MASTERPIECES
IN COLOUR

EDITED BY . .
T. LEMAN HARE

WHISTLER

1834-1903

In the Same Series

Others in Preparation.

Whistler

BY T. MARTIN WOOD
ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT
REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

[Pg vii]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[Pg 9]

I

At the time when Rossetti and his circle
were foregathering chiefly at Rossetti’s
house, quiet Chelsea scarcely knew how
daily were associations added which will
always cluster round her name. Whistler’s
share in those associations is very large,
and he has left in his paintings the memory
of many a night, as he returned beside the
river. Before Whistler painted it, night was
more opaque than it is now. It had been
[Pg 10]viewed only through the window of tradition.
It was left for a man of the world coming
out of an artificial London room to paint its
stillness, and also to show us that we ourselves
had made night more beautiful, with
ghostly silver and gold; and to tell us that
the dark bridges that sweep into it do not
interrupt—that we cannot interrupt, the music
of nature.

The figure of Whistler emerges: with
his extreme concern as to his appearance,
his careful choice of clothes, his hair so
carefully arranged. He had quite made up
his mind as to the part he intended to play
and the light in which he wished to be
regarded. He had a dual personality. Himself
as he really was and the personality
which he put forward as himself. In a
sense he never went anywhere unaccompanied;
he was followed and watched by
another self that would perhaps have been
happier at home. Tiring of this he would
disappear from society for a time. Other
men’s ringlets fall into their places accidentally—so
it might be with the young
Disraeli. Other men’s clothes have seemed[Pg 11]
characteristic without any of this elaborate
pose. He chose his clothes with a view to
their being characteristic, which is rather
different and less interesting than the fact
of their becoming so because he, Whistler,
wore them. Other men are dandies, with
little conception of the grace of their part;
with Whistler a supreme artist stepped into
the question. He designed himself. Nor
had he the illusions of vanity, but a
groundwork of philosophy upon which every
detail of his personal life was part of an
elaborate and delicately designed structure,
his art the turret of it all, from which he
saw over the heads of others. There is no
contradiction between the dandy and his
splendid art. He lived as exquisitely and
carefully as he painted. Literary culture,
merely, in his case was not great perhaps,
yet he could be called one of the most cultured
figures of his time. In every direction
he marked the path of his mind with fastidious
borders. And it is interesting that
he should have painted the greatest portrait
of Carlyle, who, we will say, represented
in English literature Goethe’s philosophy[Pg 12]
of culture, which if it has an echo in the
plastic arts, has it in the work of Whistler.
In his “Heretics” Mr. G. K. Chesterton
condemned Whistler for going in for the
art of living—I think he says the miserable
art of living—I have not seen the book for a
long time, but surely the fact that Whistler
was more than a private workman, that his
temperament had energy enough to turn
from the ardours of his work to live this
other part of life—indicates extraordinary
vitality rather than any weakness. Whistler
was never weak: he came very early to an
understanding of his limitations, and well
within those limitations took his stand.
Because of this his art was perfect. In it
he declined to dissipate his energy in any
but its natural way. In that way he is as
supreme as any master. Attacked from
another point his whole art seems but a
cobweb of beautiful ingenuity—sustained by
evasions. Whistler, one thinks, would have
been equally happy and meteorically successful
in any profession; one can imagine
what an enlivening personality his would
have been in a Parliamentary debate, and
[Pg 15]
how fascinating. Any public would have
suited him. Art was just an accident
coming on the top of many other gifts. It
took possession of him as his chief gift, but
without it he was singularly well equipped
to play a prominent part in the world.
As things happened all his other energy
went to forward, indirectly and directly, the
claims of art. Perhaps his methods of self-advancement
were not so beautiful as his
art, and his wit was of a more robust
character. For this we should be very
glad; the world would have been too ready
to overlook his delicate work—except that
it had to feed his inordinate ambition. At
first it recognised his wit and then it recognised
his art, or did its level best to, in
answer to his repeated challenges.

It is easier to explain Whistler’s personality
than his work. In his lifetime most
people had recognised all the force of his
personality, but it was not so with his art.
In this he is as a player of violin music,
or a composer after the fashion of the
masters of music—his relationship to the
subject which suggests the motif, of course,[Pg 16]
could not be quite so slight as theirs—but
it was their standpoint that he adopted and
so approached his art from another direction
than the ordinary one. To a great extent
he established the unity of the arts. Without
being a musical man, through painting
he divined the mission of music and passed
from the one art almost into the other.
And the effort above everything else for self-expression
was in its essence a musical one
too, as also the fact that he never allowed
a line or brushmark to survive that was not
as sensitively inspired—played we might
almost say—as the touch of a player, playing
with great expression, upon the keyboard
of his piano. This quality of touch—how
much it counts for in the art of
Whistler—as it counts in music. It is one
of the essential things which we have to
understand about his work, to appreciate
and enjoy it.

Both painting and music are so different
from writing in this, that the thoughts of
a painter and musician have to issue through
their fingers, they have to clothe with their
own hands the offsprings of their fancy.[Pg 17]
They cannot put this work out, as the
writer does, by dictation to a type-writer.
It is not in the style he lays the ink that
the poet finds the expression, its thickness
or its thinness bears no resemblance to his
soul, but the intimacies of a painter’s genius
are expressed in the actual substance of
his paint and in the touch with which he
lays it. So in painting the mysterious virtue
arises which among painters is called
“quality,” a certain beauty of surface resultant
from the perfection of method. And
it is “quality,” which Whistler’s work has
superlatively, in this it approaches the work
of the old masters, his method was more
similar to the old traditions than to the
systems current in the modern schools.
And part of the remote beauty, the flavour
of distinction which belongs to old canvases
is simulated by Whistler almost unconsciously.

Mr. Mortimer Mempes has put on record
the painful care with which Whistler printed
his etchings. The Count de Montesquieu,
whom Whistler painted, tells of the “sixteen
agonising sittings,” whilst “by some[Pg 18]
fifty strokes a sitting the portrait advanced.
The finished work consisted of some hundred
accents, of which none was corrected
or painted out.” From such glimpses of
his working days we are enabled to appreciate
that desire for perfection which was a
ruling factor both in his life and work. In
art he deliberately limited himself for the
sake of attaining in some one or two phases
absolute perfection; he strained away from
his pictures everything but the quintessence
of the vision and the mood. He worked by
gradually refining and refining upon an
eager start, or else by starting with great
deliberation and proceeding very slowly with
the brush balanced before every touch while
he waited for it to receive its next inspiration.
So he was always working at the
top of his powers. Those pleasant mornings
in the studio in which the Academy-picture
painter works with pipe in mouth contentedly,
but more than half-mechanically,
upon some corner of his picture were not
for him. Full inspiration came to him as
he took up his brushes, and the moment it
flagged he laid them aside. So that in his[Pg 19]
art there is not a brush mark or a line
without feeling. His inspiration, however,
was not of the yeasty foaming order of
which mad poets speak, but spontaneity.
Spontaneous action is inspired. And this is
why his work looks always as if it was done
with grace and ease, and why it seemed so
careless to Ruskin. However, such winged
moments will not follow each other all day
long, and though they take flight very
quickly, work at this high pressure—with
every touch as fresh as the first one—cannot
be indefinitely prolonged. Whistler’s friends
regretted that he should suddenly leave his
work for the sake of a garden party. It is
more likely that he turned to go to the
garden party just when the right moment
came for him to leave off working and so
conserve the result, for it is the tendency
of the artist in inspired moments to waste
his inspiration by allowing the work of one
moment to undo what was done in the one
before it.[Pg 20]

II

The wit of Whistler was not like the wit,
let us say, of Sheridan, but it was the result
of intense personal convictions as to the
lines along which art and life move together.
About one or two things in this world
Whistler was overflowing with wisdom, and
upon those things his conversation was
always salt, his sayings falling with a pretty
and a startling sound. He talked about
things which were much in advance of his
day. His was not the wisdom of the past
which always sounds impressive, but the
greater wisdom of the future, of instincts
not yet established upon the printed page.
By these he formed his convictions as he
went, referring all his experiences, chiefly
artistic ones, back to his intelligence, which
as we know was an extraordinarily acute
one. Other people’s ideas, old-fashioned
ones, coming into collision with the intensity
of his own, produced sparks on every occasion,
and this without over anxiety to be
brilliant on Whistler’s part. It is so with
original minds.[Pg 21]

There is a difference between artistic
work and other sorts of work. Outside the
arts, in other professions, what a man’s
personality is, whilst it affects the way his
work is accomplished, does not alter the
nature of that work. Immediately, however,
the work becomes of such a nature that
the word art can be inserted, then the personal
equation is before everything to be
considered. “Temperament” meets us at
every turn, in the touch of brush to paper,
in the arrangement of the design, in the
subject chosen, in the way of viewing that
subject, in the shape that subject takes.
Also we can be sure that a picture suffers
by every quality, either of mere craftsmanship
or surface finish, that tends to obscure
individuality of touch and feeling. Outside
the arts every job must be finished, if not
by one man then by another. A half-built
motor-car means nothing to any one, it
cannot be regarded as a mode of personal
expression, but in art it is otherwise, no one
can finish a work for some one else, and as
Whistler pointed out, “A work of art is
finished from the beginning.” In such a[Pg 22]
saying Whistler showed the depths from
which his wit spilt over. His intuitiveness
in certain directions was almost uncanny,
taking the place of a profound scholarship,
and this saying is a case in point. For
however fragmentary a work of art is, if it
contains only a first impulse, so far as the
work there is sufficient to explain and communicate
that impulse, it is finished—finish
can do no more. And of course this is not
to say that art should never pass such an
early stage. All this depends on what the
artist has to say: sometimes we have to
value above everything the completeness,
the perfection of surface with which a picture
has been brought to an end. Whistler’s
paradox sums up the fact that finish should
be inextricably bound up with the method
of working and the personal touch never
be so “played out” that resort is made
to that appearance of finish which can
always be obtained by labour descending
to a mechanical character. This may sound
rather technical, but it is not so really.

Here we may remark on all that is due
to Whistler, as to Manet, for disturbing the
[Pg 25]
dust in the Academies, at one time so thick
that the great difference between art and
mere craft seemed almost totally obscured.

III

Whistler’s life is at present a skeleton
of dates on which this incident occurred or
that, and at which the most notable of his
pictures appeared. And this must remain
so until an authoritative biography of the
painter has appeared. With whom the
authority rests was made the subject of a
recent Law Case. Till such a work appears
we can only deal with his art and with the
Whistler legend, the impressions, recorded
and otherwise, he left upon those who were
brought into contact with him.[1] These are
strangely at variance—some having only
met him cloaked from head to foot in the
species of misunderstanding in which, as
he explained, in surroundings of antagonism
he had wrapped himself for protection;
others remembering him for his kindliness
and his old-fashioned courtesy.

Permitting himself sufficient popularity
with a few to be called “Jimmy,” Whistler’s
full name was James Abbot McNeill
Whistler, and the initials gradually twisted
themselves into that strange arabesque with
a wavy tail which he called a butterfly and
with which he signed his pictures and his
letters. Born on 11th July 1834 at Lowell,
Massachusetts, he was the descendant of an
Irish branch of an old English family, and
in his seventeenth year he entered the
West Point Military Academy, where after
making his first etchings on the margins of
the map which he should have been engraving,
he decided to devote his life to art. He
was twenty when he left America and he
never returned to it, so that as far as
America is concerned infancy can be pleaded.
America has since bought more than her
share of the fruits of his genius, finding in
this open-handed way charming expression
for her envy. He went to Paris to study
art, where he was gay, and attracted attention
to himself by the enjoyable way in
which he spent his time. It was not until
he was twenty-five that he arrived in[Pg 27]
London, and a little later moving to Chelsea
commenced work in earnest.

A charming picture suggests itself of
the painter escorting his aged mother
every Sunday morning to the door of
Chelsea old church, as was his habit,
bowing to her as she enters and hastening
back to the studio to be witty with
his Sunday friends.

Whistler’s first important picture, “At
the Piano,” issued from Chelsea. It was
hung in the Academy in 1860 and was
bought by a member of the Academy. He
followed the next year with “La Mère Gerard,”
which belongs to Mr. Swinburne. He sent
a picture called “The White Girl,” to the
Salon of 1863. It was, however, rejected.
It was then hung at the collection called the
“Salon des Refusés,” an exhibition held as
a protest against the Academic prejudices
which still marked the Salon. There it met
with an enthusiastic reception which set
Whistler off on his career of defiance. In
1865 the painter went to Valparaiso for a
visit, from which resulted the beautiful Valparaiso
nocturnes. Back again in Chelsea,[Pg 28]
he devoted himself to the river there. He
was then living in a house in Lindsay Row.
At this time he was greatly affected by
Japanese art, and one or two pictures show
curious attempts to adapt scenes of the
life of the West to the Eastern conventions.
This phase of his art was beautiful, but he
passed it on the way to work of greater
sincerity, and more clearly the outcome of
his own vision. In 1874 the first exhibition
of Whistler’s work was held at a Gallery
in Pall Mall, containing among other things
“The Painter’s Mother,” “Thomas Carlyle,”
and “Miss Alexander.” It is interesting that
the Piano Picture, painted just as he emerged
from his studentship, is of the flower of
his art; he did things afterwards of great
significance, and did them quite differently,
but the Piano Picture does not seem a first
work preparing his art for future perfection,
it is so perfect in itself. And here perhaps
we may observe another fact in connection
with Whistler, that in the last days of his
life he painted with the same genius for the
beautiful as at the beginning; none of that
deterioration had set in, which so often comes[Pg 29]
in the wake of flattery and belated public
esteem. He was never betrayed by success
into over, or too rapid, production. He
never succumbed to the delight of anticipating
a cheque by every post instead of
bills. He found no difficulty in declining the
most tempting offers. Well, work that is
held thus sacred by its own creator, should
tempt people to search for all that made it
seem so valuable to him. Whistler had an
intense dislike of parting with his work.
When a picture was bought from him he
was like a man selling his child. Sometimes
he would see somewhere a picture he had
painted, he would borrow it to add to or improve
it, but he would keep it and live with
it and gradually forget all about its possessor.
Whatever qualms attacked his conscience
for this procrastination, it was no part of
his genius to confess, instead he would say
“For years, this dear person has had the
privilege of living with that masterpiece—what
more do they want?” At Whistler’s
death, however, it was found that the circumstances
under which a picture had at
any time been borrowed were methodically[Pg 30]
entered up, with minute directions as to
the return of one or two pictures, borrowed
thus, that were in his studio when he
died.

In Chelsea, Rossetti and Whistler were
good friends, they shared a love of blue
china, in fact inventing the modern taste for
certain kinds, especially for what they called
“Long Elizas,” a specimen upon which slim
figures are painted,—“Lange leises”—tall
damsels—as they were called by the Dutch.
One supposes that it is through Rossetti that
he came into contact with Swinburne, who
was inspired to write the poem called
“Before the Mirror,” by Whistler’s picture
“The White Girl,” and of which some of the
verses were printed after the title in the
catalogue of the Royal Academy Exhibition.
The first verse in itself suggests a scheme
of white:—

“White rose in red rose-garden
Is not so white;
Snowdrops that plead for pardon
And pine for fright
Because the hard East blows
Over their maiden rows
Grow not as this face grows from pale to bright.”
[Pg 31]

The poem was printed on gilded paper
on the frame; this was however removed on
the picture going to the Academy, and in
the catalogue the two following verses were
printed after the title:—

“Come snow, come wind or thunder
High up in air,
I watch my face, and wonder
At my bright hair;
Nought else exalts or grieves
The rose at heart, that heaves
With love of her own leaves and lips that pair.

“I cannot tell what pleasure
Or what pains were;
What pale new loves and treasures
New years will bear:
What beam will fall, what shower,
What grief or joy for dower;
But one thing knows the flower; the flower is fair.”

Later on, Swinburne did not allow the
Ten o’clock lecture to go unchallenged, and
he subjects its glittering rhetoric to a not
unkind but cold analysis which, however,
Whistler has the grace to print with marginal
reflections in “The Gentle Art of
Making Enemies,” the book which contains
the paradoxes which reflect so well his[Pg 32]
powers as a thinker. It is doubtful whether
Whistler in kinder circumstances would
have produced his brilliant theories. The
irritation caused by misconception, the necessity
of justifying even his limitations to
a world which was apparently prepared to
consider nothing else about him at one time—these
were the wine-press of his eloquence.
He disliked the rôle of teacher and apologised
for it at the beginning of his “Ten
o’clock,” and when, in later life, following
the fashion, he started a school, he relied
upon the example of his own methods of
setting the palette rather than upon precept,
with a little banter to keep good humour in
his class-room. A young lady protested “I
am sure that I am painting what I see.”
“Yes!” answered her master, “but the
shock will come when you see what you are
painting.” A student at the short-lived
Académie-Whistler has written that merely
attempting to initiate them into some purely
technical matters of art, he succeeded—almost
without his or their volition—in
transforming their ways of seeing! “Not
alone in a refining of the actual physical
[Pg 35]
sight of things, not only in a quickening of
the desire for a choicer, rarer vision of the
world about them, but in opening the door
to a more intimate sympathy with the
masters of the past.”

The thing that strikes one in reading
“The Gentle Art” is how badly those who
entered into combat with its author came
off in the end, some of them in what they
consider their witty replies committing suicide
so far as their reputation as authorities
on art went. Notable is the case of the
critic of The Times, replying “I ought to
remember your penning, like your painting,
belongs to the region of chaff.” We have
indicated the source of Whistler’s success
as a wit—at that source we find the reason
why he always scored when talking about
painting. He is playing something more
than a game of repartee. His best replies are
crystallised from his inner knowledge. In
them we get bit by bit the revelation which
he had received as a genius in his craft.

It was the force of his personality that
obtained for Whistler’s evasive art such recognition
in his lifetime as in the natural[Pg 36]
course only falls to fine painters of the obvious,
whom every one delights to honour.
He had said that “art is for artists,” and
it is true that the perfection of his own art
is the pleasure of those who study it. It
reached heights of lyrical expression where
life in completeness has not yet been represented
in painting; reached them perhaps
because so lightly freighted with elementary
human feeling. His work so often leaves
us cold, and we turn seeking for art mixed
further with the fire of life and alight with
everyday desire.

But nature showed many things to this
her appreciator—I write, her intimate friend.
As a moth which goes out from the artificial
atmosphere of a London room into the blue
night, I think of the painter of the nocturnes—yet
always as a lover of nature, never more
so than when his subject is the sea. For
he has a greater consciousness of the salt
wet air than any other sea painter, of the
veil behind which all ships are sailing and
through which the waves break, the atmosphere
which descends so mystically and invisibly
and yet which if not accounted for[Pg 37]
in a canvas leaves ships with their sails
set in a vacuum and the waves as if they
were crested with candle-grease. Is it not
absence of this atmosphere which has
tortured us on so many occasions when with
everything quite real a picture has not
brought us pleasure. Pleasure comes to us
always with reality in art, and the end of art
is realism. All is real even around a mystic,
though his thoughts are out of our sight.
Whistler was not a mystic but above everything
he wished to suggest the atmosphere
which is invisible except for its visible
effect, and I cannot help thinking his vision
essentially abstract.

He did not paint subject pictures. To
make our meaning quite clear, let us say
such pictures as Frith’s, or better still, as
Hogarth’s in which we have the extreme.
The art of Hogarth moved upon a plane
lower down, but there it had a strength unknown
to Whistler, a careless and lavish inspiration
of life itself. He had to find speech
for all sorts of things in his art, beauty
was but one of these, creeping in less as
a deliberate aim than as the accident of a[Pg 38]
nature artistic. Whistler in painting desired
to express nothing but his sense of
beauty. For the rest of his nature, he found
expression altogether outside his art in enthusiasm
for life itself, its combats, difficulties,
and its opportunities for saying brilliant
things at dinner. His dinner conversation, I
have been told, was like the abstract methods
of his etching, always cryptic, full of suggestion,—wonderful
conversation, full of short
ejaculations which carried your imagination
from one point to another with hints that
seemed to throw open doorways into passages
of thought leading right behind things.

He had a remarkable regard for purity
of speech, as became the painter of such
spiritual types of womanhood. It would
seem that women liked him, and readily
apprehended in his art his sensitive view
of life. At table he drank but little and was
a slender eater. When alone he would
sometimes forget all about his meals, or eat
scarcely anything; in later years, feeling the
necessity of taking care of himself he would
guard against his indifference by always
seeking companionship when away from
[Pg 41]
his house. His nervous disposition forced
him to content himself with little sleep, his
active brain keeping him awake conceiving
witticisms and planning the battle for the
morrow.

IV

It would be incomplete in any memoir
of Whistler to omit the most thrilling battle
of his life. To all adventurers there comes
at last the event which knocks all their
venturousness out of them or is the beginning
of a triumphant way. Whistler had
been before the footlights a long time, but
it was his contact with Professor Ruskin
which brought him into the full lime-light,
which he was so much prepared to enjoy.
Ruskin paid him the only tribute strength
can pay to strength when it is not on the
same side—with a prophetic instinct that as
regards picture exhibitions Whistler’s art
was the sign of a coming, and licentious,
freedom from the old rules of the game.
He saw in Whistler’s work the end of
old fair things, the laws of those old things[Pg 42]
all set aside. In reading the so well-known
criticism of Whistler one has a feeling that
after all Ruskin has only half expressed his
feelings in it—however it resulted in the
famous libel action. Whistler received one
farthing damages, which sum he afterwards
magnanimously returned to his eminent
critic, as his contribution towards the subscription
set on foot to pay Ruskin’s legal
expenses.

Ruskin’s criticism was as follows:—

The case came on in the Court of Exchequer
Division before Baron Huddleston[Pg 43]
on November 15, 1878, Whistler claiming
£1000 damages. “The labours of two days,
then, is that for which you ask two hundred
guineas!” asked the Attorney-General representing
Ruskin. “No,” replied Whistler,
“I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.”
“Do you think now that you could make
me see the beauty of that picture?” asked
the Attorney-General. “No!” he replied.
“Do you know I fear it would be as hopeless
as for the musician to pour his notes
into the ear of a deaf man.” In resuming
the Attorney-General said: “Let them examine
the nocturne in blue and silver, said
to represent Battersea Bridge. What was
that structure in the middle? Was it a
telescope or a fire-escape? Was it like
Battersea Bridge? What were the figures
at the top of the bridge? And if they were
horses and carts, how in the name of fortune
were they to get off?”

Mr. W. P. Frith, R.A., was examined and
in his evidence said that in his opinion Mr.
Whistler’s pictures were not serious works
of art. In the margin of the account of the
trial in “The Gentle Art” Whistler quotes[Pg 44]
from that painter’s “It was just a toss up
whether I became an artist or an auctioneer,”
and adds, “He must have tossed up.”
There was a time when policemen had to
keep the crowd away from Frith’s Margate
Sands. There was a time when Whistler’s
pictures were hissed when they were put on
the easel at Christie’s? If the attitude towards
these so different kinds of art is
changed, it is the resolution Whistler
showed in life as well as in his art that
changed it. And have we not in the above
interchange of points of view at the
court the whole vexed question—the issue
around which the battle of Whistler’s life
always raged? Whistler explained to the
court that his whole scheme was only to
bring about a certain harmony of colour.
He tried to dispel the illusion that the
painter’s craft forms itself upon the desire
to communicate a story. It may be so with
the literary craft, but there is no life in
the drawing or painting that is not inspired
by the delight of the artist in the mere outside
of things. Where there is the expression
of that delight, there may be the expression[Pg 45]
of much beside, of the spiritual meanings
behind all beauty—though Whistler did not
take this flight in his reply. He himself
tried to limit the meaning of art almost as
narrowly as Ruskin. He had this advantage
over Ruskin, that whatever he said about
painting was from the inside knowledge of
his genius in painting. Ruskin’s genius was
always approaching that subject from the
outside. We could not on any account dispense
with what was said at any time by
either of them. It was impossible for them
to see each other except as enemies across
a wide gulf, all speech with each other
drowned by the rapids of misunderstanding.
The gulf is nearly bridged. In viewing art
in its relation to life no one wrote more profoundly
than Ruskin, but he failed in knowledge
of the beautiful and inner mysterious
delights of the craft of painting. Whilst
exalting the mission of painting, he degraded
its craft, he seemed to fail in appreciation of
the fact that at its highest this is as mystical
as inspired—and as unaccountable as the
craft in Shelley’s lyrics. The number of rules
he laid down, the gospels he preached upon[Pg 46]
them reveal always the irritating scholiast
and pedant. How eloquently Whistler expresses
his irritation in the Ten o’clock
lecture!

In his account of the trial in “The
Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” Whistler
fills the margin with quotations from Ruskin
so dexterously opposed to the matter in
hand as seemingly to discredit for ever
Ruskin’s writings upon art and the mode of
thought therein. But at the bidding of
Whistler, and those who boast his opinions
second hand, we cannot abjure all this order
of thought. One passage which Whistler
quotes: “Vulgarity, dulness, or impiety will
indeed always express themselves throughout,
in brown and grey as in Rembrandt”
is not without its bearing on his own art—which
has since then quite altered the
meaning of the word grey. And despite the
perhaps unfortunate naming of Rembrandt
one divines that Ruskin is here speaking in
the light of the highest intuitive knowledge.

It must be remembered that in prose,
which may accept its motif from anything,
from art if it likes, Ruskin could sometimes[Pg 47]
lose himself as completely as Whistler often
did in the beauty of his own art. And with
the waters of beauty closing over their heads,
one was as deaf and blind as the other.
That trial was Ruskin’s Waterloo. If there
is one thing that would make me doubt
that Whistler was a great man, it is the fact
that he never had a Waterloo, but perhaps
that is reserved for those who have been successful
right from the beginning. The light
air with which Whistler carried his own
early troubles is misleading as to their extent.
Without the thread of coarser stuff
that crossed his otherwise over-refined
nature some such sadness of fate might
have awaited him as awaited Meryon, the
French etcher, for possessing motives too
far in advance of those accepted by his time.
For really at first no one hardly seemed to
have understood the delicate order of things
that Whistler was trying to do, especially
in his later etchings, in which everything
is a symbol counting upon our imagination;
everything a pleasure to its creator and
nothing a labour; every line one of nervous
impulse, the whole etching an inspiration of[Pg 48]
such impulsive threads. In what loneliness
he must have possessed his abnormal delicacy
of perception. He hugged to himself the
delusion that a knowledge of his craft enabled
artists to understand him—but it is
common for artists of abundant gifts not to
have the necessary refinement of sense, and
after all artists are not so numerous that
these appreciators will be many. But in
the wide world outside the studios there are
many people thus delicately attuned, their
numbers to be increased when Whistler in
his subtlety of vision is less ahead of the
world in point of evolution. He brought
recognition to himself before his time by
strident challenges, aggressive at every point
and scornful—as they could not have been
had the real nature of his superiority dawned
on him at the first. In the first Thames
etchings he has not received his revelation:
they do not show his hand quite so conscientiously,
nervously, awaiting its inspiration
for every movement.

Nothing can make us realise the great
significance of the Whistler influence in art
more than the contrast between the esteem
[Pg 51]
in which his etchings are now held and the
early criticisms of them which he collected
and scornfully embodied in his book. These
are indeed the most depressing reading—and
Whistler’s quaint termination to those
pages, “they roar all like bears,” does very
aptly express the feeling of desolation that
must overcome any one who appreciates the
spirit of his etchings. When praise is forthcoming
it is only for the early etchings at
the expense of those later ones in which he
conceived such an inspired use of the needle.
By the criticisms in this book we know the
exhausting struggle and how right it was
that a life, the first half of which had been
spent thus, should have no “Waterloo,” but
end with rest—and with honour, accorded
to this “Merlin,” so evidently great, if only
a few knew why.

It was 1878, the year of the Ruskin trial,
that he started working in lithography as
a medium, being initiated into the technicalities
by Mr. Thomas Way. In the “Fair
Women” Exhibition held by The International
Society, which is open whilst I write,
there are some lithographs by Whistler,[Pg 52]
which suggest purity of type and the charm
of beautiful womanhood in a manner that
puts to flight the claims of many a famous
canvas in the gallery. It is the most delicate
of all mediums; it suited his touch and the
sensitive order of his perceptions.

After the Ruskin case Whistler left
London for Venice for about a year; upon
his return he exhibited at the Fine Art
Society the first series of Venice pastels,
and a little later at the same gallery fifty-three
pastels of Venice. He also held exhibitions
at the Dowdeswell Gallery in 1883,
Etchings in 1884 in “Notes, Harmonies,
and Nocturnes,” in 1886 all the time still continuing
to exhibit at the Grosvenor Gallery
some of his most famous portraits, nocturnes,
and marines.

V

On 31st December 1884 the following
amusing letter appeared in The World,
signed with the well-known butterfly.
“Atlas, look at this! It has been culled
from the Plumber and Decorator, of all[Pg 53]
insidious prints, and forwarded to me by
the untiring people who daily supply me
with the thinkings of my critics. Read,
Atlas, and let me execute myself. ‘The
“Peacock” drawing-room of a well-to-do
shipowner, of Liverpool, at Prince’s Gate,
London, is hand painted, representing the
noble bird with wings expanded, painted
by an Associate of the Royal Academy, at
a cost of £7000, and fortunate in claiming
his daughter as his bride, and is one of
the finest specimens of high art in decoration
in the kingdom. The mansion is of
modern construction.’

“He is not guilty, this honest Associate!
It was I, Atlas, who did this thing—alone
I did it—I ‘hand painted’ this room in
the ‘mansion of modern construction.’
Woe is me! I secreted, in the provincial
shipowner’s home, the ‘noble bird with
wings expanded’—I perpetrated in harmless
obscurity, ‘the finest specimen of
high-art decoration’—and the Academy is
without stain in the art of its member.
Also the immaculate character of that
Royal body has been falsely impugned by[Pg 54]
this wicked Plumber! Mark these things,
Atlas, that justice may be done, the innocent
spared, and history cleanly written.”

Whistler’s picture “La Princesse du
Pays de la Porcelaine” had been hung by
Mr. F. R. Leyland in his mansion at Prince’s
Gate, and Whistler could not reconcile himself
to its appearance against the valuable
Spanish leather on the walls. He was to
correct this by treating a little of the wall;
meanwhile Mr. Leyland went down into
the country. When he returned it was to
find that Whistler was painting over the
whole of the room. Much money had
already been spent on the original leather
scheme, and Whistler had quickly effaced
all appearance of its intrinsic worth, but he
was in the rapid process of creating the
famous Peacock Room. Dissension took
place as to terms under the circumstances,
and Whistler finished the room with a
panel of two peacocks fighting, emblematic
of the quarrel. Mr. Leyland was considered
one of the most discriminating patrons of
his time. Just previous to the above events
the interior of the house had been recon[Pg 55]structed
and decorated in accordance with
designs by Norman Shaw and Jekyll. The
leather had been the latter architect’s
scheme for the room where the “Princesse
du Pays de la Porcelaine” was hung. The
walls were fitted with shelves designed for
the display of blue china. Whistler painted
all the window shutters with gold peacocks
on a blue ground, and a panel at the end
of the room, which had been reserved for
a picture commissioned from him; into this
panel he put the fighting peacocks, whose
eyes were real jewels, the one a ruby and
the other a diamond. It was found possible
to move all the decoration without injury
and some time after the original owner’s
death this was done, the purchaser taking
it to America. Before it left England it
was set up temporarily for the purpose of
its exhibition at Messrs. Obach’s Gallery.
The picture “The Princesse du Pays de
la Porcelaine,” the key-note, was however
missing from the scheme, having found
another purchaser.

The room was the finest example of a less
known side of Whistler’s art. His designs[Pg 56]
sprung straight from himself, they had no
connection with any European tradition. He
accepted in their entirety the conventions,
the arrangements and devices of the Japanese
designers. Yet his designs could not have
been created by any of the great artists of
Japan. There is too much vitality about
them, and these peacocks which belong to a
pattern and are conventionalised to the last
degree, have a more startling reality than
any peacock painted in a modern picture.
No one knows how Whistler came to know
so much about peacocks. A duffer can paint
the bird until he comes to the neck—and then
we have to turn to photographs for the reality
that gives us pleasure, it eludes all modern
genius. So for the most part, fortunately,
peacocks are left severely alone. The dancing
of the première danseuse at the Empire,
perfected with ardent years of study, is a
less recondite theme of movement than a
peacock raising its head. It is a delight,
to all those who love it, beside which all
dancing pales, more gracious and stately in
movement than the accumulated grace of
many women. That is how it must always[Pg 57]
seem to those who really know it. Whistler
arrived at perfect understanding by the instinctive
route on which he never went
astray.

After the peacock-room incident the
wildest legends were afloat about the whole
matter, one of them that the architect had
been driven mad by the sight of what had
happened to his leather, and that later he
was found at home painting peacocks blue
and gold all over the floor.

VI

In 1885 Whistler’s lecture on art was
given in London, Oxford, and Cambridge; to
suit the convenience of Londoners who liked
to linger over dinner, he fixed the hour of
delivery rather later than usual. This was
the famous “Ten o’clock lecture”—so vague
and shadowy in its facts at the beginning,
so brilliant at the end, and dispelling the
æsthetic fog in which the æsthetes elected
to dwell. It is significant of the slight
heed given to Whistler’s real beliefs that[Pg 58]
characteristics of his appearance were at
one time satirised in W. S. Gilbert’s “Bunthorne,”
confusing him as was common with
the æsthetic craze. In “The Ten o’clock”
his scorn is eloquent enough of the weird
cult “in which,” as he says, “all instinct
for attractiveness—all freshness and sparkle—all
woman’s winsomeness—is to give way
to a strange vocation for the unlovely—and
this desecration in the name of the Graces!”
But for all that the principles which governed
in L’art nouveau which followed and may be
said to be a part of the movement, are
prominent in those two “arrangements” of
his own, the portrait of Carlyle and the portrait
of his Mother.

No doubt the fame of an objet d’art can
last for ever with connoisseurs, if rare enough
in itself and rare in the skill displayed, and
many a painting is destined to live on these
same grounds. But there is a destiny too
for the spirit of a picture of which all this
valuable perfection is but the outward shrine.
Where human experience rises to intensity
of expression in art it is born into life anew
and less perishably. It is thus that the
[Pg 61]
picture of Whistler’s Mother is by common
consent enthroned above the level of criticism,
what we say for and against it being only
as water lapping at the foot of a cliff. Incorporate
with the traditions of a race it is
acknowledged a classic, and of a classic
one may speak as one does of life, with
freedom as to how it affects oneself. I
have challenged the effect of this picture
upon myself. The trail of the age seems
over it, the self-consciousness which is like
a blight upon modern arts and crafts.
Instead of its figure being painted in some
such accidental contact with its environment
as would naturally occur, we have an
arrangement. In rearranging things thus
for itself, art is at least one remove farther
away from things as they are, and as things
as they are reflect the influences that
brought them together, art must come
closer to life by the interpretation of this reflection
than by its alteration. There must
be an arrangement in every picture, but
the improbability of this one, outside of a
studio, spoils the picture for me. The figure
is placed in position as we should place a[Pg 62]
piano. It is not very likely that a lady
would sit at right angles to the wall with
no fire in front of her, no work-table, no
books. These thoughts rise unbidden when
I look at the picture—but Whistler begs
us in a printed letter to consider it as an
arrangement. Incidentally, he says it is
interesting to him as a portrait of his
mother. Yet he misunderstood when he
thought the artist’s rights extended beyond
his creations to the attitude in which one
should approach them, and the picture is
famous for the beautiful rendering of the
lady and to us only incidentally interesting
as an arrangement. One does not escape
the music of the outline of the figure in the
picture, the balance of all parts of the
design, the refreshing convention in comparison
with other conventions. Only conventions
perhaps are best left for portraits
where the traditional environment connected
with the high social status or office of the
sitter, supplants in our imagination the
more everyday aspect of their life. The unnaturalness
of the photographer’s art may
require concessions from every one; though[Pg 63]
even here as in painting, the art which
conceals art must save the situation; and
Whistler managed this gracefully enough
in all his other portraits.

It was Gainsborough who was haunted
by the smile of a woman. It is Whistler
who represents her movement as she turns
into the room, his art seeming to show a
consciousness that the body that turns thus,
the grace of the clothes, are but a temporary
habitation of swiftly passing spirit.

In his early piano picture the trembling
white dress of the child surprises him into
the representation of stuff itself; later his
art passes to an almost ecstatic obliviousness
to the quality of things themselves and he
surrenders the representation of their surface
qualities for a fluid, musical, all-embracing
quality of paint in which the artist can
render his theme as a virtuoso, ever striving
to overtake some almost impossible inflection
of tone. And as his art becomes thus
abstract, as it assumes such a mission as
music, he finds musical terms for the names
of his pictures to give the public the clue.

His water-colours are executed with an[Pg 64]
extremely pleasant touch of brush to paper
in which he himself delighted, and here, as
also in the case of etching, he made the
most of the particular qualities of the medium
and as ever was careful not to out-step the
limitations which an appreciation of those
qualities imposed. They do not do much
more than register the incident of colour
which interested him in any particular scene.
It was to register his pleasure in that, rather
than to make a full record of surrounding
country that he made his water-colours, and
the spectator will understand them only by
the responsiveness of his imagination to
artistic suggestion.

By the process of what is termed in the
language of art “suggestion” (that is, interpretation
by thoughtful, economical, and expressive
touches instead of a photographic
imitation) all merely mechanical labour is
eliminated and there is a consequent spiritualising
of the whole method by which
the artist makes his communication to our
imagination. He infers that we have advanced
beyond an understanding merely of
the capital letters of art, and that this auto[Pg 65]graphic
handling of the brush or etching
needle is as intelligible to us as the characteristic
penmanship of our friends and as
charming.

VII

The second great public event in Whistler’s
career was his election in 1886 to the
Presidency of the Society of British Artists
in Suffolk Street, which made exciting
history at the time. Whistler was just one
of those people who want everything in the
world arranged after some secret pattern of
their own. They make the best reformers.
But what could be a more strange spectacle
than the revolutionary Whistler in the
presidential chair of the staidest of art
societies? The desire for advertisement
overcoming the scruples of older members,
Whistler’s election as a member took place
just before their winter exhibition in 1884.
The Times of the 3rd of December 1884
recorded the fact that artistic society was
startled by the news that this most wayward
of painters had found a home among[Pg 66]
the men of Suffolk Street—of all people in
the world.

His humour did not forsake him in this
new environment. Mr. Horseley, R.A., lecturing
before the Church Congress, attacked
the nude models, especially and in particular
at the Royal Academy Schools. Shortly
after this, in sending a pastel of a nude to
the Society of British Artists, Whistler
attached the words “Horseley soit qui mal
y pense,” and was only prevailed upon to
remove them by the fear of older members
that the attack upon an Academician might
lead up to a libel case with the Royal
Academy. The Royal Academy students at
the time used to drape the legs of the chairs
and tables when Mr. Horseley visited the
schools. That was in 1885. It was the following
year that Whistler was elected President
of the Society for which he got a Royal Charter,
and to which by his methods—as President—he
brought fame for ever as the R.B.A.

Many of the electors who had supported
his membership had concluded that he was
not likely to take much part in the workings
of the Society. However, he came to[Pg 67]
the meetings and to their surprise took an
interest in the proceedings, proffering advice,
intruding new ideas, not often welcomed
by the older artists. He invited some of
the members to one of his famous Sunday
breakfasts at his studio in Tite Street,
and regaled them with his theories of art.
They were influenced by his personality
and the character of the elections altered,
men of the newer movements were elected,
and they soon formed a small but very
energetic and loyal group around Whistler,
finally acquiring sufficient power to elect
him as we have shown into the President’s
chair. After that the meetings of the
Society were exhilarating in the extreme,
and Whistler talked with extreme brilliance
to the members, and somehow got his way
until their Gallery was hung with one line of
pictures upon a carefully chosen background.

But the opposition became too strong
from members who wished to run the exhibition
on its old lines, and certainly the
funds were suffering from these very high
ideals. His opponents “brought up the
maimed, the halt, and the blind,” “all except[Pg 68]
corpses, don’t you know!” as Whistler put
it, the oldest members, the fact of whose
membership had up to that time lingered
only perhaps in their own memory, and thus
effected his out-voting at the next election.
Whistler congratulated them, for, as he explained,
no longer was the right man in the
wrong place. “You see,” he said, referring
to the group of his followers who resigned
with him, “the ‘Artists’ have come out and
the ‘British’ remain.”

It was the first time in England that pictures
had been so artistically arranged. No
pictures were badly hung, no member had
anything to complain of as far as that
went. But they were disturbed at the loss
of probable sales which they calculated the
empty spaces on the walls might be taken
to signify.

On the night of the election which ended
the Whistler dynasty there was great excitement,
and the younger members let off
steam by playing in the passages during the
counting of the votes.

The Society had come into existence
with aims of its own. An order of art was
[Pg 71]
represented which had to be represented
somewhere. A great amount of capable
work for which the Academy had not room
was on view here, representative of the
everyday activity of London studio life. It
was amusing to think of Whistler as the
President of this Society as it was constituted
in those days—and absurd. He could
have nothing in common with its homely
aims. But it was an advertisement for the
Society and for him, he probably did not
share the illusions of his followers that he
was in the right place.

When in after years the leaders of the
modern movement formed themselves into
the International Society, in 1898, through
the organisation of Mr. Francis Howard, it
was inevitable and natural that Whistler
should be the President, but at the British
Artists it was simply a case of cuckoo and
the sparrow’s nest. With his success, the
original element of the Society must have
gone elsewhere leaving him in possession of
their building.

It was fitting that Sir Joshua Reynolds
should be the President of an Academy whose[Pg 72]
theories he embraced but exposited with
greater genius. But Whistler’s theories had
no relation whatever to the body of which
he was thus made the head, and he did
not surpass in everything as Sir Joshua;
the significance of his genius resting rather
with the fact that it is epochal.

However, as all this affair happened just
at the time when paradox was coming into
vogue, there was that much only about it
that was fitting. After these events Whistler,
who was invited on to the Jury of the “New
Salon” then forming, left for Paris.

VIII

In 1892 the painter returned and held an
exhibition at the Goupil Gallery, and from
the date of this exhibition everything altered
in his favour. For years he had found it impossible
to sell his pictures except to a circle
of wealthy patrons. The prejudice excited
against his work after the issue with Ruskin
had closed all other markets for him. He
had remained the “impudent coxcomb” in[Pg 73]
so many people’s minds, and his challenge
to the omnipotence of Ruskin had not been
forgiven him. A ban was upon his works.
He said that for nearly twenty years the
Ruskin case affected his sales. But fame
he desired more ardently, and this he had,—like
Prometheus,—and of a kind that would
keep till the day came when it could be
changed for a quantity of money. When the
Goupil show was open he found this day
was already upon him, and the Americans
coming over, began to buy his works, and
early acquaintances who had acquired them
at small prices, themselves sold out, of course
much too soon. That was the time when a
purchase for the nation should have been
made.

Later he toured through France and
Brittany until he settled again in Paris in
the Rue de Bac, having married Mrs. E.
W. Godwin, the widow of the eminent architect,
builder of the White House in Tite
Street, Chelsea, which had been Whistler’s
former home. In the old days in the White
House he had furnished one or two rooms
elaborately, and others, perhaps for lack of[Pg 74]
funds to make them perfect, hardly at all.
It was then he collected the blue china
with Rossetti as a friendly rival. This was
the house in which he instituted his famous
Sunday breakfasts, and to which everybody
used to come who was distinguished. The
breakfast-time was twelve o’clock, cook
permitting. On one occasion, through some
untoward circumstances in the kitchen, it
was not placed upon the table until nearly
three. Mr. Henry James was there that
day, and has been heard to speak of it
since, and how he took a walk to bring
him nearer breakfast-time. But all this
had to be given up after the expenses of
the Ruskin Trial, and the blue china was
“knocked down.” Whistler wrote a characteristic
letter to The World in 1883
upon the alterations then being made in
the White House by his successor, one of
“Messieurs les Ennemis” a critic. In those
days his wit and vivacity had already made
him a host of acquaintances, and distinguished
men were glad to count him as
one among themselves,—whilst reserving
their opinion on his painting. But now[Pg 75]
things were very different, and he was referred
to as “the Master”—and the house
in the Rue de Bac thoroughly furnished,
partly from designs made by his gifted wife.

He came to England in 1895 and painted
at Lyme Regis, painting “The Little Rose
of Lyme Regis”—which shows that his art
is purely English—though he had said that
one might as well talk of English Mathematics
as of English Art. For in this little
girl’s face something there is that is only
found in English Art. She descends directly
from the beautiful tradition of Walker and
Sir John Millais. In December he exhibited
a collection of lithographs at the Fine Art
Society’s Gallery. He was again in London
in 1896. About this time he painted upon a
small scale an almost full-length portrait
called “The Philosopher.” It was of the
artist, Holloway. Holloway died on the 5th
March 1897, and in the sadness of the
attendant circumstances the kindness of
Whistler will always be remembered.

There were qualities in Holloway’s art
of which Whistler was appreciative, and
a characteristic story can be connected with[Pg 76]
this. There is a picture of the sea in the
National Gallery at Milbanke called “Britain’s
Realm,” by John Brett, R.A. It had great
success in its year, at the Academy. Everybody
went to see it, and it was eventually
bought for the Chantry Bequest. It had
figured also in an exhibition of sea-pieces
at the Fine Art Society. Whistler happened
to be at this exhibition when somebody
very enthusiastic over the picture brought
him up to it expecting him to admire it
also, but Whistler glanced at it through
his eye-glass, turned and emphasising his
words with a very significant gesture towards
the representation of sea—as if knocking
at a door—said with his sardonic Hé, Hé,—“Tin!
if you threw a stone on to this, it
would make a rumbling noise,” and turning
to a picture by Holloway said—“This is
art!”

Also in this year Whistler was very preoccupied
with the art of lithography. His
wife was ill, and they were staying at the
Savoy Hotel. Whistler used to sit at the
window all day looking out upon the river,
and in these circumstances he made one of[Pg 77]
the best series of lithographs. With the recovery
of Mrs. Whistler they moved up to
Hampstead, where he said “he was living on
a landscape.” At the same time he was
renting a studio in Fitzroy Street, at No. 8,
now called the Whistler Studios. In choosing
it, Whistler had said, “After all, this is the
classic ground for studios,” and he had as
neighbour a tried friend.

On May the 7th, 1896, Mrs. Whistler died,
and she was buried on the 14th. The next
day he came down to the studios and walked
with his friend. They took lunch in the
neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road.
Whistler spoke of the strangeness of fatality.
He had postponed his wife’s funeral a day
to escape the 13th, the 14th was her birthday.
They sat on, Whistler in the deepest
depression, and to divert him his companion,
Mr. Ludovici, pointed to a print exactly
over his head. It was of Frith’s Margate
Sands!

After the death of his wife, Whistler
lived much in retirement, though travelling
a little. He returned to Chelsea, and died
there in his 70th year in July 1903. His[Pg 78]
life added as richly to its associations as
the lives of his two great contemporaries
Rossetti and Carlyle, both of whom are
commemorated upon the embankment of
the river close to the places where they
lived. There is now a movement well on
foot to place a memorial there to Whistler,
to be designed by that other artist, Monsieur
Rodin, who on so different a scale has been
inspired by the same half mystic motives.
To appeal to us, not with fairy tales, but
with art imaginative in its deference to
our imagination.

Whistler was without excessive, spendthrift,
creative power. In many ways his
art was slight. Yet even so, not because
it is empty, but because it outlines for us
so much that is only visible to thought,
though thought always in relation to external
beauty.

And the indefiniteness of his art, the grey
of its colour, they are emblematic of the
times, as the plain red and blue of Titian
belonged to those days, and are resemblant
of the plainer issues that then divided men’s
thoughts.[Pg 79]

Admitting all his own limitations to himself
Whistler admitted none of them to other
people, and to those who divined his weaknesses
at certain points he seemed somewhat
of a charlatan. Perhaps in the near future
his fame will again seem to suffer, from the
strict analysis of the pretensions put forward
in his name, but if so, only to triumph again
as the true character of his achievement
comes to be distinguished.

He was such an instinctive artist that
the explanation of his art must, to some
extent, have remained hidden from himself,
and Art fixing his place among her masters,
will remember that great limitation in some
ways is always the price of a new and instinctive
knowledge in others.

The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London

The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh