerning--proclaimed the truth,
America--still blind--hastened to shout that she, too, saw the light,
and poured forth adulation _ad nauseam_.”
“But would you say that Americans are as dense as the English?”
“Heaven forbid that the Englishman’s one undeniable superiority be
challenged; but an Englishman is so honest in his stupidity that one
loves him for the--virtue; whereas the American is a ‘smart Aleck’ in
his ignorance, and therefore intolerable.”
But that was years ago, when the unconverted were more numerous on this
side,--there are still a number of stubborn dissenters, but in the
chorus of praise their voices are scarce more than a few discordant
notes.
Of late Whistler had but little cause to complain of lack of
appreciation on this side,--for, while an art so subtle as his is bound
to be more or less misunderstood, critics, amateurs, and a goodly
portion of the public have for a long time acknowledged his greatness as
an etcher, a lithographer, and a painter. In fact, for at least ten
years past his works have been gradually coming to this country--where
they belong. England and Scotland have been searched for prints and
paintings until the great collections--much greater than the public
know--of his works are here. Some day the American people will be made
more fully acquainted with the beautiful things he has done, many of
which have never been seen save by a few intimate friends.
The struggle for recognition was long and bitter,--so long and so bitter
that it developed in him the habits of controversy and whimsical
irritability by which he was for a generation more widely known than
through his art.
* * * * *
When it was once reported that he was going to America, he said, “It has
been suggested many times; but, you see, I find art so absolutely
irritating to the people that, really, I hesitate before exasperating
another nation.”
To another who asked him when he was coming, he answered, with emphasis,
“When the duty on art is removed.”
The duty on art was a source of constant irritation to Whistler,--for,
while the works of American artists residing abroad are admitted free,
the artist is compelled to make oaths, invoices, and take out consular
certificates, and pay the consular fees in line with the shipper of
olive oil and cheese.
There was even a time, under the present law, when the works of American
painters were not admitted free. The law reads, the works of American
artists “residing _temporarily_ abroad” shall be admitted free, etc.
Some department at Washington made an off-hand ruling that if an
American artist had resided more than five years abroad his works would
be subject to duty as those of a foreigner, thereby expatriating with a
stroke of the pen four-fifths of the Americans who are working like
dogs--but as artists--to make the world beautiful.
To Whistler, Sargent, and the many prosperous ones the ruling did not
greatly matter, but to the younger men who could not earn money enough
to get home it did matter, and for a time it looked as if American art
in Europe would be obliterated,--for American art in Europe depends for
its support and aggressiveness on the American artists over there. Drive
these men home, or expatriate them, so as to compel them to cast their
lots with France, or England, or Italy, and what would become of those
American sections in foreign exhibitions which for at least a dozen
years past have commanded the serious consideration of all thoughtful
observers as containing elements of strength, sobriety, and promise
found nowhere else in the entire world of art?
Happily an appeal to the Secretary of the Treasury--a man interested in
art--resulted in an immediate reversal of the ruling, and the works of
American artists come in free unless the artist declares his intention
of residing abroad permanently.
But while the ban on American painting is lifted, sculpture is in a bad
way. Under the law only sculpture “wrought by hand” from marble or metal
by the sculptor is to be classed as art. Inasmuch as the sculptor never
did work bronze by hand, and nowadays very rarely touches the marble,
there is no sculpture which comes within the law. The federal courts of
New York, high and low, have soberly held that unless it is shown that
bronzes are “wrought by hand” by the sculptor, instead of cast from
plaster, which in turn is made from the clay, they are commercial
products and classed with bronze cooking utensils at forty-five per
cent. duty. However, a federal judge in Chicago, somewhat more familiar
with art processes, has held that the New York decisions are arrant
nonsense, and original bronzes by Rodin, St. Gaudens, and other
sculptors, made in the only known way of producing bronzes, should be
classed as art. What other federal courts may hold--each, under our
wonderful system, having the right to its opinion until the Supreme
Court is called upon to finally end the differences--Heaven alone knows;
but for the present it behooves lovers of art to bring in their original
bronzes and marbles by way of Chicago.
These were some of the things Whistler--in common with many an ordinary
man--could not understand.
* * * * *
A few years ago an effort was made to have an exhibition of his pictures
in Boston. He was appealed to, but refused:
“God bless me, why should you hold an exhibition of pictures in America?
The people do not care for art.”
“How do you know? You have not been there for many years.”
“How do I know! Why, haven’t you a law to keep out pictures and statues?
Is it not in black and white that the works of the great masters must
not enter America, that they are not wanted----”
“But----”
“There are no ‘buts’ about it except the fool who butts his head against
the barrier you have erected. A people that tolerates such a law has no
love for art,--their protestation is mere pretence.”
That a great nation should deliberately discourage the importation of
beautiful things, should wallow in the mire of ugliness and refuse to be
cleansed by art, was to him a mystery,--for what difference does it make
whether painting, poetry, and music come out of the East or out of the
West, so long as they add to the happiness of a people? And why should
painting and sculpture find the gate closed when poetry and music are
admitted?
He did not know the petty commercial considerations which control
certain of the painters and sculptors and some of the institutions
supposed to be devoted to art.
For is not art the most “infant” of all the “infant industries” of this
great commercial nation? And should not the brush-worker at home be
given his meed of protection against the pauper brush-workers of
Europe--even against Rembrandt and Velasquez and all the glorious
Italians?
Beethoven and Mendelssohn and Mozart, Shakespeare and Milton,--their
works, even their original manuscripts, if in existence, though costly
beyond many paintings, come in without let or hinderance; but the work
of the painter, the original manuscript of the poet in line, of the
composer of harmonies in color, may not cross the border without
tribute.
A symphony in sound is welcomed; a symphony in color is rejected. Why
this discrimination in favor of the ear and against the eye?
There is no reason, but an inordinate amount of selfishness, in it all.
The wire-pulling painter at home, backed up by the commercially-managed
art institution, makes himself felt in the chambers at Washington where
tariffs are arranged, and painting and sculpture are removed from the
free list and placed among the pots and kettles of commerce.
Where is the poet and where is the musician in this distribution of
advantages? Why should American poetry and American music be left to
compete with the whole world while American painting and American
sculpture are suitably encouraged by a tariff of twenty per cent.?--a
figure fixed, no doubt, as is the plea, to make good the difference in
wages,--pauper labor of Europe,--pauper artists. Alas! too true; shut
the vagabonds out that their aristocratic American confrères residing at
home may maintain their “standard of living.”
* * * * *
Of all the peoples on the face of the globe, high and low, civilized and
savage, there is just one that discourages the importation of the
beautiful, and that one happens to be the youngest and the richest of
all--the one most in need of what it wilfully excludes.
* * * * *
Notwithstanding all these reasons for not coming, he had a great desire
to visit this country, and in letters to friends on this side he would
again and again express his firm intention to come the following summer
or winter, as the season might be. The death of Mrs. Whistler, some six
years ago, and his own ill health prevented,--but there was no lack of
desire.
Strangely enough, he did take a sailing-ship for South America, away
back in the sixties, and while there painted the “Crepuscule in Flesh
Color and Green; Valparaiso” and the “Nocturne Blue and Gold;
Valparaiso.”
Speaking of the voyage, he said:
“I went out in a slow sailing-ship, the only passenger. During the
voyage I made quite a number of sketches and painted one or two
sea-views,--pretty good things I thought at the time. Arriving in
port, I gave them to the purser to
[Illustration]
take back to England for me. On my return, some time later, I did
not find the package, and made inquiries for the purser. He had
changed ships and disappeared entirely. Many years passed, when one
day a friend, visiting my studio, said:
“‘By the way, I saw some marines by you in the oddest place you can
imagine.’
“‘Where?’ I asked, amazed.
“‘I happened in the room of an old fellow who had once been a
purser on a South American ship, and while talking with him saw
tacked up on the wall several sketches which I recognized as yours.
I looked at them closely, and asked the fellow where he got them.
“‘“Oh, these things,” he said; “why, a chap who went out with us
once painted them on board, off-hand like, and gave them to me.
Don’t amount to much, do they?”
“‘“Why, man, they are by Whistler.”
“‘“Whistler,” he said, blankly. “Who’s Whistler?”
“‘“Why, Whistler the artist,--the great painter.”
“‘“Whistler, Whistler. I believe that was his name. But that chap
warn’t no painter. He was just a swell who went out with the
captain; he thought he could paint some, and gave me those things
when we got to Valparaiso. No, I don’t care to let them go,--for,
somehow or other, they look more like the sea than real
pictures.”’”
Whistler made several attempts to find these sketches, but without
success.
As illustrating his facility of execution when time pressed, he painted
the “Crepuscule in Flesh Color and Green,” which is a large canvas and
one of his best things, at a single sitting, having prepared his colors
in advance of the chosen hour.
He could paint with the greatest rapidity when out-of-doors and it was
important to catch certain effects of light and color.
In 1894 he exhibited in Paris three small marines which were marvels of
clearness, force, and precision; he had painted them in a few hours
while in a small boat, which the boatman steadied against the waves as
best he could. He placed the canvas against the seat in front of him and
worked away direct from nature.
_II_
_A Family of Soldiers--Grandfather founded Chicago--Birth--St.
Petersburg--West Point--Coast Survey--His Military Spirit._
He came of a race of fighters. The family is found towards the end of
the fifteenth century in Oxfordshire, at Goring and Whitechurch on the
Thames; one branch was connected with the Websters of Battle-Abbey, and
descendants still live in the vicinity; another branch is in Essex, and
from this sprang Dr. Daniel Whistler, President of the College of
Physicians in London in the time of Charles the Second, and described as
“a quaint gentleman of rare humor,” and frequently mentioned in “Pepys’s
Diary.”
From the Oxfordshire branch, one Ralph, a son of Hugh Whistler of
Goring, went to Ireland and founded the Irish branch from which sprang
Major John Whistler, the first representative of the family in America,
and grandfather of the painter.
Major Whistler was a British soldier under Burgoyne, and was taken
prisoner at the battle of Saratoga. At the close of the war he returned
to England and made a runaway match with the daughter of a Sir Edward
Bishop.
Returning to this country with his wife, he settled at Hagerstown,
Maryland, and soon after enlisted in the American army.
“He was made a sergeant-major in a regiment that was called ‘the
infantry regiment.’ Afterwards he was adjutant of Garther’s regiment of
the levies of 1791, which brought him into General St. Glair’s command.
He was severely wounded November 4, 1791, in a battle with the Indians
on the Miami River. In 1792 ‘the regiment of infantry’ was, by Act of
Congress, designated as the ‘First Regiment,’ and to this John Whistler
was assigned as first lieutenant. In November, 1796, he was promoted to
the adjutancy, and in July, 1797, he was commissioned a captain.”
While captain of the “First Regiment,” then stationed at Detroit, he
was, in 1803, ordered to proceed to the present site of the city of
Chicago and construct Fort Dearborn.
He and his command arrived on August 17, at two o’clock in the
afternoon, and at once staked out the ground and began the erection of
palisades for protection against the Indians.
The captain had with him at the time one son, William, who was a
lieutenant in the army, and who was commander of Fort Dearborn in 1833,
when the fort was finally abandoned as a military post. Another son,
John, remained in the East.
On the completion of the fort the captain brought out the remaining
members of his family,--his wife, five daughters, and his third son,
George, then but three years old, and afterwards the father of the
artist.
“The daughters were Sarah, who married James Abbott, of Detroit,--the
ceremony took place in the fort, shortly after the family came; the
wedding-trip was made to Detroit on horseback, over an Indian trail and
the old territorial road; they had two nights of camping out; their
effects were carried on pack-horses,--Ann, married Major Marsh, of the
army; Catherine, married Major Hamilton, of the army; Harriet, married
Captain Phelan, also of the army; Caroline--eight months old when her
father built Fort Dearborn--was married in Detroit, in 1840, to William
R. Wood, of Sandwich, Georgia.”
When the army was reduced in June, 1815, Major Whistler was retired, and
in 1818 appointed military storekeeper at Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis.
He died at Bellefontaine, Missouri, in 1827. “He was a brave officer and
became the progenitor of a line of brave and efficient soldiers.”
To a visitor from Chicago the artist once said:
“Chicago, dear me, what a wonderful place! I really ought to visit it
some day,--for, you know, my grandfather founded the city and my uncle
was the last commander of Fort Dearborn.”
* * * * *
George Washington Whistler, the father of the painter, became an
engineer of great reputation, rose to the rank of major, and in 1842
accepted the invitation of Czar Nicholas to superintend the construction
of the St. Petersburg and Moscow Railroad, and it is said that, with
the exception of John Quincy Adams, no American in Russia was held in
such high estimation.
Major Whistler has been described as a very handsome man; he had rather
long curling hair which framed a most agreeable face. “He might have
been taken for an artist, rather than for a military engineer. Yet he
was, in every sense, a manly man, with most attractive expression and
ways.”
Whistler’s mother--his father’s second wife--was Anna Mathilda McNeill,
a daughter of Dr. C. D. McNeill, of Wilmington, North Carolina.
So much for the stock from which Whistler sprang, a line of able men and
good fighters. In a roundabout way he must have inherited some of the
traits of that “quaint gentleman of rare humor” so frequently mentioned
by garrulous Samuel Pepys, who says in one place, “Dr. Whistler told a
pretty story.... Their discourse was very fine; and if I should be put
out of my office, I do take great content in the liberty I shall be at
of frequenting these gentlemen’s company.”
* * * * *
It is reported that Whistler once stated he was born in St. Petersburg,
and he certainly seemed to take delight in mystifying people as to the
date and place of his birth,--part of his habitual indifference to the
sober requirements of those solemn meta-physical entities Time and
Space.
One friend has insisted in print upon Baltimore as his birthplace,
another upon Stonington, Connecticut.
His model once asked him:
“Where were you born?”
“I never was born, my child; I came from on high.”
Quite unabashed, the model retorted:
“Now, that shows how easily we deceive ourselves in this world, for I
should say you came from below.”
The Salon catalogue of 1882 referred to him as “McNeill Whistler, born
in the United States.”
His aversion to discussing dates, the lapse of years, the time it would
take to paint a portrait, or do anything else, amounted to a
superstition.
For him time did not exist. He did not carry a watch, and no obtrusive
clock was to be seen or heard anywhere about him. He did not believe in
mechanical devices for nagging and prompting much-goaded humanity. If he
were invited to dinner, it was always the better part of wisdom to order
the dinner at least a half-hour later than the moment named in the
invitation.
He once had an engagement to dine with some distinguished people in a
distant part of London. A friend who wished to be on time was waiting
for him in the studio. It was growing late, but Whistler kept on
painting, more and more absorbed.
“My dear fellow,” his friend urged at last, “it is frightfully late, and
you have to dine with Lady ----. Don’t you think you’d better stop?”
“Stop?” fairly shrieked Whistler. “Stop, when everything is going so
beautifully? Go and stuff myself with food when I can paint like this?
Never! Never! Besides, they won’t do anything until I get there,--they
never do!”
An official connected with an international art exhibition was about to
visit Paris to consult with the artists. To save time, he sent notes
ahead making appointments at his hotel with the different men at
different hours. To Whistler he sent a note fixing a day at “4.30
precisely,” whereupon Whistler regretfully replied:
“DEAR SIR: I have received your letter announcing that you will
arrive in Paris on the--th. I congratulate you. I never have been
able, and never shall be able, to be anywhere at ‘4.30 precisely.’
“Yours most faithfully,
“J. MCN. WHISTLER.”
To the stereotyped inquiry of the sitter:
“About how many sittings do you require, Mr. Whistler?”
“Dear me, how can I tell? Perhaps one, perhaps--more.”
“But--can’t you give me some idea, so I can arrange----”
“Bless me, but you must not permit the doing of so trivial a thing as a
portrait to interfere with the important affairs of life. We will just
paint in those odd moments when you have nothing better to do.”
“Suppose I am compelled to leave the city before it is finished?”
“You will return next summer, and we will resume where we left off, as
the continued-story-teller says.”
And no amount of persuasion could get him to say when he expected to
finish a work.
He would frequently say:
“We will just go ahead as if there were one long holiday before us,
without thinking of the end, and some day, when we least expect it, the
picture is finished; but if we keep thinking of the hours instead of the
work, it may never come to an end.”
This indifference to time kept him young--to the very last. He
persistently refused to note the flight of years.
There was once a very old Indian, how old no one knew, in Northern
Michigan who, when asked his age by the pertinaciously curious, always
replied, “I do not count the years; white people do--and die.”
* * * * *
His father went to Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834 to take charge of the
construction of the canals and locks. He resided in a house on Worthen
Street, and there Whistler was born on July 10.
In a history of Lowell it is stated that Whistler was probably born in
what was known as the Paul Moody house, a fine old house which stood on
the site of the present city hall; but quite possibly the family
occupied a house owned by the proprietors of the locks and canals,
which still stands and is pointed out as the “Locks and Canal house.”
The old parish book of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church contains the
following entry under 1834:
“Nov. 9, Baptized James Abbott, infant son of George Washington and Anna
Mathilda Whistler. Sponsors, the parents. T. Edson.”
Rev. Theodore Edson was the rector of the church.
The adoption of his mother’s maiden name, McNeill, as part of his own
was apparently an afterthought.
He had two brothers, William and Kirke, a half-brother, George, and a
half-sister, Deborah, who married Seymour Haden, the well-known
physician and etcher, who figures in “Gentle Art” as the
“Surgeon-etcher.” Of the brothers, Kirke died young, George remained in
this country, William became a well-known physician in London, dying a
few years ago.
* * * * *
The family afterwards spent a short time in Stonington, where Major
Whistler had charge of the construction of the railroad to Providence.
They used to drive to church in Westerly in a chaise fitted with railway
wheels, so as to travel on the tracks. There were no Sunday trains in
those days, so the track was clear. An ingenious device enabled the
horse to cross the culverts.
A locomotive named “Whistler” after the distinguished engineer--a
felicitous name--was in use until comparatively few years ago.
In the spring of 1840 Major Whistler was appointed consulting engineer
for the Western Railroad, running from Springfield to Albany, and the
family moved to Springfield and lived in what “is now known as Ethan
Chapin homestead, on Chestnut Street, north of Edwards Street.”
Old residents of the vicinity claim to remember “well the curly locks
and bright, animated countenance of the boy,” and that the three boys
“were always full of mischief,”--not an uncommon trait in youngsters,
probably still less uncommon in Whistlers.
Shortly after the railroad to Albany was opened a wreck occurred, and a
niece of Major Whistler, who was on her way to visit him, was badly
injured. She was taken to his house, and it was a long time before she
recovered.
The accident made a strong impression on Whistler, and possibly accounts
for some of the dislike he often showed towards travelling alone. It was
only in crossing crowded streets and in the confusion and bustle of
travel that he showed what might be called nervousness.
With characteristic gallantry he would offer a lady his arm to aid her
in crossing the Strand or the Boulevard, but he made sure of the places
of refuge and took no chances; if in a hurry, she would better cross
alone.
Once, not many years ago, he was at Dieppe, and wrote a friend in Paris
almost daily that he would be in the city to see him. A week passed, and
the friend, fearing he would be obliged to leave without seeing
Whistler, wrote him he would come to Dieppe and see the work he was
doing there, to which suggestion Whistler replied most cordially by
wire.
The friend packed and went, expecting to stay a night or two at least;
but, lo! Whistler, bag in hand, met him in the village to take the next
train back; whereupon the friend, much surprised, said:
“If you intended going to Paris to-day, why under the sun did you let me
ride half a day to get here?”
“Well, you see, I don’t like to travel alone; happy thought yours to
come down after me.”
And back they went, after a delightful luncheon in that little old
restaurant near the cathedral, where there is an ancient stone trough
filled with water for cooling and cleaning vegetables. The luncheon, the
way it was ordered, and the running fire of comment and directions by
Whistler to the stout old woman who did it all, were worth the journey
to Dieppe.
Whistler will be mourned more by these lowly people who used to serve
him with pleasure, because he took such a vital interest in what they
did, than by many who own his works.
* * * * *
A diary kept by the artist’s mother contains this entry, under date of
July 10, 1844:
“A poem selected by my darling Jamie, and put under my plate at the
breakfast-table, as a surprise on his tenth birthday.”
The little poem of twelve lines was addressed “To My Mother,” and
subscribed “Your Little James.”
When the boy was eleven years old, Sir William Allen, a Scotch painter,
visited the family. Mrs. Whistler’s diary contains the following entry:
“The chat then turned upon the subject of Sir William Allen’s
painting of Peter the Great teaching the majiks to make ships. This
made Jimmie’s eyes express so much interest that his love for the
art was discovered, and Sir William must needs see his attempts.
When my boys had said good-night, the great artist remarked to me,
‘Your little boy has uncommon genius, but do not urge him beyond
his inclination.’ I told him his gift had only been cultivated as
an amusement, and that I was obliged to interfere, or his
application would confine him more than we approved.”
The diary records the same year a visit to the old palace at Peterhoff,
where “our Jimmie was so saucy as to laugh” at Peter’s own paintings.
* * * * *
When Major Whistler first went to Russia he left “Jamie” for a time in
Stonington with his aunt, and the two older children, George and
Deborah, in England.
After the death of Major Whistler, in St. Petersburg, in 1849, the wife
and children returned to this country, and lived for a time in
Connecticut.
Whistler wished to enter West Point, and he persuaded his half-brother
to write Daniel Webster, to enlist his sympathy. The letter was dated
February 19, 1851. It referred to the father’s career and services and
asked that James be appointed to the Academy.
He was appointed by President Fillmore, and entered July 1, 1851,
registering from Pomfret, Windham County, Connecticut, where his mother
was then living.
Whistler was so small in stature and physique that it is surprising he
was received; the military record of his family was no doubt the
controlling consideration.
He possessed all the pugnacity and courage required for a soldier, and
the military spirit was strong in him, yet such was his bent towards art
that his career at the Academy was not one of glory; but he became very
popular with his comrades and probably led in all their mischievous
pranks.
The official records show that at the end of the first year, in 1852, he
stood forty-one in a class of fifty-two,--his standing in the different
studies being as follows: Mathematics 47, English studies 51, French 9.
At the end of his second year he stood number one in drawing, but was
not examined in other studies, being absent with leave on account of ill
health. In 1854 his standing was as follows: Philosophy 39, Drawing 1,
Chemistry deficient. For his deficiency in chemistry he was discharged
from the Academy on June 16, 1854.
A lady once asked him why he left the Academy, and he replied:
“If silicon had been a gas, madame, I should have been a soldier.”
On leaving West Point he took it into his head that Fate had intended
him for a sailor, and he tried to enter the Naval Academy at Annapolis,
but he could not get the appointment.
Through an old friend of the family, Captain Benham, of the Coast and
Geodetic Survey, he was employed as draughtsman in that department in
Washington from November 7, 1854, to February 12, 1855, at one dollar
and a half a day. In these days he signed himself James A. Whistler. His
lodgings were in an old house still standing on the northeast corner of
E and Twelfth Streets. He was always late to breakfast, and scribbled
pictures on the unpapered walls. When the landlord objected, he said:
“Now, now, never mind; I’ll not charge you anything for the decoration.”
Neither time nor the rules of the department had any terrors for him.
Even in those early days he was a law unto himself. In one instance the
following entry appears against his name:
“Two days absent and two days deducted from monthly pay for time lost by
coming late to office.”
To correct these dilatory habits Captain Benham conceived the brilliant
idea of having a fellow-clerk of punctual habits call each morning for
Whistler and bring him to the office on time. The captain believed that
the example and influence of a more methodical companion would reform
the erring one and get him to the office at nine o’clock; but it turned
out quite otherwise, for Whistler proved so charming a host each morning
that both were late.
At the end of a week the mentor reported that his efforts were wasted
and unless relieved he, too, would acquire the obnoxious habit, for each
morning Whistler managed to so interest him in the mysteries of
coffee-making and the advantages of late breakfasts that it was
impossible to get away.
Of him and his habits in those days a fellow-draughtsman,[1] who is
still in the service, says:
“He was about one year younger than myself, and therefore about
twenty years old at that time. He stayed but a little over three
months, and I have not met him since, but retain a more vivid
recollection of his sojourn than of that of many other draughtsmen
who succeeded him and remained much longer. This may be partly for
the reason that Captain Benham, who was then in charge of the
office, told me that Whistler’s father had been a star graduate of
West Point and a distinguished engineer, and requested me to be
attentive to the new appointee; it may also be for the reason that
there was something peculiar about Whistler’s person and actions
quite at variance with the ordinary run of my experience.
“His style of dress indicated an indifference to fashion which,
under circumstances, might be changed into emancipation when
fashion, for instance, went into extremes and exacted personal
discomforts. I certainly cannot remember Whistler with a
high-standing collar and silk hat, which was then the universal
custom. Classical models seemed to be his preference, a short
circular cloak and broad-brimmed felt hat gave him a finish which
reminded one of some of Rembrandt’s celebrated portraits. His
_tout ensemble_ had a strong tinge of Bohemianism which suggested
that his tastes and habits had been acquired in Paris, or, more
concisely speaking, in the Quartier Latin; indeed, he always spoke
of Paris with enthusiasm. His manners were those of an easy
self-reliance which conveyed the impression that he was a man who
minded his own business, but that it would not be exactly safe to
cross his paths.
“At the time of his engagement as draughtsman at the office not the
slightest doubt was entertained of his skill and ability to fill
his post, and it was the principal concern of Captain Benham to get
him sufficiently interested in his work to engage his serious
attention. It was, however, soon apparent that he considered
topographical drawing as a tiresome drudgery, and when he was put
on etching views on copper plate, this occupation, although more
congenial to his tastes, was yet too monotonous and mechanical and
did not afford sufficient scope to his peculiar talent for
sketching off-hand figures and to make him feel contented. Any odd
moment he could snatch from his work he was busy in throwing off
his impromptu compositions on the margins of his drawings or plate;
odd characters, such as monks, knights, beggars, seemed to be his
favorites. He was equally skilful with pen and ink, pencil, brush
and sepia after the Spanish style, or dry point in the English, and
often I was struck by the facility and rapidity with which he
evolved his inventions, there never was the shadow of a dilemma or
even hesitancy.
“From the very start he never was punctual in attendance, and as
time wore on he would absent himself for days and weeks without
tendering any excuse. As far as I remember, nobody, except Captain
Benham, cared to speak to Whistler about his irregularity, for the
reason that it was certain that no thanks would be earned and that
it would not have made the slightest difference in his habits.
Howsoever that may have been, Colonel Porterfield, the clerk, was a
strict accountant, and his monthly reports told the whole story.
Thus in one month two days were deducted from Whistler’s pay for
time lost in coming late to office, and in January, 1855, he was
credited with but six and one-half days’ work, which reduced his
scant pay to a mere pittance.
“Under these circumstances three months were quite sufficient
length of time for Whistler and the office to realize that the
employment of Whistler as a draughtsman was an experiment destined
to be a failure, and I do not think that a trace of ill feeling was
retained when it was concluded by both parties to effect a
separation and let each one go his own way.”
At that time Edward de Stoeckl was charge d’affaires of the Russian
embassy. He had known Major Whistler in St. Petersburg, and he took a
great fancy to his son.
One day Whistler invited him to dinner, and this is the account of what
happened:
“Whistler engaged a carriage and called for his distinguished
friend. As they drove on, Whistler turned to the diplomat and asked
him if he would object to their stopping at several places on the
way. M. de Stoeckl, amused at the unconventionality of the request,
assented, and his young host then directed the coachman to a
greengrocer’s, a confectioner’s, a tobacconist’s, and to several
other tradesmen.
“After visiting each of these he would reappear with his arms
filled with packages, which he deposited on the vacant seat of the
carriage. At last the two brought up at Whistler’s lodgings. After
a climb up many stairs the representative of the Czar of all the
Russias found himself in Whistler’s attic.
“Quite out of breath, he was obliged to sit down, too exhausted to
speak, during which time Whistler flitted hither and thither,
snipping a lettuce into shape for the salad, drying the oysters,
browning the biscuit, preparing the cheese, and in an incredibly
short time setting a sumptuous repast before his astonished guest,
who was delighted with the unique hospitality of the host.”
A comrade in office describes Whistler’s appearance in those days:
“He was very handsome, graceful, dressed in good taste, with a
leaning towards the style of the artist in the selection of his
clothing. His hair was a blue-black and worn very long, and the
bushy appearance seemed to give one the impression that each
separate hair was curled. Always at this time he wore a large
slouch hat and a loose coat, generally unbuttoned, and thrown back
so that the waistcoat was plainly seen.”
He never changed very much from that description, save that his hair
became slightly gray, and one lock directly over the forehead turned
completely white very prematurely. To this white lock Whistler took a
great fancy, and it is visible in the portraits and drawings he made of
himself. His hair was naturally very curly,--an inheritance from his
father,--and out of the mass of black curls the white lock would spring
with almost uncanny effect.
To the very end he was extremely fastidious in his dress. In the days
when threadbare coats were a luxury he wore them spotlessly clean, and
carried old and worn garments in such a manner that they appeared as if
made for the occasion.
In his studio and while at work he was never mussy or untidy; he had
more than a woman’s notion of neatness.
He was not only very careful of his clothes, but they must be buttoned
and adjusted just so before he would make his appearance. On him a frock
coat was never stiff and ungraceful, and somehow he managed to dissipate
the dreary formality of evening dress. It was always a pleasure to see
him enter a room; while on the street he was, in his earlier London
days, exceedingly picturesque.
He was very particular concerning his hats. In the latter Paris days he
always wore a most carefully-brushed silk hat with flat brim,--the
Quartier-Latin type. This, with his monocle--for on the street he wore a
monocle--and his long overcoat, made him an exceedingly striking figure.
One day he was in a shop, trying on a hat, when a dissatisfied customer
rushed in, and, mistaking him for some one in charge, said:
“I say, this ’at doesn’t fit.”
Eyeing him critically a moment, Whistler said:
“Neither does your coat.”
* * * * *
Whistler was thoroughly imbued with the military spirit; and if he had
not been a great artist he would have made a good officer. He was born
to command, and possessed physical courage of a high order.
In stature and physique he was short and very slight,--could not have
weighed more than one hundred and thirty pounds; but he was so perfectly
proportioned that one did not notice his size except when in sharp
contrast with others. Notwithstanding his inferiority in size and
strength, he never in his life had the slightest hesitation in striking
a man--even at the risk of annihilation--if he deemed the occasion
required it.
A good many years ago the editor of a gossipy sheet in London, called
the _Hawk_, printed some items of a personal nature which Whistler
resented. Not knowing the editor by sight, Whistler took a friend to
point him out in the foyer of one of the London theatres. Although the
man was a giant compared with Whistler, the latter, without a moment’s
hesitation, went up to him and struck him across the face with a cane,
saying with each blow, “Hawk, Hawk, Hawk.”
The editor afterwards boasted that he immediately knocked Whistler down.
Whistler claimed he slipped and fell; but, he said:
“What difference does it make whether he knocked me down or whether
I slipped? The fact is he was publicly caned, and what happened
afterwards could not offset the publicity and nature of this
chastisement. A gentleman lightly strikes another in the face with
a glove; the bully thinks the insult is wiped out if he knocks some
one down--the ethics of the prize ring; but according to the older
notions the gentleman knows that the soft touch of the glove cannot
be effaced by a blow of the fist,--for if it could, superiority in
weight would render the cad and the bully immune. The historical
fact is that I publicly drew my cane across his face; no one cares
anything about his subsequent ragings, or whether I slipped and
fell, or whether he trampled upon me.”
Again, when an artist went up to him in the Hogarth Club in London and
called him a liar and a coward, Whistler promptly slapped his face.
So far as controversies with opponents were concerned, he was courageous
to the point of indifference; but, as already noted, in crossing busy
streets and making his way through the hurly-burly of city life he was
as careful, not to say timid, as a woman; he had many superstitions
which influenced his actions.
One afternoon he said to a sitter:
“To-morrow, you know, we won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Well, you see, it’s Friday; and last Friday, you remember, what a bad
time we had,--accomplished nothing. An unlucky day anyway. We’ll take a
holiday to-morrow.”
* * * * *
The military spirit clung to him through life, and he was ever in the
habit of referring to his experience at West Point as if it were the one
entirely satisfactory episode in his career. He called himself a
“West-Pointer,” and insisted that the Academy was the one institution in
the country the superiority of which to everything of its kind in the
world was universally admitted.
“Why, you know, West Point _is_ America.”
Though living in Paris at the time and the sympathy of all France was
with Spain, he lost no opportunity for upholding the United States in
the war. He could see no flaw in the attitude or the diplomacy of this
country, and was especially eloquent over the treatment of Admiral
Cervera after his defeat.
On the other hand, such was his ingrained dislike for England that he
lost no opportunity for declaiming against her war in South Africa. He
delighted in berating the English and in prodding any English
sympathizer who happened in his way.
One day a friend from this side, of Irish birth, but who sided with
England, was in his studio, and the discussion waxed warm until the
visitor said:
“I’ll be dashed if I’ll talk with you, Whistler. What do you know about
the matter? Nothing at all.”
After a short silence, Whistler said:
“But, I say, C----, do you remember how the Boers whipped the Dublin
Fusileers?”
Whereupon the air became sulphurous.
The friend afterwards remarked:
“There was nothing in the malicious innuendo anyway, for, you know,
those regiments are recruited from all quarters, and there may not have
been a single Irishman in the Fusileers at the time of the fight.”
* * * * *
Whistler held some extraordinary opinions concerning the Dreyfus case,
the outcome of his strong military bias.
It did not matter to him whether the accused was guilty or not, the
prestige of the army must be maintained, even at the sacrifice of the
innocent,--the view which led the military section of France to such
violent extremes against Dreyfus,--and Whistler resented the assaults
upon the army as treachery to the most sacred institution of the state.
To the civilian this military bias which leads men in all countries to
such extremes in judgments and actions is incomprehensible. The attitude
of the military mind towards the ordinary problems of life, towards the
faults and failings of men, towards petty transgressions and
disobediences, towards rank, routine, and discipline, towards the
courtesies and sympathies and affections which are the leavening
influences of life, cannot be understood by the lay mind. The soldier’s
training and occupation are such that he does not think, feel, and act
as an ordinary man; his standards, convictions, and ethics are
fundamentally different; so different that he requires his own
territory, his own laws, and his own tribunals. With the soldier the
maxim of ordinary justice that it is better that ten guilty should go
free than one innocent be condemned is reversed.
* * * * *
By birth, by tradition, by association, Whistler was thoroughly
saturated with this spirit; and it affected his conduct and his attitude
towards people throughout his life. It accounts for much of the
impatience, the arrogance, the intolerance, the combativeness, the
indifference to the feelings of others with which he is charged, or
rather overcharged, for much of what is said is exaggeration.
No man can be reared in an atmosphere of authority and blind obedience
to authority without losing something of that give-and-take spirit which
softens life’s asperities.
Therefore, in any estimate of Whistler’s character and of his conduct
towards others, the influence of these very unusual early associations
and conditions must be taken into account and due allowance made.
_III_
_An American--The Puritan Element--Attitude of England and
France--Racial and Universal Qualities in Art--Art-Loving Nations._
Of Whistler’s innate and aggressive Americanism this is the place to
speak.
English in origin, the family became Irish and then American. In blood
he was doubly removed from England, first by Irish progenitors, then by
American, and in his entire make-up, physical and intellectual, he was
so absolutely un-English that to the day of his death he was an object
of curious observation and wondering comment wherever he went, in even
so cosmopolitan a city as London.
There was nothing he loved better than to surprise, mystify, confuse,
and confound the stolid Briton. And though he lived most of his life in
Chelsea and came back there to spend his last days, he was from the very
beginning and remained until the end a stranger in a strange land, a
solitary soul in the midst of an uncongenial, unsympathetic,
unappreciative, unloving people.
So little does England care for him or his art, or, more truly, so
prejudiced is the nation against him as an impertinent interloper, who
for more than a generation disturbed the serenity of her art household,
that the National Museum has no example of his work. Needless to say, if
he had been English, or had come from the remotest of England’s outlying
possessions, English paperdom and English officialdom would have claimed
him as their own, condoned his eccentricities, and bought his works with
liberal hand.
* * * * *
During the days of his greatest poverty and distress, when even France
turned stupidly aside from things she soon came to worship, and England
was jeering clumsily, and all nations repudiated him,--our own the
loudest of all,--he really seemed to be “a man without a country,” and,
beyond question, the injustice, the bitterness of it all entered deep
into his soul and remained. But whatever the folly, the blindness, the
stupidity of a country, though it seek to cast off a child so brilliant
he is not understood, the ties remain; however strained, they cannot be
broken. Nothing that America can do suffices to make an Englishman or a
Frenchman or a German out of an American,--the man himself may take on a
foreign veneer, but beneath the surface he belongs where blood and birth
have placed him.
* * * * *
He was infinitely more of an American than thousands who live at home
and ape the manners of Europe. He came from a line of ancestors so
distinctively and aggressively American that he could not have turned
out otherwise had he tried.
He was not even an Anglo-American or a Franco-American, but of all the
types and races which go to make the American people he was in blood,
appearance, alertness, combativeness, wit, and a thousand and one
traits, an exceedingly refined illustration of the Irish-American; and
because of his Irish blood, with perhaps some Scotch on his mother’s
side, he was never in sympathy with anything English, but was now and
then somewhat in sympathy with many things French, though the points of
sympathetic contact were so slight and superficial that he could not
live contentedly for any length of time in Paris. In his art, his
convictions, and his conventions he was altogether too profound, too
serious, too earnest--one might with truth say, too puritanical--to find
the atmosphere of Paris altogether congenial. His great portraits might
have come from the studio of a Covenanter, but never from a typical
Paris atelier.
* * * * *
The Puritan element which is to be found in every American achievement,
whether in war, in art, or in literature, though often deeply hidden, is
conspicuous in Whistler’s work, though he himself would probably have
been the first to deny it; and it is this element of sobriety, of
steadfastness, of undeviating adherence to convictions and ideals that
constitutes the firm foundation of his art, of his many brilliant and
beautiful superstructures of fancy.
Only a Puritan at heart could have painted the “Carlyle,” “His Mother,”
and that wonderful child portrait, “Miss Alexander.”
Only a Puritan at heart could have painted the mystery of night with all
his tender, loving, religious sympathy.
Only a Puritan at heart could have exhibited as he did in everything he
touched those infinitely precious qualities of reserve, of delicacy, of
refinement, which are the conspicuous characteristics of his work.
Concerning his refinement some one has very truly remarked:
“He so hated everything ugly or unclean that, even in the club
smoking-rooms (where one may sometimes hear rather Rabelaisian
tales), he never told a story which could not have been repeated in
the presence of modest women. His personal daintiness was extreme.
Threadbare coats on him were never shabby. He had to wear too many
threadbare garments, poor fellow! for, inasmuch as he put the
integrity of his art before everything else, he never stooped to
make those ‘pretty’ things which would have brought him a fortune,
without doubt. He was abstemious in his living, simple in all that
he did,--his exquisite, sure taste preventing him from extremes,
gaudiness, or untidiness.”
And when he lent his support, some eight years ago, to the school kept
by Carmen Rossi, who as a child had been one of his models, he would not
tolerate the study of the nude by mixed classes, and, in fact,
introduced many rules and restrictions which were considered by even
American pupils as “puritanical” in the extreme, and which the French
could not understand at all.
[Illustration]
He never painted any large and aggressive nudes, such as abound in
French art, such as, in a way, may be said to characterize French art
and mark its attitude towards life; but he made many drawings in
water-color and pastel, and painted some oils, all, however, exquisitely
refined, the element of the nude being in every instance subordinated to
the artistic scheme and intention. Many of these drawings have never
been exhibited. When seen they will go far towards demonstrating the
puritanical element in Whistler.
In his intolerance towards the methods, convictions, and ideals of
others he exhibited some of the spirit of the Puritan zealot who knows
no creed but his own.
Concerning his Americanism, one who knew him says:[2]
“Upon the known facts of Whistler’s career I do not touch. I wish
only to underline his Americanism, and to offer you one or two
personal memories. He was ‘an American of the Americans,’ say the
American papers, and who shall venture to dispute their dictum? Not
I, certainly. Nor would anybody who knew Whistler personally. I
knew him for many years in London and in Paris. I have many letters
from him on art and other matters, some of which ought to be
printed, for his letters to friends were not less works of art than
those which he composed more carefully for print. I have books and
drawings which he gave me. I mention these things as evidence that
I may fairly say something about him, at least on the personal
side. And I knew on what terms he lived with the so-called art
world in England, and what his own view of the matter was.”
And an English writer said, some ten years ago:[3]
“It should not be forgotten in America that Mr. Whistler is an
American of Americans. It may therefore be appropriately asked,
What has America done for him? It has treated him with--if
possible--even more ignorance than England; this, of course, coming
from the desire of the Anglomaniac to out-English the English.”
And there are others whose testimony will be forthcoming some day to
show how wholly and absolutely American he was to the very core and
centre of his being, and in his attitude towards all countries and
peoples of Europe.
It is true he said many harsh, bitter, and cutting things concerning the
press and people of this country, that he frequently exhibited in the
English sections of art exhibitions in preference to those of his own
country; but for all these things there were many good reasons, and we
have but ourselves to blame.
He was so much of an American that a single word of ridicule from this
side cut deeper than pages of abuse from the other. To the scoffings of
England he turned a careless ear, and replied with flippant, but
pointed, tongue; while the utter lack of support and appreciation from
his own country was ever referred to with a bitterness that betrayed
his real feelings. He could not understand how the American people could
desert a countryman battling alone against all England. As he frequently
said:
“It did not matter whether I was in the right or in the wrong,--I was
one against the mob. Why did America take the side of the mob,--and--and
get whipped?”
* * * * *
America was blind to his merits until long after he achieved fame in
every country of Europe; and it is undeniably true that the press here
truculently echoed the slurs of the critics on the other side throughout
that long period of controversy. It is a lamentable fact that up to the
day of his death he was misunderstood, or accepted as an eccentric in
many quarters of the land that now claims him as her bright particular
star in the firmament of art. Notwithstanding all these things, he
remained so conspicuously an American that every Englishman and every
Frenchman with whom he came in contact recognized him as a foreigner;
neither would have thought of mistaking him for a fellow-countryman; he
was as un-English and un-French as an Italian, or a Spaniard,
or--better--as an American.
* * * * *
The “White Girl” was rejected at the Salon in 1863; the “Portrait of my
Mother” was accepted by the Royal Academy and obscurely hung in 1871,
only after a bitter discussion, in which the one member of the committee
who favored it, Sir William Boxall, a friend of Whistler’s family,
threatened to resign unless it was accepted.
This same great portrait--it is said on good authority--was offered in
New York for twelve hundred dollars and found no buyer.
When exhibited in London, language failed to express the full measure of
the scorn and contempt the English press--from the ponderous _Times_
down to the most insignificant fly-sheet--had for this wonderful
picture; but no sooner had the French government purchased it for the
Luxembourg than all was changed, and with delightful effrontery the
_Illustrated London News_ said:
“Modern _British_ (!) art will now be represented in the National
Gallery of the Luxembourg by one of the finest paintings due to the
brush of an _English_ (!) artist,--namely, Mr. Whistler’s portrait of
his mother.”
The italics and exclamation marks are Whistler’s own, and his denial of
British complicity is complete.
* * * * *
Aside from Whistler’s personality, his art finds its only congenial
place in the midst of American art.
That his pictures will not hang in any conceivable exhibition of British
art without the incongruity being painfully perceptible goes without
saying, and none knows this better than English painters themselves.
Of all the various manifestations of art with which Whistler’s has come
in sharp contrast, English painting has been the slowest and most
stubborn in yielding to influences from the far East; whereas of all
painters of the nineteenth century Whistler was the very first to
recognize the wondrous qualities of Chinese and Japanese art and absorb
what those countries had to teach concerning line and color; and in so
far as the painters of England, and more conspicuously those of
Scotland, have learned aught of the subtleties and refinements of the
East, they have learned it _through Whistler_, and not direct.
In other words, Whistler has been absolutely immune to English
influences; there is not the faintest trace in any of his works,
etchings, lithographs, or paintings. In temperament, mood, fancy, and
imagination, in what he saw and the manner that he painted it, he was as
far removed from any “English School” as Hokusai himself.
On the other hand, England for some time has not been immune to his
influence, and things after--a long way after--Whistler appear at every
exhibition. What is known as the “Glasgow School”--that body of able and
progressive painters--long ago frankly accepted him as master.
Of English painters dead and living he had a poor--possibly too
poor--opinion. He frequently said, “England never produced but one
painter, and that was Hogarth.” In mellower moments he would say not
unkind things of certain qualities in other men; towards the living
painters who appreciated his art he was oftentimes generous in the
bestowal of praise. But it was impossible for Whistler to say a thing
was good if he did not think so; and he would exercise all his
ingenuity to get out of expressing an opinion when he knew his real
opinion would hurt the feelings of a friend. Towards strangers and
enemies he was often almost brutal in condemning what was bad,--as when
a rich man took him over his new house, dwelling with pride and
enthusiasm on this extraordinary feature and that, at each of which
Whistler would exclaim, “Amazing, amazing!” until at the end of their
tour of the rooms and halls, he at last said, “Amazing,--and there’s no
excuse for it!”
* * * * *
Of his attitude towards others a friendly writer said:[4]
“He was not a devotee of Turner, but he yielded to no man in
appreciation of certain of the works of that painter. He was not
lavish of praise where his contemporaries were concerned. Though he
could say pleasant things about them in a rather vague
way,--calling some young painter ‘a good fellow,’ and so on,--words
of explicit admiration he did not promiscuously bestow. The truth
is, there was an immense amount of stuff which he saw in the
exhibitions which he frankly detested. Yet conversation with him
did not leave the impression that he was a man grudging of praise.
It was rather that a picture had to be exceptionally good to excite
his emotions. One point is significant. It was not the flashy and
popular painter that he invited to share in the gatherings for
which his Paris studio was noted: it was the painter like Puvis de
Chavannes, the man who had greatness in him.”
That he had nothing in common with English art, the English were quick
to assert, until his fame made him a desirable acquisition, when on this
side, and that within the last few years, a disposition to claim
him--very much as the business-like empire seizes desirable territory
here and there about the globe--has begun to show itself; and, unless
America is alert, Whistler will yet appear in the National Gallery
as--to quote again the words of the _Illustrated News_--“An English
artist.”
* * * * *
As regards the French, they are disposed to claim Whistler on three
grounds:
First. That he was a student there,--with a master who taught him
nothing.
Second. That France acknowledged his genius by the purchase of the
portrait of his mother,--twenty years after it was painted, and seven
after it was exhibited in Paris.
Third. That he lived for a time in Paris.
Three reasons which would annex to France about every American artist of
note, for most of them (1) studied in France, (2) are represented in the
Luxembourg, and (3) have lived in Paris much longer than Whistler.
* * * * *
As for those first few years in Paris, even the French concede that
Gleyre was entirely without influence upon Whistler’s subsequent career.
As regards the recognition of his genius, France was exceedingly slow.
The portrait of his mother was exhibited in London in 1871, and
purchased for the Luxembourg in 1891, though it had been awarded a medal
at the Salon some seven years before.
France no more taught Whistler to paint than it taught him to etch. His
masters were older and greater than the art of France. Before he was
twenty-five he had absorbed all and rejected most that France had to
teach. At twenty-eight he painted a picture which, scorned by the Salon,
startled all who visited the “Salon des Refusés,” and then--still under
thirty--he shook the dust of France from his feet, obliterated every
vestige of her influence from his art, and started out to make his way
alone and unaided in the domain of the beautiful.
* * * * *
In 1865 he again stirred the critics with that novel creation of color
“The Princess of the Land of Porcelain.” Nothing of the kind had ever
been seen in either French or any other art. It was the application of
Western methods to Eastern motives; it was plainly a study primarily in
color, secondarily in line, not at all in character. It was the first
great step taken by the Western world towards abstract art.
“The Princess of the Land of Porcelain,” the “Lange Leizen,” the “Gold
Screen,” the “Balcony”--all early pictures--are all one and the same in
motive; they are his first attempts in a large way to produce color
harmonies, to subordinate everything to the color composition.
[Illustration]
Of Whistler and American art in those days an unnamed correspondent has
written from Paris:[5]
“It would puzzle the analysis of a competent critic to find what
Whistler owed to Gleyre; and the young American openly professed to
have profited by the counter example of Gustave Courbet, who was
the realist of that day. From the first triumph of Courbet in 1849,
Gleyre had shrunk back into his shell and no longer exhibited at
the annual salons.
“From the start Whistler was an independent; and when, after six
years of work in the studios, he offered a picture for the judgment
of the official Salon, the jury promptly refused it. Whistler was
not discouraged, and hung the painting in the outlaws’ Salon des
Refusés. It created a stir that was almost enthusiasm, and the name
of his ‘Fille Blanche’--White Maiden--was still remembered when
four years later a few American painters demanded a section for
their work at the Universal Exposition of 1867. I have looked up a
criticism of the time, and imagine it will be found more
interesting now than when it was written.
“‘The United States of America are surely a great country and the
North Americans a great people, but what little artists they are!
The big daubs which they exhibit, under pretence of “Blue
Mountains,” “Niagara Falls,” “Genesee Plain,” or “Rain in the
Tropics,” show as much childish arrogance as boyish ignorance.
People say that these loud placards are sold for crazy prices in
Philadelphia or Boston. I am willing to believe it, but I cannot
rejoice at it.’
“This is laid on with no light brush, and some of us can recall the
American painters of that remote age who were so mishandled. But
the remaining paragraph of the lines given to American art may
surprise those who look on Whistler as only a contemporary.
“‘M. Whistler seems to me the only American artist really worthy of
attention; he is our old acquaintance of the Salon des Refusés of
1863, where his “Fille Blanche” had a _suces d’engouement_ (a
success of infatuation!). He is truly an American, as understood by
the motto, “time is money.” M. Whistler so well knows the value of
time that he scarcely stops at the small points of execution; the
impression seized as it flies and fixed as soon as possible in
swift strokes, with a galloping brush--such is the artist and such,
too, is the man.’
“Velasquez was already in the air, but Japanese art, to which
Whistler afterwards allowed himself to be thought indebted, was not
yet spoken of. Thus the young American artist was the precursor of
movements which years afterwards came to a head, and which for the
most part he has outlived. In view of this, the closing verdict of
the official critic of 1867 is worth noting, the more so as it
shows the reward already attributed to the American’s industry in
another branch of art. ‘While waiting for M. Whistler to become a
painter in the sense which old Europe still attaches to the word,
he is already an etcher (_aquafortiste_), all fire and color, and
very worthy of attention, even if he had only this claim to it.’”
Before France cared very much for Velasquez, before it so much as knew
there was an island called Japan on the art map, Whistler was playing
with the blacks and grays of the master of Madrid and with the blues and
silvery whites of the porcelains of the Orient.
And it was he,--Whistler,--the American, who turned the face of France
towards the East, and made her see things in line and color her most
vagrant fancy had never before conceived.
Searching the shops of Amsterdam, he found the blue-and-white china
which gave him inspiration to do those things beside which the finest
art of France is crude and barbaric.
* * * * *
Not very long ago a French writer said, “There is not, as yet, an
American school of painting, but there are already many American
painters, and great ones, who will in time form a school.”
Let us hope not.
A friend--a painter--once called Whistler’s attention to several very
good things by Alfred Stevens. Whistler looked at them a moment, then
said, “School, school, school,” and turned away.
In that, or any other restrictive or regulative sense of the word, let
us hope there will be no “American school;” but so long as there are
American painters there will be American paintings; and the greater the
work the more completely will it reflect the man, and the greater the
man the more surely and subtly will it reflect his nationality.
The phrase “American painters” means something more than Americans who
paint, and “American paintings” implies the transmission to the work of
something of the painter’s individuality, which includes as an important
element his racial and national characteristics.
In other words, American painters, regardless of where they are trained,
where they work, and what they paint, must produce American paintings;
they cannot wholly eliminate their individuality and nationality; they
cannot become so completely French or English as to absolutely
obliterate every trace of their American origin, and their works, though
English, French, or Italian to the last degree, will still exhibit
traces of American origin. So true is this, that the paintings of men
who have lived longest abroad and tried hardest to paint after the
manner of others find their most congenial surroundings amidst American
art.
* * * * *
So long as we have American paintings we shall have an American “school”
in the sense that all American paintings taken together, whether few or
many, whether good or bad, will be distinguished and distinguishable
from the paintings of every other country. In that sense America has,
and always has had, a “school” of painting, though for a long time the
school was little more than a kindergarten.
America has no centre like Paris, or Rome, or Florence, where a large
body of men and women are gathered from the four quarters of the globe
to study art. In that sense America has no “school;” but that sort of a
“school” is about the worst thing that can happen to a country. These
great centres for the diffusion of art are usually fatal to the
development of native art; the presence of a horde of foreigners, each
with his own peculiarities and characteristics, some with the effeminacy
of the South, others with the brutal force and overpowering virilty of
the North, stifles national initiative and produces sterile
cosmopolites.
Paris, with its salons, exhibitions, competitions, medals, prizes, and
innumerable incentives towards commercial, blatant, and vicious art, is
the curse of French art, and pretty soon France will have no art that is
really hers.
The atmosphere of Paris is one of strenuous striving after effect, of
mighty endeavor to make an impression; it encourages facility, dash,
bravura, eccentricities, and experiments of all kinds. From the depths
of our hearts let us be thankful that America has no “school” of that
kind, and earnestly hope that American artists residing temporarily
within that atmosphere will be affected as little as was Whistler.
Paris is an æsthetic Babel.
The art of Greece was suffocated when the entire coast-line of the
Mediterranean came to study the Acropolis.
* * * * *
Turning to the entire body of American painters, at home and abroad, we
find that they constitute at the present day the one “school” that has
already given to the world the greatest artist since the days of
Rembrandt and Velasquez,--and greater than either in some respects, as
we shall see,--and also the greatest of living portrait-painters, not to
mention a half-dozen more who are recognized internationally as masters
in their chosen fields; the one “school” that contains more of sobriety,
more of sanity, more of youthful vigor and virility, more of indomitable
energy and perseverance, more of promise and assurance of mighty
achievement than all the schools of all the other nations taken
together.
If the world is destined to see the modern equivalent of ancient Athens,
it will be somewhere within the confines of North America.
The countries of the Old World have had their opportunities, and the
tide of progress in its circuit of the globe is already lapping the
shores of the Western continent.
In temperament the typical American lies about midway between the
stolidity of the Englishman and the volatility of the Frenchman. He has
much of the dogged perseverance of the former, with a large element of
the facility and versatility of the latter; he is steadfast in the
pursuit of his ideals, and at the same time quick to adopt new and
improved methods for attaining his ends; he has an Englishman’s tenacity
of conviction and much of a Frenchman’s brilliancy of expression. As
compared with an Englishman the American appears more than half French;
as compared with a Frenchman he seems essentially English. It is this
combination of earnest convictions, profound belief in self and country,
sobriety, perseverance, tenacity of purpose, stolid endurance, with
inventiveness, originality, irresistible impulsiveness, dash and
brilliancy in execution, that assures to the future of North America the
noblest of human achievements.
For the present the strength and resources of the country are absorbed
in the production of wealth; but soon the people will tire of this
pursuit, and the accumulated wealth of nation, States, cities, and
individuals will turn to the encouragement of things beautiful in not
only art and literature, but in the long-neglected handicrafts,--the
crafts that make instead of destroying men.
* * * * *
At the World’s Exposition of 1893, in Chicago, Whistler’s paintings
hung, where they rightfully belonged, in the American section. Though
far and away superior to anything in the entire section, and conspicuous
above everything near for their exquisite beauty, still it cannot be
gainsaid that of all the sections of that exhibition the American was
the only one which would contain Whistler’s work without the contrast
being so marked as to be absolutely destructive. That they could not
hang with entire fitness among the English pictures even the English
would admit; that their sober harmonies were distinctively at variance
with the brilliant and superficial qualities of the French pictures was
apparent to even the unpractised eye. “The Yellow Buskin” and “The Fur
Jacket,” to mention no others, could hang in only one place, and that
was where they were put,--in the main hall of the American section,
flanked and confronted by American work.
Not that the pictures about them equalled in merit,--that is not the
question; but they were sufficiently akin to constitute an harmonious
environment.
* * * * *
Art is simply a mode of expression, and the highest, truest, noblest art
is the reflection of the best there is in a people. It follows,
therefore, that the art of any race or people must exhibit the racial
characteristics. A painting, for instance, belongs first to the man who
painted it and bears on its face so many marks of his individuality that
not only he but others recognize it as his. Secondly, the painting
belongs to the race or people with which the artist is identified, for
the very traits which distinguish him as an American, or an Englishman,
or a Frenchman from all other nationalities inevitably make themselves
felt in the work, and distinguish it not only specifically from all
other canvases, but generically from the work of other peoples, schools,
epochs, eras, etc.
A man may change his allegiance and live in foreign lands, but he cannot
change his blood. If a Chinaman, he will remain a Chinaman, no matter
where he lives; if an American, he will remain an American, though, like
many of our mess-of-potage citizens, he may remain a bastard American in
the endeavor to become an adopted Englishman.
* * * * *
The finer the art the more universal its qualities. And yet there is no
poem and no picture that is absolutely without the marks of its master;
and the marks of the master mean the marks of his race,--in fact, the
racial indications are inversely in number to those of the individual;
the deeper a man buries his personality in his work the stronger the
indications of his race. Shakespeare so lost himself that his personal
characteristics nowhere appear in his great plays, and a conception of
the poet’s personality could not be formed from a reading of the
lines--so universal was his genius; yet his poetry is essentially and
everlastingly English,--far more conspicuously English than the poetry
of lesser men who sing about England and things English. It is more
English than Chaucer, more English than Spencer, more English than
Browning, Tennyson, or Swinburne; it breathes more fully and more truly
the spirit of the English people in their greatest days than any poetry
ever uttered by the English tongue.
* * * * *
The greater the man, the more completely does he express his people. It
takes a great race to produce a great man; and once produced, he is
everlastingly linked with his tribe.
But greatness implies the suppression of the petty, including all petty
resemblances; therefore, a man by the universal qualities of his genius
may seem to belong to the world, whereas in truth he is but the
expression of the best there is in his countrymen.
Rembrandt suppressed all provincialisms and seemed to etch and paint for
mankind rather than for a limited public in Holland; and yet to the last
he was simply the greatest of Dutch artists. And because he was so
essentially and truly Dutch he is one of the world’s great artists; in
the chorus of the world’s proud voices there is no mistaking his
accent.
Velasquez is at the same time the least Spanish of painters and the most
Spanish of artists. Suppressing all eccentricities of time and place, he
rose to universal heights, and the world claims him as its own; and yet
his fame depends upon the fact that he was from first to last a
Spaniard,--a Spaniard in precisely the sense that Cervantes was the
expression of inarticulate forces behind him. Deriving more or less help
from his contemporaries, and from this quarter and that, from the visit
of Rubens and from his own journey to Italy, he, after all, was the
achievement of the Spanish people in painting. He was not an Italian, he
was not a Frenchman, he was not a Dutchman,--he was a Spaniard of the
Spaniards, as Shakespeare was an Englishman of the English.
* * * * *
Having wandered far afield in the endeavor to point out the intimate
connection between, first, a man and his work,--which connection every
one admits,--and, secondly, between the race and the work,--a connection
which is not so readily perceived,--let us return to Whistler, whose
work furnishes proof positive of what has been said.
It is commonly taken for granted that if a man lives and studies and
works abroad for many years he loses his individuality and becomes in
some mysterious manner the offspring of the country where he works. It
is assumed that American painters residing in Rome become more or less
Italian; that those residing in Paris become more or less French; that
those residing in London become more or less English; while those who
move restlessly from place to place become more or less of characterless
cosmopolites. All of which is true inversely to the real strength and
genius of the artist. A weak man is swerved by this influence and that
and--chameleon like--takes on the hues of his surroundings, but a strong
man simply absorbs and assimilates without in the slightest degree
losing his individuality. Unhappily, many American artists residing
abroad possess so little stamina, so little of real character, so little
of genius, that they are--like topers--dependent upon the daily stimulus
afforded by the manifold art activities about them; they never get out
of school, but remain helplessly dependent upon teachers and copy-books.
The annual Salon, like a college commencement day, is their great
incentive; their petty exhibitions are so many field-days necessary to
sustain childish enthusiasm.
Happily, all do not yield to those influences, and no two yield in
precisely the same degree,--the extent to which individuality is lost
depending upon the weakness of the man. A poor, weak, wishy-washy
American quickly falls into the habit of painting pictures after the
manner of those about him, and his mannerisms out-Herod Herod; others,
with more character, yield less to their environment; while the chosen
few simply absorb whatever of good they find, and without yielding a jot
of their individuality, without swerving to the right or to the left, go
on producing after their own fashion things which belong to them and
the race that produced them.
For more than forty years Whistler was the conspicuous example of the
last-named class,--a class so small that it included besides himself--no
others.
Great as certain of our American artists residing abroad undoubtedly
are, good as many of these surely are, creditable on the whole as all
are to American art, there is not one whose work does not betray the
influences of his environment; there is not one who has not sacrificed
something of his originality, something of his strength, something of
his native force and character on strange altars, saving and excepting,
always, Whistler.
* * * * *
The most that men have ventured to say is that he was influenced by
Velasquez, though he himself has said he never visited Madrid,--a
statement many insist cannot be true; others say he has been influenced
by Japanese art,--but Velasquez and the art of Japan are far from French
or English art of the nineteenth century; and the assertion that he was
influenced by either is a confession that he lived unscathed amidst his
surroundings.
Back of the art of Japan is the purer art of China; and to that source
must we go if we seek the factors that influenced Whistler, for he loved
the porcelain and pottery of China long before they were collected by
the museums and amateurs of Europe.
“When no one cared for it,” he said, “I used to find in Amsterdam the
most beautiful blue-and-white china. That was a good many years ago; it
is all gone now.”
Old Delft did not inspire him with any enthusiasm. “Crude, crude,
crude.”
This art of China, as reflected and elaborated in that of Japan,
influenced him,--of that there can be no doubt,--and he recognized what
was good in Japanese art before others gave it any attention.
The art of Velasquez had its due weight, for he loved the work of the
Spanish master; and if he never visited Madrid, perhaps it was because
he feared falling too much under its influence. But he went frequently
to the Louvre, and invariably to the little “Infanta,” which he would
look at long and earnestly, and to Titian’s “Man with the Glove,” which
was a favorite, and to certain Rembrandts, and to Franz Hals, and a few,
a very few others,--the gems of the collection,--ignoring completely the
pictures which commonly attract, never once glancing up at the huge
canvases by Rubens and his pupils; in fact, so far as he was concerned
the walls might have been bare save for a half-dozen masterpieces; and
these he really did love. There was no mistaking his attitude towards
them. It was one of reverential affection. He appreciated a really good
thing, whether he or some one else had done it, and he hated above
everything sham and pretence and foolish display. To him a picture the
size of one’s hand, if well and conscientiously done, was just as
important as a full-length portrait.
The Italian masters influenced him, for he often spoke of them, of the
wonderful effects they obtained with such simple materials and such
straight-forward methods; their mastery of color influenced him, and he
sought, so far as possible, to discover the pigments and the methods
they used.
Those are the factors which helped to make Whistler,--the purest art; he
was not influenced by what went on about him, or by what was said about
him. So little did he care what others were doing or how they did it
that his very brushes and pigments were different; and his methods were
so peculiarly his own that no one painted at all like him, and his
fellow-artists looked on in amazement.
* * * * *
The wave of impressionism which submerged all Paris in the very midst of
his career left him unaffected,--for his art was an older and truer
impressionism, an impressionism that did not depend upon the size of
brushes or the consistency of pigments.
A visitor once said to him:
“Mr. Whistler, it seems to me you do not use some of those very
expensive and brilliant colors which are in vogue nowadays.”
“No.” And he diligently worked away at his palette. “I can’t afford
to,--they are so apt to spoil the picture.”
“But they are effective.”
“For how long? A year, or a score of years, perhaps; but who can tell
what they will be a century or five centuries hence. The old masters
used simple pigments which they ground themselves. I try to use what
they used. After all, it is not so much what one uses as the way it is
used.”
* * * * *
Much of the foregoing argument concerning the Americanism of Whistler
and his art may seem to be contradicted by his own express utterances.
For did he not say in his “Ten o’Clock”?
“Listen! There never was an artistic period.”
“There never was an art-loving nation.”
And he pointed out how the man who, “differing from the rest,” who
“stayed by the tents with the women and traced strange devices with a
burnt stick upon a gourd, ... who took no joy in the ways of his
brethren, ... who perceived in nature about him curious curvings, as
faces are seen in the fire, this dreamer apart, was the first artist.”
“And presently there came to this man another--and, in time, others--of
like nature, chosen by the gods; and so they worked together; and soon
they fashioned, from the moistened earth, forms resembling the gourd.
And with the power of creation, the heirloom of the artist, presently
they went beyond the slovenly suggestion of nature, and the first vase
was born, in beautiful proportion.”
And the toilers and the heroes were athirst, “and all drank alike from
the artist’s goblets, fashioned cunningly, taking no note the while of
the craftsman’s pride, and understanding not his glory in his work;
drinking at the cup, not from choice, not from a consciousness that it
was beautiful, but because, forsooth, there was no other!”
“And the people questioned not, _and had nothing to say in the matter_.”
“So Greece was in its splendor, and art reigned supreme,--by force of
fact, not by election,--and there was no meddling by the outsider.”
Again he says:
“The master stands in no relation to the moment at which he occurs a
monument of isolation, hinting at sadness, having no part in the
progress of his fellow-men.”
* * * * *
Those are the propositions which called out the reply--positive and
intemperate--from Swinburne,[6] and so estranged the two, and which to
this day have proved huge stumbling-blocks in the paths of those who try
to understand Whistler.
For the world does believe that there have been “artistic periods,” that
there have been “art-loving nations,” that in some mysterious manner the
master does stand in “relation to the moment at which he occurs.”
And the world is right; though it does not necessarily follow that
Whistler was wrong in the particular views he had in mind when he
uttered his epigrammatic propositions.
* * * * *
In one sense it is undoubtedly true that the master does seem to stand
apart, “a mounment of isolation,” that he does seem to happen without
any causal connection with either parents or country, time or
place,--for who could have foretold the greatness of Shakespeare from an
acquaintance with those obscure individuals his father and mother, or
from a knowledge of Stratford and its environs? Who could have predicted
the triumphs of Napoleon from a study of his Corsican forbears, or the
strange genius of Lincoln from his illiterate progenitors and humble
surroundings, or the elemental force of Walt Whitman from his ancestry
and American conditions?
No one; and yet there is the profound conviction that each of these men,
like every great man,--prophet, king, statesman warrior, poet, or
painter,--appeared, not miraculously, but as the inevitable result of
irresistible forces; that the brilliant man is, after all, the son of
his parents and the child of his times.
In the mystery of generation two stupidities fused in the alembic of
maternity produce a genius.
* * * * *
The occasion does not create, but calls forth its master. Every war has
its great general, every crisis its great leader, and in the world of
art great artists respond to meet the requirements of the hour.
The bent of a nation determines the occupations of her sons,--towards
war and conquest, towards peace and industry, towards things artistic or
things commercial, all as the case may be.
It is not the birth of the poet that turns the nation from commerce to
poetry; it is rather the imperceptible development of the nation itself
in the direction of the ideal that calls into activity--not being--the
poet.
Neither race nor nation can by its fiat create a poet; but it can by its
encouragement stimulate his activity and rouse him to his best. It could
not create a Keats; but it might have urged him on to even greater
heights than he attained,--for who can doubt that his clear, pure
crystalline song was stifled for lack of appreciation?
* * * * *
Now and then a genius, such as Carlyle, such as Whistler, such as
Whitman, asserts himself in spite of all rebuffs, for each of these men
pursued his chosen path regardless of all revilings; but, so susceptible
is genius to encouragement and discouragement, that, for the most part,
it droops before the withering blast of adverse criticism, and only
those of hearts so strong and wills so stubborn that opposition inflames
them to greater efforts make headway against the world.
It was no one genius that made the monuments and literature of Greece,
the art of China and Japan, the paintings of Italy, the Gothic
cathedrals of France and England; it was the demand for all these things
and their appreciation by those who could not do them that called forth
and encouraged the doers.
* * * * *
The first artist may neglect the chase and the field and remain by the
tents idly tracing strange designs upon gourds; but unless those who
till the soil and bring in the food see his decorated gourds and like
them, and prefer them to the plain ones which abound, and are willing to
give him food and shelter for his work, he will not remain by the tents
very long, and his artistic career will be foreshortened by necessity.
But if the toilers and the hunters like the decorated gourds, and the
demand for them increases, others of the tribe who have talent for
designing and decoration will join the master and imitate his work, and
every now and then a pupil will prove a genius and surpass the “first
artist,” and art will grow and art-products will multiply, but only so
long as the rest of the tribe are willing to work and toil and to
exchange the necessaries of life for paintings and carvings and pottery;
and the greater the demand, the keener the desire of the people for
decorated things in preference to those that are plain and cheap, the
larger will be the chance of uncovering now and then a genius, until, as
with the Greeks, the effective demand for things beautiful, for poetry,
music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, becomes so great that we
have an artistic people and an art-epoch,--that is to say, a people that
is only too glad to encourage and support a large number of artists of
every kind, and an era when of a given population an unusually large
percentage is devoted to the service of the beautiful.
* * * * *
The master does _seem_--as Whistler says--to come unbidden; but he will
not remain long, and others will not follow in his footsteps, unless he
arouses at least sufficient appreciation to give him life.
The future of art--of literature, of the drama, and of all the
handicrafts--in America depends not upon the coming of a genius, but
upon the growth of an effective and irresistible demand for good things;
when that demand is sufficiently imperative, a Phidias, an Angelo, a
Shakespeare will respond, for genius is latent everywhere.
The sudden degradation of the arts in Japan within the memory of man was
not due to the disappearance of the talent and genius which for nearly a
thousand years had been steadily--almost methodically--producing things
beautiful, but it was due to the suppression of the feudal system, of
those great lords who from the beginning had been the sure patrons of
art and supporters of artists, and to the throwing open of ports to the
commerce of the world and the introduction of the commercial spirit.
The genius for the creation of beautiful things remains,--for a people
does not change in the twinkling of an eye,--but the talent is no longer
in demand, or, in many cases, is diverted to the more profitable
pursuits of the hour.
_IV_
_Early Days in Paris and Venice--Etchings, Lithographs, and
Water-Colors--“Propositions” and “Ten o’clock."_
After leaving the coast survey, Whistler went to England, and thence to
Paris in 1855, and entered the studio of Charles Gabriel Gleyre, where
he remained two years.
Beyond the fact that Whistler was for a time in his studio, Gleyre has
not much claim on fame. There could not have been anything in common
between the master and his pupil, for he was academic to the last
degree. “Not even by a tour in the East did he allow himself to be led
away from the classic manner; and as the head of a great leading studio
he recognized it as the task of his life to hand the traditions of the
school of Ingres,” whom Whistler used to call a “Bourgeois Greek,” “on
to the present.” He “was a man of sound culture, who during a sojourn in
Italy, which lasted five years, had examined Etruscan vases and Greek
statues with unintermittent zeal, studied the Italian classics, and
copied all Raphael. Having come back to Paris, he never drew a line
without having first assured himself how Raphael would have proceeded.”
However, there must have been a certain combative streak in his
character which did appeal to Whistler, for in 1849 he quarreled with
the Salon over the success of Courbet, and thereafter sent his pictures
to Swiss exhibitions.
* * * * *
Whistler’s first commission grew out of an acquaintance made at West
Point. At one of the commencement festivities he met a charming young
girl, a Miss Sally Williams, and her father, Captain Williams.
While a student in Paris, the pretty daughter and the bluff old captain
called on him, and the captain said:
“Mr. Whistler, we are over here to see Paris, and I want you to show us
the pictures.”
Nothing loath, Whistler took them to the Louvre, and after they had
walked a mile or two the captain stopped before some pictures that
pleased him and asked:
“Do you suppose you could copy these pictures?”
“Possibly.”
“Then, I wish you would copy this, and that, and that,” pointing out
three paintings. “When they are finished, deliver them to my agent, and
he will pay you your price.”
Whistler made the copies, and received the first money he ever earned
with his brush.
One of these canvases, a copy of an Ingres, turned up in New York a year
or two ago. It bore Whistler’s signature, but was so atrocious--imagine
a combination of Ingres and Whistler--that even the dealer doubted its
authenticity; but when a photograph was shown Whistler, he recognized
the picture and told the story.
* * * * *
Of these early days many stories are told, but they are all more or less
apocryphal. It is as natural for stories to cluster about Whistler as
for barnacles to cling to a ship. He told so many good ones that, as
with Lincoln, innumerable good, bad, and indifferent which he did not
tell are attributed to him, and thousands are told about him which have
slight foundations in fact.
It is well nigh impossible to sift the true from the false,--a thing
Whistler himself did not attempt,--though it is possible to sift the
wheat from the chaff, the inane, insipid, and pointless from the bright
and crisp.
Any man can vouch for a story, but who can vouch for a good story? The
story-teller? Heaven forbid! By all the rules of evidence the testimony
of so interested a witness is inadmissible. The better the story, the
more doubtful its authenticity,--its formal, its literal authenticity.
The better the teller, the more daring his liberties with prosaic
details. A good story-teller is a lapidary who receives his material in
the rough and polishes it into a jewel by removing three-fourths of its
substance; or, under pressure of necessity, he deftly manufactures
paste. To be without stories is the story-teller’s crime; a wit without
witticisms is no wit at all, hence the strain upon veracity.
Happily, the world conspires to help both wit and story-teller by
supplying during their lives, and in great abundance after their deaths,
stories and witticisms without end. Give a man the reputation of being a
humorist, and all he has to do is to sit discreetly silent and watch his
reputation grow. If he really deserves his reputation, he may add to his
fame by fresh activities; but if he is something of a sham, as most wits
are, he would better leave his sayings to the imaginations of others.
* * * * *
Whistler’s sense of humor was so keen, his wit so sharp, his facility in
epigram and clever sayings so extraordinary, that what are genuinely his
are better than anything others have said about him; therefore, it is a
pity some one has not jotted down first hand some of the good things
that constantly fell from his lips. Perhaps some one has, and his life
and sayings will yet appear with all the marks of authority and
authenticity.
But his sharp and exceedingly terse sayings often suffer greatly in the
telling, frequently to the loss of all point and character. The
following instance is in point:
A group of society women were once discussing the graces and
accomplishments of Frederic Leighton.
“So handsome.”
“Plays divinely.”
“Perfectly charming.”
“Sings.”
“And is so great a sculptor.”
Whereupon Whistler, who was of the party, timidly advanced the query:
“Paints a little, too, does he not?”
That is one version of an old and well-worn Whistler anecdote, and other
versions, which are at all characteristic, do not vary in more than two
or three words.
See what the story becomes in the mouth of the incompetent.[7]
“One evening a dozen of us were sitting in Broughton’s
reception-room, waiting for our carriages to be announced, and
Whistler was sitting by himself on a lounge on the other side of
the room. We were discussing the versatile talents of Frederic
Leighton, one of the leading painters of England, and afterwards
president of the Royal Academy. One spoke of his astonishing
linguistic accomplishments: he could express himself in every
European tongue and in several Oriental ones. Another mentioned his
distinguished merit as an architect: he was building an addition to
his studio which was like a vision of Aladdin or Haroun Al Rashid.
Another called attention to his ability in sculpture: a group of an
athlete and a serpent was then exhibiting in the Academy, which
challenged the works of antique art. Another mentioned his talent
as an orator: no man in London could make a better after-dinner
speech. Another praised his personal beauty and grace and his
athletic prowess. At length there fell a silence, because all of us
had contributed his or her mite of eulogy,--all of us, that is,
with the exception of Whistler, reclining on his elbow at the other
side of the room.
“By a common impulse we all glanced over at him: what would he
say? He partly raised himself from his lolling attitude and reached
for his crush hat on the sofa. ‘Yes,’ he added, slowly and
judicially, as if benevolently confirming all the praise we had
poured forth; and then, as if by an after-thought, calling our
attention to a singular fact not generally known, ‘Yes, and he can
paint, too!’”
After all the verbosity, padding, and penny-a-lining, the point is
missed by attributing to Whistler the positive averment that Leighton
could paint.
Small wonder that the writer in the next paragraph confesses:
“My own crude first attempts to understand Whistler’s paintings
were dismal failures; and of course I imagined that the failure was
in the painting, and not in myself. I could see no beauty in them:
the drawing was indeterminate; the colors were not pretty; the
pictures all seemed unfinished.”
It is less difficult than one would suppose to recall things said by
Whistler, for he would repeat a good thing and was always polishing.
For instance, in his controversy with the critics he originally said
that “Ruskin’s high-sounding, empty things ... flow of language that
would, could he hear it, give Titian the same shock of surprise that was
Balaam’s when the first great critic proffered his opinion.”
A very literal correspondent wrote to the papers that the “ass was
right,” and quoted the Bible in proof.
Nothing daunted, Whistler acknowledged the hit, saying, “But, I fancy,
you will admit that this is the only ass on record who ever did see the
Angel of the Lord, and that we are past the age of miracles.”
Years after, in referring to the matter, he improved his reply to, “But
I fancy you will admit that this is the only ass on record that ever was
right, and the age of miracles is past.”
* * * * *
His love of epigram was so great that nothing which was terse or pointed
escaped his ears or fled his memory.
One day, while lunching with a friend who knew something about the
habits and eccentricities of good wine, Whistler was telling about the
peculiarities of Henry James, how James would drag a slender incident
through several pages until it was exhausted, whereupon his friend
casually remarked:
“The best of wine is spoiled by too small a spiggot.”
Immediately alert, Whistler said:
“What’s that? what’s that you said? Did you get that out of
Shakespeare?”
“Not at all; it is simply a physical fact that if you let good wine
dribble through a small spiggot you lose its fragrance and character.”
“God bless me, but I believe you are right; and it’s a good
saying,--it’s James to a--drop.”
* * * * *
No doubt there are many still living who knew Whistler in those early
Paris days, but if so, few have so far made known their reminiscences.
One fellow-student describes one of the places they used to dine
inexpensively as follows:[8]
“In Paris, in the fifties, there existed in the Rue de la
Michandiere what appeared to be an ordinary Paris creamery. In the
front shop were sold milk, butter, and eggs. Over the door was the
usual painted tin coffee-pot, indicating that _caffé au lait_, and
eggs, butter, and rolls could be obtained in the back room.
“The place was kept by Madame Busque, who had been a governess in a
private family in the south of France, and having saved a little
money, had come to Paris and opened a creamery. The very day she
opened her shop, Mr. Chase, Paris correspondent of the New York
_Times_, passing by, was attracted by the clean look of the place,
and stepped in for his early breakfast of coffee and rolls. The
little back room contained two round tables, and beyond was the
kitchen with the usual charcoal broiler and little furnaces. Chase
was so pleased that he came again, and getting acquainted with
Madame, who was well educated and very ladylike and anxious to
please, arranged for a dinner at 6.30 for a party of four.
Everything was good and so well served that soon she had a regular
custom of American residents,--literary men, artists, and students
of all kinds, art, scientific, literary, and medical,--and soon the
place became famous. American dishes were introduced,--mince and
pumpkin pies and buckwheat cakes. It was not easy to reproduce
these things in Paris. The pumpkin pie was a trouble. Madame was
told how to make it by a man who only knew how it looked and
tasted, and who neglected to mention the crust; and as Madame had
no knowledge of pies in general, she served the first pumpkin pie
as a soup in a tureen. Just at that time came in a bright young
woman, introduced by one of the _habitués_, who offered to come
next forenoon and show Madame Busque how to make a genuine Yankee
pumpkin pie, which she did; and the pies produced in that little
creamery were famous and were sent out to Americans all over Paris.
Fine carriages, including that of the American minister, to the
amazement of the neighborhood, would call for these pies to take
home.
“Among the _habitués_ was young Whistler, then an art student. He
was bright, original, and amusing, but gave at that time no promise
of any particular ability as an artist. His drawing was careless. I
remember one of his pictures,--a woman seated at the piano, a
little child playing on the floor. The piano was so out of drawing
that it looked as if it were falling over. As students are always
fond of guying each other, one said to Whistler, ‘Hurry and put a
fifth leg under that piano or it will fall and smash the baby.’
“One day, in the Luxembourg, Whistler had his easel in a crowd with
others. They were all at work making copies from a famous picture
that had just been added to the gallery. Whistler would paint a
bit, and then rush back to contemplate what he had done. In one of
these mad backward rushes he struck a step-ladder on the top of
which was a painter. Over went step-ladder, painter, and all, and
the painter, trying to save himself, seized the top of his own
canvas and another, pulling them over, easels and all. One knocked
down another, and there was a great crash. Whistler was in the
midst, and his loud voice was heard, as he sat on the floor, his
head protruding through a big canvas that had fallen on him, using
expressions of a vigorous type. He was seized by the guardian,
because, as Whistler was making the most noise, he assumed that the
whole fuss was due to him. This was quite correct; but all the
painters coming to his rescue, telling the guardian that it was all
an accident, he let Whistler off.
“He organized a company of French negro minstrels, writing the
songs and stories, and gave a performance which was very amusing.
Among the _habitués_ at Madame Busque’s was a student from the
School of Mines, Vinton, afterwards Professor of Mining at Columbia
College, and during the war a brigadier-general. He himself told me
the following story in 1866. One night in South Carolina an officer
wandered into his camp. He sent word to the general by the sergeant
of the guard that he was an officer who had lost his way, that he
asked permission to pass the rest of the night in his camp, adding
that he had known General Vinton when a student in Paris. General
Vinton sent for the officer, whom he failed to recognize. After
some thought he asked the question, ‘Who was the funniest man we
knew in Paris?’ ‘Whistler,’ instantly answered the officer. ‘All
right,’ says Vinton; ‘take that empty cot; you are no spy.’”
Among the students he knew in those days were Degas, Ribot, and
Fantin-Latour, whose work every one knows.
Manet was working up to his best; in 1861 he painted the “Child with a
Sword,” now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and altogether the
atmosphere was charged with the strong sulphur of revolution.
In England the pre-Raphaelites--old and new--were turning the hands of
time backward, in France the Impressionists were pressing them forward,
in both countries the ferment of change was working.
* * * * *
When only twenty-four years of age, in 1858, Whistler’s first etchings
appeared, published by Delâtre, with a dedication to Seymour Haden, his
brother-in-law. In those days the relations between the two men were
very cordial; unhappily, not so later, as may be seen in “Gentle Art.”
[Illustration]
One of Haden’s best plates, “Battersea Beach,” bears in its first state
this inscription, “Old Chelsea, Seymour Haden, 1863, out of Whistler’s
window,” and another plate of the same year is entitled, “Whistler’s
House, old Chelsea.”[9]
* * * * *
Prior to the publication of the “French Set,” Whistler had etched three
plates, which were catalogued as[10]
“Early Portrait of Whistler. A young man bare-headed. An impression on
which Whistler wrote ‘Early Portrait of Self’ is in the Avery collection
in the Lenox Library, New York.
“Annie Haden. On the only impression known, now in Avery collection,
Lenox Library, Whistler wrote, ‘Very early; most probably unique.’
“The Dutchman Holding His Glass. This is signed ‘J. W.,’ and but two or
three impressions are in existence.”
There must have been many other early attempts before the “French Set”
was formally undertaken, and possibly other plates and prints will come
to light in the rigorous search that is sure to be made for everything
that he ever did. A plate made while in the service of the coast survey
is in existence,--a headland embellished with vagrant heads and figures.
Some of the prints are to be seen in collections.
The “French Set” consisted of twelve plates and an etched title, making
thirteen plates in all.
But few copies of the set were printed, and the original price was two
guineas per copy.
It is, of course, quite impracticable to give a complete list of
Whistler’s etchings, for three hundred and seventy-two have been duly
listed and described, and it is altogether likely that this number will
be increased to over four hundred.
Whistler himself was very careless about keeping either a set of proofs
or anything like a memorandum of what he had done. In fact, he did not
know what or how many etchings and lithographs he had made or how many
pictures he had painted.
Everything he did was so entirely the pleasure of the moment, and each
new work, whether large or small, so completely absorbed him, that he
quite forgot the labor of yesterday.
All his life long he would begin things and throw them aside, and he
would finish things and throw them aside also. To him the only hour of
vital import was the present. To the very last his work shows the
enthusiasm, the even more than youthful impulsiveness, with which he
would begin each new undertaking.
He could never work at an etching, a lithograph, or a painting one
moment after it became drudgery; he could never finish a thing simply
because he had begun it, or because some one thought it ought to be
finished; hence endless misunderstandings with sitters and patrons, who
could not understand why what they had bargained for should not be
finished and delivered.
No matter how hard at work on any subject, he was instantly diverted by
another which appealed to him more; and he would leave a sitter who was
to pay him a thousand guineas to sketch an Italian urchin.
Unmethodical to the last degree in all his affairs, always absorbed in
what he had in hand, it is not surprising that he kept little track of
the things he had done.
* * * * *
The first catalogue of his etchings was published in London in 1874. It
contained about eighty etchings. In 1886 Mr. Frederick Wedmore
catalogued two hundred and fourteen, and in 1899 increased the number to
two hundred and sixty-eight.
In 1902 a supplement[11] to Wedmore’s catalogue brought the number of
known prints up to three hundred and seventy-two.
* * * * *
The “Thames Set,” sixteen in number, did not appear publicly as a “set”
until 1871, though made many years before; and the very rare early
impressions made by Whistler himself are considered far superior to the
prints of 1871 and after.
In 1880 the Fine Arts Society issued the “First Venice Set” of a dozen
plates, and in 1886 Messrs. Dowdeswell issued a set of twenty-six, known
as the “Twenty-six Etchings.”
One who knew him in his early Venice days gives the following
reminiscences:[12]
“We were often invited to dine with Whistler, whose apartment was
on the next flight above. He came to our rooms one day, and said,
‘A----, I would like you and B---- to dine with me to-day. You have
such a supply of newspapers, please bring several with you, as I
have neither papers nor table-cloth, and they will answer the
purpose quite well.’ I did as he requested, and surprised and
amused was our host when I called his attention to a column and a
half of ‘Whistler stories’ in one of the Boston papers, which was
serving as our table-cloth.
“One day I called on Whistler when he was engaged in decorating the
interior of a house. He lay on his back on the floor, and the
handle of the brush was a fish-pole which reached to the ceiling.
“Once a year, in the summer time, it is the custom of Venetians to
go to the Lido, a surf-bathing resort, to see the sun rise. They
leave in the evening, in gondolas, accompanied with the inevitable
mandolin and guitar, and sometimes with an upright piano. The
excursionists make a night of it, and Whistler was one of the
number. Next day he wished to make a study from our window, the
approach to the Grand Canal. Leaving him for a time by himself,
upon my return there was a striking study of the view on the easel,
and Whistler before the easel asleep. The brushes had fallen from
his grasp, and, well charged with fresh paint, were resting in his
lap. As he wore white duck trousers, the effect can well be
imagined.
“I have often heard him use the word ‘pretty,’ when looking at a
study that had no particular redeeming feature to recommend it. Not
wishing to wound the feelings of the artist, he would remark, with
that peculiar drawl of his, ‘That is pretty, yes, very pretty.’
“One day he called upon two students. On the wall was the study of
a child, most beautifully done by one of them. Whistler stood
before it for a long time in deep admiration, and then, turning to
the art student, said, ‘That is away beyond yourself.’ Truly it
was, for I called again a few days afterwards, and the body
attached to the beautiful head was not worthy the brush of a
five-years-old child. And I wondered how such incongruous things
could be.
“Whistler was very loyal to his ‘white lock;’ said it was an
inheritance in the family for several generations. He wore a slouch
hat; and I have watched him on several occasions, before the
mirror, where he remained for a long time, arranging it on his
curly hair for the best effect before starting for the Florian
café.
“And this reminds me that he was in need sometimes of the
wherewithal to procure his coffee. So he called on me for aid. It
was amusing to me, for I had scarcely soldi to pay for my own, and
so I often went without. However, I could well afford to pay for
Whistler’s coffee, inasmuch as he was a fine linguist, and I called
on him to assist me in the battle I had with the padrona on two
occasions. The mercenary woman was completely nonplussed, for
Whistler waxed eloquent in the Italian tongue. There was no
mistake, he was in dead earnest, for his gesticulations and excited
tones of voice assured it, and my case was won.
“Tintoretto was his ideal artist among the old masters, and he
often spoke most highly of his productions, especially ‘The
Crucifixion.’
“In the line of pastels he was original, doing them on ordinary
wrapping-paper. They were simply beautiful. I saw them in a London
gallery a few months later, and they were an inspiration; so much
so that he has had since many imitators but no equals.
“On one occasion I had a demonstration. We set out together on a
sketching tour of the town. We came suddenly upon a subject that
was very rich in tone--a cooper-shop. I lost no time getting to
work. I threw my sketching-block flat upon the pavement, and
emptied the contents of my box of water-colors upon it to get the
tone quickly. The paper being well saturated with water, made it an
easy matter to bring forth light from out the deep tone with strips
of blotting-paper. I was not aware of doing anything unusual until
I heard a ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ which has been called Whistler’s Satanic
laugh.
“‘What amuses you, Mr. Whistler? Why do you laugh? Are you making
fun of my sketch?’
“‘Oh, no,’ said he, with assurance. ‘I am admiring the ingenious
way in which you work.’
“This to me was high praise, for it came from one who rarely
indulged in praise.”
Another, speaking of the same period, says:[13]
“I first knew Mr. James McNeill Whistler many years ago in Venice,
when he was quite unknown to fame. He had lodging at the top of an
old palace in the uttermost parts of the town, and many days he
would breakfast, lunch, and dine off nothing more nutritious than a
plateful of polenta or macaroni. He was just as witty, and gave
himself just the same outrageous but inoffensive airs as afterwards
in the days of his prosperity. He used to go about and do
marvellous etchings for which he could find no market, or else only
starvation prices. When he was absolutely obliged to, he would sell
them for what he could get; but he never lost the fullest
confidence in his own powers; and, whenever he could, he preferred
to keep them in the expectation--nay, certainty--of being able to
sell them some day at a high figure.
“He used to go roaming about Venice in search of subjects for his
etchings, and those who know all about it say that the charm of his
work lies quite as much in the choice of subjects as in their
execution. He used to make a great deal of mystery about his
etching expeditions, and was rarely prevailed upon to let any one
accompany him. If he did, it was always under the strictest pledge
of secrecy. What was the use, he would ask, of his ferreting out
some wonderful old bridge or archway, and thinking of making it
immortal, if some second-rate painter-man were to come after him
and make it commonplace with his caricatures? On the other hand, if
some friend of his discovered an ideal spot, and asked what he
thought of it, he would not scruple for an instant to say, ‘Come,
now, this is all nonsense, your trying to do this. It is much too
good a subject to be wasted on you. You’d better let me see what I
can do with it.’ And he would be so charming about it, and take his
own superiority so completely for granted, that no one ever dreamed
of refusing him.”
The story is told that a woman, some elderly countess, moved into an
apartment immediately below him. By her noise, fussiness, and goings to
and fro she annoyed him very much, and Whistler wished her out.
The weather was hot, and one day the countess put a jar of goldfish on
the balcony immediately beneath his window. During her absence Whistler
tied a bent pin to a thread and caught the fish, broiled them to a turn,
and dropped them back. Soon the countess returned, and on finding her
goldfish dead, there was a great commotion, and the next day she packed
up and left, saying that Venice was altogether too hot,--the sun had
cooked her goldfish in their jar.
Of Whistler’s etchings Seymour Haden once said that if he had to part
with his Rembrandts or his Whistlers he would let the former go.
This collection of Haden’s came to this country a few years ago.
An enthusiastic collector says:
“I should say of Mr. Whistler that he was an artistic genius, whose
etched work has not been surpassed by any one, and equalled only by
Rembrandt. Comparing the etching of the two, it should be said of
Rembrandt that he chose greater subjects,--as, for instance,
‘Christ Healing the Sick’ and ‘The Crucifixion;’ in landscape ‘The
Three Trees;’ and in portraiture ‘Jan Lutma,’ ‘Ephraim Bonus,’ and
‘The Burgomaster Six.’ It certainly cannot be said of Whistler that
he ever etched any plates such as the two first mentioned. Though
Rembrandt’s etchings number, say, two hundred and seventy plates,
when a buyer has bought fifty, he has, no matter how much money he
may possess, all the Rembrandts he wants. In other words, two
hundred and twenty plates are of little value.
“Whistler has catalogued three hundred and seventy-two plates; but
it would not do to think of stopping the buying of his prints with
fifty, or twice that number, or any other figures, indeed, short of
them all. The difference between Rembrandt and Whistler might be
expressed in this way: Rembrandt etched many things whose technique
was not the best, whose subjects were abominable, and whose work
generally was far from pleasing. Whistler, on the contrary, has
never etched a plate that would not be a delight to any
connoisseur.
“I have fifty-five Rembrandts, and, with the exception of half a
dozen more, I have all that I want, or all that I would buy, no
matter how much money I had. Of Whistlers I have fifty-one, and I
carry constantly in my pocket a list of as many more that I would
be glad to buy if I had the chance. I can add that if I succeed in
getting the others I shall then want as many more.
“While Whistler has not equalled Rembrandt in some of the great
things, yet his average is very much higher. The latter etched
scores of plates that do his memory no honor; the former, on the
contrary, has never etched one that will not be remembered with
pleasure. To etch a fine portrait is the surest proof of the
master; the human face is the grandest subject that any artist ever
had. I have always thought that Rembrandt’s ‘Jan Lutma’ was the
grand old man of all etched portraiture, though it is hard to see
in what possible respect it surpasses ‘The Engraver,’ ‘Becquet,’
‘Drouet,’ and other portraits by Whistler.
“Rembrandt’s ‘Three Trees,’ in landscape, is a greater plate than
Whistler’s ‘Zaandam,’ though the latter is well-nigh perfection. I
know no Rembrandt interior that approaches Whistler’s ‘Kitchen,’
and I know no exteriors, unless possibly a few by Meryon, that
approach his ‘Palaces,’ ‘The Doorway,’ ‘Two Doorways,’ the
‘Embroidered Curtain,’ and a score or two of others that are well
known to all lovers of black and white.
“This story was started on Whistler ten or twelve years ago, and
has been on its travels ever since: Some one asked him which of his
etchings he thought the best. His answer was, ‘All of them.’ And he
told the truth. Of plates that he thought much of, when I saw him
thirteen years ago, the little ‘Marie Loches,’ which is another
name for the Mayor’s residence, was hung over his desk, and I
distinctly remember that the fine ‘Pierrot,’ in the Amsterdam set,
was also a prime favorite of his. Later I have heard it said that
the portrait of ‘Annie’ he regarded as his finest figure piece.”
In February, 1883, he exhibited in London, in the rooms of the Fine Arts
Society, fifty-one etchings and dry-points.
It was, according to the placards,--and in reality,--an “Arrangement in
Yellow and White,” for the room was white, with yellow mouldings; the
frames of the prints white, the chairs white, the ottomans yellow; the
draperies were yellow, with white butterflies; there were yellow flowers
in yellow Japanese vases on the mantels; and even the attendants were
clothed in white and yellow. As a French artist remarked, “It was a
dream of yellow.”
This, however, is how it struck some of the angry critics, who were
impaled in the catalogue:
“While Mr. Whistler’s staring study in yellow and white was open to
the public we did not notice it,--for notice would have been
advertisement, and we did not choose to advertise him.
“Of the arrangement in yellow and white, we note that it was simply
an insult to the visitors,--almost intolerable to any one
possessing an eye for color, which Mr. Whistler, fortunately for
him, does not,--and absolutely sickening (in the strictest sense of
the word) to those at all sensitive in such matters. ‘I feel sick
and giddy in this hateful room,’ remarked a lady to us after she
had been there but a few minutes. Even the common cottage chairs,
painted a coarse yellow, did not solace the visitors; and the
ornaments on the mantel-piece, something like old bottle-necks,
only excited a faint smile in the sickened company.”[14]
The sea-sick lady was probably an invention of the writer.
* * * * *
Another, apparently somewhat less susceptible to the “sickening” effects
of yellow, simply says:
“Mr. Whistler has on view at the Fine Art Society’s some
half-a-hundred etchings; but it was not to see these only that he
invited his friends, and many fine people besides, last Saturday.
In the laudable effort for a new sensation, he had been engaging in
literature; and a grave servant, dressed in yellow and white (to
suit the temporary decoration of the walls during the show) pressed
into the hands of those who had come in all innocence to see the
etchings a pamphlet in which Mr. Whistler’s arrangements had
extended to an arrangement of critics.”[15]
The catalogue which stirred the ire of the critics was an innocent
little thing in brown-paper cover containing a list of the prints; but
beneath each was a line or two from the critics, and they were all there
in outspoken condemnation of the work of the man who is now placed, by
even the critics, on a plane with Rembrandt. Some have since confessed
their errors in print and begged for the mantle of charity.
* * * * *
On the title-page appeared:
“Out of their own mouths shall ye judge them.”
And here, as an example, is what he printed beneath “No. 51, Lagoon;
Noon.” In mercy the names of the critics are omitted.
“Years ago James Whistler was a person of high promise.”
“What the art of Mr. Whistler yields is a _tertium quid_.”
“All of which gems, I am sincerely thankful to say, I cannot
appreciate.”
“As we have hinted, the series does not represent any Venice that
we much care to remember; for who wants to remember the
degradation of what has been noble, the foulness of what has been
fair?”
“Disastrous failures.”
“Failures that are complete and failures that are partial.”
“A publicity rarely bestowed upon failures at all.”
Whereupon Whistler brought the catalogue to a close with these
scriptural sentences:
“Therefore is judgment far from us, neither doth justice overtake
us; we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we
walk in darkness.”
“We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no
eyes; we stumble at noonday as in the night.”
“We roar all, like bears.”
Whistler’s manner of arraigning his critics was his own. No one else
could compile such delightful bits of literature as were those
catalogues he issued from time to time; but the idea of publishing
adverse criticism with the work criticised was not new.
To his first edition of “Sartor Resartus” Carlyle--Whistler’s neighbor
in Chelsea--printed as an appendix the letter of condemnation which
Murray the publisher received from his literary adviser and which led to
the rejection of the manuscript.
The scheme is not without advantages,--it amuses the reader and
confounds the critic, to which ends books and paintings are created.
* * * * *
How the galled jades winced may be gathered from the following mild
comments:
“Mr. Whistler’s catalogue, however, is our present game. He takes
for motto, ‘Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?’ But Mr. Whistler
mistakes his vocation. He is no butterfly. He might be compared,
perhaps, to a bird,--the bird that can sing but won’t. If one
judged, however, from some of his etchings, one would say a spider
was nearer his mark. But a butterfly! the emblem of all that is
bright and beautiful in form and color! Daniel Lambert might as
reasonably have taken the part of the Apothecary in ‘Romeo and
Juliet,’ or Julia Pastrana have essayed the _rôle_ of Imogen.
“Criticism _is_ powerless with him in many different ways. It is
powerless to correct his taste for wilfully drawing ill. If a
school-girl of ten showed such a picture of a human being as this
(referring to illustration), for instance, we might criticise
usefully enough. We might point out that no human being (we suppose
the thing is intended for a human being, but it may be meant for a
rag-bag) ever had such features or such shape. But of what use
would it be to tell Mr. Whistler as much? He knows it already, only
he despises the public so much that he thinks it will do well
enough for them.
“Again, criticism is powerless to explain what was meant by some
such figure as this, in No. 33. The legs we can especially answer
for, while the appendages which come where a horse has his feet and
pasterns are perfect transcripts--they are things we never could
forget. We have not the faintest idea what they really are. We
would not insult Mr. Whistler by supposing he tried to draw a horse
with the customary equine legs, and so failed as to produce these
marvels. Perhaps Dr. Wilson knows of some animal limbed thus
strangely.
“It is because of such insults as these to common sense and common
understanding, and from no ill-will we bear him, that we refuse
seriously to criticise such work as Mr. Whistler has recently
brought before the public. Whatever in it is good adds to his
offence, for it shows the offence to be wilful, if not
premeditated.”[16]
Poor etchings,--condemned for their virtues, condemned for their
faults,--there is no health in them.
* * * * *
And these and many similar things were written, only twenty years ago,
of the greatest etchings the world has known since the days of
Rembrandt.
When one thinks of the obscurity of Rembrandt to the day of his death,
and how little his work was known for long after, of the passing of
Meryon without recognition, it must be conceded that Whistler is coming
into his own amazingly fast.
* * * * *
Senefelder discovered the process, but Whistler perfected the art of
lithography. It was not until 1877, twenty years after he began etching,
that he made his first lithographs.
There had been many before him, but none like him.
During the first half of the century the process was in great vogue in
France, and men like Ingres, Millet, Corot, and Delacroix tried the
facile stone.
One can readily understand how so fascinating a process appealed to
Whistler, and the wonder is that he did not attempt it earlier.
The use of transfer-paper, whereby the artist is enabled to make his
drawing when and where he pleases upon the paper, instead of being
hampered by the heavy stone, has greatly advanced the art, though
drawing on the stone possesses certain advantages and attractions over
the paper.
Not many years ago Whistler was called as an expert witness in a case
which involved the question whether the use of transfer-paper was
lithography. The result of the case is of no consequence. While on the
stand, he turned to the judge, and said:
“May I be permitted to explain, my lord, to these gentlemen (the jury)
why we are all here?”
“Certainly not,” answered the court; “we are all here because we cannot
help it.”
The witty ruling of the court deprived those present of remarks which
would have been not only to the point but greatly amusing.
It was in this case that an artist who had written many fine things
about Whistler and his work appeared as a witness on the other side, and
in cross-examining the great painter, counsel called attention to one of
the complimentary things that had been written (“Mr. Whistler’s almost
nothings are priceless”), and asked, “You don’t dissent to that, do you,
Mr. Whistler?”
Whistler smiled, and replied, “It is very simple and very proper that
Mr. ---- should say that sort of a thing, but I attach no importance to
it.”
And it is really true that no man ever enjoyed more having nice things
said about his work, and no man ever attributed less importance to
either favorable or unfavorable comments. He accepted both as a matter
of course and of no consequence; neither he nor his work was affected in
the slightest degree.
In 1896 he exhibited some seventy lithographs in the rooms of the Fine
Arts Society, and they were a revelation of the possibilities of the
process in the hands of a master of line.
The Way catalogue, now out of print, contained one hundred and thirty,
purporting to cover those printed down to and including 1896.
To this list must be added at least eight more which are well known, and
possibly others.
* * * * *
There are, therefore, in existence nearly four hundred etchings and
dry-points by Whistler, and probably not less than one hundred and fifty
lithographs,--a large volume of work for one man, even if he produced
nothing else.
Stress is here laid upon the mere volume of his work to meet some
remarkable views which have been put forth concerning him and to correct
the popular impression that his controversies diverted him from his art.
He was but sixty-nine when he died. His first etchings appeared in
1857-58. For the remainder of his life he averaged twelve plates and
lithographs a year,--one a month; and of this great number, it is
conceded by conservative experts, the percentage of successful plates
and stones is much larger than that of any of his great predecessors. In
fact, there are no failures. Some of the plates were more sketchy and of
slighter importance than others, but every one is the genuine expression
of the artist’s mood at the moment of execution, and precious
accordingly.
Not many years ago there was in a certain city an exhibition of the
slight but pretty work of a famous French illustrator. By his grace, and
especially by his happy facility in the drawing of children in checked
frocks and gray or brown or blue stockings and stubby shoes, the work
attracted attention, and, as always happens with the pretty and the
novel, aroused an enthusiasm quite out of proportion to its real merit.
Two men fell into a dispute over the merits of the little drawings, one
siding with the throng and maintaining they were great, the other
insisting they were simply pretty,--too pretty to be good and really
quite hard and mechanical in execution,--in fact, quite inconsequential
as art.
“Look,” said he, “at this figure of a child. See how the outline is
painfully traced in black and then the colors filled in as mechanically
and methodically as if a stencil had been used. What would a Jap say to
that?”
“He would say it is fine. It is Japanese in color and motive.”
“About as Japanese as a colored illustration in a modern magazine.” The
discussion became heated.
Oddly enough, at that moment a Japanese expert, who was crossing the
country on his way to Europe to catalogue some collections, entered the
room, and he was appealed to for his opinion of the drawing in question.
In broken English he said:
“It is--very--pretty, very pretty; but--I not know how you say it,--but
it is what you call--Spencerian,--yes, that is the name of the
copy-books--Spencerian writing, while a Japanese drawing is
the--autograph--that is the difference--the autograph.”
And that is the difference between some of the work of even the great
ones before him and whatever Whistler did,--everything he touched was
his autograph; whereas with even Rembrandt there is the feeling now and
then, though seldom, of the set purpose, of the determination to secure
a certain result, of the intention to do something for others. Whistler
never did anything for any one but himself. He never touched needle or
brush to please model, sitter, or patron. Whenever the work in hand
ceased to amuse and interest him as a creation of his own fancy, he
dropped it. He could not work after his interest had evaporated.
* * * * *
There is in existence a water-color[17] bearing Whistler’s signature on
the back, and also this endorsement: “From my window. This was his first
attempt at water-color.--E. W. Godwin.”
It is a characteristic view of the Thames with Old Battersea Bridge
reaching almost from side to side.
In his pastels and water-colors, as in his etchings and lithographs, he
never forced a delicate medium beyond its limitations.
Of all artists who ever lived, Whistler made the least mystery of his
art.
He not only expressed his intentions fully in his art, but also in
unmistakable language.
In the first of his “Propositions,” published many years ago, he laid
down certain fundamental principles which controlled his use of etching,
water-color, and pastel, the first proposition being:
“That in art it is criminal to go beyond the means used in its
exercise.”
And he defined the limits of the etcher’s plate, and by implication the
dimensions of the water-color and pastel--art’s most fragile means.
* * * * *
In the famous “Propositions No. 2” he formulated the principles which
governed his work as a painter, the first being:
“A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about
the end has disappeared.”
And the last:
“The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter,--perfect in
its bud as in its bloom,--with no reason to explain its presence, no
mission to fulfil, a joy to the artist, a delusion to the
philanthropist, a puzzle to the botanist, an accident of sentiment and
alliteration to the literary man.”[18]
* * * * *
These two sets of “Propositions,” read in connection with his one
lecture, the “Ten o’Clock,” which was delivered in London, February 20,
1885, at Cambridge, March 24, and Oxford, April 30, contain his creed
in art.
Many a painter has written books explanatory of his art, but none has
ever stated so plainly and so tersely the principles which actually
governed all he did. Whistler was so epigrammatic in utterance that he
was not taken seriously, but accused of paradox. But whoever reads what
he has so soberly and earnestly said will better understand his work.
And whatever may be thought of reprinting entire the “Gentle Art,” there
can be no question about the great need of scattering broadcast the
“Propositions” and the “Ten o’Clock.”
_V_
_Chelsea--The Royal Academy--“Portrait of His
Mother”--“Carlyle”--Grosvenor Gallery--The “Peacock
Room”--Concerning Exhibitions._
After--possibly because--his “White Girl” was rejected at the Salon, he
went to London and made his home at Chelsea, where he had as neighbors
Carlyle, Rossetti, George Eliot, and others of note in art and
literature.
Carlyle’s description of Chelsea as it was in 1834, when he and his wife
moved there, is interesting,--for the place changed little before
Whistler came. Writing to his wife concerning the house he had found,
Carlyle said:
“The street runs down upon the river, which I suppose you might see
by stretching out your head from the front window, at a distance of
fifty yards on the left. We are called ‘Cheyne Row’ proper
(pronounced _Chainie_ Row), and are a ‘genteel neighborhood;’ two
old ladies on one side, unknown character on the other, but with
‘pianos.’ The street is flag pathed, sunk storied, iron railed, all
old-fashioned and tightly done up; looks out on a rank of sturdy
old _pollarded_ (that is, beheaded) lime-trees, standing there like
giants in _tawtie_ wigs (for the new boughs are still young);
beyond this a high brick wall; backwards a garden, the size of our
back one at Comely Bank, with trees, etc., in bad culture; beyond
this green hayfields and tree avenues, once a bishop’s
pleasure-grounds, an unpicturesque yet rather cheerful outlook. The
house itself is eminent, antique, wainscoted to the very ceiling,
and has been all new painted and repaired; broadish stair with
massive balustrade (in the old style), corniced and as thick as
one’s thigh; floors thick as a rock, wood of them here and there
worm-eaten, yet capable of cleanness, and still with thrice the
strength of a modern floor. And then as to rooms, Goody! Three
stories beside the sunk story, in every one of them three
apartments, in depth something like forty feet in all--a front
dining-room (marble chimney-piece, etc.), then a back dining-room
or breakfast-room, a little narrower by reason of the kitchen
stairs; then out of this, and narrower still (to allow a back
window, you consider), a china-room or pantry, or I know not what,
all shelved and fit to hold crockery for the whole street. Such is
the ground area, which, of course, continues to the top, and
furnishes every bedroom with a dressing-room or second bedroom; on
the whole a most massive, roomy, sufficient old house, with places,
for example, to hang, say, three dozen hats or cloaks on, and as
many crevices and queer old presses and shelved closets (all tight
and new painted in their way) as would gratify the most covetous
Goody,--rent, thirty-five pounds! I confess I am strongly tempted.
Chelsea is a singular heterogeneous kind of spot, very dirty and
confused in some places, quite beautiful in others, abounding with
antiquities and the traces of great men,--Sir Thomas More, Steele,
Smollett, etc. Our row, which for the last three doors or so is a
street, and none of the noblest, runs out upon a ‘Parade’ (perhaps
they call it), running along the shore of the river, a broad
highway with huge shady trees, boats lying moored, and a smell of
shipping and tar. Battersea Bridge (of wood) a few yards off; the
broad river, with white-trowsered, white-shirted Cockneys dashing
by like arrows in thin, long canoes of boats; beyond, the green,
beautiful knolls of Surrey, with their villages,--on the whole a
most artificial, green-painted, yet lively, fresh, almost
opera-looking business, such as you can fancy. Finally, Chelsea
abounds more than any place in omnibi, and they take you to
Coventry Street for sixpence. Revolve all this in thy fancy and
judgment, my child, and see what thou canst _make_ of it.”[19]
Between Whistler and Rossetti there sprang up a friendship that was
singular, considering how diametrically opposite they were to one
another in nearly everything. They had, however, this in common,--each
was in search of a degree of the beautiful quite beyond the grasp of the
ordinary mortal; but of the two, Whistler’s is incomparably the finer
art, for it is the purer and more abstract, while Rossetti’s painting
exhibited the literary bent very conspicuously,--it was inextricably
involved with his poetry.
One day he showed Whistler a sketch which Whistler liked, and he urged
Rossetti to go on with it; but Rossetti became so infatuated with his
conception that instead of finishing the picture he wrote a sonnet on
the subject and read it to Whistler, who said:
“Rossetti take out the picture and frame the sonnet.”
Life in Chelsea in those days had its drawbacks.
Whistler’s utter lack of commercial instinct, his dislike for the
dealers, the habit he had of falling out with any one who discussed
money matters with him, and that reluctance to part with pictures which
was a conspicuous trait through life, often involved him in trouble
financially.
* * * * *
In 1879 E. W. Godwin designed and built for him a house in Tite Street.
It was of white brick, and known as the “White House,” and is described
as having been very artistic in so far as it was settled and furnished,
but for some time only two rooms were in order. “Everywhere you
encountered great packing-cases full of pretty things, and saw
preparations for papering and carpeting, but somehow or other nothing
ever got any forwarder. What was done was perfect in its way. The white
wainscoting, the rich draperies, the rare Oriental china, the pictures
and their frames, the old silver, all had a charm and a history of their
own.”[20]
His powers of persuasion were such that it is said he once tamed a
bailiff--temporarily in possession--to a degree of docility little short
of amazing,--a favorite word of his.
“When the man first appeared he tried to wear his hat in the
drawing-room and smoke about the house. Whistler soon settled that.
He went out into the hall and fetched a stick, and daintily knocked
the man’s hat off. The man was so surprised that he forgot to be
angry, and within a day or two he had been trained to wait at
table. One morning, when Mr. Whistler was shaving, a message was
brought up that the man (he was always known in the house as ‘the
man,’ as if he were the only one of his species) wanted to speak to
him.
“‘Very well, send him up,’ said Mr. Whistler. He went on shaving,
and when the man came in said, abruptly, ‘Now, then, what do you
want?’
“‘I want my money, sir.’
“‘What money?’
“‘My possession money, sir.’
“‘What, haven’t they given it to you?’
“‘No, sir; it’s you that have to give it to me.’
“‘Oh, the deuce I have!’ And Mr. Whistler laughingly gave him to
understand that, if he wanted money, his only chance was to apply
elsewhere.
“‘Well, I think it’s very hard, sir,’ the man began to snivel; ‘I
have my own family to keep, and my own rent to pay----’
“‘I’ll tell you what I advise you to do,’ Mr. Whistler returned, as
he gently pushed him out of the room: ‘you should do as I do, and
have “a man” in your own house.’
“Soon after this the man came and said that if he was not paid he
would have to put bills up outside the house announcing a sale.
And, sure enough, a few days after great posters were stuck up all
over the front of the house, announcing so many tables, and so many
chairs, and so much old Nankin china for sale on a given day. Mr.
Whistler enjoyed the joke hugely, and hastened to send out
invitations to all his friends to a luncheon-party, adding, as a
postscript, ‘You will know the house by the bills of sale stuck up
outside.’ And the bailiff proved an admirable butler, and the party
one of the merriest ever known.”[21]
The “White House” was finally sold, and it is said that when he moved
out he wrote on the wall, “Except the Lord build the house, their labor
is in vain that build it,--E. W. Godwin, R.S.A., built this one.”
Speaking of architects, the story is told that he was once dining, and
dining well, at the house of a friend in London. Towards the end of the
dinner he was obliged to leave the table and run up-stairs to write a
note. In a few moments a great noise was heard in the hall, and Whistler
was found to have fallen down the stairs. “Who is your architect?” he
asked. His host told him. “I might have known it; the ---- teetotaler!”
By the irony of fate the “White House” was afterwards occupied and much
altered by the detested critic of the _Times_,--detested possibly
because he occupied and dared to alter the house,--and Whistler asked:
“Shall the birthplace of art become the tomb of its parasite?”
It was this critic who pronounced a water-color drawing of Ruskin by
Herkomer the best oil portrait the painter had ever done,--a mistake
Whistler never let the unlucky writer forget.
* * * * *
In those days he exhibited quite frequently at the Royal Academy.
Among the earliest pictures exhibited was “At the Piano.” It attracted
the attention of the Scotch painter John Phillip, who wished to buy it.
Whistler left the price to him, and Phillip sent a check for thirty
guineas, which was entirely satisfactory, so far as any one knows.
Thirty thousand dollars has already been paid for one of his very early
pictures, and for any one of a
[Illustration]
half-dozen of his important canvases a bid of fifty thousand dollars may
be had any day.
It is a question of only a few years when Whistler’s paintings will sell
as high as Rembrandt’s. The great galleries of Europe have not yet
entered the field, and many of the great private collections have no
example of his work. A few Americans, but not many out of the large
number of those who buy pictures regardless of cost, are already
inquiring. When all these factors come into competition, as they will
soon or late, prices will be realized that will make the dearest of
English or French painters seem cheap.
* * * * *
In 1872 the portrait of his mother, an “Arrangement in Gray and Black,”
was sent in to the Academy, and accepted only after a sharp controversy,
wherein Sir William Boxall, R.A., gave the committee their choice
between hanging the picture and accepting his own resignation as one of
their number. “For,” said he, “it shall never be told of me that I
served on a committee which refused such a work as that.” The picture
was eventually placed with the “black-and-white” exhibit, drawings,
engravings, etc., and apparently only the critics saw it. What they said
Whistler has himself recorded.
Somebody has asked, Suppose Whistler had been taken up and made an
A.R.A., and in due course an R.A.--what then?
The thing is well-nigh inconceivable; and even if an A.R.A., his innate
dislike for sham and pretension in art and his sense of humor would
have prevented him from becoming a full-fledged academician in a body
wherein, as in all similar bodies, mutual appreciation, or at least
mutual restraint from honest depreciation, is essential to existence.
Whistler would probably have accepted the first degree, the A.R.A., of
the fraternity,--for all his life he was personally, but not in his art,
singularly susceptible to the praise of his fellow-men; but he would
have remained in the Academy about as long as he remained president of
the British Society of Painters,--just long enough to overturn things
generally, and then get out.
Once, when taken to task for referring to a painter who was only an
A.R.A. as an R.A., he retorted that it was a difference without a
distinction.
To the orthodox academicians his work was a mystery. Once, when dining
in a restaurant in the West End, the waiter, having difficulty in
supplying Whistler’s wants, said, “Well, sir, I can’t quite make out
what you mean.”
“Gad, sir,” he cried, in tones of amazement, “are you an R.A.?”
It is not within the range of possibilities that the Royal Academy, or
any other institution, would have had any perceptible influence on
Whistler’s art,--on _that_ side he was indifferent to the influences
which affect most men, to considerations of gain and popular
appreciation.
In the account of a certain public sale the statement was printed that
when one of his pictures was put up it was loudly hissed. He sat down
and wrote the editor acknowledging the compliment, “the distinguished
though unconscious compliment so publicly paid. It is rare that
recognition so complete is made during the lifetime of the painter.”
Another time he said, “There are those, they tell me, who have the
approval of the public, and live.”
Long after he ceased to exhibit at the Academy a lady met him at one of
the exhibitions, and expressed her surprise.
“Well, you know,” he answered, “one must do something to lend interest
to the show,--so here I am.”
* * * * *
Years after, the Academy, while Leighton was president, invited him to
send some of his pictures, and here is the account of what happened:[22]
“He was in Brussels. There came a telegram from him to me which was
a cry of exultation:
“‘MY DEAR S.: The Lord hath delivered them into my hands. I am
sending you by post their last dying confession.’
“And so next morning the post duly brought a letter from Whistler
inclosing the official proposal from the Royal Academy, signed by
Mr. Eaton, secretary to that distinguished body, inviting Whistler
to contribute to a loan exhibition then presently to be held.
Whistler wrote:
“‘Of course, I refuse. You know me too well to doubt that. Do they
think they can use me after so long trampling on me? Do they think
I don’t see what they want? Do they think I need them? At last
they perceive that they need me, but in the day of their extremity
they shall ask in vain.’
“I am quoting from memory, but I give the substance accurately. He
inclosed his answer to the Academy, long since a public document,
with permission to cable it if I liked to America. I telegraphed
Whistler begging him to send no answer till my letter should reach
him. He wired: ‘I do not understand, but I will wait till
to-morrow.’ I wrote to him in the best ink, as Merimee said, at my
command. I tried to point out that the Academy had offered him the
_amende honorable_; that their invitation was an acknowledgment of
their error, and was meant as an atonement; that if he sought to
humiliate his enemies, no humiliation could be so complete as their
public surrender, of which the proof would be the hanging of his
works on their walls, and much else which I thought obvious and
conclusive. And I begged him to remember that I had always thought
him right, and always said the world would come round to him, and
that now, as ever before, whether right or wrong, mine was the
counsel of a friend. The answer came by wire early next morning:
‘Alas, my dear S., that you too should have gone over to the
enemy!’ I believe if I had but besought him to consider that his
acceptance would have been a service to art, and if he could
himself have thought that it would be, he would have accepted. I
never saw Whistler again, never heard from him; a friendship of
twenty years came there and then to an end--on his side.”
In 1897 a circular was mailed to him, addressed, “The Academy, England.”
At the post-office they added “Burlington House,” where it was declined.
Finally the circular reached him, bearing the endorsement, “Not known at
the R. A.” He gave it to the press, saying, “In these days of doubtful
frequentation, it is my rare good fortune to be able to send you an
unsolicited, official, and final certificate of character.”
The fact was, mail addressed simply “Whistler, England,” would reach
him.
* * * * *
The Grosvenor Gallery, opened in 1877 by Sir Coutts Lindsay, offered an
opportunity to many a man who either would not or could not exhibit at
the Academy.
It was here that some of Whistler’s best things were shown,--the
portraits of Irving as Philip II.; Miss Rosa Corder; Miss Gilchrist, the
actress; the Carlyle; Miss Alexander; and Lady Archibald Campbell,
commonly known as “The Lady with the Yellow Buskin,” and many of his
famous nocturnes.
Whistler had a very peculiar laugh,--demoniacal his enemies called
it,--and it is said that while his portrait was being painted, Irving
caught this laugh and used it with effect in the part of
Mephistopheles,--but then, who knows?
The story of the painting and the naming of “The Yellow Buskin” is worth
repeating.
Lady Archibald Campbell was an exceedingly handsome woman, and Whistler
expressed the desire to paint her portrait. She graciously consented,
and the sittings began.
In those days Whistler was looked upon in London as little less than a
mountebank in art, and one day, putting it as nicely as she could, she
said:
“My husband wished me to say that he--he appreciated the honor of your
inviting me to sit for a portrait, but that--that he did not wish to be
understood as committing himself in any way, and the picture must not be
considered a commission.”
“Dear me, no,” said Whistler, as he painted away; “under no
circumstances. Lord Archibald need give himself no uneasiness,--my
compensation is in your condescension. We are doing this for the
pleasure there is in it.”
The portrait was finished, exhibited as “_La Dame au Brodequin
Jaune_,”--and duly ridiculed.
Lady Campbell’s friends expressed surprise that she should have
permitted so eccentric an artist to do so ugly a thing. But time went
on; the picture made a profound sensation and won its way.
Some time after, Whistler met Lady Campbell in London, and she said to
him:
“My dear Mr. Whistler, I hear my portrait has been exhibited everywhere
and become famous.”
“Sh--sh--sh!” with finger on lips. “So it has, my dear Lady Archibald;
but every discretion has been observed that Lord Campbell could
desire,--your name is not mentioned. The portrait is known as ‘The
Yellow Buskin.’” It is now in the Wilstach collection, in Philadelphia.
* * * * *
Whistler preferred to exhibit his work under conditions which he
controlled. As early as 1874 he gave a special exhibition in London, and
in the years 1880, 1881, 1883, 1884, and 1886 he exhibited
[Illustration]
either prints or paintings in the rooms of the Fine Arts Society.
He always occupied the place of honor with the International Society at
Knightsbridge.
Occasionally he would use the galleries of dealers, but not often, and
then only upon his own terms.
* * * * *
While living at Chelsea he had Carlyle as a near neighbor, and of his
own notion he painted the portrait that now hangs in Glasgow.
These two extraordinary beings were quite congenial. The dogmatic old
philosopher, then past seventy-five, sat day after day to the eccentric
painter, who was nearly forty years his junior, as patiently as if he
were a professional model, and the sittings were long and tedious.
One day, as he was leaving, quite exhausted, he met at the door a little
girl in white, and he asked her name.
“I am Miss Alexander,” she said, primly, “and I am going to have my
portrait painted.”
The sage shook his head in commiseration, and muttered, as he passed on:
“Puir lassie, puir lassie!”
If proof were required of the underlying sincerity and earnestness of
Whistler in those days when the world refused to take him seriously,
this long and intimate association with Carlyle would be more than
sufficient.
They were neighbors. Carlyle had every opportunity of seeing Whistler on
the street and in his studio. Seemingly two beings could not be less
sympathetic, and yet the philosopher who had so few good words for any
one, who was the implacable foe of sham and falsehood, who was
intolerant of the society of others, who cared little for art and less
for artists, freely gave his time and society to the most unpopular
painter in England.
In truth there was a good deal in common between the two,--in the
attitude of the one towards literature and what his fellow-writers were
saying, and in the attitude of the other towards art and what his
fellow-painters were doing. Each stood in his own sphere for the highest
ideals, and no doubt each recognized in the other the quality of
sincerity in his profession.
* * * * *
Poor Carlyle! your name should never be mentioned without an anathema
for the scavengers who dealt with your memory. If they are not suffering
the torments of the damned, the mills of the gods have ceased to turn.
Froude prefaced the Life of Carlyle with a long protestation that it
contained the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; which,
it seems, according to even his notions, was a lie; for in the secrecy
of his closet he prepared a pamphlet containing the revelations of the
Jewsbury creature,--the expert opinion of “an ill-natured old maid,” as
Mrs. Carlyle called her,--to the effect that Carlyle should never have
married; and this pamphlet, containing the salacious tittle-tattle
between himself and
[Illustration]
this old maid, is given the world as presumably his last instalment of
revelations, though no one knows how much similar stuff the Jewsbury
creature, a romancer by profession, may have left pigeon-holed for still
further harm.
And the answer to it all is that Carlyle, in spite of the old maid’s
opinion, was married; and what is more to the point, remained married
forty years, with no more of differences and dissensions, even accepting
all the Froude-Jewsbury tattle, than any good wife will have with any
good Scotchman; and during their long married life she was a help and an
inspiration to her husband, and after her death she was mourned as few
wives in the history of mankind have been mourned.
A depth beyond the imagination of Dante must be found for the
Froude-Jewsbury combination.
* * * * *
As the portrait neared completion, Carlyle took a good look at it one
day, seemed pleased, and said:
“Weel, man, you have given me a clean collar, and that is more than
Meester Watts has done.”
The portrait was begun and ended as a labor of love, and for nearly
twenty years it remained unsold.
After Carlyle died some citizens of Glasgow, from purely patriotic
motives, and with no appreciation whatsoever of the painting, thought it
should be purchased, and a public subscription was started.
When the amount first talked of--quite a small sum--had been nearly
subscribed, Whistler learned that the subscription paper expressly
disavowed all approval of himself and his art, whereupon he promptly
more than doubled the price, to the dismay of the canny Scots, who
wished to buy the portrait without the art; and when they hesitated, he
again raised the price, to their utter discomfiture, and the picture was
not purchased until 1891.
It is now owned by the corporation of Glasgow, and hangs in the public
gallery surrounded by a mass of lesser works which completely dwarf its
great proportions and render adequate appreciation impossible.
It is worth while to visit Glasgow to see this portrait, but until the
authorities have the good judgment to give it a room, or at least a wall
to itself, the journey will prove an exasperation.
* * * * *
The hanging of pictures is a “lost art;” and most of the art of pictures
is lost in the hanging.
A picture is painted in a certain environment of light, color, and
tone,--and to Whistler this environment was a vital consideration. For
the time being the canvas is the one conspicuous thing in the studio, of
even greater importance than subject or model. From this environment of
creation, and with which it is in perfect harmony, it is violently
forced into conjunction with great squares of atrocious gilt frames and
expanses of clashing canvases.
A gallery of pictures is the slaughter-house of art; annual exhibitions
are the shambles of beauty.
So far as galleries are concerned, the advantage is usually with the
dealer, for he knows the value of arrangement and shows his best things
more or less detached. One by one the gems of his collection are
presented to the customer and time given for appreciation.
* * * * *
There are but two uses to which a painting can be put with any sense of
the fitness of things: it may be used decoratively alone or in
connection with one or two others which harmonize and which are
distributed to produce a perfect effect; this is the noblest use to
which a painting of any kind can be put, the production of an effect in
which the painting, however great, is but an element in a perfect whole.
Another and commoner use is the enjoyment of a picture by itself, as one
reads a poem or listens to music, more or less oblivious to all
surroundings. It is obvious that this sort of enjoyment implies the
subordination of all surroundings to the painting, or the poem, or the
music, the arrangement of the environment so as to secure the greatest
possible freedom from intrusive and distracting sights and sounds,--in
short, as regards painting, the reproduction in a sense of the
atmosphere of the studio where the picture was created, or of the place,
altar, or chapel for which it was intended; and it means most
emphatically freedom from sharp contrast with pictures by other men and
of other times, schools, and conditions, however good, which will clash
precisely as would two orchestras playing different pieces in the same
hall.
One can imagine Whistler and Carlyle--painter and philosopher, two
masters, each in his vocation--in the studio, and the growing portrait,
a thing of beauty _there_, a bond of union between two men so divergent,
and one can imagine how beautiful the portrait would be anywhere if by
itself amidst harmonious surroundings, whether used as the chief
ornament of a dignified hall or placed in a more neutral atmosphere for
study and appreciation. But one cannot imagine more destructive
surroundings than those of a public gallery, the walls of which teem
with writhing, wriggling things in huge gilt frames and glaring colors.
And the painters, who ought to know better, but who encourage these
great collections and exhibitions, who live for them, work for them,
slave for them, are more to blame for the existence of these
heterogeneous conglomerations than the public, who do not know better,
but walk helplessly about amidst endless rows of staring canvases, dimly
conscious that all is not right.
* * * * *
Pictures of equal merit do not necessarily hang together. A Velasquez
and a Raphael, each supremely beautiful in the place for which it is
intended, produce an inharmonious effect if placed side by side.
A rabble, with men or pictures, is a throng composed of more or less
incongruous and unsympathetic units.
With the exception of the few instances, as in the Turner room in the
National Gallery in London, where the works of one man are grouped for
the express purpose of comparison and study, every collection of
pictures is a rabble, and as a whole--ugly.
Nor does the grouping of the works of one man in one room produce a
beautiful effect, a beautiful room; not at all, for they are grouped for
a scientific rather than an æsthetic purpose, for the purpose of study
and comparison in a room which is, as it should be, otherwise barren and
neutral.
One or, at most, two fine pictures are all any ordinary room will stand,
and to produce an effect wherein nothing overwhelmingly predominates,
but everything finds its place and remains there, requires genius
different from but of the same high order as that of the painter, and
that sort of genius has been lacking in the Western world for some
centuries.
So low has the once great art of painting fallen that it has helplessly
relinquished its original field of great achievement, the adornment of
buildings inside and out, and that has become a separate trade so
incompetently followed that the phrase “interior decorator” is one of
reproach.
And yet little as the commercial “interior decorator” knows about
decoration, it is safer to trust to his fustian stock of burlaps,
wall-papers, imitation leathers, metals, lustres, and illuminations than
follow the guidance of the painters themselves,--for, with rare
exceptions, they know nothing beyond the narrow confines of their
frames, and their own houses and studios resemble curiosity-shops.
The art of decoration, which implies the co-operation of architect,
sculptor, and painter as a unit, has not been practised since the
sixteenth century, and not in any high degree of perfection since three
hundred years before.
With the disintegration of the union among the arts, each has
accomplished endless detached and isolated perfections, but nothing that
is really worth while in the sense that a Greek temple or a Gothic
cathedral was worth while,--for nothing so chaste and perfect as the
former or so sublime and beautiful as the latter has been done since
each of the three constructive arts began to work in jealous
independence of the others.
* * * * *
Rossetti and Whistler were both friends of the wealthy and eccentric
ship-owner F. R. Leyland, of No. 50 Prince’s Gate. He was a collector of
things rare and beautiful, a “patron” of art and artists, a musician,
and altogether a character one associates with Romance rather than with
London.
It was for him that Whistler painted the famous “Peacock Room,” under
the following circumstances:
Leyland had bought the “Princess of the Land of Porcelain,” and one day
Whistler went to see it in place. He found it in a dining-room which was
richly decorated with costly Spanish leather and a heavy ceiling of
wood, a place altogether too sombre for his bright and brilliant
“Princess,” and he protested against the discord.
* * * * *
“What would you do?” asked Leyland.
“Paint the room.”
“What! paint that beautiful Spanish leather?”
“Most assuredly,--if this is to be the boudoir of the ‘Princess.’”
Whistler was told to go ahead and make the room harmonize with the
painting.
He started in and covered every inch of wall surface, even the insides
of the shutters, with a wonderful scheme of decoration in blue and gold,
the brilliant coloring of the peacock, making a color-effect rich beyond
description.
Unhappily, nothing had been said concerning the price, and that finally
named by Leyland seemed to Whistler quite inadequate; but he made no
complaint and went on with the work. The trouble came when Leyland paid
in pounds instead of in guineas. That was more than Whistler could
stand.
All professional men in England being paid in guineas, he would not
permit art to be dealt with as merchandise. He felt, therefore, that he
had been robbed of his shillings, and the whole affair, which from the
beginning had been a matter of pleasure rather than of profit with him,
was placed on a commercial footing. Considering the time spent, the
surface covered, the work done, the price fixed by Leyland was quite
inadequate. Then, to pay in scant pounds, instead of full guineas, that
was, in truth, adding insult to injury.
The work was not quite complete, and he took his revenge by painting his
“patron” in the guise of a peacock, with his claws on what might be mere
decoration, or, as any one might fancy, a pile of guineas. The likeness
was not immediately perceptible, but, with a hint, the world soon saw
it, and laughed.
* * * * *
Leyland has been dead a long time, and the house has passed from his
family, but the “Peacock Room” is still in existence, and the curious
visitor is occasionally, but not often, admitted. The “Princess” no
longer hangs at one end, for long ago she went to Scotland, and will
soon find her way to America; but the two peacocks are at the other
end,--one the personification of the grasping “patron” and the other
bearing a faint though perceptible likeness to the defiant painter with
the white lock.
The shelves, which were once filled with the rarest of blue-and-white
china, are now given over to books, and altogether the place is but a
melancholy reminder of former beauty. But the decoration is in good
condition, and could the walls and ceilings be removed and the
“Princess” restored, the original effect would be reproduced.
The construction of the room was not Whistler’s, so he worked under
great disadvantages in dealing with architectural features, particularly
the ceiling, which he did not like; so the room, if ever removed, would
not represent his ideas of proportion and construction. It would simply
show how he made the best of a difficult situation.
The architect who designed the room and looked upon the house as his
stepping-stone to fame, when he saw the--to him--desecration, was
completely unbalanced, went insane, and died not long after.
* * * * *
If opportunities had offered, Whistler would have been a great
decorator, for such was his susceptibility to color that he could not
tolerate discordant effects about him. It was ever his habit to decorate
his studio, his house, or any rooms he occupied to suit his exceedingly
fastidious taste.
He did not “decorate” in the sense the term is accepted nowadays. In
truth, the casual visitor to his studio or to his house would depart
under the impression there was no decoration at all, for neither figures
nor patterns made the walls attractive, yet from floor to ceiling every
square inch was a matter of extreme solicitude. He would mix colors and
apply them with his own hands until the room was in harmony.
Even the great barn of an attic which was his studio in Paris was
painted by him, so that from its dark--not black--rich oak floor, along
base-boards and walls, to sloping roof, the effect was such as he sought
as an environment for his pictures,--a brown, a grayish brown, a soft
and singular shade of brown, hard to describe, difficult to see, but
delightful to _feel_ in its sober and retiring neutrality,--and that is
the best color, the best tone, against which to hang Whistler’s
paintings in any general exhibition, for it remains quietly and
unobtrusively in the background, and at the same time the silvery
quality in it gives it life.
* * * * *
When London laughed at his “Yellow and White” exhibition of etchings it
did not know that a master of color was giving an object-lesson in
interior decoration.
Who can recall without a feeling of restful satisfaction the delightful
reception-room of that later home in Paris, at 110 Rue du Bac? So simple
that, really, there was not a conspicuous feature about it, and yet
every detail had been worked out with as much care as he bestowed on a
painting.
This feature of Whistler’s art, this susceptibility to color and line in
surroundings will be referred to again in the discussion of his
exquisite color-sense.
For the present it is sufficient to point out that he was something more
than a painter of easel pictures; that instinctively he was akin to
those great masters who combined their efforts with those of the
architect in the endeavor to produce beautiful results.
A sympathetic writer has said:
“Although he was in no way a spendthrift, he would make every sort
of sacrifice to his art. Had he been given more opportunity, there
seems no reason to doubt that he would have made other rooms even
more beautiful than the famous ‘Peacock’ dining-room. But, frankly,
the public did not care for his work enough to buy much of it from
him at anything like a fair price; so that he was obliged to limit
himself to comparatively small surfaces, easel pictures, over
which collectors will soon begin to wrangle, we dare say, now that
the clever hand which created them can work no more, and the big,
kind heart which gave this man the courage to fight through fifty
years against ‘_la bêtise humaine_’ is cold and still.”[23]
In showing his work to visitors he exercised all the reserve and
discretion of the Japanese, who places before his guests but one
kakemona during that most formal and elaborate of social festivities,
the “Tea Ceremony,” or who, under pressure of repeated requests, takes
from its little box and unfolds from its many silken wrappings one, just
one, of his precious bits of porcelain. No more on the same day, lest
the surfeited guests fail in appreciation.
If in his studio, Whistler would first turn to the wall every picture
and arrange the few pieces of furniture so that nothing should attract
the vagrant eye, then he would place the one picture he wished seen on
the easel in the best of light, without, however, letting it be seen
until frame and glass were carefully wiped, when, stepping back on a
line with his visitor, he, too, would enjoy his work as if he saw it for
the first time. He would never exhibit anything he was tired of, and he
never tired of anything he exhibited. This appreciation of his own work,
his enthusiasm over what he had done, was often misunderstood by people
accustomed to the false modesty of artists who stand dumb while others
vainly strive to see in their work the beauties which they of all
people can best make known.
* * * * *
If time permitted he might bring forth two, or even three, pictures, but
rarely more, and always each by itself. If some visitor, presuming on
his good nature,--and he was indulgent in the extreme to those he
liked,--insisted on placing the pictures side by side for comparison, as
is the custom in shops, he was as uneasy and unhappy as would be a poet
if several persons insisted on reading aloud before him several of his
poems at the same time,--for what is a picture but a poem, mute to the
ear but clarion-voiced to the eye?
* * * * *
In public exhibitions of his works he had the same sense of the eternal
fitness of things.
First of all, the room must be properly lighted, and Whistler’s
paintings require a soft light. In his studio the skylight was well
arranged with shades, so he could keep the light soft and constant; and
frequently he would draw the shades so as to make the room quite dark,
and then view portrait and sitter as they loomed up in shadow.
“Some students planned to call on him one New Year’s morning. A
friendly student, not at all sure that Whistler would like it, gave
him a little tip as to the surprise party.
“‘Tell them that I never receive callers,’ he exclaimed, excitedly.
The student explained that he wasn’t supposed to know anything
about it.
“‘Are you sure they mean well?’ he inquired, anxiously. And on
being reassured, ‘Well, tell them I never receive visitors in the
morning.’
“The students called in the afternoon, and found awaiting them a
most genial and delightful host. He told stories and showed them
his palettes to prove that he practised what he preached, and
pictures and sketches were exhibited to them never seen by the
public, among the surprising ones being some allegorical studies.
He served them with champagne and fruits and cakes, and was most
solicitous as to their enjoyment. One of them asked him how he
arranged his subjects so as to produce the low tone noted in his
pictures. He posed a visitor, pulled over the shades so as to shut
out all light, save from one window, and there before them was a
living Whistler ‘arrangement’ ready to recede behind a frame, as he
says all portraits should do.”
It is a pity to ever subject his pictures to the trying light of the
usual gallery, and it is a still greater pity to exhibit them at night
in competition with foot-lights and foyer. His work should not be made
the attraction for either a “five-o’clock tea” or a dress rehearsal.
People who will not go during the day are not worth inviting.
The fact that people are content to view the best paintings of all time
by artificial light, and even profess to find a “softness” and “charm”
lacking by day, is but additional evidence of that want of
susceptibility and fine feeling which characterizes the modern world,
artists and laymen alike. For no picture that was painted by daylight
should be seen at night, if all its beauties are to be felt.
* * * * *
A room for the exhibition of his pictures should be of precisely the
right tone, and this is a matter of no little difficulty.
When president of the Society of British Artists, in 1886, his
arrangement of the rooms was criticised as being “tentative,” because he
had left the battens on the walls; whereupon he wrote that in the
engineering of the light and the treatment of the walls and the
arrangement of the draperies everything was intentional; that the
battens were meant to remain, “not only for their use, but as bringing
parallel lines into play that subdivide charmingly the lower portions of
the walls and add to their light appearance; that the whole combination
is complete.”
There is a hint to all managers of exhibitions.
* * * * *
To summarize the foregoing suggestions:
The tone of the walls should be such as to keep them in the background.
The monotonous blankness of the walls may be broken by unobtrusive
lines, not arbitrarily for effect, but justifiably for use and effect.
Only such draperies should be used as are absolutely necessary to reduce
vacancies or to soften harsh lines, and these should lose themselves in
the tone of the room.
Floor should be low in tone, the rich, dark brown of old oak keeping its
place under foot best of all.
If the room is large and a few chairs and benches are admitted, they
should be of wood, plain and for service alone, as becomes a room that
is arranged but for one purpose,--namely, the exhibition of certain
pictures,--and they should be painted or stained in tone to correspond
with the room.
The light should be under absolute control, and kept quite soft,
diffused, and constant throughout the day.
The room should be closed at night, or at least the people fully warned
by notices in catalogue and elsewhere that if they have any real desire
to see and understand the pictures they will come during the day.
The pictures should be well spaced, so that each may, to a certain
degree, be studied by itself, for each is as complete a work as a piece
of music.
In short, in an exhibition of pictures, or of anything else, everything
should be subordinated to the things exhibited; nothing should be
permitted to obtrude upon the attention to their disadvantage; the work
of the decorator and furnisher on such an occasion is perfect when it is
unnoticed.
For black-and-whites, experiments in color may be made, but for
paintings which are compositions in color the background should be
neutral,--silent like the background of music.
As every one knows, green and red, side by side, accentuate and help
each other; therefore, pictures in which the prevailing tone is green
are helped by a red or crimson background, while pictures in which the
prevailing tone is red are helped by a green background.
The foregoing is elementary and a matter of common observation, and the
walls of art galleries and exhibitions are frequently covered with
either a shade of green or a shade of crimson; but in placing pictures
no discrimination is exercised,--landscapes and marines in which green
predominates are placed side by side with portraits and interiors in
which red frequently predominates on the same green or red background,
to the advantage of one set of pictures and the detriment of the other.
So far as color-effect is concerned, the pictures themselves go very
well side by side, the red of the life pieces helping the green of the
nature pieces, and _vice versa_; but if the background is permitted to
assert itself, if the pictures are spaced on the wall, any background
which accentuates the one class does so at the expense of the other.
If pictures in which the prevailing tone is green are to be placed on
the same wall with pictures in which red predominates, the background
should be neither red nor green, but, theoretically, a gray, which is
neutral and helps all colors in contrast; practically, however, a
grayish hue of brown, because pure gray requires a greater expanse of
wall between each picture than the exigencies of an exhibition or of a
typical picture gallery permit, while the element of brown permits the
wall to assert itself a little more positively between the frames, and,
at the same time, the quality of neutrality is almost as well preserved.
The stronger the tone of the background the nearer together pictures may
be placed; the weaker and more neutral the background the wider the
spacing must be,--a pure gray requiring the widest spacing of all
backgrounds, a deep crimson the narrowest. In other words, it requires a
wide expanse of gray to support a little color, while a very little
crimson will carry a very large expanse of color in the way of gilt
frames and strong landscapes and marines.
Wide frames, whether of gold or dark wood, enable green walls to carry
green pictures and red walls to carry red pictures without the pictures
suffering so much; the frames intervene, and the immediate contrast is
between canvas and frame instead of canvas and wall. But the secondary
contrast is there and is felt precisely in proportion to the extent of
the spacing between the pictures, and the pictures suffer accordingly.
_VI_
_The Ruskin Suit--His Attitude towards the World and towards
Art--“The Gentle Art of Making Enemies”--Critics and Criticism._
In 1877 Ruskin, passing through the Grosvenor Gallery, caught sight of
something the like of which he had never seen in the world of art. It
was the “Nocturne, Black and Gold. The Falling Rocket,” a faithful
transcript of the painter’s impression of a night-scene in Cremorne
Gardens. But Ruskin cared less for the subtle glories of night than for
the more garish beauties of the day, and still less for the sights and
sounds of Cremorne Gardens, and neither he nor any one else in either
modern or ancient world knew anything at all about the painting of night
as Whistler painted it. It is not surprising, therefore, that he was
startled, for the picture seemed to violate all those canons of art
which he had laid down in English the beauty of which more than condones
his every error, and in the impulse of the moment he wrote in a number
of _Fors Clavigera_:
“For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the
purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the
gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly
[Illustration]
approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen and heard much of
cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask
two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”
* * * * *
By way of extenuation, it must be borne in mind that this was written
off-hand, at a time when Ruskin was saying so many extravagant things,
though with them so many profoundly true things, that no one quite
understood him, and many thought him not quite sound mentally. The habit
of sweeping generalizations, of extravagant appreciations and
depreciations had grown apace since the publication of the first volume
of “Modern Painters,” nearly forty years before, and he invariably
yielded to the impression or the prejudice of the moment.
* * * * *
If Ruskin, in estimating Whistler, had paused but a moment and recalled
just a paragraph from the preface to the second edition of the first
volume of “Modern Painters” he would have been more tolerant, for he
there said:
“All that is highest in art, all that is creative and imaginative,
is formed and created by every great master for himself, and cannot
be repeated or imitated by others. We judge of the excellence of a
rising writer, not so much by the resemblance of his works to what
has been done before as by their difference from it; and while we
advise him, in the first trials of strength, to set certain models
before him, with respect to inferior points,--one for
versification, another for arrangement, another for treatment,--we
yet admit not his greatness until he has broken away from all his
models and struck forth versification, arrangement, and treatment
of his own.”
And was not Ruskin himself the life-long apologist for a most original
and extraordinary genius,--a man who to his last days was as little
understood as Whistler?
Here are some things that were said of Turner as late as 1842, when he
was doing some of his best work:
“The ‘Dogano’ (_sic_) and ‘Campo Santo’ have a glorious _ensemble_,
and are produced by wonderful art, but they mean nothing. They are
produced as if by throwing handfuls of white and blue and red at
the canvas, letting what chanced to stick, stick, and then
shadowing in some forms to make the appearance of a picture; and
yet there is a fine harmony in the highest range of color to please
the sense of vision. We admire and we lament to see such genius so
employed. But ‘Farther on you may fare worse.’ No. 182 is a
snow-storm of most unintelligible character,--the snow-storm of a
confused dream, with a steamboat ‘making signals,’ and (apparently,
like the painter who was in it) ‘going by the head’ (lead?).
Neither by land nor water was such a scene ever witnessed. And of
338, ‘Burial at Sea,’ though there is a striking effect, still the
whole is so idealized and removed from truth that, instead of the
feeling it ought to effect, it only excites ridicule. And No. 353
caps all for absurdity, without even any of the redeeming qualities
of the rest. It represents Bonaparte--facetiously described as the
‘Exile and the rock-limpet’--standing on the sea-shore at St.
Helena ... the whole thing is so truly ludicrous,” etc.[24]
Another writer says:
“This gentleman has on former occasions chosen to paint with cream,
or chocolate, yolk of egg, or currant-jelly,--there he uses his
whole array of kitchen-stuff.... We cannot fancy the state of eye
which will permit any one cognizant of art to treat these
rhapsodies as Lord Byron treated ‘Christabel;’ neither can we
believe in any future revolution which shall bring the world round
to the opinion of the worshipper, if worshippers such frenzies
still possess.”[25]
In reply to these and similar criticisms Ruskin said:[26]
“There is nothing so high in art but that a scurrile jest can reach
it; and often the greater the work the easier it is to turn it into
ridicule. To appreciate the science of Turner’s color would require
the study of a life, but to laugh at it requires little more than
the knowledge that yolk of egg is yellow and spinach green,--a fund
of critical information on which the remarks of most of our leading
periodicals have been of late years exclusively based. We shall,
however, in spite of the sulphur-and-treacle criticisms of our
Scotch connoisseurs and the eggs and the spinach of our English
ones, endeavor to test the works of this great colorist by a
knowledge of nature somewhat more extensive than is to be gained by
an acquaintance, however familiar, with the apothecary’s shop or
the dinner-table.”
There is Ruskin in arms on the other side,--it making all the difference
in the world which ox is gored.
What an interesting chapter in the history of appreciation it all makes.
Here we have the critics fulminating against Turner in “egg and spinach”
terms and Ruskin fulminating against the critics in “pot and kettle”
terms. A few years later we have Ruskin fulminating against Whistler in
the same old terms; but Whistler greatly improved the language of
vituperation by introducing humor, and answered with words that bit like
acid and epigrams pointed like needles--the etcher in controversy.
“Produced as if by throwing handfuls of white and blue and red at the
canvas,” said the critic of Turner. “Flinging a pot of paint in the
public’s face,” said Ruskin of Whistler. Beyond this, criticism begins
to be personal.
And Whistler drew the line on the “pot and kettle” stage and brought
suit for libel.
The case was heard in November, 1878, before Baron Huddleston and a
special jury.
The cross-examination of Whistler by the attorney-general, who appeared
for the defendant, was one of the features of the case, and brought out
many of the artist’s views concerning art and art critics.
It is said that during the trial one of Whistler’s counsel was holding
up the nocturne in controversy before the jury, when one of the counsel
on the other side called out:
“You are holding that upside down.”
“No, I’m not.”
“I tell you, you are.”
“How do you know which is the top and which is the bottom?”
“Oh, I don’t know; only when I saw it hanging in the Grosvenor Gallery
it was the other side up.”
Whereupon--out of deference to precedent--the nocturne was reversed.
When Whistler was asked whether the nocturne represented a view of
Cremorne, he answered:
“If it were called a view of Cremorne, it would certainly bring about
nothing but disappointment on the part of the beholders. It is an
artistic arrangement.”
And again, when asked whether a certain nocturne in blue and silver was
a “correct” representation of Battersea Bridge, he replied:
“I did not intend it to be a ‘correct’ portrait of the bridge. It is
only a moonlight scene, and the pier in the centre of the picture may
not be like the piers at Battersea Bridge as you know them in broad
daylight. As to what the picture represents, that depends upon who looks
at it. To some it may represent all that is intended; to others it may
represent nothing.”
“The prevailing color is blue?”
“Perhaps.”
“Are these figures on the top of the bridge intended for people?”
“They are just what you like.”
“Is that a barge beneath?”
“Yes. I am very much encouraged at your perceiving that. My whole
scheme was only to bring about a certain harmony of color.”
* * * * *
Mr. Ruskin did not appear, but others testified in his behalf.
Edward Burne-Jones admitted the picture had fine color, but found
absolutely no detail and composition. It was “bewildering in form,” and
“one of the thousand failures to paint night,” and “not worth two
hundred guineas.”
All of which opinions have been reversed by time,--even to the value,
which quintupled many years ago.
Mr. Frith--of whose art both Burne-Jones and Ruskin probably had
opinions that could not be expressed in temperate language--presented
his credentials as the author of the “Railway Station,” “Derby Day,” and
the “Rakes Progress,” and testified that Whistler’s pictures were “not
serious works of art.” But, then, he confessed he had not been invited
to exhibit at the Grosvenor Gallery, and, as every one knows, what is
considered art in one exhibition may not be so considered in another.
And Tom Taylor, of the _Times_,--well, for Tom Taylor’s testimony and
opinions one must go to the “Gentle Art.” It is his one sure niche in
the temple of fame.
In addressing the jury, the attorney-general said “he did not know when
so much amusement had been offered to the British public as by Mr.
Whistler’s pictures.”
The verdict was for the plaintiff, and the damages assessed at one
farthing; which coin Whistler wore on his chain long afterwards.
The costs assessed against Ruskin amounted to £386 12s. 4d., and were
paid by public subscription, one hundred and twenty persons
contributing.
Concerning this suit, Ruskin said, “I am blamed by my prudent
acquaintances for being too personal; but, truly, I find vaguely
objurgatory language generally a mere form of what Plato calls
‘shadow-fighting.’” And long after, when a friend asked him about the
case, he said, “I am afraid of a libel action if I open my mouth; and if
I can’t say what I like about a person, I prefer to say nothing at
all.”[27]
* * * * *
Even Ruskin could not say what he liked about any one, though every one,
including the victim, might like the manner of his saying it. Still, it
will ever remain a matter of wonder how Whistler induced an English
jury, who could not possibly understand him, to give him a nominal
verdict and saddle the costs upon Ruskin, who was something of a popular
idol.
Whistler’s lawyers must have been cleverer than those of the other side.
The attorney-general probably proved, as his speech indicates, a clumsy
defender in a case involving nice questions of art.
Be it said to the credit of Whistler’s sagacity, he always employed the
best lawyers available. He once said, “Poor lawyers, like poor
paintings, are dear at any price.”
* * * * *
While Whistler had practised the gentle art of making enemies from the
beginning of his career, his suit against Ruskin was, so to speak, his
first public appearance, and he threw his dart at a shining mark.
What his real feelings towards Ruskin were no man can say,--for towards
the public and his critics he was one man, towards his art he was quite
another.
To the world he seemed the incarnation of vanity and conceit; to the few
whose privilege it was to see him at work he appeared, and was, the
embodiment of sincerity and earnestness, of simplicity to the verge of
diffidence.
It is impossible to conceive two personalities so different as Whistler
at work and Whistler at play, and all his controversies were play to
him, the amusement of his hours of relaxation.
* * * * *
He sued Ruskin, not because his status before art was in any wise
affected, but because his status before the public was assailed; not
because he cared the snap of his finger for any adverse opinion
concerning his pictures, but because he felt that he had a certain
position, pose one might say, to maintain, and because it amused him to
sue one who was considered so infallible; and he, no doubt, felt
reasonably sure he would be more than recompensed by the solemn
testimony of opposing witnesses.
* * * * *
Whistler has been so often charged with being a poser that in the eyes
of the world he really must have seemed so.
He was a poser in the sense already indicated,--namely, he was one man
before the public and another at work. In this sense every man clever
enough to forget himself at times is something of a poser, for only the
stupid who can talk nothing but “shop,” wherever they are, are the same
day in and day out.
Most men are able to leave their work behind and adopt a _rôle_ more or
less artificial in social intercourse. The brilliant few who make
society possess this faculty in an eminent degree.
The objection that social England has against the shopkeeper is, no
doubt, based upon many sad experiences that the shopkeeper brings his
shop with him to dinner, and will not, or cannot, pose to the extent of
forgetting his material concerns in the presence of the frivolous.
The preacher, the politician, the lawyer, the soldier may introduce a
little “shop” in general conversation, for these occupations are
supposed to have a more general interest; but the butcher, the baker,
and the candlestick-maker cannot. But preacher, politician, lawyer, and
soldier make the better guests if they pose a little and forget, for the
time being, their occupations.
Convictions must be introduced sparingly in social intercourse; a very
few go a great way.
Why not adopt and duly post some such salutary rule as this? In social
intercourse the utterance of one’s profound convictions shall bear the
same ratio to one’s total utterances on any given occasion that the
speaker bears to the number present and participating in the
conversation. That is to say, if the conversation is between two alone,
half that either says may be his convictions, the other half a polite,
though futile, endeavor to understand the other’s convictions. If at a
table of twelve, about a twelfth of one’s real thoughts are permissible,
and all that, in justice to others, should be attempted.
But, then, conversation is a lost art. An Athenian could talk better
about everything than a modern can talk about anything. Cast a subject,
a thought, so much as a suggestion, into a knot of Greeks, and in a
trice, like dogs over a bone, they would be wrestling with it, and the
less they knew about it the brighter the discussion.
Knowledge is the last refuge of the stupid. Facts are the sinkers of
talk. Ideas are the flash-lights of the imagination; and conversation
depends not upon knowledge but upon ideas. One who knows nothing of a
subject may have more ideas concerning it than one who knows all about.
Women are frequently better conversers than men, because less hampered
by facts.
Knowledge is a heavy weight for conversation to carry. But of all the
bores who find their way to the dinner-table the specialist in
knowledge is the most hopeless. The man who knows everything about
something is at the stupid end; the man who knows something about
everything at the brilliant, with a place at his right hand for the
woman who knows nothing about anything.
Whistler was of the choice few who would never speak seriously of his
serious pursuits in general conversation. At those very moments when he
seemed to be saying most about art and artists he was in reality saying
least of what he really thought. When he talked most of himself he said
nothing that he really felt. It was almost impossible to draw from him a
serious opinion concerning a picture or a painter. Though he might rail
by the hour against this man or that, if the mood seized him, it all
meant nothing.
In his studio, when at work, opinions and appreciations worth
remembering would drop from his lips; but he rarely committed himself;
not because his convictions were not clear, but because he seldom
thought it worth while.
* * * * *
Once he was dining with quite a distinguished company. The
conversation--possibly as tribute to the presence of so noted an
artist--turned upon art, and finally upon a notorious picture, called
“Nana,” of a naked woman on a couch, that was quite a sensation in
London. It has been seen on this side.
Loud were the expressions of approval. Whistler remained silent.
“What do you think of ‘Nana,’ Mr. Whistler?” asked the
distinguished lady at his right.
“Is it not wonderful?--so life-like,” exclaimed the distinguished
lady at his left.
But Whistler, apparently spellbound by the bird before him, was
silent.
“But, Mr. Whistler, you have not told us what _you_ think about
‘Nana,’” said the distinguished lady opposite.
At bay at last, he said:
“Really, madam, you know, it is quite--presumptious--quite, for one
who--who is simply, as one might say, a painter, and therefore--you
know--not entitled to opinions--to express himself in the presence
of so--so many distinguished connoisseurs; but--since you demand my
opinion--as a highwayman would a purse--I yield to superior
strength and say--with all deference--that ‘Nana’ is--trash.”
“Oh!”
“Oh, Mr. Whistler.”
“But have you seen it?”
“No.”
“Then, how can you say it is trash?”
“It must be--it--is so--popular.”
“Will you go to see it?”
“That is not necessary.”
“But I want you to go with me to-morrow to see ‘Nana.’” And the
charming lady on his right insisted so imperiously that he should
go with her and several of the company who wished to be of the
party, that he yielded, saying, however:
“On one condition.”
“What is it?”
“That you will go with me afterward, to the National Gallery and
see some pictures I am sure you have never seen.”
“Some new ones?”
“To you--yes.”
It was agreed; and the following day Whistler with several of the
party paid each a shilling to see “Nana” stretched at ease under a
strong light at the far end of a dark room. It might have been a
painting or “Nana” herself, the realism was so gross.
All save Whistler were in raptures over the wondrous thing. He was
silent.
Then they went to the National Gallery, and he took them before one
great portrait after another.
“But we have seen these before,” chorused the voices.
“Impossible!” exclaimed Whistler.
“Oh, yes, many times,” sang the voices.
“But you do not like them; you detest them.”
“Oh, no! no! no----!”
“But they are not at all like ‘Nana’; they haven’t ‘Nana’s’
wonderful flesh-tones, ‘Nana’s’ beautiful skin; are not so
life-like as ‘Nana,’ and beside ‘Nana’ you must consider them as
poor, wretched daubs.”
And so he took them from one masterpiece to another, repeating
before each one their raptures over “Nana” until they were silent.
Then he said:
“I have shown you some pictures that are considered good by those
whose opinions are precious, and you have not found in one a single
characteristic that you admired in ‘Nana,’ and you yourselves would
not admit her to this glorious company; therefore, again I say,
‘Nana’ is--trash.”
In the sense, therefore, that he presented a careless, trivial, or
cynical side to the public and a serious side to his art, Whistler was a
poser, and during his idle hours he had the habit of amusing himself at
the expense of any one who crossed his path. And why not? Did not the
world try so hard to amuse itself at his expense? Were his feelings
spared? Was aught of ridicule or insult that human ingenuity could
devise withheld?
But his opponents were so clumsy that, save as he himself preserved
their crude repartees, only his epigrammatic utterances are remembered;
and therefore he has all the blame for the controversies, while the
truth is that, considering the flood of opprobrium poured out upon him
in print and in speech, he said very little, took but occasional notice
of his assailants. All he said fills but a portion of a small book,--the
“Gentle Art,”--while his opponents have the balance; and if all adverse
personal comments of a despicable nature were gathered together from
both sides of the Atlantic, they would make up many closely-printed
volumes.
For a man who could write so well, Whistler exercised great restraint in
writing so little, but--that little!
* * * * *
And yet it is a pity, from one point of view, that he wrote at all; his
art did not need it, and in the way of general estimation and
recognition suffers not a little on account of it.
For twenty-odd years the public has been amused, startled, and irritated
by the letters and utterances which make up “The Gentle Art of Making
Enemies,” and it will be many a long day before they are so far
forgotten that Whistler’s art will be judged wholly upon its merits.
If the “Gentle Art” did not exist as it does in its harmony in brown,
English literature would lack a volume which is in itself a bit of art
and unique of its kind. There is nothing at all like it, and only
Whistler could have done it. The book is a perfect expression of one
side of his many-sided and extraordinary personality, and as such is
therefore a work of art, and, at the same time, material which cannot be
spared if the man is to be thoroughly understood; but it reveals the
side which is least worth understanding, it accentuates traits which are
inconsequential, and it gives the public an entirely erroneous
impression, because the public find it easy to buy and read the book,
but difficult to so much as see the pictures, and quite impossible to
understand them when they do see them.
In Whistler’s life the writing of the few lines and the putting together
of the matter contained in the “Gentle Art” occupied an almost
infinitesimal fraction of his leisure hours, whereas for fifty years he
painted, etched, and lithographed industriously; yet, so far as the
public of England and America is concerned, his controversies overshadow
his art; while to the French, who happily could not read the book, he is
known only as an artist.
* * * * *
Criticism of art afforded Whistler a world of amusement, and the art
critic was his especial aversion.
“That writers should destroy writings to the benefit of writing” seemed
to him just, but that writers should criticise painting seemed to him
altogether illogical.
And he quotes the critic of the _Times_, who said of Velasquez’s “Las
Menimas” that it was “slovenly in execution, poor in color,--being
little but a combination of neutral grays and ugly in its forms.”
And he shows how the same great critic praised a Turner that turned out
to be no Turner. When this particular critic died, a few years ago,
Whistler sorrowfully said, “I have hardly a warm personal enemy left.”
And he showed how one said that Daubigny had neither drawing nor color,
and another that the works of Corot to the first impression of an
Englishman “are the sketches of an amateur,” and another that everything
Courbet touches “becomes unpleasant.”
All these by the most eminent critics in the land,--men whose say-so in
days gone by made and unmade, for the time being, the reputations of
artists.
And he grouped together a number of Ruskin’s dogmatic utterances, where
in his enthusiasm for certain men he condemned others who were
infinitely superior,--as, for instance, where he praises without
limitations the work of the forgotten Prout, and says that Rembrandt’s
colors are wrong from beginning to end, and that “Vulgarity, dulness, or
impiety will indeed always express themselves through art in brown and
gray, as in Rembrandt;” and again where he places Rubens above Titian
and Raphael, and compares an unknown Mulready with Albert Dürer, to the
disadvantage of the latter.
These things it pleased Whistler to do, and he has done them with rare
piquancy in the “Gentle Art.”
If what is contained therein savors in aught of malice, let it be
remembered that public, critics, painters were snapping at his heels
during the years that he was doing the very work which public, critics,
and painters now worship, and a lesser man would have yielded to the
storm of adverse opinion and ridicule.
With the exception of a few friends and admirers, he was absolutely
without support during the period when an artist most needs
encouragement.
It is everlastingly to his credit that neither the ridicule of
others--“the voice of the nation”--nor his own necessities, and they
pressed heavily at times, caused him to swerve a hair’s breadth from
what he believed to be worth doing in art.
Nearly every great artist of whom we have any record has at one time or
another in his career yielded to the temptation--frequently under
pressure of dire necessity--to do something that would sell. No such
reproach can be laid at Whistler’s door.
* * * * *
The galled critics complained that he did not treat them fairly,--that
he selected small excerpts from voluminous essays; whereas, if he had
reprinted the essays entire, language apparently plain would have been
reversed in meaning. For instance, he of the _Times_, who had written of
Velasquez, complained that the quotation gave “exactly the opposite
impression to that which the article, taken as a whole, conveys.” It
must have been an extraordinary article to transform what was quoted
into praise; but Whistler, in reply, said:
“Why squabble over your little article? You _did_ print what I
quote, you know, Tom; and it is surely unimportant what more you
may have written of the Master. That you should have written
anything at all is your crime.”
Ruskin never complained of anything Whistler wrote. The one utterance
which caused the suit for libel was probably the first and last that
passed his lips. The eloquent old man never did pay very much attention
to what others thought of him; he was too busy with his own dreams and
fancies.
He did write what Whistler quoted about Rembrandt, but the whole passage
is a lament over the lack of appreciation of color, and is as follows:
“For instance: our reprobation of bright color is, I think, for the
most part, mere affectation, and must soon be done away with.
Vulgarity, dulness, or impiety will indeed always express
themselves through art in brown and gray, as in Rembrandt,
Caravaggio, and Salvator; but we are not wholly vulgar, dull, or
impious, nor, as moderns, are we necessarily obliged to continue so
in any wise. Our greatest men, whether sad or gay, still delight,
like the great men of all ages, in brilliant hues. The coloring of
Scott and Byron is full and pure; that of Keats and Tennyson rich
even to excess. Our practical failures in coloring are merely the
necessary consequences of our prolonged want of practice during the
period of Renaissance affectation and ignorance; and the only
durable difference between old and modern coloring is the
acceptance of certain hues by the modern, which please him by
expressing that melancholy peculiar to his more reflective or
sentimental character and the greater variety of them necessary to
express his greater science.”[28]
Again, on the subject of color, he says:
“We find the greatest artists mainly divided into two
groups,--those who paint principally with respect to local color,
headed by Paul Veronese, Titian, and Turner, and those who paint
principally with reference to light and shade irrespective of
color, headed by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Raphael. The
noblest members of each of these classes introduce the element
proper to the other class, in a subordinate way. Paul Veronese
introduces a subordinate light and shade, and Leonardo introduces a
subordinate local color. The main difference is, that with
Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Raphael vast masses of the picture are
lost in comparatively colorless (dark, gray, or brown)
shadow,--these painters _beginning_ with the _lights_ and going
_down_ to blackness; but with Veronese, Titian, and Turner the
whole picture is like the rose,--glowing with color in the shadows
and rising into paler and more delicate hues, or masses of
whiteness, in the lights,--they having _begun_ with the _shadows_
and gone up _to_ whiteness.”
Ruskin said so much about art, and said it so dogmatically, that no one
utterance gives an adequate conception of what he thought about any one
man. Furthermore, while his language is crystal itself, his thoughts are
often contradictory and confusing in the extreme.
For instance, no man with any sense of color whatsoever would group
Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Raphael together as men who painted
“irrespective of color,”--for no great Italian from the days of Giotto
to those of Michael Angelo painted regardless of color; on the contrary,
color is the one conspicuous, brilliant, and beautiful feature of their
work, and the color-sense, as it existed in those days in all its
exquisite refinement, is, generally speaking, absolutely wanting in
ours.
In all but color Rembrandt forgot more than most of the Italians ever
knew; but in the use of color--not imitatively, not after the manner of
nature, but decoratively and arbitrarily--the Italians forgot more than
Rembrandt ever knew; and, so far as color is concerned, there is
absolutely nothing in common between Rembrandt and Leonardo or Raphael,
while there is much in common between the two latter.
It was not color, but _light_, that Ruskin appreciated, as is shown by a
hundred passages, but by none more _clearly_ than that quoted wherein he
says of the three painters last named,--and the italics are his,--“these
painters _beginning_ with _lights_ and going _down_ to blackness; but
with Veronese, Titian, and Turner the whole picture is like the
rose,--glowing with color in the shadows and rising into paler and more
delicate hues, or masses of whiteness, in the lights,--they having
_begun_ with the _shadows_ and gone up _to_ whiteness.”
* * * * *
When he held his exhibition in London, in 1892, of “Nocturnes, Marines,
and Chevalet Pieces,”--a “small collection kindly _lent_ their
owners,”--he once more printed in his dainty brown-paper-covered
catalogue, beneath each picture, the early comments of press, critics,
and people, and called it all “The Voice of a People.”
And what a collection of bizarre opinions it is, to be sure, from the
serious _Times_ to the lightsome _Merrie England_, which said:
“He paints in soot colors and mud colors, but, far from enjoying the
primary hues, has little or no perception of secondary or tertiary
color.”
Which goes to show that the budding science of chromatics is not without
effect on vocabularies.
Here we have the “kitchen stuff” criticism of Turner in 1842 paraphrased
word for word in the mud and soot criticism of Whistler precisely fifty
years later.
Is the jargon of criticism at once limited and exhausted? Are we to
linger forever about the cook-stove in the depreciation of art? With the
introduction of the steel range of mammoth proportions can we not find
new terms of opprobrium? Besides, there are the gas and gasoline stoves
of explosive habit, which ought to be suggestive of novelty in
vituperation. But, alas, the critic is prone to repeat himself, and the
language of the fathers is visited upon the children unto the third and
fourth generations of them that hate.
* * * * *
And press, critics, and artists are convicted, once more, of
incompetency. But what does it matter, save as a warning that will not
be heeded? Are we any wiser in our generation? Were Whistler to appear
to-day, as he did forty-odd years ago, would he be received with the
praise his works command now? Hardly.
Many of his followers were quite as absurd in their misplaced admiration
as the maligned public in its denunciation, and no one knew it better
than he. He came upon two of them once as they were waxing eloquent
before a sketch that had somehow escaped his studio,--possibly
overlooked and left behind in some of his movings. He listened a moment
to their raptures, fitted his monocle to his eye, took a look at this
“masterpiece,” and said:
“God bless me, I wonder where that came from. Not worth the canvas it’s
painted on.”
And he turned away.
We who have been taught to see, not wholly but in part, may laugh at our
betters who, when he first appeared, could see nothing at all; but our
virtue is acquired.
* * * * *
His attitude towards critics is summed up in the short but pointed
article written in December, 1878, shortly after the Ruskin suit, and
called “Art and Art Critics.”
“Shall the painter, then (I foresee the question), decide upon
painting? Shall _he_ be the critic and sole authority? Aggressive
as is this supposition, I fear that, in the length of time, his
assertion alone has established what even the gentlemen of the
quill accept as the canons of art and recognize as the masterpieces
of work.”
All of which is undeniably true. The painter must in the end judge of
painting, and the sculptor judge of sculpture. But there are two
distinct sides to a work of art,--to every work, for that matter: there
is the relation between the worker and his work, and the relation
between the completed work and the public,--the work being the
intermediary between artist and people, his means of communication, his
mode and manner of speech.
There is, therefore, the process of creation and the process of
appreciation, of utterance and of understanding.
The painting of a picture is one thing, its appreciation by the public
is quite another.
A man need not be a dramatist to watch the effect of a drama upon the
audience; a man need not own a vineyard to know good wine.
The critic stands, or, rather, should stand, between the public and the
work he criticises, whether it be poem, painting, statue, or drama; the
mistake he commonly makes is in forcing himself between the worker and
his work, and in trying to teach him something only another and better
worker in the _same_ art is competent to do.
Critics make most of their blunders in judging works according to
preconceived notions as to how they should be done,--in condemning, for
instance, a picture because not painted after prevailing modes and
methods, because it is a departure, whereas with these considerations
the lay-critic has nothing to do; they fall entirely within the province
of the painter-critic, the one man who is competent, in the long run, to
pass upon the methods employed.
Every work is an appeal to the public,--its completion and exhibition
make it such; therefore, every work challenges the critical faculties,
great or small, of those who see it. It is inevitable that some more
interested should spring up to interpret, rightly or wrongly, the work
to the public; the artist seldom takes the trouble,--in fact, has
neither the time nor the temperament; his message is complete in the
picture, others must understand it as best they can.
The playwright cannot address the audience save through the play, the
poet speaks only through his poetry, the painter through his pictures,
the sculptor through the forms of his creation. Seldom is an artist
gifted with more than one tongue, and that tongue is his art. How, then,
can artists interpret the work of artists? How can the painter, who is
dumb save with his brush, or the sculptor, who is mute save with his
clay and chisel, tell the world anything about the work of others?
It is the business of those who can speak and write to tell the people,
not how the work was created, unless they were present, but how it
impressed them as a finished thing. That is the province of legitimate
criticism.
Every man who has done his best to understand, though at the risk of
betraying his ignorance, has the right to say how he likes what he sees
or hears or tastes. The opinions of some are worth more than those of
others; and these opinions, with the reasons therefor, we are delighted
to hear. That is about all there is to sound criticism; and in that
sense comment and those whose profession is to comment are
inevitable,--until the æsthetic millenium, when critics cease from
troubling and the artists are at rest.
Ruskin, unfortunately, attempted the double duty of telling painters how
to paint and the public what to like. With all his industry and
considerable talent for drawing, he was not competent to tell painters
how to paint,--though much that he said is accepted as sound,--and his
judgments of the relative merits of painters and pictures were biassed
by his own convictions regarding the way the work should be done.
His limitations were due to his strong preferences and violent
prejudices. His devotion to Turner--a great painter--was one limitation;
lack of appreciation of Rembrandt was another; failure to estimate
Velasquez at his real worth was another; and a lot of enthusiasms for
men who are now forgotten are so many additional evidences of lack of
judicial temper in Ruskin. But all these things are as nothings in
comparison with the rich store of things said in English so strong, so
simple, and yet so beautiful that it fairly intoxicates and rouses
something akin to a religious enthusiasm.
* * * * *
A word concerning the “Voice of a People,” as Whistler called his little
collection of criticisms. What is it?
In literature the “Voice of a People” makes itself heard at the
bookseller’s counter and over the desk of the circulating library,--and
that, too, regardless of critics who praise this book and condemn that.
Sometimes, before the Critic has spoken, the “Voice” is heard, and the
presses groan with the burden of their task; or, more often, after the
Critic has had his say, the “Voice,” disregarding labored precepts,
calls loudly for what it is told it should not have; and so in
literature the “Voice” makes itself heard loud and clear and natural,
and there is no mistaking it.
Likewise in the drama the insistent “Voice” demands trash or otherwise,
quite regardless of the protest of the Critic. The run of a play is not
determined by the criticisms. The opinion of the Critic is often
foreseen and defied; but neither writer, manager, nor actor can foretell
the verdict of the “Voice,”--favorable often when least expected;
adverse often when least deserved.
But in art the “Voice”--stentorian in literature and the drama--sinks to
a whisper so diffident that it cannot be heard amidst the trumpetings of
the Critics.
The Critics--those whose business it was to write and talk about
art--ridiculed Whistler, not the “Voice.” Left wholly to itself, it is
quite likely the “Voice” would have found much that it liked in the
beautiful combinations of tones and colors, for there is nothing
inherently repulsive in Whistler’s work, as in much other that Critics
command the “Voice” to praise; on the contrary, his paintings are
exceedingly restful to the eye, and exceedingly attractive as schemes of
color if nothing else. The “Voice,” left to itself, would say, “I do
not understand them, but I like them,--just as I like music, without
knowing much about it.”
* * * * *
But the “Voice”--independent enough in literature, the drama, and even
in music--dares not lisp in art until the Critic speaks. Then the
“Voice” praises what he praises, condemns what he condemns, until the
secret purchases and growing demand for the outcast confounds both
Critic and echoing “Voice.” Then the “Voice” turns--as it has in the
case of Whistler--and rends the Critics, unless those agile gentlemen
change sides and praise what they formerly condemned.
Too bad that Whistler attributed the “Voice” of the Critic to that
long-suffering animal--the Public, which, if often wrong, is always
honest, and, in all but art--vociferous.
* * * * *
Concerning his habit of persistently impaling the critics, a writer
says:[29]
“We wish that the catalogue did not, for the tenth time, contain
quotations from all the dull things which bewildered criticism has
said about him. Mr. Whistler is a wit, and should recollect that
the same old joke must not be told too often to the same old
audience.”
But where is the joke? In the criticisms or in their repetition? If the
criticisms were serious, then repetition is doubly serious.
Nor is it “the same old audience,” but each year, each hour, a new
audience. Of all the English-speaking people not one in a million have
ever heard the joke; and if joke there be, it is surely a gracious act
to make it known.
The far-seeing publisher deftly detaches the favorable comment from
uncongenial context and prints it boldly on the fly-leaf of the volume.
Why should not author or painter print his page of depreciations that,
as Whistler says, “history may be cleanly written”? And if preserved and
printed once, why not for all time?
The record of a people is not complete unless their likes and dislikes
be known. What would we not give for the adverse criticisms of
Shakespeare? And there must have been many besides poor Greene’s. What
would we not give for some of the off-hand comments of his fellow-actors
and his fellow-managers?
The world conspires to deceive the world. The literature of adulation is
carefully conserved until mortals, denuded of their frailties, become
gods.
* * * * *
In the course of his career Whistler met with many bizarre
appreciations, but none more astonishing than this:[30]
“To understand Mr. Whistler you must understand his body. I do not
mean that Mr. Whistler has suffered from bad health,--his health
has always been excellent; all great artists have excellent
health, but his constitution is more nervous than robust. He is
even a strong man, but he is lacking in weight. Were he six inches
taller and his bulk proportionally increased, his art would be
different.”
The classification of the prize-ring into feather-, light-, middle-, and
heavy-weights makes its appearance in art; genius, like jockeys, must
weigh-in and-out. By rights, therefore, Paganini should have played the
bass-viol and Napoleon should have been a drummer-boy. The painter must
measure his canvas by his belt, and bant the masterpiece into shape. The
gymnasium is the true school of art, and the dumb-bell is mightier than
the brush.
“For if Whistler had been six inches taller and his bulk
proportionally increased, ... instead of having painted a dozen
portraits,--every one, even the ‘Mother’ and ‘Miss Alexander,’
which I personally take to be the two best, a little febrile in its
extreme beauty, whilst some, masterpieces though they be, are
clearly touched with weakness and marked with hysteria,--Mr.
Whistler would have painted a hundred portraits as strong, as
vigorous, as decisive, and as easily accomplished as any by
Velasquez or Hals.”
This is the sort of comment that follows but never precedes
acquaintance. After knowing a painter, it is easy to discover all his
physical characteristics and idiosyncrasies in his work,--so easy, in
fact, that many critics prefer to pass on books, plays, and pictures on
their merits without knowing anything about the authors, the actors, or
painters; for in the end a work must stand or fall by itself.
From an examination of the “Hermes,” can this critic give us the stature
of Praxiteles? From the “Nike” in the Louvre can he describe the unknown
master? What does the “Sistine Madonna” tell him of the weight of
Raphael, or the “Lesson in Anatomy” of the “bulk” of Rembrandt?
* * * * *
A man’s physical condition may be--frequently is--reflected in his work.
If he is an invalid, what he does is apt to show it,--though Herbert
Spencer is a case to the contrary; but his physique is another matter.
Genius is not a matter of inches. The weight of the brain is not
controlled by the size of the body; still more independent is the
organization and development of the brain.
If a man have strength and health--and these the critic concedes to
Whistler--his work may be the work of a giant.
One of the greatest and strongest of Germany’s living artists is almost
a dwarf; the most virile painter in America to-day is short and slight.
* * * * *
The same critic, referring to the letters in the “Gentle Art,” says, “If
Mr. Whistler had the bull-like health of Michael Angelo, Rubens, Hals,
the letters would never have been written.” But, as a matter of fact,
Angelo was “a man of more than usually nervous temperament.” As any one
at all familiar with his career, his many controversies, his voluminous
letters, well knows, “his temperament exposed him to sudden outbursts of
scorn and anger which brought him now and then into violent collision
with his neighbors.” His habit of ridiculing and annoying his
fellow-pupils invited the blow from Pietro Torrigiano which gave him his
broken nose. He was a weakly child and suffered two illnesses in
manhood, but by carefully refraining from all excesses he regained and
preserved his health. “His countenance always showed a good and
wholesome color. Of stature he is as follows: height middling, broad in
the shoulders; the rest of the body somewhat slender in proportion.”
The foregoing scarcely bears out the sweeping generalization that “the
greatest painters, I mean the very greatest,--Michael Angelo, Velasquez,
and Rubens,--were gifted by nature with as full a measure of health as
of genius. Their physical constitutions resembled more those of bulls
than of men.”
As for Velasquez, who can speak authoritatively for him?
* * * * *
While the physical characteristics of geniuses are habitually
exaggerated, and the weak, the nervous, the delicate are made well and
strong and “like bulls” in the enthusiasm of appreciation or the
exigencies of theory, it would not be difficult to point out in history,
art, and literature innumerable instances of men whose achievements
afford no indications whatsoever of their bodily make up,--in fact, it
is common experience that neither poet nor painter ever corresponds with
preconceived notions, and to meet the one or the other is to court
disenchantment.
If Whistler had been six inches taller he would not have been Angelo, or
Rembrandt, or Velasquez, but--in all probability--a soldier.
_VII_
_Supreme as a Colorist--Color and Music--His Susceptibility to
Color--Ruskin and Color--Art and Nature._
Supreme as a colorist, Whistler achieved fame as an etcher long before
the world acknowledged his greatness as a painter. Even now it is the
fashion to exalt his etchings to the depreciation of his paintings,--to
say that he was a great artist in the one medium but unsuccessful in the
other.
The following is a fair illustration of this sort of comment:
“Cool-headed conservatism should clarify the halo which encircles
Whistler’s portraits. The periodic ‘symphonies,’ ‘harmonies,’ and
‘arrangements,’ in gray and green, green and rose, purple and gold,
or brown and black, have, or had, novelty to recommend them,--more
novelty, however, than psychology. Apart from one or two, they are
little beyond essays in subdued _Japonisme_ with subtle dashes of
Velasquez. The portrait of his mother alone shows adequate depth,
for the overlauded Carlyle is merely a male replica of the single
canvas wherein the artist seemed to lose--and to find--himself. It
is not in portraiture, but in etching and lithography, that
Whistler has disclosed the validity of his talent.”[31]
To which may be added the following comments since his death from
leading American papers:
“Whistler in earlier life was a real etcher, easily the first of
the nineteenth century. The number of his plates of the best
quality is comparatively small. He soon lost his power or the
incentive to execute it. His hand degenerated, his work became
trivial and insincere. As a painter none of his pictures will ever
explain to posterity the reputation, or the apparent reputation,
that he enjoyed during his lifetime.”
“It is, however, as an etcher rather than as a painter that
Whistler will be remembered.”
“Thus, setting aside the portraits of his mother, of Thomas
Carlyle, Lady Campbell, and Miss Alexander, and the startling
‘Nocturne in Blue and Silver,’ and the ‘Arrangement in Black,’ it
might be possible to count upon the fingers of one hand the finest
examples of his brush.”
Many others of similar import might be gathered, but the foregoing
suffice. In reading them it should not be forgotten that the etchings,
which are now praised without reserve, passed through the same stages of
depreciation through which the paintings are passing; so that, guided by
the parallel, it is reasonable to expect the complete acceptance of the
latter as masterpieces in the near future.
Broadly speaking, the order of acceptance has been:
First. Etchings and lithographs.
Second. Portraits.
Third. Color harmonies,--such as many of his figure-pieces, marines,
nocturnes, and pure color compositions generally, none of which is fully
accepted, some of which are scarcely known, and
[Illustration]
all of which are misunderstood, in spite of his many explicit words of
explanation.
Such has been the order of general acceptance of his work; but the order
of real merit is almost precisely reversed.
Whistler stands supreme,--
First as a colorist.
Secondly as a painter of portraits.
Thirdly as an etcher and lithographer.
As an etcher comparisons are drawn between him and Rembrandt.
As a painter of portraits comparisons are drawn between him and
Velasquez.
As a colorist he is beyond comparison save with the masters of the far
East.
In etching and lithography and the painting of portraits he, at most,
simply did as well or better what others have done before; but in the
composition of harmonies of color to please the eye, as harmonies of
sound please the ear, he accomplished results which are unique.
What he did with the needle is not so wholly and absolutely unlike all
that had been done before as to render comparisons impossible; whereas
with the brush in his domain of color Whistler stands alone. His art was
his own; he painted like no other man dead or living.
His etchings were so fine, so subtle, that the world had difficulty in
comprehending them; but it did learn to like them, and that, too, at a
comparatively early date. But even now his pictures are fully
understood by no one; and yet they have had a profounder influence upon
the art of to-day than those of any other master.
He opened the door of the East to the painters of the West and showed
them how they might paint after the manner of the best there is in the
Oriental world, and not only retain, but accentuate their own
individuality.
The secret of Whistler’s art, as of all great art, is that it was the
absolutely true and unaffected expression of his convictions and of his
impressions of the life and world about him; and his impressions and
convictions in the domain of color, like those of Beethoven in the world
of sound, were worth recording.
He is to color what Beethoven is to sound, and his distinguishing merit
is that of all the men of his century or of many preceding centuries he
was the only one to treat color as a composer of music treats sound,--as
material for the arrangement of harmonies to please the eye as music
pleases the ear.
* * * * *
When Burne-Jones, in the Ruskin suit, was asked if he saw any art
quality in “The Falling Rocket,” he apologetically said, “I must speak
the truth, you know,” and then testified: “It has fine color and
atmosphere,” but of detail and composition “absolutely none.”
As if the shower of fire of a falling rocket against the blackness of
night could have sharp detail and composition; as if anything were
possible beyond “fine color and atmosphere;” and color and atmosphere
are all Whistler intended. “My whole scheme,” he himself testified, “was
only to bring about a certain harmony of color,” and, according to the
only decently qualified witness for the other side, he succeeded.
Even Frith, the painter of “Derby Day” and the “Rake’s Progress,” said,
“There is a pretty color which pleases the eye, but there is nothing
more.”
Why should there be anything more, if to please the eye were the
painter’s sole intention? Is it not as legitimate to please the eye with
compositions of color, otherwise meaningless, as it is to please the ear
with compositions of sound?
Profoundly speaking, color has no other object than to please the eye.
The story should be told, the moral pointed, in black and white. The use
of color imitatively, or to accentuate the characterization, is as base
as the use of sound imitatively.
Color is to the eye precisely what sound is to the ear, and the highest
use to which either can be put is the production of pure, not to say
abstract, harmonies for the satisfaction of its respective sense.
* * * * *
As long ago as 1868 Swinburne, in a pamphlet on the Royal Academy
exhibition of that year, said:
“No task is harder than this translation from color into speech,
when the speech must be so hoarse and feeble, when the color is so
subtle and sublime. Music and verse might strike some string
accordant in sound to such painting, but a version such as this is
a psalm of Tate’s to a psalm of David’s. In all of the main
strings touched are certain varying chords of blue and white, not
without interludes of the bright and tender tones of floral purple
or red. They all have immediate beauty, they all give the delight
of natural things; they seem to have grown as a flower grows, not
in any forcing house of ingenious and laborious cunning. This is,
in my eyes, a special quality of Mr. Whistler’s genius; a freshness
and fulness of the loveliest life of things, with a high, clear
power upon them which seems to educe a picture as the sun does a
blossom or a fruit.”
In language too plain for the slightest misunderstanding he has himself
told the world precisely what he meant his pictures to be, but the world
will not take him at his word.
Nearly thirty years ago, when the people wondered at his calling his
works “symphonies,” “arrangements,” “harmonies,” and “nocturnes,” he
wrote:
“The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a
picture apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.
“My picture of a ‘Harmony in Gray and Gold’ is an illustration of
my meaning,--a snow-scene with a single black figure and a lighted
tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the
black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that
spot. All that I know is that my combination of gray and gold is
the basis of the picture. Now, this is precisely what my friends
cannot grasp.
“They say, ‘Why not call it “Trotty Veck,” and sell it for a round
harmony of golden guineas?’ naively acknowledging that without
baptism there is no ... market!’”[32]
And farther on he said:
“As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of
sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of
sound or color.
“The great musicians knew this. Beethoven and the rest wrote
music,--simply music; symphony in this key, concerto or sonata in
that.
“On F or G they constructed celestial harmonies,--as
harmonies,--combinations evolved from the chorus of F or G and
their minor correlatives.
“This is pure music as distinguished from airs,--commonplace and
vulgar in themselves, but interesting from their associations,--as,
for instance, ‘Yankee Doodle’, or ‘Partant pour la Syrie.’
“Art should be independent of all clap-trap, should stand alone,
and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or er, without confounding
this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love,
patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with
it; and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and
‘harmonies.’”[33]
And concerning the portrait of his mother, which nearly every one
admires for the subject while few pause to consider the color, he wrote:
“Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as
an ‘Arrangement in Gray and Black.’ 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?”[34]
Within these few lines are contained Whistler’s whole philosophy of art,
his convictions and his intentions; the words are so plain a child may
read and comprehend their meaning, and yet people will not understand
him.
Whistler’s art was purely sensuous, as the finest music is sensuous. He
had no interest whatsoever in the many problems of life and death, in
the story of any person or the traditions of any place.
He had less interest in the associations connected with Old Battersea
Bridge than the boatman lazily floating by; but at certain hours and
under certain conditions, at twilight or at dusk, or in the fog, it made
a long, tremulous line which pleased him, and he painted it.
The fact that the Thames bounds English history was of no consequence to
him; but the muddy river between lines of buildings and wharves and
shipping, and covered by boats and crossed by bridges, furnished him
endless compositions in line and color.
The glory and the romance of Venice made no impression on his art; but
in out-of-the-way places, where others saw nothing, he found scenes
which inspired his etchings.
As an etcher and a lithographer Whistler played with the mystery of
line, as in painting he played with the mystery of color.
There is an art of pure line as there is an art of pure form and of pure
color. It is just as possible to make a lot of meaningless lines which
please the eye in their curves and endless variety as it is to please
the eye with combinations of colors.
Decorative patterns and designs, aside from color, are simply line
harmonies.
A child loves to make straight and round and curved lines upon slate or
paper.
The eye follows lines with a delight akin to that taken in form and
color.
When the Savoy Hotel was in process of construction, and the great steel
beams thrust themselves upward towards the sky, and there was a
lattice-work of girders and a veritable song of line, Whistler, seeing
it one day from a neighboring window, exclaimed:
“Hurry; where are my things? I must catch that now, for it will never
again be so beautiful.”
* * * * *
High buildings, mechanical processes, modern costumes had no terrors for
him, simply because he had no sentiment concerning them; if they
furnished him beauties of line or color he cared not whether they were
new or old.
Whistler’s art was as devoid of sentiment as that of a Japanese.
To our Western notions the everlasting convention that serves for a face
in Japanese art seems hopelessly monotonous. To them our painstaking
characterization of the features and peculiarities of each person is no
art at all, but grotesque caricature; it is the subordination of art
which is of universal interest to the eccentricities of the individual
which are of local interest.
In Whistler’s art one must not look for any solution of the problems of
life, for any sign of the emotions which control human conduct,--for
love and hate and fear, for hope and ambition, for the tortures of
jealousy or the bitterness of despair,--these are all absent; his art is
pure and serene. His works are to painting what the “Ode to a Grecian
Urn” or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is to poetry, and hence in human
interest they fall far short of the tragedies, the epics, the romances
of literature and art, and they must not be judged by standards he did
not seek to emulate. He could no more have painted a “Crucifixion” or a
“Last Judgment” than he could have carved the “Moses” or written
“Hamlet.” In every sense, save that of abstract beauty of line and
color, other painters have excelled Whistler, but as the master of pure
line and color harmonies he is supreme.
* * * * *
Whistler’s etchings and photographs were simply compositions in line,
delightful harmonies in black and white. It is too bad to preserve their
names or identify them with any locality, for their exquisite art is
better appreciated if no distracting consideration is aroused. But,
oddly enough, he occasionally made concessions in the naming of these
that he did not in the naming of his paintings.
Take, for instance, that charming lithograph, “Confidences in the
Garden,”--two ladies walking in the corner of an old garden. The garden
is in the rear of his Paris home on the Rue du Bac. The ladies are
probably Mrs. Whistler and her sister. But what does it add to the
print to call it “Confidences in the Garden”? Nothing at all. On the
contrary, the title at once suggests a host of considerations which
conflict with the abstract enjoyment of the composition.
That sort of a title is precisely what he condemns for his paintings. It
is, however, one of the very few instances where his titles suggest
anything more than the obvious subject. For the most part he was
consistent in choosing names that do not distract.
Even the portraits he did not care to have known as “Portrait of Mr.
A----,” or “Portrait of Lady C----,” thereby catering first to the
vanity of a sitter, then to the idle curiosity of the multitude. His
portraits were compositions in line and color, and, as such, were
artistic creations. That they happened also to be portraits of certain
individuals was a mere coincidence. The portrait feature, upon which
people lay so much stress, was of the least consequence to him; and just
because he did not permit the photographic element to move him, he
secured results which are far beyond the art of the “portrait-painter.”
* * * * *
The sense of color is so lost to painters, as well as to laymen, that to
talk of color compositions as one speaks of sound compositions is to
challenge doubt and occasion surprise. And yet there is a music of color
even as there is a music of sound, and there should be a delight in
color composition even as there is a delight in sound composition; and
this delight should be something fundamentally distinct from any
interest in the subject of the composition. The subject may be a man, or
a woman, or a field, or a tree, or a wave, or a cloud, or just nothing
at all--mere masses or streaks of color; the perfection or the
imperfection of the color arrangement remains the same.
That the color-sense is lost to laymen, critics, and painters is
evidenced by the ridicule that for thirty years was heaped upon Whistler
for calling his pictures “harmonies,” “symphonies,” “nocturnes,” etc.;
for adopting the more or less abstract nomenclature of sound
compositions--music--to describe color compositions.
One paper described them as “some figure pieces, which this artist
exhibits as ‘harmonies’ in this, that, or the other, being, as they are,
mere rubs-in of color, have no claims to be regarded as pictures.”
Another says, “A dark bluish surface, with dots on it, and the faintest
adumbrations of shape under the darkness, is gravely called a ‘Nocturne
in Black and Gold.’” Again, “Two of Mr. Whistler’s ‘color-symphonies,’ a
‘Nocturne in Blue and Gold,’ and a ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold.’ If he
did not exhibit these as pictures under peculiar and, what seems to most
people, pretentious titles they would be entitled to their due meed of
admiration. But they only come one step nearer pictures than delicately
graduated tints on a wall-paper do.”
And so in endless iteration and reiteration.
It never occurred to either painters or critics to judge the pictures
as if they were in reality so many “delicately graduated tints on a
wall-paper.” The color-sense was deficient. The pictures were judged by
their composition, their subjects,--or, rather, not appreciated at all,
but condemned, on account of their titles, which expressed exactly what
the painter desired to convey,--namely, his attempts to produce
harmonies in color independently of subject.
So far from Whistler’s titles being absurd, they were so many frank
attempts to tell the public what the painter was really trying to do. He
might have been more obscure, like many a composer of music, and simply
said, “_Opus_ I.,” or “_Opus_ XX.,” and so on. He did call three of his
early pictures “Symphony in White, No. I.,” “Symphony in White, No.
II.,” and “Symphony in White, No. III.;” but the first, a full-length
figure, was also known as the “White Girl” of the “Salon des Refusés,”
1863; the second, a three-quarter length of a young girl in white,
standing by a mantel, as “The Little White Girl;” while the third, with
no other title, is of two girls in white.
But for the most part he chose to describe each particular work as an
arrangement of blue and silver, or black and gray, or flesh-color and
brown, according to the predominating tones of the composition, thereby
aiding the eye of the observer.
There are beauties of form devoid of color;
There are beauties of color devoid of form;
There are beauties of form and color combined.
Of the foregoing the first is familiar in sculpture, and the third is
familiar in painting, but the second is scarcely observed at all, though
color without form is found wherever color is used decoratively.
The ordinary house-painter endeavors to secure agreeable effects by the
mere arrangement of colors. The interior-decorator endeavors--for the
most part with disastrous results--to secure agreeable effects by the
mere distribution of color. In a crude way the house-painter, the
sign-painter, the decorator, the dyer, the dress-maker, are all
color-composers, their object being to produce harmonies in color quite
irrespective of line and form. They know nothing about drawing, they
know nothing about modelling, but they try to please the eye by color
arrangements.
To rightly understand the color-sense let us briefly consider the matter
from its scientific side.
* * * * *
The ear has a range of musical sounds of from sixteen and one-half
air-vibrations per second--the note of the lowest pipe of the great
organ--to four thousand seven hundred and fifty-two vibrations per
second, the highest note of the piccolo of the orchestra,--a range of
about eight octaves.
Below sixteen and one-half vibrations per second, and above four
thousand seven hundred and fifty-two,--as high, in fact, as forty
thousand,--sounds are audible, but not musical, being either too low and
throbbing or two high and piercing to be agreeable.
In all countries this range of musical sounds is divided into
octaves,--the octave of any given note having simply double the number
of air-vibrations.
At the present time, in the Western world, each octave is divided, as
every one knows, into twelve notes, indicated on the piano by the seven
white keys and the five black.
For instance, the middle C of the piano has two hundred and sixty-four
vibrations per second, the C above has, of course, just double, or five
hundred and twenty-eight vibrations per second. In the chromatic scale
these two hundred and sixty-four vibrations, which make the octave, are
divided into only twelve intervals, an average of twenty-two vibrations
to the interval. In the octavo above the average would be twice that, or
forty-four, and so on doubling to the end.
There is a change in pitch with the addition of so much as a fraction of
a vibration per second. As a matter of fact, musicians can detect the
variation of pitch caused by the difference of half a vibration per
second in the middle octaves; the power to detect changes in pitch due
to fractional changes in vibrations decreasing towards the bass and
treble.
With this power of discriminating a thousand degrees of pitch in a
single octave the Western world is content to arbitrarily and
mechanically divide the octave into but twelve tones and semi-tones.
The Arabic octave contains twenty-four quarter-tones, and Oriental
nations generally take cognizance of intervals so small they seem to us
discords.
Helmholtz requested a distinguished musician to investigate this matter
in Cairo, and this is the report:
“This evening I have been listening attentively to the song on the
minarets, to try to appreciate the quarter-tones, which I had not
supposed to exist, as I had thought that the Arabs sang _out of
tune_. But to-day as I was with the dervishes I became certain that
such quarter-tones existed, and for the following reasons: Many
passages in litanies of this kind end with a tone which was at
first the quarter-tone and ended in the pure tone. As the passage
was frequently repeated, I was able to observe this every time, and
I found the intonation invariable.”[35]
All of which goes to show how susceptible the highly-trained ear is to
fine gradations and combinations of sound and how easy it is to become
accustomed to coarse intervals when the finer are no longer used.
* * * * *
The various notes as sounded by a great variety of musical instruments
constitute the raw material from which the composer and performer
produce melodies and harmonies absolutely unknown to nature, and
which--judged by the only possible standard, their emotional and
intellectual effects--are incomparably finer than any sounds in nature,
finer because a human utterance, the play of soul upon soul.
* * * * *
The eye has a range of color-notes from four hundred millions of
millions of ether-vibrations per second, the rate of the deepest red of
the spectrum, to seven hundred and fifty millions of millions, the rate
of the violet rays. The following table of vibration rates of the colors
of the spectrum shows the vibration intervals which divide the
pronounced colors:[36]
Color-sensation. Ether-vibrations per second.
Deep red 400 millions of millions.
Red-orange 437 “ “
Yellow-orange 457 “ “
Yellow 509 “ “
Green 570 “ “
Blue-green 617 “ “
Blue-violet 696 “ “
Violet 750 “ “
This color-scale, as produced by a great variety of agents,--such as
colored lights, glass, stones, metals, fabrics, dyes, stains, pigments,
etc.,--constitutes the raw material from which the color-composer,
painter, and decorator produce melodies and harmonies absolutely unknown
to nature, and, judged as musical sounds are judged, are incomparably
finer than effects in nature, because essentially human, because
produced by man for their emotional and intellectual effect upon man.
Theoretically the variation of a single ether-vibration per second
changes the shade of the color; but while the trained ear can detect the
variation in pitch due to a half-vibration of air per second more or
less, ether-vibrations are so incomparably more rapid that the best the
trained eye can do is detect about one thousand different tints in the
spectrum. In other words, there must be an increase or decrease of three
hundred and fifty thousand millions of ether-vibrations before even the
practised eye is consciously affected.
It is, however, altogether likely that while the eye is not consciously
affected without these great variations in frequency, it is
_unconsciously_ affected, and susceptibility to and skill in handling
color depend upon this unconscious susceptibility.
It is pretty well established that the range of color-vision cannot be
materially extended below the red or above the violet by practice, but
susceptibility to color variations and the ability to distinguish
gradations of tone within the scale can be increased almost
indefinitely.
Education of the color-sense is the development of this _unconscious_
susceptibility,--of the _feeling_ for, as distinguished from a knowledge
of, color.
A man may _know_ all about color and have no _feeling_ for it. On the
other hand, a man may be singularly susceptible to color-effects without
being able to name correctly a dozen shades.
Nothing educates the color-sense so much as steady contemplation of
color-harmonies in nature and art. But unless a man possesses an
instinctive feeling for color he will never select the best examples;
whereas if his eye is exceedingly susceptible he will intuitively cling
to the best the world affords.
* * * * *
Whistler was gifted with susceptibility to color in an extraordinary
degree. Where, by way of illustration, the untrained eye can distinguish
one or two hundred shades of color in the spectrum and the
highly-trained eye a thousand, Whistler could probably distinguish two
thousand, and possibly _feel_ as many more.
In fact, so keen was his susceptibility to color that intervals--to use,
very legitimately, the musical term--quite imperceptible to others
affected him greatly.
* * * * *
The neck-tie of a sitter once caused him no end of trouble.
The suit the sitter was wearing was of a light-brown tone; the ulster
was of a darker Scotch plaid,--all softened in tone by time and wear. In
so many shades of brown it certainly seemed to the casual eye that the
shade of the brown silk tie the sitter had on found a place. But, no; to
Whistler it was a discordant note, though half hidden by the garments.
All available ties were exhausted,--even those of friends and
neighboring artists were levied upon. Others could see nothing
inharmonious in many of the ties that were tried; but they made Whistler
positively uncomfortable,--just as uncomfortable as the leader of an
orchestra is when an instrument plays a discord; and it was not until
the “Bon Marché” had been ransacked--for, not ties, but simply fabrics
in shades of brown--that a piece was found that would answer.
Then, mark you, the brown of the tie was by no means reproduced in the
portrait, but the brown as modified by all the browns and notes of the
entire costume, and as still further modified by all the browns and all
the notes and shades and lights of the studio.
During this search for a note of brown--a search which seemed to the
sitter, and even to artist friends, finical in the extreme--the great
painter one afternoon justified himself by showing some little pastel
sketches of a model with bits of transparent drapery floating about her.
The sketches were on coarse brown board, and about ten or twelve inches
high by five or six wide, and there were just a few strokes of almost
imperceptible color to indicate the flesh tones and the draperies, all
so slight as to scarce attract notice; and yet each of the filmy bits of
drapery had been dyed by the painter with as much care to secure the
desired notes as he would take in painting a portrait.
No one who has not seen him at work can form any adequate notion of his
extreme susceptibility to infinitesimal variations of color; it exceeded
that of any painter of whom the Western world has sufficient record for
comparison.
A Frenchman has said:
“Whistler’s works are dreams of color. The gray of them is unique.
It is made of white, blue, green, of all the tints. It is the
tender gray of England’s coasts, of the North Sea, and of the sky
that in summer is above it; the horizon gray where the pale blue of
the sky and the pale green of the sea unite and form one.
“It is a subtle shade, in accord with the penumbras in which he
delighted. He was the musician of the rainbow. No one understood as
well as he the mysterious relations of painting and of music, the
seven notes and the seven colors, and the way to play these with
the sharps and flats of the prism. Even as a symphony is in D or a
sonata is in A, his pictures were orchestrated according to a
tone,--the ‘Lady with the Iris,’ for example, a mauve flower placed
in the hand of the figure, as a note and signifying that the
portrait was to be a colored polyphony of lilac and of violets.
“More precision is lent to this curious æsthetic by the titles that
he gave to certain small canvases representing twilights of Venice
and of London, which he entitled ‘Nocturnes,’ in a parallel with
those of Chopin, but of a Chopin serene and who dreams instead of a
Chopin ill and who weeps. There, as in portraits, the gray of
England’s coasts appears, but bluer. It has in portraits the tints
of twilight in ashes. In all his works he reveals the land of his
origin, the land that has produced Edgar Allan Poe.”
Many stories are told illustrating his susceptibility to color. Some of
them are pointless; but the fact they are told at all shows how this
trait impressed both the artists and the public.
“One morning he had an engagement at a banker’s, where he was to
receive a large sum of money for a set of etchings, a sum that he
happened to need very much at that time. He was busy chatting and
showing some of his things to an appreciative visitor, who happened
to know the circumstances, and considerately reminded him that he
had far to go and that the American would probably be in a hurry
and would not wait.
“‘Yes,’ said Whistler; ‘but just look at this now,’ pulling forward
another canvas. And so it went on, until his friend said:
‘Whistler, you really must go! That man will never wait for you.’
“‘What a nuisance you are!’ he exclaimed; but he got ready, and
they started.
“They were tearing down the street at a great rate, when Whistler
suddenly stopped the cab and made the driver go back to a certain
spot,--and they had to go backwards and forwards for quite a while
before they found the exact place,--in order to get a view of a
certain little green-grocer’s shop, with his fruit and vegetables
outside, striped awnings, etc.
“Whistler put up his hands for a frame, squinted and twisted.
‘Beautiful!’ he exclaimed. ‘Lovely! I’m going to do that; but I
think I’ll have him move the oranges over to the right more, and
that green, now--let me see----’
“‘Whistler!’ cried his friend, ‘_do_ come along! That man will be
home in New York before we get there!’
“‘What a nuisance you are!’ declared Whistler, and was sulky the
rest of the way.
“It was not a pose. The painter was so enchanted by what he saw
that banker and money were nothing to him at that moment.”
And it is said a visitor once found him at work in his studio.
“The furniture was of a pale gray; the hangings were of the same color;
the window shades were of gray; the model a woman with gray eyes,
wearing a gray costume; and the costume of the painter was also of the
same prevailing color.
“Whistler refused to talk with his visitor until he had removed his
flaming red cravat; and, after a few minutes’ conversation, commented
upon the fact that the tone values of his coat and trousers were out of
harmony.”
An exaggeration, but it all might have occurred; for has he not himself
described, in “Gentle Art,” how the loud dress of a critic destroyed his
exhibition. “To have seen him, O, my wise Atlas, was my privilege and my
misery,--for he stood under one of my own ‘harmonies,’ already with
difficulty gasping its gentle breath, himself an amazing ‘arrangement’
in strong mustard-and-cress, with bird’s-eye belcher of Reckitt’s blue,
and then and there destroyed absolutely, unintentionally, and once for
all, my year’s work!”
* * * * *
The analogy between the musical scale and the color scale has been many
times noted.
Helmholtz[37] draws the following analogy:
F ♯ End of the red.
G Red.
G ♯ Red.
A Red.
A ♯ Orange-red.
B Orange.
c Yellow.
c ♯ Green.
d Greenish-blue.
d ♯ Cyanogen-blue.
e Indigo-blue.
f Violet.
f ♯ Violet.
g Ultra-violet.
g ♯ Ultra-violet.
a Ultra-violet.
a ♯ Ultra-violet.
b End of the solar spectrum.
There is, of course, this fundamental difference between the two senses:
the action of air-waves upon the ear is mechanical, simply a succession
of beats, while the action of ether-waves upon the retina is chemical in
its character.
The true analogy lies in the simple fact that the ear is susceptible to
certain sounds produced by air-waves of certain frequencies, while the
eye is susceptible to certain colors produced by ether-waves of certain
frequencies, and it is possible to mechanically combine in one case the
sounds so as to produce harmonies that please the ear, and in the other
case the colors so as to produce harmonies that please the eye; and so
far as pure sound and pure color is concerned, the harmonious
compositions need have no relation, imitative or otherwise, to anything
in nature.
* * * * *
The uneducated ear prefers melodies which are more or less suggestive of
sounds heard in nature,--more or less realistic imitations of songs of
birds, rippling of waters, falling of rain, rustling of leaves, crashing
of thunder, etc.; or if familiar sounds are not imitated, the title of
the composition must suggest some incident, place, or scene more or less
familiar, so the deficient ear may be helped out by the imagination.
The highly-trained ear, on the other hand, delights in abstract
compositions of sound, in harmonies which have no perceptible relation
to any sound in nature, and which do not suggest any person, scene, or
incident in literature or history.
The purer the taste in music the more abstract the compositions that
satisfy.
So far as the appreciation of color harmonies is concerned, the taste of
the Western world is like unto that of the uneducated ear in music.
We are not content with pure color compositions as we are with pure
sound, but we demand either imitations of natural objects or
representations of historical, literary, religious, or emotional
subjects. We must have something besides pure line and color.
A musician may strike a succession of notes, or a chord, and we are
pleased, the ear is satisfied; but if the painter simply sweeps his
brush several times across the canvas, we are not satisfied, though the
combination of colors be something more beautiful and harmonious than
anything ever seen. It is not a “picture” to us; it lacks the “subject”
to which we are accustomed.
And yet there are in existence certain canvases by Whistler which are
little more than color-schemes, and which in color-effects are among the
most beautiful things he ever painted; and in all the galleries of
Europe there is nothing to compare with them in pure joyousness of
color.
As children and men we enjoy the color-effects of fireworks against the
blackness of night, and we enjoy the darkness and the shadows about us,
the sudden light upon expectant faces, the dark-moving figures in the
intervals. All this is delight in color,--color without sentiment, color
without story, color without other thought or reflection than pure
sensuous enjoyment; and we even feel the tawdry cheapness of the attempt
when by set arrangement the features of some local or national celebrity
are presented. But when an artist who sees such a night-scene and paints
it in such manner that the color-scheme is preserved and its beauty
enhanced in translation, we demand something more. We demand, as did
Burne-Jones, “detail and composition,”--in short, we demand the features
of our local celebrity.
Until we learn to love color, as we love music, for its own sake, there
will never be any decorations of homes and public buildings that will be
worth while.
* * * * *
In days long gone by, in Italy during the Renaissance and before, in
Greece during the Golden Age, color was enjoyed for the sake of color,
regardless of the dictates of nature. If an Italian felt like making a
background of blue or gold, he did so; if a Greek felt like painting and
gilding his sculpture, he did so, until the Parthenon and its contents
must have been gorgeous with color, laid on, not after the precepts of
nature, but for the most part arbitrarily, to please the eye.
All decoration begins with nature and ends in convention.
In this progress from birth in the imitation of natural forms and colors
to death in the rigidity of a hard and lifeless convention there is a
maturity wherein lines and contours and colors play with perfect
freedom, original forms and models being absorbed in the finer creations
of the imagination.
* * * * *
Ruskin habitually confused the use of _color_ with the painting of
_light_; while in truth there is no necessary connection at all between
colorists and _lightists_,--to coin a word that will very legitimately
mark a distinction.
The painting of light is the distinguishing feature of
nineteenth-century art, and Turner was the apostle crying in the
wilderness of darkness; he was the first to successfully attempt the
realization of sunlight. He keyed his palette up with the sun as the
objective point, while the Italians who had influenced him had keyed
theirs up simply to produce color-effects. They decorated walls and
altars and painted pictures--as a potter decorates his earthen bowl--to
please the eye.
Although Ruskin habitually speaks of Turner as a colorist, and
undoubtedly says a great many fine things concerning color, he did not
care at all for color apart from the delineation of form. To him color
was useful only as a mode of drawing; in itself it was as nothing at
all.
Speaking of his so-called “truths” of color, he says:
“All truths of color sink at once into the second rank. He,
therefore, who has neglected a truth of form for a truth of color
has neglected a great truth for a less one.
“That color is indeed a most unimportant characteristic of objects
will be farther evident on the slightest consideration. The color
of plants is constantly changing with the season, and of everything
with the quality of light falling on it; but the nature and essence
of the thing are independent of these changes. An oak is an oak,
whether green with spring or red with winter; a dahlia is a dahlia,
whether it be yellow or crimson; and if some monster-hunting
botanist should ever frighten the flower blue, still it will be a
dahlia; but let one curve of the petals, one groove of the stamens,
be wanting, and the flower ceases to be the same.”[38]
“The most convincing proof of the unimportance of color lies in the
accurate observation of the way in which any material object
impresses itself on the mind. If we look at nature carefully we
shall find that her colors are in a state of perpetual confusion
and indistinctness, while her forms, as told by light and shade,
are invariably clear, distinct, and speaking. The stones and gravel
of the bank catch green reflections from the boughs above; the
bushes receive grays and yellows from the ground; every hairbreadth
of polished surface gives a little bit of the blue sky or the gold
of the sun, like a star upon the local color; this local color,
changeful and uncertain in itself, is again disguised and modified
by the hue of the light or quenched in the gray of the shadow; and
the confusion and blending of tint is altogether so great that
were we left to find out what objects were by their colors only, we
would scarcely in places distinguish the boughs of a tree from the
air beyond them or the ground beneath them.”
“We shall see hereafter, in considering ideas of beauty, that
color, even as a source of pleasure, is feeble compared to form.
But this we cannot insist upon at present,--we have only to do with
simple truth; and the observations we have made are sufficient to
prove that the artist who sacrifices or forgets a truth of form in
the pursuit of a truth of color sacrifices what is definite to what
is uncertain and what is essential to what is accidental.”[39]
“It is, indeed, by this that the works of Turner are peculiarly
distinguished from those of all other colorists,--by the dazzling
intensity, namely, of the light which he sheds through every hue,
and which, far more than their brilliant color, is the real source
of their overpowering effect upon the eye, an effect so
_reasonably_ made the subject of perpetual animadversion, as if the
sun which they represent were a quiet, and subdued, and gentle, and
manageable luminary, and never dazzled anybody, under any
circumstances whatsoever. I am fond of standing by a bright Turner
in the Academy, to listen to the unintentional compliments of the
crowd,--‘What a glaring thing!’ ‘I declare I can’t look at it!’
‘Don’t it hurt your eyes?’--expressed as if they were in the
constant habit of looking the sun full in the face with the most
perfect comfort and entire facility of vision. It is curious after
hearing people malign some of Turner’s noble passages of light to
pass to some really ungrammatical and false pictures of the old
masters in which we have color given _without_ light.”[40]
“What I am next about to say with respect to Turner’s color I
should wish to be received with caution, as it admits of dispute.
I think that the first approach to viciousness of color in any
master is commonly indicated chiefly by a prevalence of purple and
an absence of yellow. I think nature mixes yellow with almost every
one of her hues, never, or very rarely, using red without it, but
frequently using yellow with scarcely any red; and I believe it
will be in consequence found that her favorite opposition, that
which generally characterizes and gives tone to her color, is
yellow and black, passing, as it retires, into white and blue. It
is beyond dispute that the great fundamental opposition of Rubens
is yellow and black, and that on this, concentrated in one part of
the picture and modified in various grays throughout, chiefly
depend the tones of all his finest works. And in Titian, though
there is a far greater tendency to the purple than in Rubens, I
believe no red is ever mixed with the pure blue, or glazed over it,
which has not in it a modifying quantity of yellow. At all events,
I am nearly certain that whatever rich and pure purples are
introduced locally by the great colorists nothing is so destructive
of all fine color as the slightest tendency to purple in general
tone; and I am equally certain that Turner is distinguished from
all the vicious colorists of the present day by the foundation of
all his tones being black, yellow, and the intermediate grays,
while the tendency of our common glare-seekers is invariably to
pure, cold, impossible purples.”
“Powerful and captivating and faithful as his color is, it is the
least important of all his excellences, because it is the least
important feature of nature. He paints in color, but he thinks in
light and shade; and, were it necessary, rather than lose one line
of his forms or one ray of his sunshine, would, I apprehend, be
content to paint in black and white to the end of his life.”[41]
For practical purposes truths of form are more essential than ‘truths’
of color; to mistake the size, shape, solidity, and texture of anything
is far more disastrous than to mistake its color. The color-blind get on
very well in the world, often without knowing their defect; but a person
who was form-blind would not get on at all.
The correct appreciation of form is of such vital importance that two
senses are brought to bear,--the sense of touch--the parent sense--as
well as the sense of sight; and without the co-operation of the sense of
touch, sight would be comparatively helpless in recognizing solidity,
texture, contours, etc. In the appreciation of form touch gets on very
well without sight, while sight could not get on at all without touch;
but, happily, a sense so precious is never completely lost.
Ruskin constantly uses the phrases, “truths of form,” “truths of color,”
and it is apparent that by these phrases he really means fidelity to
natural effects. With him a drawing, be it of a stone, a leaf, a tree, a
mountain, is not _true_ unless it corresponds to the thing in nature;
nor is a light or a shadow or a color _true_ unless it corresponds to
the effect in nature.
Now, so far as art is concerned, those so-called “truths” are of the
least importance.
Suppose a musician were to talk of “truths of sound,” meaning thereby
the more or less faithful imitation of the songs of birds, the rippling
of waters, the roll of thunder. Every one would know that his art was
of the most primitive character.
“Truths of sound,” in the sense that Ruskin speaks of “truths of form”
and “truths of color,” are not tolerated in music. To attain certain
effects, dramatic in character, imitations of sounds in nature are
sometimes introduced, but sparingly, and unless with great skill the
effect is disagreeable to even the uneducated ear, and if pressed too
far it becomes grotesque.
One art is like unto another, and what are really “truths” in one are
“truths” in another. It is immaterial whether the sense of hearing,
sight, or touch is appealed to; it does not matter whether it is a
composition of sound, of color, of line, or of form that is under
consideration, the fundamental principles of the art are the same; and
one of the fundamental propositions is: imitation is fatal to pure art.
It is the business of art to improve on nature, to take the raw
materials nature furnishes--her forces, her forms, her lines, her
colors, her lights and shadows, her sounds, her odors, her flavors--and
produce from them harmonious and agreeable effects unknown to nature.
Whistler has said:
“The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints
only the tree or flower or other surface he sees before him were an
artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for
the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait-painting to put
on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that
one day,--to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; in
arrangement of colors to treat a flower as his key, not as his
model.”[42]
Art begins with “truths,” in the Ruskin sense, and flowers in
“harmonies,” in the Whistler sense. It begins with the concrete, with
imitation, with fidelity to natural effects, and it develops by a
process of abstraction until it attains the chaste perfection of a Greek
temple or a Beethoven symphony.
Nature is never left entirely behind, and some arts are more dependent
upon her than others; but, generally speaking, the more abstract the art
the higher it is; the purer and freer it is from imitation or suggestion
of natural effects, the nobler its attainment. Because poetry and music
are almost entirely independent of nature and natural effects, do they
as arts, from one point of view, outrank sculpture and painting.
* * * * *
Ruskin, of course, was by no means blind to these considerations, and
when he talked of “truths of form” and “truths of color” he did not mean
literal imitation, but he did mean the fidelity of a draughtsman, of a
man whose eye and mind were on the thing or effect before him; and his
great work is one long attempt to show that Turner in his brilliant and
fanciful compositions was still clinging close to nature, that he
painted rocks and trees and clouds and sunlight as they really were, and
more beautifully than any man before or since.
All of which goes to show that Turner was not a colorist in the sense
Whistler was.
The one used color as a means, the other as an end. To the one color,
like line, or like black and white, was incidental to his
composition--the composition, the conception, the dream, the fancy,--in
short, the subject, being all important. To the other harmonies in color
was the end in view, almost to the exclusion in some of the nocturnes of
line and of form.
To Ruskin, even more than with Turner, color was simply a means to an
end,--the more perfect imitation of nature; hence his utter lack of
sympathy for Whistler’s work.
To pure color arrangements Ruskin was blind. He demanded a relation and
significance beyond the mere color harmony. Lines or waves of color
placed side by side arbitrarily, and with no more relation to nature
than so many notes of music, had no meaning for him, whereas for
Whistler they meant practically all there is to the science and art of
color.
To Ruskin the blue hair of a Greek statue would have seemed absurd and
childish; to the Greek it would have been simply a color-note in the
place where it was needed to perfect the color-scheme.
So utterly wanting is the sense of color-music in the modern world that
we like our sculpture in either ghastly marble, or, still more
perversely, with the yellow hues and dirt and dinginess wrought by time
and the elements, whereas those who created the greatest sculpture known
subdued all garish qualities by the use of gold and bronze and color,
not imitatively, but arbitrarily, to please a highly cultivated fancy.
* * * * *
From descriptions of Ruskin’s home, “Brantwood,” it is clear that he had
no craving for harmonious effects about him. Discords did not disturb
him; he could return with no sensations of discomfort from the keen
appreciation of natural beauties to rooms which would be intolerable to
any one like Whistler with an instinct for proportion and color.
The house had “a stucco classic portico in the corner, painted and
grained and heaped around with lucky horseshoes, highly black-leaded.”
The incongruity of the painting and graining--so contrary to all
Ruskin’s teachings--and black-leaded horseshoes surprised even his
friendly biographer.
His own room “he papered with naturalistic fancies to his own taste,”
and on the walls were “a Dürer engraving, some Prouts and Turners, a
couple of old Venetian heads, and Meissonier’s ‘Napoleon,’”--a typical
collector’s conglomeration.
The walls of the dining-room were painted “duck-egg,” whatever that
color may be, and covered with an even more heterogeneous collection of
pictures,--“the ‘Doge of Gritta,’ a bit saved from the great Titian
that was burnt in the fire at the Ducal Palace in 1574; a couple of
Tintorets; Turner and Reynolds, each painted by himself in youth;
Raphael, by a pupil, so it is said; portraits of old Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin
and little John and his ‘boo hills.’”
His study was “papered with a pattern specially copied from Marco
Marziali’s ‘Circumcision’ in the National Gallery, and hung with
Turners.” There was a crimson arm-chair and a “polished-steel fender,
very unartistic,” his biographer remarks; “red mahogany furniture, with
startling shiny emerald leather chair-cushions; red carpet and green
curtains.” This is the sort of room wherein Ruskin worked and wrote. It
simply illustrates the truth that it is one thing to write and talk
about color and a far different thing to really _feel_ color.
* * * * *
It is the custom to call every man who paints in high key or uses
brilliant colors a colorist, as Ruskin called Turner and Rubens
colorists; but it is not the mere use of color that makes a man a
colorist, but the use he makes of it, the object he has in mind in using
it.
The mechanical draughtsman and the architect may use on their plans and
designs all the known colors, but no one would think of calling either a
colorist.
In painting still-life a man may exhaust the palette and yet be no
colorist. In painting portraits one man may require his sitters to dress
in bright colors, another in sober blacks, grays, or browns, with the
result that one set of portraits fairly dazzle the beholder, while the
other scarce attracts attention; and yet the former may not be the work
of a colorist while the latter may.
The determining factor is the attitude of the painter towards color. If
he uses color imitatively, or as incidental to drawing, or as a means to
some end other than the production of color harmonies, he is not a
colorist; but if his delight is in color, if he uses color for the sake
of color, for the sake of charming the eye, as the ear is charmed by
music, then he is a colorist.
No hard and fast line of demarcation can be drawn, since every painter
is something of a colorist; but between the two extremes of the painter
on one hand who uses color imitatively or as incidental to drawing and
the colorist who produces and delights in pure color schemes and
harmonies there is a wide interval.
Whistler, in his love of color, approached the latter extreme; but it
was only when he practised decoration that he could indulge his fancy
without limitations. When he brought the Leyland dining-room into
harmony with his “Princess of the Land of Porcelain” by the use of blue
and gold, line and form--though somewhat apparent--were virtually
negligible quantities; and when he arranged the reception-room of the
house in Rue du Bac, and his own studio, the only considerations were
the color-effects.
In his “White Girl” of 1863 Whistler began in a large way his symphonies
in color; and while in pictures like the “Thames in Ice,” “The Music
Room,” and “At the Piano” he painted along more conventional lines,
these departures were infrequent and in themselves exhibited his
predilection for color. It was simply impossible for him to paint any
picture without making the color harmony a prime object.
Not long after the “White Girl,” which was “Symphony in White, No. I.,”
followed the other experiments in white, known as Symphonies Nos. II.
and III.
Then came--the chronological order is not important--the Japanese group,
“The Princess of the Land of Porcelain,” “The Gold Screen,” “The
Balcony,” the “Lange Leizen,” and others, in which the figures and
accessories, though still prominent, were made subordinate to the
brilliant color schemes. The compositions were still obvious, but the
color incomparably more so.
Then the “Nocturnes,” in which detail and composition were refined away,
and little remained but color-effects so exquisite that they seemed, and
still seem, beyond the power of brush, and more like some thin glazes
and enamels than paintings on canvas.
As music in color the “Nocturnes” and certain of the “Harmonies” and
“Symphonies,” wherein detail is as nothing and the color everything, are
Whistler’s most exquisite--the word is used advisedly--achievements.
Others will equal his portraits before they equal his “Nocturnes.”
As a still further step towards pure color composition he had in mind
for years a series of pictures, pure creations of fancy, somewhat
suggestive of the Japanese group, but less realistic--just color-music.
Happily, the sketches are in existence, and afford some indication of
the color-dreams that floated through the great painter’s imagination.
They show how musical color is when freed from entangling associations
and used broadly and decoratively.
* * * * *
We have, then, the following phases, rather than “periods,” in his
mastery of color:
1. That wherein composition and detail predominate, though color is the
motive.
2. That wherein composition and detail are still conspicuous, but are
subordinate to the color scheme.
3. That wherein composition and detail are practically lost in the
effort to produce subtle color harmonies.
4. That wherein the sole object is color-music, quite regardless of
other considerations.
This progress from the, so to speak, tentative use of color in
connection with more or less conventional composition to the triumph of
color and suppression of composition is abundantly illustrated in his
works. It would not be difficult to arrange an exhibition of four groups
of about three canvases each, which would illustrate each phase. Such
an exhibition would do more to enlighten the public regarding his work
than any number of exhibitions of a large number of pictures gathered
and grouped in the usual way.
* * * * *
Regarding the use of flat tones he is reported to have once said:
“House-painters have the right idea about painting, God bless them.”
How far removed from Ruskin, who said:
“Hence, wherever in a painting we have unvaried color extended even over
a small space, there is falsehood. Nothing can be natural which is
monotonous; nothing true which only tells one story.”
To Ruskin nature was all in all; to Whistler color was of first
consideration. The one looked at color to find natural effects; the
other looked at nature to find color-effects.
Whistler chose intuitively those scenes and those hours of the day when
he would be least hampered by rigid requirements of line and form.
He frequently painted the sea under strong light; but under any light
water presents itself in broken lines and large masses.
He was a master of line in the high sense that with a few lines he could
render not only the character but the characteristics of whatever was
before him. He was a master of form,--even as Ruskin uses the
term,--since he could, when the conditions required it, express the most
subtle contours in terms of light and shade and color; but he cared
less for the bald realities of sunlight than for the shadows of dusk and
the mysteries of night.
He has himself said:
“The sun blares, the wind blows from the east, the sky is bereft of
cloud, and without all is of iron. The windows of the Crystal
Palace are seen from all points of London. The holiday-maker
rejoices in the glorious day, and the painter turns aside to shut
his eyes.
“How little this is understood, and how dutifully the casual in
nature is accepted as sublime, may be gathered from the unlimited
admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset.
“The dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in distinctness,
but the joy of the tourist is to recognize the traveller on the
top. The desire to see for the sake of seeing is, with the mass,
alone the one to be gratified, hence the delight in detail.
“And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as
with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky,
and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are
palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and
fairy-land is before us,--then the wayfarer hastens home; the
working-man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of
pleasure cease to understand, as they have ceased to see; and
Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song
to the artist alone, her son and her master,--her son in that he
loves her, her master in that he knows her.”[43]
And it was his habit to paint when the studio was filled with gloom and
lengthening shadows crept across the floor; when it was so dark the dull
eye of sitter or chance visitor could scarce distinguish the figure on
the canvas.
This “painting in the dark,” as some have called it, was a singular
trait. He would paint with increasing force and effect as the room
became darker and darker, until it seemed as if the falling of night was
an inspiration.
Once a sitter asked him how it was possible to paint when it was so
dark.
“As the light fades and the shadows deepen all petty and exacting
details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they
are in great strong masses: the buttons are lost, but the garment
remains; the garment is lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is
lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture
remains. And _that_ night cannot efface from the painter’s imagination.”
* * * * *
People never could understand his attitude towards nature. When he spoke
of the “unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset,”
and how “the dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in
distinctness, but the joy of the tourist is to recognize the traveller
on the top,” he at once puzzled and irritated the lay mind, for is not
the sunset beautiful? and the traveller on the highest peak of greater
interest than the mountain?
When a lady one day rushed up to him and enthusiastically exclaimed:
“Oh, Mr. Whistler, I have just been up the river, and it reminded me so
much of your pictures.”
And he replied:
“Indeed! Then, Nature is looking up,”--people resented it as vanity.
But it was not vanity. It was simply his attitude towards nature and
art.
If some one had said to Mendelssohn, “I have just been in the woods and
heard sounds that were just like some of your “Songs without Words,”
Mendelssohn would have been surprised, and might well have replied,
“Then, the birds are doing better.”
Concerning nature, Whistler said:
“That nature is always right is an assertion artistically as untrue
as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature
is very rarely right; to such an extent, even, that it might almost
be said that nature is usually wrong. That is to say, the condition
of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a
picture is rare, and not common at all.
“This would seem, to even the most intelligent, a doctrine almost
blasphemous. So incorporated with our education has the supposed
aphorism become, that its belief is held to be part of our moral
being; and the words themselves have, in our ear, the ring of
religion. Still, seldom does nature succeed in producing a
picture.”[44]
One should never confound art with nature; they are antithetical terms.
There is no art in nature; there should be no nature in art. And what is
art is not nature, and what is nature is not art.
Nature is the raw material, art is the finished product; and art should
no more resemble nature than a cave resembles a house. And to the
extent that art slavishly imitates nature is it of the cave-dwelling
variety.
There is no color that is not found in nature. There is no combination
of colors a hint of which cannot be found in nature. But it is the
business of art to take the colors, accept the hints, and produce
combinations and effects not found in nature.
It is not the business of the artist to paint anything as it is, but
everything as _he_ sees it.
Yet the public demand that a tree shall be reproduced as _they_ see
it,--that the picture shall be a substitute for the reality. Why not go
to the window and look at the tree? For, as a _tree_, with its quivering
leaves and the infinite play of light and shadow, it is more beautiful
than any realistic photograph, drawing, or painting possibly could be.
But to see the reflection of the tree in the depths of a human soul one
must turn to art, to poetry, to music, or to painting. The reflection
may not at all resemble the reality any more than Keats’s “Ode to a
Nightingale” resembles the bird or the song of the bird; but it will be
far more interesting and far more beautiful because a human expression.
The child’s mud-house and the boy’s snow-man are of greater concern to
humankind than all the plains and mountains of the earth.
_VIII_
_The Royal Society of British Artists--In Paris once more--At Home and
at Work._
In June, 1886, Whistler was elected president of the Royal Society of
British Artists.
Prior to that time he had exhibited in the rooms of the society in
Suffolk Street, and he was no doubt elected to give life to a moribund
association. He succeeded beyond the wildest anticipations of the most
sanguine members.
He rearranged the exhibitions by excluding sufficient of the unworthy to
leave ample space on the walls for the proper exhibition of such
pictures as were accepted.
When the Prince of Wales, now King Edward, visited the galleries for the
first time, Whistler, as president, received him. And when the prince
said he had never before heard of the society and asked its history,
Whistler, with the grace of a courtier, replied:
“It has none, your Highness. Its history dates from to-day.”
Two years of so revolutionary a president were all the ancient
association could stand. As has been well said:[45]
“That Suffolk-Street episode was, perhaps, the oddest of an odd
career. The most mediocre and middle-class of all the artistic
societies of London was in low water, and the thought occurred to
some revolutionary members to make Whistler president. It was like
electing a sparrow-hawk to rule a community of bats. Some of the
bats moved out, some followers of the sparrow-hawk came in; but the
interesting new community did not last long. The suburban ladies,
who had been the support of the Society of British Artists, were
shocked at the changes. They found no pleasure in the awning
stretched across the middle of the room, the battened walls, the
spaced-out ‘impressionist’ pictures, and the total absence of the
anecdotes and bright colors which they loved. A few hundred
visitors of another sort came, and were charmed, but the commercial
test of success was not satisfied. Before long Whistler ceased to
be president, and the society, under a more congruous chief,
‘relapsed to its ancient mood.’”
When he failed of re-election many of his friends resigned.
“It is all very simple,” he said. “The ‘Royal Society of British
Artists’ has disintegrated,--the ‘Artists’ have come out, the ‘British’
remain.”
When interviewed to obtain his explanation of the “state of affairs:”
“The state of affairs?” said Mr. Whistler, in his light and airy
way, raising his eyebrows and twinkling his eyes, as if it were all
the best possible fun in the world; “why, my dear sir, there’s
positively _no_ state of affairs at all. Contrary to public
declaration, there’s actually nothing chaotic in the whole
business. On the contrary, everything is in order, and just as it
should be,--the survival of the fittest as regards the presidency,
don’t you see; and, well--Suffolk Street is itself again! A new
government has come in; and, as I told the members the other
night, I congratulate the society on the result of their vote: for
no longer can it be said that the right man is in the wrong place.
No doubt their pristine sense of undisturbed somnolence will again
settle upon them after the exasperated mental condition arising
from the unnatural strain recently put upon the old ship. Eh? what?
ha! ha!”
He painted a signboard for the entrance to the galleries,--a lion and a
butterfly,--a “harmony in gold and red,” with which, he says, “I took as
much trouble as I did with the best picture I ever painted.”
But his successor in office clothed the golden lion “with a coat of
dirty black,” and effaced the butterfly entirely; whereupon he called
the society to task for destroying the work of a fellow-artist, and the
entire episode appears in the “Gentle Art” as only he could tell it.
* * * * *
In 1887 he married the widow of E. W. Godwin, the architect of the
“White House,” and not long after they went to live in Paris, at 110 Rue
du Bac.
The narrow passage-way that leads from the street to where they lived
is, like thousands of others in Old Paris, just an archway between two
shops, unpromising and uninviting.
Passing through, one finds a small paved court immediately in the rear,
and on three sides of this court the entrances and windows of the
apartments and houses opening therefrom.
The court itself is not without interest. On one side there is an old
bronze fountain, long since dry; about the walls a sculptured frieze,
much the worse for wear; everything of by-gone days,--the very
architecture, in all its details, of another generation.
Whistler’s entrance was on the ground floor, just across the little
court. On a memorable day the bell was answered by a solemn-faced
English servant,--possibly more than ordinarily solemn-faced, because
that particular morning he was in great disfavor, and was subsequently
discharged for a cumulation of shortcomings which would have exhausted
the patience of an ordinary man thrice over. But Whistler--all
impressions to the contrary, notwithstanding--was a man of infinite
patience with sitter and servant,--the work of the latter being
considerably lighter than that of the former. Under only the greatest
provocation would he discharge either.
Passing through the door, one went down several steps into the small
hall, and through that into the reception-room.
This room was a revelation of the personality of the artist,--simple,
dignified, harmonious; it was restful and charming to the last degree.
The details were so unobtrusive that it is difficult to recall
particular features. The floor was covered with a coarse, dark-blue
matting; the panelled walls were in pure white and blue, while the
ceiling was in a light shade of blue. The room stood firmly on its feet,
unlike so many in even the best of houses, which have floors so light
and walls so dark that everything is topsy-turvy.
Color seeks and finds its level; light floors, with darker walls and
ceilings, reverse the natural order of things, and compel people to live
on their heads.
The few pieces of furniture were of an old pattern, graceful almost to
fragility, and covered with some light stuff which harmonized with the
tone of the walls.
There were but two pictures in the room, one at each end, both sketches
by Whistler, “harmonies” or “arrangements” in color rather than
compositions. The “key” being blue, the pictures blended with the walls,
as all pictures should, as if part of the original scheme of decoration.
When a visitor, who was fascinated by the color of these two studies,
asked the painter if he would part with them, he said:
“God bless me, no! I am going to do something big some day from those.
Pretty, eh?”
His studio was filled with just such “notes” and “jottings” of schemes
in color and composition, and from each it was his intention to work out
something more important and complete; but such was the fertility of his
imagination that no man could hope to carry even a fraction to finished
conclusions.
Near the fireplace, at one end of the room, was a little old-fashioned
table covered with writing-materials,--paper of the smallest size, a
dainty ink-stand, and several quill pens. This was the table of
controversy, the battlefield of disputation, the veritable mount of
irony, while the ink-well was the fountain of exquisite sarcasm, and
the quill pens the scalpels which laid bare the vital recesses of
unlucky opponents.
It was the habit of the painter, in his idle moments, to sit at this
little table, with a small cup of coffee and a cigarette, and write
those barbed and pointed notes which, like so many banderillas,
irritated to frenzy the bulls they were aimed at.
The far side of the room opened into one of those quaint old gardens so
often found tucked away in the midst of crumbling buildings on the
ancient thoroughfares. Its narrow confines were enlarged to the eye by
winding, gravelled walks and vistas of flowers and bushes; the rickety
seats, half hidden by the foliage, invited the loiterer to repose, and
the high wall beyond suggested the gloomy confines of some convent or
deserted monastery.
“A picturesque spot. Once at dusk there came the tinkle of a far-off
bell, as if for vesper prayers; the years rolled back, and visions of
other days flitted along the garden paths; stately dames in rich
brocades, with powder, patch, and high coiffure, and gallant courtiers
with graved and jewelled blades, whose whispered vows were no more
stable than the sound of rustling leaves.”
Here of a Sunday afternoon Mrs. Whistler frequently served tea, and in
this garden he made some of his best lithographs.
At home Whistler was the most delightful of--guests. The cares of
hospitality sat lightly upon him.
To the caller who had come at the appointed hour, and had waited for
thirty or forty minutes, he would apologize so delightfully for the
“unpardonable delay,” that a prince could take no offence, much less an
ordinary visitor, who could profitably spend the time in studying the
harmonious surroundings.
It is difficult to describe the charm of his manner, so different from
the notion of it that prevails generally.
He was far more easy of approach than most celebrities; and once within
the charmed circle, he was the most agreeable and companionable of
living men.
He would make the diffident feel instantly at ease, and he would exert
himself to interest even the stupid visitor, but he would not encourage
him to come again.
His own talk was so bright that it was unnecessary for any guest to say
much,--a capacity for listening appreciatively being the best
qualification. Still, he did not monopolize the conversation. He himself
was one of the keenest listeners that ever sat at a dinner-table;
nothing escaped him. And if by chance some one said a good thing, he was
the first to applaud it.
In company it was impossible to draw him into serious discussion. If the
attempt were made, it usually led to a monologue on his part on some
branch of the topic under discussion,--a monologue so extravagant, so
funny, so irresistible in its humor and denunciation that the entire
company would turn and listen with delight.
No one who has ever heard his comparison of the Englishman who carries
his tub and sponge on the top of the coach to parade his cleanliness
with the French who had vast public baths before England was discovered
can ever forget the inimitable wit and humor and--underlying truth of it
all. Again, his description of the Germans,--a people that call a glove
a hand-shoe. Well, it is idle to even call to mind these things; they
will never be heard again, and no report could do them justice.
A lady, after visiting him, said, “He is like no other human being; a
creature of moods and epigrams, but perfectly delightful. I feel as if
I’d been conversing with a flash of lightning in a brown velvet coat.”
No man could draw him out of malice aforethought. It was fatal to say:
“Mr. Whistler, do tell that story of the----” etc.
Of that sort he was no story-teller at all, and if persistently urged,
would close up like a clam; but, if left to himself, he would take part
in any conversation that might be started, and would soon take the lead,
not obviously or offensively, but naturally, and say things that would
make the professed wit dumb with envy. He would say things he had said,
or even printed, before, if the subject warranted it. He might even go a
bit out of his way to drag in a good thing which he thought would fit;
but for the most part his talk was the spontaneous utterance of the
occasion.
He was known to every “chef” and “maître d’hôtel” in London and
Paris,--for, while he ate and drank most sparingly, he was exceedingly
fastidious.
He did not care greatly for the large caravansaries like the “Ritz,”
where people go to perform in public astounding gastronomic feats; but
he knew every place in Paris where a really good dish was to be had at a
moderate price, and every such place gave him the best it had.
* * * * *
Nearly every sketch, drawing, or portrait of Whistler gives some phase
of his many-sided personality, but not one--not even those by
himself--gives anything like an adequate conception.
He was a man most difficult to place on canvas. He could not be grasped
and held long enough. He himself tried it, but with only moderate
success. Others have tried it and failed completely,--that is, failed to
portray him at his best; for that matter, no one who has ever drawn or
painted him did so when he was at his best, for those moments came only
in the seclusion of his own studio, when, alone with model or sitter, he
worked absolutely oblivious to everything but his art. No man is at his
best when posing for photograph, sketch, or portrait, and Whistler was
farther from being an exception to this rule than most others. He knew
too well what a portrait should be to feel the indifference which is
essential to a perfectly natural pose. Consequently, while few men were
better known by sight in Paris and London, scarce any one knew him as he
was,--the most profoundly serious, conscientious, and consistent artist
of his day and generation.
As has been stated, he was always exceedingly particular about his
dress,--as finicky as a woman. In his early London days he carried a
long, slender wand, like a mahl-stick, for a cane, and was conspicuous
wherever he went, not only on account of his diminutive size, but also
by his stick and dress.
An attendant at an exhibition once wished to relieve him of his cane,
but he exclaimed:
“Oh, no, my man! I keep this for the critics.”
* * * * *
The following, by a London correspondent, is a very good description,
though of late years he had abandoned the cane and his hair was somewhat
grayer:
“They say Whistler is fifty-six. But years have nothing to do with
him. He is as young in spirit, as lithe in body, as dapper in
‘get-up’ as he was twenty years ago.
“Is there another man in London with such vitality as Whistler
has,--I care not what his age,--another so dainty, another so
sprightly in wit? Do you see that dapper gentleman coming along
Cheyne Walk, silk hat with very tall crown and very straight brim;
habit apparently broadcloth (frock coat), fitting to perfection a
supple figure; feet small as a girl’s,--an American girl’s; hands
delicately gloved in yellow; in the right hand a lithe, slim wand,
twice as long as a walking stick; glass in eye; black moustache and
slight ‘imperial;’ black hair with wavy threads of gray here and
there? The dainty gentleman lifts his hat, and you see above his
forehead the slender, white lock--the white plume as famous as
that of Navarre. This is our friend Whistler, the inimitable, truly
called ‘the master.’ You may meet him in the early morning, or at a
private view in the afternoon, at an evening party, two hours
before midnight or two hours after it; and you will find him as
fresh in spirit, as dainty, as lively, as witty at one time as at
another.”
Some one once gave him an American umbrella,--one of those that when
rolled tightly are as small as walking-sticks. He was delighted with it,
and used it as a cane. One day, coming out of the studio with a friend,
and while hurrying to the cab-stand a few blocks away, it began to
drizzle, and his friend, who had no umbrella, said:
“Hurry and put up your umbrella or we’ll get our hats wet.”
He fumbled a second at the umbrella, then hurried on.
“But I would get my umbrella wet.”
* * * * *
It was commonly said Whistler was unapproachable. In his studio, when at
work, yes; in his home, no.
A note of introduction from any approved correspondent would almost
invariably bring a favorable response. But not every correspondent was
approved; or if so at one time, did not necessarily remain so
indefinitely, and a note from the wrong--perhaps wronged--source was no
commendation at all. On the whole, a frank application from a stranger
for permission to call was quite as likely as not to prove successful,
such a note in itself being a tribute.
But at the studio it was very different. He had no reception-days or
hours, as many painters have. He had no use for the social rabble in his
workshop.
One warm afternoon, when hard at work, the bell rang. Brush in hand, he
went to the outer door at the head of the six flights of steep, slippery
oak stairs, and found there Mr. C----, whom he knew,--a man who had
little to do but bother others,--and Lady D----, a distinguished and
clever woman, both out of breath from their long climb.
“Ah! my dear Mr. Whistler,” drawled C----, “I have taken the liberty of
bringing Lady D---- to see you. I knew you would be delighted.”
“Delighted! I’m sure; quite beyond expression; but,”--mysteriously, and
holding the door so as to bar their entrance,--“my dear Lady D----, I
would never forgive our friend for bringing you up six flights of stairs
on so hot a day to visit a studio at one of those--eh--pagan moments
when”--and he glanced furtively behind him and still further closed the
door--“it is absolutely impossible for a lady to be received. Upon my
soul, I should never forgive him.”
And the lady looked daggers at her confused cavalier, as Whistler bowed
them down the six flights of oaken stairs and returned to resume work on
the portrait of a very sedate old gentleman, who had taken advantage of
the interruption to break for a moment the rigor of his pose.
In those days and for many years the Paris studio was at No. 86 Notre
Dame des Champs. Whistler said one day, “Only the French have any taste
in the naming of streets.”
The six steep flights of polished oak stairs no doubt shortened his life
by many years. As long ago as 1894 he was accustomed to take a long rest
on a settee at the head of the third flight, and again on reaching the
top. Later he would have his luncheon served in the studio to avoid the
fatigue of going down and coming back. He was by no means an old man,
and looked the picture of health, cheeks ruddy, eye bright; but he would
get out of breath, and his heart gave him trouble,--startled him at
times with its eccentricities and warnings.
A blunt friend, frightened at seeing him one day almost collapse on
reaching the studio, said:
“I tell you, Whistler, those stairs will be the death of you; and I’ll
be hanged if I am coming here any more with you, for you’ll die on my
hands, and that would get me into a nice mess. Why don’t you have a
studio on the ground floor?”
“When I die--I will.”
* * * * *
But while casual callers met with scant courtesy at the studio, he was,
as has already been noted, exceptionally cordial to all who were
sincerely interested in his work, and would spend hours and hours of
days that were precious in showing pictures to people who really could
not understand them,--for that matter, who did understand them?--but who
were honest in their expressions of approval, and this, too, with no
thought of selling anything he had; in fact, nothing chilled the
enthusiasm of the moment so much as the suggestion of a purchase; he
became immediately a different being, and one by one his treasures would
be turned to the wall.
* * * * *
The studio was a large barn-like room at the very top of the high
building. There was a small entryway, which had a glass door opening out
upon a balcony, high up over the street, and another door which opened
into the studio proper.
A huge skylight lighted this great attic, but only in part, for the room
was too big to be well lighted from any one opening.
The old oak floor was quite dark, and in places where he worked it was
polished by use, for when entirely absorbed he had the habit of moving
back and forth so quickly as to slide a pace or two.
The tone of the studio was brown, not a deep or muddy brown, but a brown
that seemed tinged with gray.
The base-board that stretched a narrow line about the big room was a
deeper shade than the wall, and so nice were the gradations of tone,
that floor, base-board, wall, and raftered ceiling blended together as
one harmonious whole, all of which was the work of Whistler.
The furniture amounted to nothing: a table near the far side, where he
lunched, an old sofa against the wall under the skylight, two or three
old French chairs, his easel and palette. There was a high stove near
the door,--one of those French complications intended for the generation
of a maximum of heat with a minimum consumption of precious coal. Like
most labor-saving devices, it required some skill for its management,
and Whistler was not a mechanic.
One cold day it was only too apparent the stove needed encouragement,
and the sitter suggested that the damper be opened,--in fact, started to
open it himself, when Whistler, greatly alarmed, exclaimed:
“God bless me! but you must not touch that; the last time I meddled with
it, the fire went out. There is only one man in Paris who understands
that stove.”
“Well, where is he?”
“Dear me, I discharged him to-day. How unlucky.”
“Then, we must seize the stove by the horns and take our chances on the
consequences.” And throwing the damper wide open, there was soon a
blazing fire.
* * * * *
For work outside, Whistler used a very small palette of the usual form;
in his studio he carried no palette whatsoever, but used in lieu thereof
a rectangular table that resembled a writing-desk. The top sloped
slightly; at the left were tubes of colors, at the right one or two
bowls containing oil and turpentine, with which the colors when mixed
were reduced so thin that they would run on the sloping top of the
table.
He relied upon innumerable coats of thin color to secure the desired
effect rather than upon one or two coats of greater consistency. This
made the work long and tedious as compared with the modern mode of
taking the pigments as they squirm from the tubes and pasting them while
yet alive on the canvas; but it has undoubtedly given his pictures a
permanency and durability far beyond that of others.
He seldom began to arrange his palette until the model or sitter was in
pose; and ten or fifteen minutes were not infrequently spent in getting
palette and brushes to suit him. To a model paid by the hour this delay
was of no concern, but to the unpractised sitter, whose limit of
endurance and patience did not exceed an hour, the time spent in setting
the palette seemed unduly long and altogether wasted. But all that was a
part of the refinement of Whistler’s art.
So susceptible was his color-sense that he could not mix colors to suit
him unless canvas and sitter were before him precisely as they would be
when he began to paint. The arrangement of the colors on the palette was
but preliminary to placing those same colors on the canvas, therefore
the sitter was as essential to the one process as the other.
* * * * *
Once inside his studio, Whistler seemed to lose all the eccentricities
of manner by which he was known to the world. He doffed his coat,
substituted for his monocle a pair of servicable spectacles, and was
ready for work.
If it were a full-length portrait, he placed the canvas near his palette
and his sitter in pose about four feet to the other side of the easel.
For observation he stood about twelve feet back towards the
doorway,--very close, in fact, to the refractory stove. The light fell
slanting on the right of the portrait and sitter, over the painter’s
left shoulder, and this light he would modify each day according to the
amount of sunshine and the effect he desired.
He then selected two or three small brushes with handles about three
feet in length, stood back about twelve feet, took a good look at both
sitter and canvas, then stepping quickly forward, and, standing as far
from the canvas as the long handles and his arms permitted, he began to
rapidly sketch in the figure with long, firm strokes of the brush. The
advantage of long handles was obvious,--they enabled him to stand back
quite a distance and sketch directly from his sitter. Except for this
first sketch, he used ordinary brushes with ordinary handles.
There was nothing eccentric or unusual in his methods or in what he
worked with. Probably no painter in all Paris used simpler means to
arrive at great results. It is quite likely that no other painter of
to-day--judging entirely from appearances of modern canvases--could
achieve any satisfactory results with materials so elemental.
To make the sketch required possibly thirty minutes. To the casual
observer there was often more of a likeness in the first sketch than at
any time after,--which simply goes to show the power of line devoid of
color and also the easy task of the caricaturist.
* * * * *
The sketch finished, the long-handled brushes were discarded and work
began in earnest. With one or more, sometimes a handful of brushes,--for
they would accumulate without his realizing it,--he would again stand
back and carefully scrutinize sitter and canvas until it seemed as
if--and no doubt it was so--he transferred a visual impression of the
subject to the canvas and fixed it there ready to be made permanent with
line and color; then quickly, often with a run and a slide, he rushed up
to the canvas and, without glancing at his sitter, vigorously painted so
long as his visual image lasted, then going back the full distance he
took another look, and so on day after day to the end.
In life-size work he seldom stood close to the canvas and painted direct
from his sitter.
He has laid down the proposition:
“The one aim of the unsuspecting painter is to make his man ‘stand
out’ from the frame, never doubting that, on the contrary, he
should really, and in truth absolutely does, stand _within_ the
frame, and at a depth behind it equal to the distance at which the
painter sees his model. The frame is, indeed, the window through
which the painter looks at his model, and nothing could be more
offensively inartistic than this brutal attempt to thrust the model
on the hitherside of this window.”[46]
The number of sittings required varied greatly, and did not depend in
any degree upon the size of the canvas. Sometimes he would paint a
life-size figure with great rapidity; again he would spend weeks and
months on a very small picture. All depending upon conditions over which
he had no control.
He has devoted as many as ninety sittings to a portrait, only to
pronounce it unfinished and unsatisfactory.
No work counted or was permitted to remain save that painted in what he
called his “grand manner,” which meant the work of those days and hours
when everything--sitter, light, weather, spirits, mood, enthusiasm--was
just right,--a combination that might come several days in succession or
but once in a fortnight.
He once said, “The portrait of my mother was painted in a few hours,”
meaning that the work of the last few hours was the work that really
counted.
It was interesting to watch a picture grow under the hands of Whistler.
With most painters something is finished from day to day, and in the
course of ten or twelve sittings the portrait is complete. Not so with
him. Nothing, not a detail, not even an infinitesimal section of the
background was finished until the last.
He worked with great rapidity and long hours, but he used his colors
thin and covered the canvas with innumerable coats of paint. The colors
increased in depth and intensity as the work progressed. At first the
entire figure was painted in grayish-brown tones, with very little of
flesh color, the whole blending perfectly with the grayish-brown of the
prepared canvas; then the entire background would be intensified a
little; then the figure made a little stronger; then the background, and
so on from day to day and week to week, and often from month to month,
to the exhaustion of the sitter, but the perfection of the work, if the
sitter remained patient and continued in favor.
At no time did he permit the figure to get away from or out of the
background; at no time did he permit the background to oppress the
figure, but the development of both was even and harmonious, with
neither discord nor undue contrast.
And so the portrait would really grow, really develop as an entirety,
very much as a negative under the action of the chemicals comes out
gradually--lights, shadows, and all from the first faint indications to
their full values.
It was as if the portrait were hidden within the canvas and the master
by passing his wands day after day over the surface evoked the image.
Most painters can take a canvas and begin at once with the colors of the
finished picture, making each stroke count from the very first, often,
if the canvas has been prepared, doing little or nothing to the
background. Whistler himself would sometimes let the prepared canvas
show, all the resources of his art he understood, but if he did, the
picture was simply a sketch.
In a very profound sense Whistler’s work from the very beginning was
always finished,--finished in the sense that any growing thing is
perfect from day to day. The plant may be but a tender shoot just
appearing above the ground, or it may be in full leaf, or in gorgeous
blossom, but it is finished, it is perfect by day and night. In that
sense were Whistler’s paintings finished. If they were sketches, then
the slight amount of color used was precisely the amount the sketch
required. At no time was the sense of proportion outraged by carrying
line or color or likeness beyond the symmetrical development of the
three.
* * * * *
One must not be understood as saying that all his pictures are of equal
merit,--perfection does not necessarily mean that; nor that he did not
do many things he considered failures.
Few painters ever destroyed more work, no painter was ever more critical
of his own work. But, in spite of all he could do, things would get out
into the world that he wished destroyed. This was due in part to the
facility with which he made sketches and the enthusiasm with which he
would begin new things, many of which never got on. Now and then some of
these unfinished things--unfinished from the first stroke, because never
quite satisfactory to him--would escape his studio.
Artists express very positive opinions regarding the merits of his
pictures, placing some with the best the world has done, others as quite
unworthy the master. As no two painters agree which are the best and
which are the least worthy, the layman is helpless. In truth, only
Whistler himself could have pointed out all the qualities and defects,
and this he never did. If pressed for an opinion or a preference, he
would evade the question, or by deftly speaking of this or that quality
of the works under discussion would leave his hearers with the
impression they knew all about the matter, when in reality they were no
wiser than before. He simply did not care to discuss his work intimately
with the lay or the professional mind. What he saw was beyond their
comprehension, or if not beyond their comprehension, then they saw it
without further words from him, for did not the picture speak plainly
for itself?
* * * * *
Contrary to general impression, he was patience itself in his studio. A
sitter who was with him every day for nearly six weeks never heard him
utter an impatient word; on the contrary, he was all kindness. He would
permit his sitter to bring friends to the studio, and he would listen to
all the foolish suggestions that could occur to a tired and impatient
man.
Sometimes he would rebuke a too-insistent sitter, as the following
anecdotes show, if true:
It is said that one man annoyed him by saying at the end of each
sitting:
“How about that ear, Mr. Whistler? Don’t forget to finish that!”
At the last sitting, everything being done except this ear, Whistler
said:
“Well, I think I am through. Now I’ll sign it.” Which he did in a very
solemn, important manner, as was his way.
“But my ear, Mr. Whistler! You aren’t going to leave it that way?”
“Oh, you can put it in after you get home.”
He was once painting the portrait of a distinguished novelist, who,
though extremely clever, was not blessed with the fatal gift of beauty.
When the portrait was finished, the sitter did not seem satisfied with
it.
“Don’t you like it?” inquired Whistler.
“No; can’t say I do. But,” in self justification, “you must admit that
it is a bad work of art.”
“Yes,” Whistler replied; “but I think you must admit that you are a bad
work of nature.”
The truth is, he would listen to every suggestion made by the sitter,
model, or even casual visitor, if one were admitted.
A sitter once said to him:
“Mr. Whistler, isn’t there something wrong about the right eye?”
Instantly alert, he said:
“What’s that you say? Um--um--right eye----” And he carefully examined
the canvas. “We’ll have a look at that. Suppose you stand for just a
moment--just a moment.” And he paid as much heed as if the criticism had
come from competent sources.
Mrs. Whistler would now and then come to the studio, and he would
eagerly ask her opinion of the progress made; and her suggestions were
always followed. For her ability as an artist--for her own pleasure,
rather than for profit--and as a critic of his work he had the highest
opinion. Her suggestions were ever to the point, and under her influence
a work always made rapid headway. It was an irreparable loss when she
died in 1897, and he was never again quite so light-hearted. For a long
time he kept the apartments at 110 Rue du Bac, but did not live there.
* * * * *
His will expressed his devotion to her memory and belief in her art,--
“I bequeath my wife’s entire collection of garnets rare and
beautiful, together with sprays, pendants, etc., of the same style
of work or setting in white stones, brilliants, or old paste, our
entire collection of beautiful old silver and plate, and the
complete collection of old china, to the Louvre. This bequest is on
condition that the three collections be gathered together in one
and displayed as the ‘Beatrix Whistler Collection.’ Also that in it
or appropriately in the same room shall be hung proofs of my wife’s
exquisite etchings, of which I leave a list attached to my will
signed by me.”
By a codicil dated May 7, 1903, he revoked the bequest to the Louvre,
but he expressed a desire that, in the event of his residuary legatee
retaining the collection of garnets during her life, she would bequeath
them to the Louvre upon her death.
He was unsparing of his sitters only in this one respect,--he would
become so absorbed in his work as to completely forget them, and they
would collapse with fatigue. Sometimes he would notice by their pallor
the faintness which was overcoming them, and instantly, all solicitude,
he would have them rest, or go out on the balcony for fresh air; but he
himself never sat down. While they were resting he would walk back and
forth, looking at the canvas, but rarely touching it, and talking to
himself,--now and then, but not often, taking the sitter into his
confidence. The moment the sitter was rested he would begin working
again like one possessed.
By close observation it could be seen that the best work was usually
done during the first long pose, or in the last hour of the afternoon,
when the shadows were deepening; and the wise sitter would humor this
trait and pose his longest and best in those two hours.
To the unaccustomed a half-hour standing--without moving so much as to
disturb a line of the garments--is a long pose. But with practice--and
with Whistler one had practice--an hour and a half without moving a
muscle is not impossible.
Every portrait Whistler ever began he expected to make his masterpiece.
That is the way he started in with any work. It was to be the best thing
he ever did; and so long as the enthusiasm lasted he would walk up and
down the studio talking half to himself half to his sitter:
“We will just go right on as we have begun, and it will be
fine,--perhaps the finest thing I have ever done.”
“Not as good as the portrait of your mother?”--the inevitable question.
“Perhaps; who knows? Possibly finer in a way; for this, you know, is
different. We’ll make a big thing of it.” And so on for days and weeks,
until something would occur,--possibly weariness on the part of the
sitter; possibly failure to keep appointments on days when the painter
felt like doing his best; possibly too great anxiety to see the picture
finished,--and the painter’s enthusiasm would subside, and the portrait
would turn out not so great after all.
After the first few days he would place the canvas in its frame, and
thereafter paint with it so. And his frames were designed by himself.
All who have seen his pictures know them,--just simple, dignified lines,
with no contortions of wood and gilt.
* * * * *
When a sitter was of congenial spirit and complacent mood they would
lunch in the studio, and he would paint all day, from eleven in the
morning until--well, until it was so dark that all was dim and shadowy
and ghostly; and then together both would take their leave, always
turning at the door for a last look at the canvas looming mysterious in
the darkness; then grope their way down the winding oaken stairs, later
to dine together at some unfrequented place where the proprietor watched
the fire himself and had stored away in musty depths a few--just a
few--relics of memorable vintages.
“O my friends, when I am sped, appoint a meeting; and when ye have
met together, be ye glad thereof; and when the cup-bearer holds in
her hand a flagon of old wine, then think of old Khayyam and drink
to his memory.”
In a glass of ruby Margaux of the vintage of ’58, the last of its dusty
bin, I drink to the memory of those glorious days when the vacant canvas
assumed the hues of life and grew beneath the touch; and those fragrant
nights when, with stately ceremony, the cob-webbed bottle came forth
from its bed of long repose to subdue fatigue, banish all care, and
leave but the thought of the beautiful.--Behold, far soul, the empty
glass!
_IX_
_Portrait-Painting--How he Differed from his Great
Predecessors--The “Likeness”--Composition of Color--No Commercial
Side--Baronet vs. Butterfly._
Whistler was not a “portrait-painter,” as the phrase goes nowadays; but
he was, in certain respects, the greatest painter of portraits the world
has known.
As a “portrait-painter” he fell far short of Rembrandt, Velasquez, and a
host of lesser men; but as a painter of portraits he rose superior to
them all in certain refinements of the art.
* * * * *
There is a vast difference between the “portrait-painter” to whom the
sitter is of first importance and the painter to whom his art is of
first importance. The difference lies in the attitude of the artist
towards his canvas, towards the work he is about to undertake. Is the
inspiration wholly his own, or is he influenced by considerations quite
foreign to the production of a pure work of art?
The attitude of the “portrait-painter” may be likened unto that of the
“poet laureate,” whose verse is at the command of conditions he does
not control; who _may_, by accident, write a good thing,--but the rule
is otherwise, with even the best.
* * * * *
To rightly place a human being on canvas, or in stone, or in marble, or
in poetry, is the noblest achievement of art. On the technical side it
exhausts the resources of the art; on the spiritual side it exhausts the
genius of the artist. But “portrait-painting” as a profession, as an
industrial and a commercial proposition, is a degradation of art.
It is in strict accord with the spirit of the age; it is a
natural and an inevitable evolution. But it is, nevertheless, a
degradation,--for wherein does the shop-like atelier of the professional
“portrait-painter” differ from the emporium and the bazaar of commerce?
And wherein do the methods of the shrewd and successful painter differ
from those of the successful merchant? Are not the doors of the studio
open to every comer with a purse? Are not the prices fixed at so much
per square yard of canvas? Is not the patronage of celebrities sought,
regardless of artistic possibilities, for the prestige it gives? Are not
the A.R.A. and the R.A., and all the degrees and decorations, sought,
like the “By special appointment to H.M.--” of the tradesman, for the
money there is in them?
But what need to enumerate the motives that move the professional
“portrait-painter,”--they are written on his every canvas.
Sculpture still clings to its ideals, and the “bust-maker” is a term of
reproach. No sculptor with any ambition whatsoever, with any love for
his art, would willingly look forward to a career of portrait
bust-making. Dire necessity may compel him, and year after year he may
make the marble and bronze effigies of local celebrities; but the yoke
galls, the task wearies, and he looks forward to the time when,
emancipated from his thraldom, he may do something _of his own_.
Not so the “portrait-painter.” He glories in his degradation; paints a
score of huge, staring canvases, blatant likenesses of blatant people,
and, before the paint is dry, parades them in exhibition as his latest
galaxy of masterpieces,--not that his art may be magnified, but that his
trade may be advertised.
The sculptor is only too glad if his bronze effigies are hidden in leafy
thickets, in parks, and out-of-the-way places. He has not learned the
commercial value of exhibitions. He does not every few months place on
view a lot of marbles and bronzes, the work of as many weeks. He has not
caught from the shop-keeper the trick of displaying his wares in a
window. But the “portrait-painter”----!
* * * * *
“Portrait-painting” pays,--that is the worst of it all. It is the one
branch of the art of painting that can be followed as methodically as
the making of clothes. It is, for that matter, closely allied to and
quite dependent upon the tailor and the dressmaker. Worth has made more
portraits than any one painter in Paris.
The “portrait-painter” must dress his manikin in clothes that will
“paint,” for the manikin is worse than nothing for the picture. There
must be a gown of brilliant stuffs, and either a hat or the
hair-dresser,--who also has made and unmade portraits,--or there must be
a uniform, hunting-breeches, judge’s gown and wig, accordingly as the
manikin is woman or man; and it is the theatrical trappings that are
painted, and, incidentally thereto,--manikin.
* * * * *
Reynolds painted something like two thousand canvases. In 1758 one
hundred and fifty persons sat to him,--an average of three portraits a
week. He was as methodical as an automatic machine. Rose early,
breakfasted at nine, was in the studio at ten, worked by himself until
eleven, when his first sitter of the day would appear, to be succeeded
by another precisely one hour later, and so on, a sitter an hour, until
four o’clock, when the popular painter made himself ready for a plunge
in the social swirl.
Portraits produced under such conditions cannot be made more than
technically brilliant,--superficial likenesses of the great majority of
the sitters,--and are unworthy the painter’s art.
After a brief study of their careers, and without seeing a portrait by
either, one would be warranted in looking for a masterpiece among
Gainsborough’s two hundred and twenty portraits rather than among the
two thousand canvases of Reynolds.
Great facility of execution is not necessarily a condemnatory feature
of a man’s art, but it is a dangerous feature, and with most men it is a
fatal feature.
The hand of the master must be entirely subservient to the brain. No
obstacle should intervene between the inspiration and its complete
expression, but the hand must not force the imagination; and it is true
that command of technic--mere digital dexterity--does lead the
performer, whether painter or musician, to speak when he has nothing to
say.
Happily for the reputation of Reynolds, he painted now and then a
portrait in which he took more interest, and these have some--possibly
not many--of the qualities that live. For the most part his reputation
rests on mere volume of brilliant and high-grade work,--very much as one
factory has a greater reputation than another. And he did more than any
man who ever lived to reduce “portrait-painting” to a trade, a
mechanical pursuit.
In the modern sense of the phrase, he was one of the greatest of
“portrait-painters;” certainly the most “successful”--again in the
modern sense--the world has known, of talent supreme, in genius wanting.
* * * * *
But there are portraits and portraits,--to illustrate:
There are portraits.
There are portraits that are also pictures.
There are pictures that are also portraits.
There are pictures.
The first-named are mere likenesses,--photographs on canvas. This sort
is very common and very popular; they are made with great facility by
the professional “portrait-painters” and they are greatly applauded
wherever seen. They have their fixed prices,--so much for half,
three-quarters, or full-length,--and they are quite a matter of
commerce, with a maximum of dexterity and a minimum of art. There are
those who can and do paint great portraits, who turn out endless numbers
of these mechanically-made things to the detriment of their art. Of the
best of this sort were the most of Reynolds’s portraits,--superficially
brilliant and attractive likenesses that ought not to be seen outside
the family circle for which they were intended. Of this same sort are
most of those startling people who issue from the studios of the popular
“portrait-painters” of to-day, to thrust the nonentity of their
individualities upon us. The identity of the “Blue-Boy,” by
Gainesborough, is quite immaterial; the identity of the “Shrimp-Girl,”
by Hogarth, is likewise immaterial; the identity of the “Child with a
Sword,” by Manet, is of no importance,--for these are pictures, though
at the same time portraits.
But the identity of the “portraits” by the popular “portrait-painter”
is, in ninety-nine instances out of a hundred, a matter of great
importance, the value of the canvas being enhanced by the celebrity or
notoriety of the sitter.
The mere portrait is better than no portrait at all, but it should be a
fixture in its own household, a family heirloom, and strictly entailed;
descendants failing, then to the midden.
Between the mere portrait and the portrait that possesses some of the
universal qualities of a work of art the interval is wide, and almost
one of kind rather than degree, though no line of strict demarcation can
be drawn; while, as between the painting that is primarily a portrait,
with incidental universal qualities, and a painting that is primarily a
work of art, and incidentally a portrait, the difference is entirely a
matter of degree.
In, for instance, the “Blue-Boy” the portrait element predominates; in
the “Shrimp-Girl” the universal element predominates. In the former, the
portrait was uppermost in the painter’s mind; in the other, the picture
was the only consideration. And yet Hogarth’s is undoubtedly the more
perfect portrait, though slight and sketchy as compared with the
composition and finish of the Gainsborough.
In fact, the “Shrimp-Girl,” as an abstract work of art, is a degree
higher than the picture-portrait. It is a picture,--a work of art in the
doing of which no considerations other than the artistic intention moved
the painter.
A mere portrait, in the dash and brilliancy of its execution or the
decorative quality of its color, may be better than a picture of
indifferent execution or poor color; the one may be worth keeping in a
limited circle, or even of some use decoratively in a more general way,
while the other is not worth preserving at all. But there is hope for
the man who attempts to paint a picture, to produce a work of art,
though he fails miserably; whereas there is no hope for the brilliant
technician whose sole ambition is to paint and sell his canvas
photographs as rapidly as possible.
Manet’s “Child with a Sword” is a superb portrait of a child,--a model,
to be sure, but none the less a little human being, with as many
attributes of life and humanity as the child whose parents pay the price
of a likeness. Manet’s chief merit lies in the fact that all his life
long he tried to paint pictures, sometimes successfully, sometimes
unsuccessfully; never with any profound insight into human nature or
life, but always straightforwardly and sincerely, and with a strong,
firm hand. He painted many portraits of his sister and his friends, but
invariably with the intention to do something of more universal validity
than a likeness.
The casual visitor to the Louvre may examine at his leisure the little
“Infanta” and the “Mona Lisa,” both great pictures, both great
portraits, but of the two the portrait element is rather more pronounced
in the Velasquez than in the Leonardo.
The little “Infanta” is there for all time on the canvas, precisely as
she was in the painter’s studio, a wonderful portrait of a child, a
wonderful picture of a bit of humanity, but less of a type than an
individual.
As for the “Mona Lisa,” who can doubt that in the long years the painter
worked on this portrait all superficial resemblances and characteristics
disappeared until the constant, the elemental, the soul alone remained?
It possesses many of the qualities of the idealized madonnas of Italian
religious art. It began with the painter’s admiration of a beautiful
woman, an individual of that day and generation; it ended with an ideal
which will last so long as the slowly-darkening pigments retain line and
lineaments.
* * * * *
The mere adding of accessories in the way of composition or background
or the adoption of a classic or theatrical pose may make the work more
decorative, but it does not enhance the real merit of the portrait, the
status of which cannot be altered by the surrounding canvas.
When Mrs. Siddons entered Reynolds’s studio, he said, as he conducted
her to the raised platform:
“Take your seat upon the throne for which you were born, and suggest to
me the idea of the ‘Tragic Muse.’”
“I made a few steps,” relates the actress, “and then took at once the
attitude in which the ‘Tragic Muse’ has remained.”
When the portrait was finished, Sir Joshua said:
“I cannot lose this opportunity of sending my name to posterity on the
hem of your garment,” and he placed his signature on the border of the
gown.
All of which are the conditions under which theatrical and meritricious
art is produced. The portrait of a woman posing as the “Tragic Muse”
_may_ turn out well, but the chances are otherwise.
There are “portrait-painters” who are better than others, and the best
of all were Rembrandt and Velasquez, the latter the greatest
portrait-painter who ever lived,--so great that his portraits are great
as pictures; but not quite in the abstract sense that a painting by
Raphael is a picture,--a bright and beautiful song in line and color;
not quite in the sense that a painting by Angelo is a picture,--the
tumultuous outpouring of a human soul; not quite in the subtle sense
that a painting by Whistler is a picture,--a harmony to delight the eye
as music delights the ear.
Rembrandt and Velasquez were great in technical directions in their
portraiture, and their achievements remain unchallenged; but in the
painting of portraits each was something of the “portrait-painter,”--not
the facile, commercial painter of to-day, but they painted portraits to
earn their living. Now and then the portrait was a labor of love and a
great picture, seldom--at least in the case of Velasquez--a matter of
drudgery, and therefore a failure.
Velasquez was so happily situated in the court at Madrid, of the king’s
household, on friendly terms with the royal family, that he painted
their portraits with far more devotion and interest than he could
possibly feel towards a stranger.
A portrait of Philip the Fourth by Velasquez ought to be as good a work
of art as a bust of Pericles by Phidias,--and that is about the most
that can be said in portraiture,--but a bust of Pericles would not be
the best that the art of Phidias could do, for his art was not limited
by lineaments.
* * * * *
Wherein the art of Whistler differed from the art of Rembrandt and
Velasquez in the painting of human likenesses is as follows:
With Whistler the sitter, whether model or patron, was subordinated to
the composition, to the harmony of line and color,--was simply an
integral part of the larger scheme in the painter’s mind.
With Rembrandt and Velasquez the sitter was the important feature,
everything else being quite casual; the object in mind being to paint a
great portrait, to put a human being on canvas. A worthy object when
worthily done, but not quite so pure and subtle and abstract, not quite
so free from limitations of time and place and person as the intention
to do something of universal validity in which the individual shall not
obtrude beyond his due measure of importance.
In the attempt to do things that had never been done before, in the
attempt to make painting as pure an art as music and poetry, Whistler
possibly made many failures, or rather many more or less incomplete
successes, but in his best things it is undeniably true that he produced
pictures wherein the portrait element was as subtly if not as “strongly”
developed as in anything ever before painted, and wherein at the same
time that element was successfully subordinated to ideals more refined
and universal.
Both Rembrandt and Velasquez did “stronger” things than Whistler,--that
is to say, they placed their subjects more positively and forcefully on
the canvas, so that they stand out more aggressively, and fill not only
their frames but the room; they do not obtrude, but they are great big
characterizations which make themselves felt in any company.
Whistler’s portraits, like all his pictures, retire within their frames,
do not assert themselves, are not “strong,” as the term is quite
legitimately used in the sense of powerful, positive, and vigorous. His
portraits are neither “stunning” nor overwhelming; they are so quiet,
restful, and harmonious as to almost escape notice. There is a
wraith-like quality about some of them that has often been noted; some
of them seem the portraits of shadows rather than realities.
A woman standing before “The Fur Jacket” said:
“So that is a portrait of a woman by Whistler?”
“No,” replied her companion; “it is Whistler’s impression of a woman.”
Neither was right,--for, as a matter of fact, it is simply a composition
of line and color wherein a woman--in this case a model--is the central
figure of the arrangement. The painting of a likeness was not in
Whistler’s mind at all. The painting of a woman, either as a type or an
individual, probably did not enter his head; but he had in mind a scheme
which pleased him, and this scheme he placed on canvas. It is quite
likely the woman happened to enter his studio, and the effect of figure,
costume, and environment caught his fancy. That was the way many of the
portraits were begun.
Lady Archibald Campbell was nothing to him except a possibility; she was
to him as a theme, as a motive to a musician. At the outset he had all
sorts of trouble with the picture; and it was not until one day Lady
Campbell happened to come in with her fur cape over her shoulders that
he made a new start and painted the picture. It is a great portrait, one
of his very best, a haunting likeness of a woman; not such a
photographic likeness as friends and relatives demand, but just the
likeness that posterity demands: a woman, a type, with all the charm,
all the refinement, all the real, the true, the elusive qualities of a
woman,--in short, those qualities of mind and body which reappear in
descendants of the third and fourth generation and demonstrate the
faithfulness of the portrait.
* * * * *
There is no portrait by Rembrandt or Velasquez which at all resembles
Whistler’s portrait of his mother.
It is not at all like anything by Rembrandt; there is a hint of the
blacks and grays of Velasquez, but that is a superficial observation
made by every passing tourist.
In scheme, composition, intention, and execution the picture is
essentially different from anything the great Spanish painter ever did.
One ought to recognize the fundamental difference between the two
artists on looking at the little “Infanta” in the Louvre,--there is no
need to go farther. Velasquez had a firm strong grasp of life about him
which Whistler lacked. The one was a man among men, the other a poet
among poets, a musician among musicians, a dreamer among dreamers; the
one painted men, women, and children because they interested him, the
other painted them because he was interested in beautiful things; the
one viewed the world by day with his feet planted firmly on the ground,
the other viewed it by dusk and by night with his head in the mist and
clouds.
There was the same difference between Velasquez and Whistler that there
is between two poets, one of whom--like, say, Byron--deals with life
with a sure hand, the other--like Keats--deals with beauty as the finest
thing in life.
* * * * *
In poetry even the casual reader does not confound men of opposite
temperaments, though both use the medium of verse to express their
thoughts; but in painting, people habitually confuse men who have
absolutely nothing in common except the medium they use. And yet for
every poet there is somewhere a painter of like moods and temperament.
Men do not differ, though some use poetry, some music, some sculpture,
some painting to express their fancies and convictions.
Were one so disposed, it would not be difficult to point out the
Browning, the Tennyson, the Whitman, the Bach, the Beethoven, the Wagner
of painting, for the human soul is the same in every art.
Beyond the fact, therefore, that Velasquez and Whistler both expressed
themselves by means of painting, they were not at all alike, and their
work must reflect their fundamental differences.
Whistler, in susceptibility to color and fleeting line, in love for
abstract, almost ethereal beauty, was akin to the choice spirits of the
far East. He found more that appealed to him and affected him in the
blue-and-white porcelain of China than in any painting from Madrid.
Velasquez might give him many valuable hints as to the use of color, as
to the practice of his art, but no suggestions whatsoever as to ends and
aims. These motives he found in the East, in those wonderful lands where
men, leaving nature far behind, almost touched heaven in their
philosophies, and did seize some of heaven’s infinite blues and silvery
grays in their arts.
* * * * *
It is idle to compare Whistler’s portraits with those of any other man,
for the qualities that make those of others great are not found
accentuated in his, and the qualities that make his great are not found
refined in those of others.
* * * * *
The matter of likeness, which troubles most people, is of vital
importance to the “portrait-painter,” since it is his sole excuse, the
only justification he has for existing, but to art it does not matter at
all.
Likeness has no objective existence. It is entirely a matter of
impression, a subjective realization. Beyond the size of the mouth, the
shape of the nose, the color of the eyes there is little to what is
called a “likeness.” A person never looks the same to different people
or on different occasions.
To the casual acquaintance a “likeness” is but skin deep; to the friend
of a lifetime it is altogether a matter of character. A portrait that
satisfies a wife fails to please a mother, and one that provokes the
applause of the passing throng is a disappointment to the family.
* * * * *
For what is one man’s appearance to another but the impact of
personality upon personality, the coming together of two vitalities
clothed in flesh and blood. But some there are who see only the clothes
of another,--the very outward shell and husk; others who see only the
flesh and blood,--the physical covering; others who get at the man and
know him in part as he is. For whom shall the portrait be painted,--for
those who see, or those who know, or those who love? And by whom shall
the portrait be painted,--by the tailor-painter or by the soul-painter?
The world is filled with painters of the superficial, with painters of
husks; and those are the painters who impress the multitude, for they
see what the multitude see, and there is no mystery to puzzle, but
everything is superficial and plain.
* * * * *
A likeness is the physical semblance of the soul; and the only likeness
worth having on canvas or in marble or in words is the faithful
transcript of the impression the sitter makes on the artist.
From the fact that this impression changes and deepens from hour to
hour, and day to day, and week to week, as the two beings come to know
each other, it follows that the best portrait can only be painted after
sufficient acquaintance for the dissipation of those superficial traits
and characteristics which envelop everyone like a fog.
It is the special province of caricature to seize upon a man’s
superficialities and peculiarities, and make the most or the worst of
them; but it is the business of portraiture to get beneath and give a
glimpse, an impression of the true man.
To this end Whistler’s many and long sittings were of inestimable
service. The portrait grew with his acquaintance with his sitter. What
first pleased him as a scheme of color and an agreeable personality came
in time to interest him as a human being, with the result in the most
successful canvases that the picture would be all he desired as a
harmony, as a song without sound, and also a marvellously subtle
realization of his impression of the human being he had learned to know.
* * * * *
In one respect the identity of a portrait is not a matter of entire
indifference, for the attitude of the painter is more or less affected
by his relation to the sitter, and whatever affects him affects his
work.
Many an artist does his best when his wife or child or some one he loves
is the model; and the man who could not paint his mother a little
better, a little more sympathetically than a stranger would be soulless
indeed. In poetry the influence of a mistress is a matter of tradition.
The picture, as a work of art, must be judged independently of its
associations. It stands by itself, and is good, bad, or indifferent,
regardless of the painter or the conditions under which it was done; but
some of its excellencies may be explained if we learn it was a labor of
love.
It would not add a feather’s weight to the superb qualities of the
“Hermes,” at Olympia, if it were discovered to be a likeness of the
sculptor’s son; nor would it detract in the slightest degree from its
perfection if it were found to have been the work of an unknown man, and
not by Praxiteles,--though in the latter case there would be a great
abatement of enthusiasm on the part of the touring public. But if a
number of the master’s works were in existence, and it was perceived
that the “Hermes” possessed certain qualities of tenderness, certain
indefinable elements of superiority that made it the masterpiece, the
knowledge that some one whom the sculptor loved dearly had posed would
help to explain the almost imperceptible differences. The work would
stand on its own merits; but one of the reasons why it stood so high
would be found in the relationship between sculptor and model.
By many who should be qualified to speak Whistler’s portrait of his
mother is considered his masterpiece, possibly by some because it is of
his mother, but by others quite independently of the relationship.
Others there are who consider the portrait of Carlyle his masterpiece,
possibly because it is of Carlyle, but by some independently of the
identity of the sitter.
Seldom is the portrait of any unknown or less known sitter mentioned in
comparison,--all of which goes to show the bias which results from
knowing the identity.
Every Scotchman would insist upon the Carlyle, most of them quite
unconscious of the patriotic bias.
There are pictures far more subtle in color, more “Whistlerian” in
effect, more distinctively the creations of a great poet in color than
these two portraits, but as compared with any _two_, or even _three_,
or, possibly, _four_ others, the preservation of these are of vital
importance to the fame of the artist and the advancement of art. In this
sense they may be considered his masterpieces, and of the two the one
that hangs in the Luxembourg is far the finer. It is one of the few
pictures that leave nothing to be said by painter or layman.
It is more than a portrait,--it is a large composition of line and form
and color; it is a great portrait made subordinate to a great picture.
* * * * *
Whistler was seldom so satisfied with a portrait that he was willing to
part with it. He could always see things he wished to change,--partly,
no doubt, because his impression of his subject changed from day to
day,--and he would often keep a portrait by him for months and years
before exhibiting. In fact he exhibited a like reserve about nearly all
his work. It was next to impossible to get anything from him for current
exhibitions.
He would faithfully and with the best of intentions promise to have
something ready. The time would come, and he would be found still at
work on the canvas as leisurely as if so many centuries were before him
instead of so many hours, Nothing ever induced him to either hasten his
work or exhibit it unfinished. The fact that he might not be represented
gave him not the slightest uneasiness. The result was that the Whistlers
seen were generally old Whistlers,--all the better for that. For
instance, of the pictures exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition,
not one had been painted within ten or fifteen years,--two dated as far
back as 1864.
At the Antwerp Exhibition, a year later, there was certainly not a
picture painted within ten years. By this method the artist had the
advantage of his own mature judgment and the assistance of time,--and
time wields a great brush. There is no glaze, no finish, no varnish
equal to that dispensed so evenly, so mellowly, so softly, so
beautifully by time. Furthermore, there is no judgment so sound, no
criticism so penetrating as the judgment and criticism of the artist
himself on his own work after the enthusiasm of the hour has worn off.
One of the finest indications of Whistler’s greatness was this reserve
in the exhibition of new work, this ability to do fine things and
quietly put them away out of sight, until with lapse of time they could
be looked over dispassionately, repainted if necessary, and either
banished forever or exhibited in all their glory.
Most artists delight in seeing exhibited immediately--often
prematurely--the things they do, and the delight is not unnatural.
Others there are who, on account of numerous disappointments or from
queer crotchets, are opposed altogether to exhibitions. Whistler was not
of the latter class; he was quite human enough to enjoy, as he himself
said, the honors which come from well-conducted exhibitions. He was an
officer of the Legion of Honor, had received awards and honors without
number, including the extraordinary award of the gold medal for etching
and also for painting at the Paris Exposition of 1900, and an honorary
degree from a Scotch University. These honors sat lightly, but by no
means uneasily, upon him.
* * * * *
His unwillingness to part with work led to no end of trouble and
misunderstanding. People could not understand why they should not have
what they had bargained and often paid for, why there should be any
delay whatsoever, much less why after many demands their money should be
returned and the picture kept by the artist.
All this is, of course, diametrically opposed to the rules of commerce,
and Whistler has been blamed for his unreliability, to use the mildest
term urged against him.
Without knowing him it is impossible to understand his attitude towards
his pictures.
In the first place, he was profoundly attached to them, whether sold or
not. They were and remained _his_ work; and in a humorous way he
frequently insisted upon this superior right of the creator,--as on the
fly-leaf of the catalogue of his London exhibition, which read:
“_Nocturnes, Marines, and Chevalet Pieces_: a catalogue. Small
collection kindly _lent_ their owners.”
And sometimes this assertion of a superior equity went so far as to
interfere with the right of possession, which was quite beyond the
comprehension of the multitude.
The story is told that a certain Lady B---- purchased one of his
pictures, but was never able to get it.
One day she drove to the studio in her victoria. Mr. Whistler went out
to the sidewalk to greet her.
“Mr. Whistler,” she said, “two years ago I bought one of your
pictures, a beautiful thing, and I have never been able to hang it
on my walls. It has been loaned to one exhibition after another.
Now, to-day I have my carriage with me, and I would like to take it
home with me. I am told it is in your possession.”
“Dear lady,” returned Whistler, “you ask the impossible. I will
send it to you at the earliest practicable moment. You know,--those
last slight touches,--which achieve perfection,--make all things
beautiful.” And so forth and so forth, to the same effect, and the
lady drove off without her picture.
After she had departed, Whistler commenced to poke around the
studio, and, to the great astonishment of a friend who had been an
involuntary listener to the above conversation, he brought forth a
canvas.
“Here it is,” he said. “She was right about one thing, it _is_
beautiful.” And it _was_ beautiful.
“But the impudence of these people,” he continued, “who think that
because they pay a few paltry hundred pounds they _own_ my
pictures. Why, it merely secures them the privilege of having them
in their houses now and then! The pictures are _mine_!”
However, this side of Whistler is on record in the case of “The Baronet
_vs._ The Butterfly,” as he called the suit of Sir William Eden to
obtain possession of the portrait of Lady Eden.
As the circumstances of this famous case illustrate Whistler’s attitude
towards his work, and at the same time his attitude towards those who
tried to deal commercially with him, they are worth recalling:
In June, 1893, Sir William Eden, a wealthy English baronet, wrote a
letter to Goupil & Co., in London, asking what Mr. Whistler’s price
would be for a small picture of Lady Eden, and he was informed that the
price would be about five hundred guineas. He replied, stating that he
thought the price too high, and said that he would call and see Mr.
Whistler in Paris. Instead of so doing, he applied to a common friend,
who wrote Whistler saying that the portrait “is for a friend of mine, on
the one hand, and, on the other hand, you will have to paint a very
lovely and very elegant woman, whose portrait you will be delighted to
undertake,” and “under the circumstances I think you might make very
liberal concessions.”
The matter of price was always a matter of indifference to
Whistler,--_if also_ of indifference to the other party,--and when Sir
William wrote concerning the price, Whistler replied very cordially in
January, 1894, as follows:
“DEAR SIR WILLIAM EDEN: Your letter has only just been handed to
me, but this may still, perhaps, reach you in the afternoon. It is
quite understood as to the little painting, and I think there can
be no difficulty about the sum. The only really interesting point
is that I should be able to produce the charming picture which,
with the aid of Lady Eden, ought to be expected. Once undertaken,
however slight, for me one work is as important as another, and
even more so, as Calino said. As for the amount, Moore, I fancy,
spoke of one hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds.”
The letter is quite characteristic of the artist. His interest was in
the possibility of producing a charming picture. The amount he mentioned
was less than he ordinarily asked for a water-color sketch, and
one-fifth that named by Goupil & Co.
It must be noted that the amount is not fixed by Whistler, but is left
at from one hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds, depending of
course upon the painter’s own feeling regarding his work, and not
depending in any sense upon the whim of the baronet.
The portrait went on towards completion. Instead of painting a head, as
was originally suggested, Whistler painted a full-length figure seated
upon a little sofa, the entire composition being quite as elaborate an
interior as if the canvas had been five times the size. The picture was
about fourteen to sixteen inches long by five or six inches high, and
was such an exquisite bit of the painter’s art that a representative of
a public gallery, who did not know that it was a commission, offered for
it twelve hundred dollars, and higher offers were made.
Sir William Eden did not again refer to the price, although he had many
opportunities; but on February 14, St. Valentine’s day, the baronet
visited the studio and expressed himself as delighted with the picture.
On taking leave, he informed Mr. Whistler that he was about to start for
India on a hunting-tour, and, taking an envelope from his pocket, he
handed it to the artist. “Here is a valentine for you. Look at it after
I have gone. Don’t bother about it just now.”
When the artist opened his “valentine,” he found a check for one hundred
guineas,--the minimum amount mentioned in his letter. The baronet had
taken it upon himself to fix the price of the picture on the eve of his
departure. The “valentine” read as follows:
“4 RUE DE PRESBOURG, PARIS, February 14, 1894.
“DEAR MR. WHISTLER: Herewith your valentine,--cheque value one
hundred guineas. The picture will always be of inestimable value to
me, and will be handed down as an heirloom as long as heirlooms
last.
“I shall always look with pleasure to the painting of it,--and,
with thanks, remain
“Yours sincerely,
“WILLIAM EDEN.”
To which Whistler immediately replied:
“110 RUE DU BAC, PARIS, February 14.
“MY DEAR SIR WILLIAM: I have your valentine. You really are
magnificent, and have scored all round.
“I can only hope that the little picture will prove even slightly
worthy of all of us, and I rely on Lady Eden’s amiable promise to
let me add the few last touches we know of. She has been so
courageous and kind all along in doing her part.
“With best wishes again for your journey,
“Very faithfully,
“J. MCNEILL WHISTLER.”
From the legal point of view Whistler made the mistake of not
immediately returning the check for one hundred guineas, and the
additional mistake of exhibiting the picture in the Salon of the Champ
de Mars in the spring of 1894, as No. 1187, under the title of “Brown
and Gold. Portrait of Lady E----.”
But ultimately the one hundred guineas were returned, and the baronet
brought suit to secure the possession of the picture.
Whistler would have permitted himself to be drawn-and-quartered before
Sir William Eden should have any work of his. He felt, and most justly,
that a work which had been begun by him, first, to oblige others, and
secondly, as a labor of love, had been placed upon a commercial footing
of the lowest level. He felt that there had been no real desire to have
one of his pictures on account of its artistic merit, but that there had
been an attempt to secure something of commercial value for one-third
its market price.
The episode of the “valentine,” truly ingeniously devised, completely
changed the relations between the parties. He painted out the little
portrait, substituted another head, and stood ready to return the
hundred guineas and to pay whatever damages the court might award the
plaintiff; but under no circumstances should the baronet have the
picture.
For the first time in the annals of litigation the question was
presented for final determination,--whether an artist could be compelled
to deliver work which he claimed was not yet finished to his
satisfaction, even though he had received the price. Be it said to the
credit of the French tribunal of last resort, that it held broadly that
the artist is master and proprietor of his work until such time as it
shall please him to deliver it. But that, failing delivery, he must
return the price with interest thereon, together with such damages as
the sitter may have sustained.
The hand of the painter cannot be forced by the importunity of either
patient or impatient patron, and no man but the painter himself can say
when a painting is sufficiently finished to be delivered.
Except in those few cases where Whistler took such intense dislikes to
sitters or purchasers that he would not permit them to have his work
under any circumstances, there is no instance where the great painter,
in unduly delaying the delivery of a picture, had any intention of
depriving the owner of what was rightfully his,--namely, the possession
of the picture.
Beyond the right of possession, Whistler did not concede much to the
owner. Frequently he challenged the owner’s right to exhibit without his
sanction, and he was quite inclined to deny to the owner the moral right
to sell at speculative prices. He had a poor opinion of those who would
buy from the artist to sell later at a profit; he classed them as
dealers.
* * * * *
Sitters did not always see things in the same light, and became tired,
then impatient, sometimes ugly. Then Whistler would no longer like them,
and the sittings would come to an end. If the portrait was unfinished,
it was cast aside to remain forever unfinished; if finished, the money
would be returned and the portrait kept,--under no circumstances to fall
into the hands of a person whom he disliked.
The studio contained many an unfinished portrait, some of them works of
great beauty, but of complete indifference to Whistler. He lost all
interest in them when he lost interest in the sitters; and it mattered
not to him that he had spent and lost days, and weeks, and months of
precious time, nor did it matter to him that his sitters had exhausted
themselves with numerous and long seances.
* * * * *
Childless, his paintings were his children, and to part with one was
like the parting of mother and child.
In these days, when the selling of pictures has become an essential part
of the art of painting, it is difficult for people to comprehend the
attitude of a man who really did not like to sell.
“What are pictures painted for, if not to sell?” asks the spirit of the
age.
It does not seem quite so obvious that poems are written to sell and
that music is composed to sell. Even the “practical man” feels that
poems and music ought to be made for something more than to sell, and if
they are not, they will be the worst for the narrow end in view; but
paintings and sculpture, they are commercial products to be dealt in
accordingly.
When Whistler did part with a picture he had no faculty for getting a
high price. His prices were very uncertain. To one person he might ask a
round sum, to another small,--just as the mood seized him, the price
having no particular relation to the painting.
He never could see why paintings should be sold, like cloth, by the
square yard; why a large picture should necessarily bring more than a
small. To him perfection was perfection, whether large or small.
What justifiable reason is there for the commercial schedule of so much
for a head, so much for a half-length, so much for a full-length
portrait?
The one may, but does by no means necessarily, take a little more time;
but, then, a painter does not value his work by the day.
A perfect thing is a perfect thing, whether large or small, Whistler
would frequently say. In the matter of prices he was obliged to yield
somewhat to custom, and ask more for large pictures than for small, but
he did so reluctantly and intermittently, with the natural result that
dealers, who screen pictures as the plasterer does his gravel, could do
nothing with him.
* * * * *
Of late years, with a demand far beyond any possible supply, his prices
advanced; but where a Degas, for instance, would sell for five, ten, or
fifteen thousand dollars, a Whistler of incomparably greater beauty
would sell for a third or a fifth the amount,--proof of what the
co-operation of the dealer can do.
Some years ago he showed a visitor several heads of Italian children,
each about ten or twelve, by sixteen or eighteen inches in size. With
them was a three-quarter length of one of the children. They were all
superb bits of portraiture, and akin to the “Little Rose, Lyme Regis,”
in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
The visitor was eager to get one or more of the pictures. After
considerable pressure, he said:
“I think they ought to be worth six hundred guineas each; don’t
you?”
“And the large one?” said the visitor.
“Oh, the same. That is no more important than the small.”
“Very well. May I have all four?”
“Dear me! You don’t want them all?”
“If you will let me have them.”
“But--” and then the struggle began, “I must look them over; they
are not quite finished.”
“But, surely, these two are finished.”
“Yes, I might let those go by-and-bye, but not now.”
“Will you send them to me?”
“Yes, certainly, after I have gone over them again.”
“I will leave a check.”
“God bless me, no! You must not do that. It will be time enough to
send a check after you receive the little pictures.”
Needless to say, the pictures were never received. They had just been
finished, and he could not bring himself to part with them. It was not a
matter of money at all,--likely as not he sold them later for less,--but
it was always next to impossible to get him to part with recent work. If
he happened to have on hand a picture five or ten years old, possibly
that could be bought and taken away, but anything in which he was
interested at the time he would not let go.
* * * * *
In 1894 he exhibited three small marines, which he had painted off-shore
while the boatman steadied
[Illustration]
his boat. They were fresh and crisp,--so good that a great painter of
marines said of them in the exhibition, “They over-topped everything
about them.”
Two were sold, and he showed the third to an American who came to
the studio. The caller said at once he would be only too glad to
take it at the price named; the matter was apparently closed, and
the buyer sailed for home, leaving a friend to get the picture.
A day or two after, Whistler stood looking long and earnestly at
the little marine, saying half to himself:
“It is good, isn’t it?”
Then he took the canvas out of the frame, and said:
“I think it needs touching up a little.”
Another pause, then:
“Do you know, I believe I won’t let this go just yet. I want to go
over it once more. You know, I can send your friend something else
next winter,--something that he may like better. And if he doesn’t
like it, why, he can return it.”
“But, Mr. Whistler, he wants this little marine. There is not much
to do upon it, is there?”
“No--o; but, then, you see----”
“Well, why not give it the last touches now, and let him have it.
If you do not send him this, I am afraid he will never have one of
your pictures.”
“Oh, yes, he will; next winter----”
“But next winter others will come in when we are not here, and buy
from you whatever you have.”
“Well, we will see.”
And only persistent urgings, day after day, even after a draft on London
had been forced upon him, induced him to ship the painting.
At no time was there any question of price or money involved; he simply
did not wish to part with the last of his three marines.
It was not until about 1890, and after, that Whistler’s paintings began
to sell at anything like their real worth. To his credit be it said, his
work was never “popular.”
By his independence, his seeming defiance of all conventional and
academic notions in his art, his eccentricities, and his lack of
commercial instincts he managed, at a very early period in his career,
to alienate,--
Dealers,
Painters, and
Public,
the three factors upon which commercial success depends.
* * * * *
“A millionaire--one who was getting up an art-gallery--went to
Whistler’s studio and glanced casually at the pictures.
“‘How much for the lot?’ he asked, with the confidence of one who owns
gold mines.
“‘Your millions,’ said Whistler.
“‘What!’
“‘My posthumous prices.’ And the painter added, ‘Good-morning.’”
_X_
_The School of Carmen--In Search of Health--Chelsea once more--The End._
To please Madame Carmen Rossi, who as a child had been one of his best
models, Whistler consented in 1897 to criticise the work of such
students as might attend her school. As a result Carmen’s atelier was
for the time being the most distinguished in Paris, and it was not
uncommon to see carriages with coachmen and footmen in livery before the
door on the days that Whistler was expected.
As he passed about among the pupils he seldom praised and was never
enthusiastic. He would sometimes stand many minutes before a canvas that
merited his attention and would suggest changes and improvements; and
now and then he took a brush and made the alterations himself,
remarking, if the student were a young woman, “Now you have a Whistler
all to your charming self.”
The story is told that once he stopped before a very brilliant canvas,
and exclaimed, “Hideous! hideous!” The student said, somewhat proudly,
that she had taken private lessons from Bouguereau, and he blandly
inquired, “Bouguereau, Bouguereau,--who is Bouguereau?”
A pupil has printed some reminiscences of those days:[47]
“Usually Mr. Whistler came once a week to criticise us, and on
those days the class, numbering anywhere from fifteen to forty, had
been instructed to adopt a certain respectful mode of bearing on
the arrival of the master; so, when the concierge threw wide the
door and formally announced, ‘Monsieur Whistler,’ every student had
risen to return his ceremonious salutation. Vividly I recall the
scene: a man of not much more than medium stature, but so slight as
to give the impression, when standing apart from others, of being
much taller; dressed entirely in black, even to the suéde gloves;
every garment immaculate in fit and condition; a little red rosette
of the Legion of Honor of France forming the only spot of color
about him until a faint flush rose to his cheek as he greeted the
class with kindly smile.
“Then, as _massier_ (or monitor, in charge of the class), he passed
me his long, black, fur-lined coat and tall, straight-brimmed
hat,--those well-known targets for the caricaturist,--and began his
criticism by inspecting every drawing and weighing its merits--if
any there were, as only too rarely happened--before uttering a
word. This silent inspection finished, Mr. Whistler usually asked
for a palette,--preferably mine, because it was patterned after his
own, and made him ‘feel at home,’ as he expressed it,--and then,
without removing his gloves, painted a few strokes here and there
on some of the pupils’ work. Even in the matter of a palette he
evinced marked sentiment. A carelessly kept one was, above all, his
particular abhorrence, and generally elicited some such remark as
the following: ‘My friends, have you noticed the way in which a
musician cares for his violin--how beautiful it is? how well kept?
how tenderly handled? Your palette is your instrument, its colors
the notes, and upon it you play your symphonies.’
“As an instructor he was courteous to each pupil, but naturally
most interested in those who followed his precepts closest.
Sometimes he jested at the expense of a luckless pupil. I remember
an amusing instance. Smoking was prohibited on the days for
criticism, since our master believed it clouded the atelier and in
some degree obscured a view of the model. One day, upon entering,
Mr. Whistler noticed an Englishman, much addicted to his huge
cigars, who continued puffing away contentedly during the
‘criticism.’ Mr. Whistler turned quickly, asking me why his wishes
were not enforced; but before I could frame a reply he had
addressed our British friend, saying, ‘Er--my dear sir, I know you
do not smoke to show disrespect to my request that the students
should refrain from smoking on the days I come to them, nor would
you desire to infringe upon the rules of the atelier--but--er--it
seems to me--er--that when you are painting--er--you might possibly
become so absorbed in your work as to--er--well--let your cigar go
out.’ I often remarked a whimsical affectation of Mr. Whistler in
his manner of speech with different pupils in his class,--we were a
diverse lot from many lands, Americans and English predominating.
If criticising an American, for instance, Mr. Whistler’s choice of
language, and in some cases his accent, would become markedly
English in form; while in addressing an Englishman he would adopt
the Yankee drawl, sometimes adding a touch of local slang. I
subsequently learned that these were his customary tactics, even in
society, but in class criticism he always addressed us in French.”
His methods of teaching were original. He laid little stress on drawing.
He hated and despised academic treatment. He wanted the pupil to paint.
A few careful charcoal strokes on the canvas as a guide, the rest to be
drawn in with brush and color. And he preached simplicity,--as few tones
as possible, as low as possible. But it is painful to record that the
endeavors of a certain proportion of the class to attempt the
achievements of the master in this respect resulted in a unique crop of
posters. The constant theme of his discourse was “mixtures.” He advised
a pupil to get first on his palette a correct and sufficient mixture of
each tone required for his picture. Often he would give a long criticism
without so much as glancing at the canvas,--a criticism on the mixtures
he found on the pupil’s palette; and he himself would work indefinitely
at the colors, and all the while talking, till it appeared to him to be
satisfactory. “And then,” says an enthusiastic young artist, “when he
did take up some of the color and transfer it to the canvas, why, it
would just sing.”
“One day on entering the class-room he discovered that a red
background had been arranged behind the model. He was horrified,
and directed the students to put up something duller in tone.
“Then he scraped out the red paint on a pupil’s canvas and
proceeded to mix and lay on a new background. Somehow the red would
show through, and he found it difficult to satisfy himself with the
effect he produced. He mixed and studied and scraped, working
laboriously, surrounded by a group of admiring students. Finally,
he remarked:
“‘I suppose you know what I’m trying to do?’
“‘Oh, yes, sir,’ they chorused.
“‘Well, it’s more than I know myself,’ he grimly replied.”
It is to be hoped that his epigrammatic utterances which hung on the
walls of the Carmen Rossi school have been preserved, for they would be
valuable additions to the “Propositions” and “Ten o’Clock” already
published.
With none of the instincts of the teacher, he in time lost interest in
the school. After a year or two his visits became infrequent, and upon
leaving Paris his connection ceased.
* * * * *
The studio in Notre Dame des Champs and the home on the Rue du Bac were
closed a few years after the death of Mrs. Whistler, and he made his
home once more in Chelsea, at 74 Cheyne Walk, with frequent excursions
to the Continent.
In the winter of 1901 he was at Ajaccio, and he wrote to a friend: “You
will be surprised at this present address. But it’s all
right,--‘Napoleon and I, you know.’”
In another letter to the same friend, speaking of a public official with
whom he had some legal transactions, he remarks: “Say that I know how
devotedly kind he has been in his care of me, but the care of the state
overwhelms him. You cannot serve the republic ... and Whistler.”
* * * * *
For many years his heart had troubled him, and towards the last the
warnings came more frequently and persistently. The year before his
death he was quite ill at The Hague, and one of the London papers
printed the following of a semi-obituary flavor:
“Mr. Whistler is so young in spirit that his friends must have read
with surprise the Dutch physician’s pronouncement that the present
illness is due to ‘advanced age.’ In England sixty-seven is not exactly
regarded as ‘advanced age;’ but even for the gay ‘butterfly’ time does
not stand still, and some who are unacquainted with the details of Mr.
Whistler’s career, though they may know his work well, will be surprised
to hear that he was exhibiting at the Academy forty-three years ago. His
contributions to the exhibition of 1859 were ‘Two Etchings from Nature,’
and at intervals during the following fourteen or fifteen years Mr.
Whistler was represented at the Academy by a number of works, both
paintings and etchings. In 1863 his contributions numbered seven in all,
and in 1865 four. Among his Academy pictures of 1865 was the famous
‘Little White Girl,’[48] the painting that attracted so much attention
at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. This picture--rejected at the Salon of
1863--was inspired, though the fact seems to have been forgotten of
late, by the following lines of Swinburne:
“‘Come snow, come wind or thunder
High up in air,
I watch my face and wonder
At my bright hair, etc., etc.’”
The item called forth the following characteristic correction, dated
from The Hague:
“SIR: I feel it no indiscretion to speak of my ‘convalescence’
since you have given it official existence.
[Illustration]
“May I therefore acknowledge the tender little glow of health
induced by reading, as I sat here in the morning sun, the
flattering attention paid me by your gentleman of ready wreath and
quick biography.
“I cannot, as I look at my improving self with daily satisfaction,
really believe it all; still it has helped to do me good. And it is
with almost sorrow that I must beg you, perhaps, to put back into
its pigeon-hole, for later on, this present summary, and replace it
with something preparatory--which, doubtless, you have also ready.
“This will give you time, moreover, for some correction,--if really
it be worth while. But certainly the ‘Little White Girl,’ which was
not rejected at the Salon of ’63, was, I am forced to say, not
‘inspired by the following lines of Swinburne,’ for the one simple
reason that those lines were only written, in my studio, after the
picture was painted. And the writing of them was a rare and
graceful tribute from the poet to the painter--a noble recognition
of one work by the production of a nobler one.
“Again, of ‘the many tales concerning the hanging, at the Academy,
of the well-known portrait of the artist’s mother, now at the
Luxembourg,’ one is true--let us trust your gentleman may have time
to find it out--that I may correct it. I surely may always
hereafter rely on the _Morning Post_ to see that no vulgar Woking
joke reach me.
“It is my marvellous privilege, then, to come back, as who should
say, while the air is still warm with appreciation, affection, and
regret, and to learn in how little I had offended.
“The continuing to wear my own hair and eyebrows, after
distinguished confrères and eminent persons had long ceased their
habit, has, I gather, clearly given pain. This, I see, is much
remarked on. It is even found inconsiderate and unseemly in me, as
hinting at affectation.
“I might beg you, sir, to find a pretty place for this, that I
would make my ‘apology,’ containing also promise, in years to
come, to lose these outer signs of vexing presumption.
“Protesting, with full enjoyment of its unmerited eulogy, against
your premature tablet, I ask you again to contradict it, and appeal
to your own sense of kind sympathy when I tell you I learn that I
have, lurking in London, still ‘a friend’--though for the life of
me I cannot remember his name.
“And I have, sir, the honor to be
“J. MCNEILL WHISTLER.”
In the spring of 1903, only a few months before his death, three of his
pictures were withdrawn from the annual exhibition of the Society of
American Artists in New York. They had not been sent in by him, but
loaned by the owner upon the understanding they would be given the
prominence which he thought Whistler’s work deserved.
In the absence of the owner in Europe the whole matter was left in
charge of a member of the society,--a well-known artist,--who, when he
saw where the committee had placed the little pictures, promptly
withdrew them, and notified the owner of his action, which was approved.
Whistler learned of the matter, and wrote the following letter:
“DEAR MR. L---- : I have just learned with distress that my
canvases have been a trouble and a cause of thought to the
gentlemen of the hanging committee.
“Pray present to them my compliments and my deep regrets.
“I fear also that this is not the first time of simple and
good-natured intrusion,--‘looking in,’ as who should say, with
beaming fellowship and crass camaraderie upon the highly-finished
table and well-seated guests,--to be kindly and swiftly shuffled
into some further respectable place, that all be well and
hospitality endure.
“Promise, then, for me, that I have learned and that this ‘shall
not occur again.’ And, above all, do not allow a matter of colossal
importance to ever interfere with the afternoon habit of peace and
good will and the leaf of the mint so pleasantly associated with
this society.
“I could not be other than much affected by your warm and immediate
demonstration, but I should never forgive myself were the
consequences of lasting vexation to your distinguished confrères,
and, believe me, dear Mr. L----, very sincerely,
“J. MCNEILL WHISTLER.
"LONDON, April 7, 1903."
To the end he worked with indefatigable energy, save only those days and
hours when he was compelled by exhaustion or by the physicians to rest.
Work was a tonic to him, and, while painting, the rebellious organs of
his body were submissive to his genius.
He would forget himself when, brush in hand, he stood before a canvas.
* * * * *
During the spring of 1903 he had been far from well. Into May he worked,
but not regularly nor for long at a time. In June he was quite ill, and
his friends were apprehensive; but in the early part of July he began to
gain, so that he took long drives and planned resuming his work.
On the afternoon of July 16 he was out for a drive and in the best of
spirits, with plans for the future that even a younger man could not
hope to execute.
* * * * *
Art, the ever-youthful mistress of his life, urged him on. Should he
confess before her the ravages of years? In dauntless enthusiasm, in
boundless ambition, in spirit unsubdued he was still young. He struggled
to his feet and for the last time stood before the canvas,--the magic
mirror from which he, wizzard-like, had evoked so many beautiful images;
he thought of the things he yet would do, of lines that would charm for
all time, of colors that would play like the iridescent hues upon the
surface of the shimmering sea, of the wraith-like images of people which
lurked in the depths of the canvas awaiting the touch of his wand to
step forth in all their stately dignity and beauty.
And the soul of the master was filled with delight.
But the visions of beauty were shattered,
Like forms of the mist they were scattered--
As bubbles are blown by a breath--
By the grim, haunting spectre of Death.
The tired body could not respond, and there where he had worked, on the
afternoon of Friday, July 17, the great painter died.
* * * * *
On the following Wednesday the funeral services were held in the old
church at Chelsea where he often went with his mother, and he was buried
beside her in the graveyard at Chiswick.
“_We have then but to wait--until with the mark of the gods upon
him--there come among us again the chosen--who shall continue what
has gone before. Satisfied that, even were he never to appear, the
story of the beautiful is already complete--hewn in the marbles of
the Parthenon--and broidered, with the birds, upon the fan of
Hokusai--at the foot of Fusiyama._”--WHISTLER’S “Ten o’Clock.”
INDEX
[Illustration]
Ajaccio, 281
Albany, 33
Allen, Sir William, 35
America, attitude towards, 52-53;
desire to visit, 22;
trip to South America, 22-23
American appreciation, 15-17;
art, future of, 63-64;
characteristics, 64-65
Americanism, Whistler’s, 47-48
Ancestors, 25-28
Anecdotes and sayings, as a teacher, 277-281;
attitude towards America, 52-53;
authenticity of stories, 81-82;
bailiff in the “White House,” 112-113;
Balaam’s ass, 84-85;
blue-and-white china, 70;
Boer war, 45;
Carlyle portrait, 123;
colors and pigments used, 72-73;
concerning a sitter, 238-239;
concerning birth, 29;
concerning Carlyle and Miss Alexander, 121;
concerning Chicago, 27;
concerning each portrait, 241-242;
concerning his portraits, 255;
concerning poor lawyers, 148;
concerning purchasers, 265-266;
concerning sittings required, 30-31;
continually polishing, 84-85;
Dieppe, 34;
disintegration of the Royal Society of British Artists, 218;
early days in Paris, 86-88;
early days in Venice, 92-95;
effacing an insult, 43;
falling down stairs, 114;
first money earned with brush, 80-81;
Henry James, 85;
his umbrella, 227;
Hogarth, 55;
house-painters, 212;
late to dinner, 29-30;
Leighton, 82-84;
in lithography suit, 103;
man whose coat did not fit, 42;
“Nana,” 151-153;
Napoleon and I, 281;
Nature looking up, 214;
necktie of a sitter, 191;
no artistic period, 73-78;
old Delft, 71;
painting in the dark, 214;
“Peacock Room,” 129;
of Peter the Great, 35;
railway accident, 33-34;
rebuking an admirer, 162;
rich man’s house, 56;
Rossetti, 111;
Royal Academy, 116-119;
Savoy Hotel, 181;
school, 61;
selling his pictures, 274-275;
Stoeckl dinner, 40-41;
story of “The Yellow Buskin,” 119-120;
studio on ground floor, 229;
the arrangement in gray, 194;
the color of a critic’s clothes, 195;
the grocer’s shop, 193-194;
the millionaire, 276;
the model and the red background, 280;
the pupil who smoked, 279;
the republic and Whistler, 281;
the Ruskin trial, 144-147;
the studio stove, 231;
to the Prince of Wales, 217;
trip to Valparaiso, 22-23;
unwelcome callers at studio, 228;
visit of students to his studio, 134-135;
“warm personal enemy,” 156;
West Point, 36;
while in service of Coast and Geodetic Survey, 37-41
Angelo, Michael, 253
Appearance and characteristics, 36;
alertness, 85;
a poser, 149-155;
approachable, except in studio, 227-228;
as a story-teller, 224;
at home, 222;
attitude towards art and artists, 122;
attitude towards nature, 213-216;
attitude towards other artists, 56;
attitude towards purchasers, 265-272;
attitude towards the Royal Academy, 115-119;
careless about keeping list of works, 90;
courage, 42-43;
dilatory habits, 37-41;
dress when a young man, 41-42;
George Moore’s theory, 168-172;
his Americanism, 47-78;
his dislikes and prejudices, 271-272;
laugh, 119;
military spirit, 45-46;
no commercial instinct, 111;
no mystery about his art, 106-108;
on the street, 226;
Puritan element, 49-50;
refinement, 50;
sense of humor, 82;
superstitions, 44;
susceptibility to color intervals, 191-195;
West Point, 44;
when twenty, 38-40
Art, abstract use of color, 211;
and physique, 168-172;
early love for, 35;
harmonies in line, 182;
his paintings and poetry, 182;
of pure line, 180-181;
Oriental, 176;
purely sensuous, 180
Artistic period, 73-78
Autograph character of work, 105-106
Balcony,” “The, 58
Baptism, 32
Baronet _vs._ The Butterfly, 266-270
Beauties of form and color, 185-186
Beethoven, 257;
relation to, 176
Birth, 28-29, 31-32
Boston, proposed exhibition of pictures, 20
Bouguereau, 277
Boxall, Sir William, 53-54
Brothers and sisters, 32
Burne-Jones, 176;
Ruskin trial, 146
Carlyle, 119;
and Froude, 122-123;
as a friend, 121-122
Catalogues, 167-168, 265;
of exhibition in 1892, 160-161;
of lithographs, 104.
See Exhibitions
Character. See Appearance and characteristics
Chelsea, Carlyle as neighbor and sitter, 121-122;
Carlyle’s description, 109-111;
death and last illness, 285-286;
early days in, 109;
his last home, 281-286;
the bailiff, 112-113;
“White House,” 112-113;
“White House” occupied by a critic, 114
Chicago, grandfather founded, 26-27
Chinese and Japanese art, 181;
autograph character of Japanese art, 105-106;
blue china, 61;
degradation of Japanese art, 78;
influence of, 55
Chiswick, buried at, 286
Coast and Geodetic Survey, 39-40
Color, “ability to feel,” 208;
abstract composition, 197;
and the musical scale, 195-196;
art of pure color, 180-181;
beauties of, 185-186;
decoration, 128-135;
first color harmonies, 58;
his own explanation of, 178-180;
illustrated in different pictures, 211;
in Italy and Greece, 198;
of sculptor, 206;
range of color-notes, 189-191;
Ruskin’s attitude towards, 158-160, 199-208;
Ruskin trial, 145-146;
sense of, lost, 183-184;
supreme as a colorist, 173;
the house-painter and decorator, 186;
used imitatively, 204, 207, 209;
Whistler’s susceptibility to, 191-195
Colorist. See Color
Commercial side, lacking, 265-276
Conversation, a lost art, 149-151
Courage, 33, 36, 42-43
Criticism, language of, 161
Criticisms in America, 15-16
Critics, arraignment of, in catalogue, 98-102, 160-161, 167-168
Critics and criticisms, attitude towards, 162-165;
early criticism of Turner, 142-143;
George Moore, 168-172;
his attitude towards, 155-157;
his color harmonies not understood, 184;
is the painter the final judge?, 162-165;
order of appreciation, 173-175;
Ruskin’s attitude towards color, 158-160;
“Voice of a People,” 165-167
Dealers, attitude towards, 276
Death and last illness, 285-286
Decoration, 127-133;
as a decorator, 131-135;
in home in Paris, 220-222;
“Peacock Room,” 128-131, 209
Dieppe, 33-34
Dress, 41-42
Eden, Sir William, 267-270
England’s indifference, 47-49
Englishman’s stupidity, 16
Etchings, appreciation of a collector, 96-97;
of Haden, 96;
catalogues of, 91;
early French criticism, 60;
“French Set,” 90;
Haden collection of, 96;
his first, 88-89;
his “Venice Set,” 91;
“Thames Set,” 91;
“Twenty-six Etchings,” 91
Exhibitions, 1868, 177;
1893, 65;
at Antwerp, 263;
at Chicago, 263;
at London, 265;
at Paris, 1894, 24, 264;
at the Royal Academy, 114-119;
criticisms of, 98-101;
his catalogues, 99-101;
light and background required for his pictures, 134-139;
of etchings, 1883, 97;
of lithographs, 104;
reluctant about exhibiting, 262-264;
Society of American Artists in 1903, 284-285;
Society of British Artists, 136;
special, 120-121;
with artificial light, 135;
“Yellow and White,” 98, 132
Family, 25-28;
brothers and sisters, 32;
father, 27-28, 35;
mother, 28;
mother’s diary, 34-35
Fine Arts Society, 121
Foreword, 7
Form, appreciation of, 203
Fort Dearborn, grandfather built, 26-27
French art, influence of, 57-60;
criticism, early, 59-60
Frith, 177;
Ruskin trial, 146
Fur Jacket,” “The, 65
Gainesborough, 249, 250
Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” “The, 32, 154-155
Glasgow and the Carlyle portrait, 124;
school, 55
Gleyre, 57, 59, 79
Gold Screen,” “The, 58
Greece, art of, 63
Grosvenor Gallery, 119
Haden, 32, 88-89, 96
Hague, The, illness at, 281-284;
letter from, 282-284
Hanging of pictures, 124-128
Harmonies, symphonies, and nocturnes, his explanation of, 178-180
“Hermes,” by Praxiteles, 261
Hogarth, 55, 249, 250
Honors and awards, 264
Impressionism, 72
Ingres, copy of painting by, 80-81
Interior decorator, 127-128
International Society, 121
Irish ancestors, 25, 47
Italian painters, influence of, 71-72
Japanese art and influence of, 55.
See Chinese and Japanese art
Khayyam, Omar, 243
Lange Leizen,” “The, 58
Leyland, F. R., 128-131
Light and background for pictures, 134-139;
as distinguished from color, 160
Lithographs, naming of, 183
Lithography, 102-104, 180. See Exhibitions, Catalogues
Lowell, 31-32
Manet, 249-250
Marines, 24, 274-275
Marriage, 219
Method. See Work
Miss Alexander, 50, 119
“Mona Lisa,” 251
Moore, “Modern Painting,” 168-172
Mother, diary of, 34-35;
portrait of, 53-54, 58, 115
Music, 176-177;
and color, 193;
and painting, 179;
and the color scale, 195-196;
range of sounds, 186-188;
the uneducated ear, 196;
“truths of sound,” 203-204
National influence, 61-78
Nature and art, 213-216;
and color, 216;
and music, 215
Naval Academy, 37
Nocturnes, 119. See Pictures
Nude, attitude towards, 50-51
Painting and music, 179;
flat tones, 212;
his manner and mode of, 231-237
Paris as an art centre, 62-63;
early days in, 86-88;
home life in, 222-224;
in 1855, 79;
Rue du Bac, 219;
studio, 131, 132
Pastels, 106-107
“Peacock Room,” 128-131, 209;
trouble over payment, 129-130
Phidias, 253
Philadelphia, 120
Physical appearances. See Appearance and characteristics
Picture galleries, 124-128
Pictures, arrangement of, by periods, 211;
“At the Piano,” 114, 210;
Carlyle portrait, 123-124;
estimation of, 261;
exhibition of, to visitors, 133-135;
“Falling Rocket,” 140;
hanging of, a lost art, 124-128;
hanging of portrait of his mother, 115;
“Lange Leizen,” 210;
marines, 212;
naming of, 178, 183, 185;
“Nocturnes,” “Harmonies,” and “Symphonies,” 210, 211;
present prices of, 114-115;
“The Princess of the Land of Porcelain,” 58, 128, 210;
“Little Rose, Lyme Regis,” 273;
story of “The Yellow Buskin,” 119-120;
Symphonies in White, II. and III., 210;
“Thames in Ice,” 210;
“The Balcony,” 210;
“The Gold Screen,” 210;
the Japanese group, 210, 211;
“The Music Room,” 210;
“White Girl,” 59-60, 109, 210, 282;
“The Yellow Buskin,” 65.
See Portraits
Pomfret, 36
Portraits, classification of, 248;
color compositions, 258;
difference between Whistler and Velasquez, 256-258;
each one to be a masterpiece, 241-242;
his best, 261-262;
Irving as Philip II., 119;
Lady Campbell, 119;
likeness, 258-262;
manner and mode of painting, 231-237;
Miss Gilchrist, 119;
of Lady E----, 269;
portrait-painting, 244;
sittings required, 30-31, 235;
wraith-like quality, 255
Praxiteles, 261
“Propositions” and “The Ten o’Clock,” 108
Providence, 32
Puritan element, 49-50
Racial influence, 61-78
Raphael, 253
Rembrandt, 67, 175, 244, 253, 254, 255, 256;
essentially Dutch, 67
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 247, 249, 252
Rosa Corder, 119
Rossetti, 111
Rossi, Carmen, school of, 277-281
Royal Academy, attitude towards, 114-119;
exhibitions at, etc., 114-119
Royal Society of British Artists, 217
Rue du Bac, 219
Ruskin and flat tones, 212;
attitude towards color, 158-160, 199-208;
attitude towards early criticism of Turner, 143;
color in his home, 207-208;
his limitations, 165;
suit, 140-149
Savoy Hotel, 181
Sayings. See Anecdotes and sayings
School, no American, 61-63;
of Carmen Rossi, 277-281
Sculptor and portrait busts, 245-246
Society of British Artists, exhibition of, 136
Sounds, range of musical, 186-188
Springfield, 33
St. Petersburg, 27-28, 34-35
Stonington, 32, 35
Stories. See Anecdotes and sayings
Studio, description of, 230-231;
in Paris, 229
Swinburne, 74, 177
Taylor, Tom, 146
Teacher, as a, 277-281
“Ten o’Clock,” no artistic period, 73-78
Time, dilatory habits, 37-41;
indifference to, 29-31;
never prompt, 30
Travel, dislike for, 33-34;
effect of, on artists, 69-70
Turner and color, 199;
early criticism of, 142-143;
Whistler’s appreciation of, 56
Valparaiso, trip to, 22-23
Velasquez, 60, 175, 244, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257;
essentially Spanish, 68;
influence of, 71
Venice, early days in, 92-95
“Voice of a People,” 165-167
Water-color, his first, 106
Webster, Daniel, letter to, 35-36
West Point, 35-36
Westerly, 32
“White Girl,” 53, 283
“White House.” See Chelsea
Will, 240
Witticisms. See Anecdotes and sayings
Work always a pleasure, 90-91;
as a decorator, 128-135;
colors and pigments used, 72-73;
description of method, 231-237;
exhibition to visitors, 133-135;
facility in execution, 23;
his attitude towards a sitter, 238-239, 241;
painting in the dark, 213-214;
volume of, 104-105
Yellow Buskin,” “The, 119, 256
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Mr. A. Lindenkohl, now the oldest draughtsman in the department.
[2] G. W. Smalley, in the London _Times_.
[3] _The Nation_, vol. liv., pp. 280-281, April 14, 1892.
[4] New York _Tribune_, July 26, 1903.
[5] New York _Evening Post_, August 1, 1903.
[6] _Fortnightly Review_, June, 1888.
[7] _The Independent_, November 2, 1899.
[8] Major W. L. B. Jenney, in the _American Architect_, January 1, 1898.
[9] Wedmore, Fine Prints, p. 103.
[10] Wedmore’s Catalogue, pp. 19-20.
[11] Printed by H. Wunderlich & Co., New York.
[12] W. S. Adams, in the Springfield _Republican_.
[13] _McClure’s Magazine_, vol. vii. p. 374.
[14] _Knowledge_, April 5, 1883, p. 208.
[15] _The Academy_, February 24, 1883, p. 139.
[16] _Knowledge_, April 6, 1883, pp. 208, 209.
[17] Owned by Frank Gair Macomber, Esq., of Boston.
[18] Gentle Art, p. 116.
[19] Life of Carlyle, First Forty Years, vol. ii., pp. 345-6.
[20] _McClure’s Magazine_, vol. vii. p. 374.
[21] _McClure’s Magazine_, vol. vii. p. 374.
[22] G. W. Smalley, in the London _Times_. Reprinted in the New York
_Tribune_, August 19, 1903.
[23] _Harper’s Weekly_, August 1, 1903.
[24] _Library Gazette_, May 14, 1842 p. 331.
[25] _Athenæum_, May 14, 1842, p. 433.
[26] See opening paragraph of Chapter II. of the first and second
editions of the first volume of “Modern Painters.”
[27] John Ruskin, by Spielmann, p. 34.
[28] Modern Painters, vol. iii., chap. xvii., paragraph 18.
[29] _Saturday Review_, March 26, 1892, p. 357.
[30] Moore, Modern Painting, p. 6.
[31] _The Critic_, vol. xxxviii. p. 32, January, 1901.
[32] Gentle Art, p. 126.
[33] Gentle Art, pp. 127, 128.
[34] Ibid., p. 128.
[35] Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone, p. 265.
[36] Fleming, Waves and Ripples in Water, Air, and Æther, p. 252.
[37] Physiological Optics, p. 237.
[38] Modern Painters, vol. i., part ii., sec. i., chap. v., par. 3.
[39] Modern Painters, vol. i., part ii., sec. i., chap. v., par. 8, 9.
[40] Ibid., sec. ii., chap. ii., par. 12.
[41] Modern Painters, vol. i., part ii., sec. ii., chap. ii., par. 17,
20.
[42] Gentle Art, p. 128.
[43] Gentle Art, pp. 143, 144.
[44] Gentle Art, p. 143.
[45] London _Times_, July 18, 1903.
[46] Gentle Art, pp. 177, 178.
[47] E. S. Crawford, in _The Reader_, September, 1903.
[48] See page 185.
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