shade."--_P. G. Hamerton._
"Short, scratchy lines."--_St. James's Gazette._
"The architectural ornaments and the interlacing bars of the gratings
are suggested rather than drawn."
_St. James's Gazette._
"Amateur prodige."--_Saturday Review._
14.--LONG LAGOON.
"We think that London fogs and the muddy old Thames supply Mr.
Whistler's needle with subjects more congenial than do the Venetian
palaces and lagoons."--_Daily News._
15.--TEMPLE.
"The work does not feel much."--_Times._
16.--LITTLE SALUTE.--(DRY-POINT.)
"As for the lucubrations of Mr. Whistler, they come like shadows and
will so depart, _and it is unnecessary to disquiet one's self about
them_."
17.--THE BRIDGE.
"These works have been done with a swiftness and dash that precludes
anything like care and finish."
"These Etchings of Mr. Whistler's are nothing like so satisfactory as
his earlier Chelsea ones; they neither convey the idea of space nor
have they the delicacy of handling and treatment which we see in
those."
"He looked at Venice never in detail."
_F. Wedmore._
18.--WOOL CARDERS.
"They have a merit of their own, and I do not wish to understand
it."[24]--_F. Wedmore._
[Note 24: Mr. Wedmore is the lucky discoverer of the
following:--
"Vigour and exquisiteness are denied--are they
not?--even to a Velasquez"!]
19.--UPRIGHT VENICE.
"Little to recommend them save the eccentricity of their titles."
20.--LITTLE VENICE.
"The Little Venice is one of the slightest of the series."--_St.
James's Gazette._
"In the Little Venice and the Little Lagoon Mr. Whistler has attempted
to convey impressions by lines far too few for his purposes."--_Daily
News._
"Our river is naturally full of effects in _black and white and
bistre_. Venetian skies and marbles have colour you cannot suggest
with a point and some printer's ink."--_Daily News._
"It is not the Venice of a maiden's fancies."--_'Arry._
21.--LITTLE COURT.
"Merely technical triumphs."--_Standard._
22.--REGENT'S QUADRANT.
"There may be a few who find genius in insanity."
23.--LOBSTER POTS.
"So little in them."[25]--_P. G. Hamerton._
[Note 25: The same Critic holds:
"The Thames is beautiful from Maidenhead to Kew, but not
from Battersea to Sheerness."]
24.--RIVA No. 2.
"In all his former Etchings he was careful to give a strong foundation
of firm drawing. In these plates, however, he has cast aside this
painstaking method."
_St. James's Gazette._
25.--ISLANDS.
"An artist who has never mastered the subtleties of accurate
form."[26]--_F. Wedmore._
[Note 26: Elsewhere Mr. Wedmore is inspired to say--
"The true collector must _gradually_ and _painfully_
acquire the eye to judge of the impression."]
[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_
_This_ is possibly the process through which the
preacher is passing.
[Illustration]]
26.--THE LITTLE LAGOON.
"Well, little new came of it, in etching; nothing new that was
beautiful."--_F. Wedmore._
27.--NOCTURNE SHIPPING.
[Sidenote: "Amazing!"
[Illustration]]
"This Archimago of the iconographic aoraton, or graphiology of the
Hidden."--_Daily Telegraph._
"Popularity is the only insult that has not yet been offered to Mr.
Whistler."--_Oscar Wilde._
28.--TWO DOORWAYS.
"It is trying to any sketch without tone to be hung upon a wall as
these have been."--_P. G. Hamerton._
29.--OLD WOMEN.
"He is never literary."--_P. G. Hamerton._
30.--RIVA.
[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_
Like Eno's Fruit Salt or the "Anti-mal-de-Mer."
[Illustration]]
"He took from London to Venice his happy fashion of suggesting lapping
water."--_F. Wedmore._
"Even such a well-worn subject as the Riva degli Schiavoni is made
original (?) by being taken from a high point of view, and looked at
lengthwise, instead of from the canal."
31.--DRURY LANE.
"In Mr. Whistler's productions one might safely say that there is no
culture."--_Athenæum._
32.--THE BALCONY.
"His colour is subversive."--_Russian Press._
33.--ALDERNEY STREET.
"The best art may be produced with trouble."
_F. Wedmore._[27]
[Note 27: "I am not a Mede nor a Persian."--F.
WEDMORE.]
34.--THE SMITHY.
"They produce a disappointing impression."
"His Etchings seem weak when framed."[28]
_P. G. Hamerton._
[Note 28: Mr. Hamerton does also say:
"Indifference to beauty is however compatible with
splendid success in etching, as the career of Rembrandt
proved."--_Etching and Etchers._]
35.--STABLES.
"An unpleasing thing, and framed in Mr. Whistler's odd
fashion."--_City Press._
36.--THE MAST.
[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_
At the service of critics of unequal sizes.
[Illustration]]
"The Mast and the Little Mast are dependent for much of their
interest, on the drawing of festoons of cord hanging from unequal
heights."
_P. G. Hamerton._
37.--TRAGHETTO.
"The artist's present principles seem to deny him any effective
chiaroscuro."--_P. G. Hamerton._
[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_
"Sometimes generally always."
[Illustration]]
"Mr. Whistler's figure drawings, generally defective and always
incomplete."
38.--FISHING BOAT.
"Subjects unimportant in themselves."
_P. G. Hamerton._
39.--PONTE PIOVAN.
"Want of variety in the handling."
_St. James's Gazette._
40.--GARDEN.
"An art which is happier in the gloom of a doorway than in the glow of
the sunshine, and turns with a pleasant blindness from whatsoever in
Nature or Man is of perfect beauty or noble thought."--_'Arry._
41.--THE RIALTO.
"Mr. Whistler has etched too much for his reputation."--_F. Wedmore._
[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_
This critic, true, is a Slade Professor.
[Illustration]]
"Scampering caprice."--_S. Colvin._
"Mr. Whistler's drawing, which is sometimes that of a very slovenly
master."
42.--LONG VENICE.
"After all, there are certain accepted canons about what constitutes
good drawing, good colour, and good painting; and when an artist
deliberately sets himself to ignore or violate all of these, it is
desirable that his work should not be classed with that of ordinary
artists."--_'Arry._
43.--NOCTURNE SALUTE.
"The utter absence, as far as my eye[29] may be trusted, of
gradation."--_F. Wedmore._
[Note 29:?
[Illustration]]
"There are many things in a painter's art which even a photographer
cannot understand."
_Laudatory notice in Provincial Press._
44.--FURNACE NOCTURNE.
"There is no moral element in his chiaroscuro."
_Richmond Eagle._
45.--PIAZETTA.
"Whistler does not take much pains with his work."
_New York Paper._
"A sort of transatlantic impudence in his cleverness."
"His pictures do not claim to be accurate."
46.--THE LITTLE MAST.
"Form and line are of little account to him."
47.--QUIET CANAL.
"Herr Whistler stellt ganz wunderbare Productionen aus, die auf
Gesetze der Form und der Farbe gegründet scheinen, die dem
Uneingeweihten unverständlich sind."--_Wiener Presse._
"This new manner of Mr. Whistler's is no improvement upon that which
helped him to win his fame in this field of art."
48.--PALACES.
"The absence, seemingly, of any power of drawing the forms of
water."[30]--_F. Wedmore._
[Note 30: See No. 30, _The Riva_.]
"He has never, so far as we know, attempted to transfer to copper any
of the more ambitious works of the architect."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
"He has been content to show us what his eyes can see, and not what
his hand can do."
_St. James's Gazette._
49.--SALUTE DAWN.
"Too sensational."--_Athenæum._
"Pushing a single artistic principle to the verge of
affectation."--_Sidney Colvin._
50.--BEGGARS.
"In the character of humanity he has not time to be
interested."--_Standard._
"General absence of tone."--_P. G. Hamerton._
51.--LAGOON: NOON.
"Years ago James Whistler was a person of high promise."--_F. Wedmore._
"What the art of Mr. Whistler yields is a tertium quid."[31]--_Sidney
Colvin._
[Note 31: _REFLECTION:_
The quid of sweet and bitter fancy.
[Illustration]]
"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?"
_'Arry[32] in the "Times."_
[Note 32: _REFLECTION:_
The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them
because he knoweth not how to go to the City.
[Illustration]]
"Disastrous failures."--_F. Wedmore._
"Failures that are complete and failures that are partial."--_F.
Wedmore._
"A publicity rarely bestowed upon failures at all."
_F. Wedmore, Nineteenth Century._
[Sidenote:
_"Voilà ce que l'on dit de moi
Dans la Gazette de Hollande."_]
"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."
[Illustration]
_Taking the Bait_
[Sidenote: _The Academy_, Feb. 24, 1883.]
By the simple process of applying snippets of published sentences to
works of art to which the original comments were never meant to have
reference, and sometimes, too, by lively misquotation--as when a
writer who "did not wish to understate" Mr. Whistler's merit is made
to say he "did not wish to understand" it, Mr. Whistler has counted on
good-humouredly confounding criticism. He has entertained but not
persuaded; and if his literary efforts with the scissors and the
paste-pot might be taken with any seriousness we should have to rebuke
him for his feat. But we are far from doing so. He desired, it seems,
to say that he and Velasquez were both above criticism. An artist in
literature would have said it in fewer words; but indulgence may
fairly be granted to the less assured methods of an amateur in
authorship.
F. WEDMORE.
_An Apology_
[Sidenote: _The World_, Feb. 28, 1883.]
Atlas--There are those, they tell me, who have the approval of the
people--and live! For them the _succès d'estime_; for me, O Atlas, the
_succès d'exécration_--the only tribute possible from the Mob to the
Master! This I have now nobly achieved. _Glissons!_ In the hour of my
triumph let me not neglect my ambulance.
Mr. Frederick Wedmore--a critic--one of the wounded--complains that by
dexterously substituting "understand" for "understate," I have dealt
unfairly by him, and wrongly rendered his writing. Let me hasten to
acknowledge the error, and apologise. My carelessness is culpable, and
the misprint without excuse; for naturally I have all along known, and
the typographer should have been duly warned, that with Mr. Wedmore,
as with his brethren, it is always a matter of understating, and not
at all one of understanding.
_Quant aux autres_--well, with the exception of "'Arry," who
really is dead, they will recover. Scalped and disfigured, they are
not mortally hurt; and--would you believe it?--possessed with an
infinite capacity for continuing, they have already returned, nothing
doubting, to their limited literature, of which I have exhausted the
stock.--Yours, _en passant_,
Chelsea.
[Illustration]
_"Jeux Innocents" in Tite Street_
[Sidenote: _The World_, Dec. 26, 1883.]
Mr. Whistler's final breakfast of the year was given on Sunday last.
The hospitable master has fresh wonders in store for his friends in
the new year; for, not content with treating his next-door critic
after the manner that Portuguese sailors treat the Apostle Judas at
Easter-tide, he is said to have perfected a new instrument of torture.
This invention is of the nature of a camera obscura, whereby, by a
crafty "arrangement" of reflectors, he promises to display in his own
studio, to his friends, "'Arry at the White House," under all the
appropriate circumstances that might be expected of a "Celebrity at
Home."
ATLAS.
_A Line from the Lands End_
[Sidenote: _The World_, Jan. 2, 1884.]
Delightful! Atlas--I have read here, to the idle miners--culture in
their manners curiously, at this season, blended with intoxication--your
brilliant and graphic description of 'Arry at the other end of my
arrangement in telescopic lenses.
The sensitive sons of the Cornish caves, by instinct refined, revel in
the writhing of the resurrected 'Arry.
Our natures are evidently of the same dainty brutality. Cruelty to the
critic after demise, is a revelation, and the story of 'Arry pursued
with post-mortem, and, for Sunday demonstration, kept by galvanism
from his grave, is to them most fascinating.
I have, my sympathetic Atlas, the success that might have been Edgar
Poe's, could he have read to such an audience the horrible "Case of
Mr. Waldemar."
My invention and machinery, by the way, these warm-hearted people
believe to be something after the fashion of their own sluice-boxes--and
I dare not undeceive them.
Atlas, _je te la souhaite bonne et heureuse_!
ST. IVES, CORNWALL,
Dec. 27.
[Illustration]
_The Easy Expert_
Atlas--They have sent me the _Spectator_--a paper upon which our late
'Arry lingered to the last as art critic. In its columns I find a
correspondent calling aloud for our kind intervention. Present me,
brave Atlas, to the editor, that I may say to him:
[Sidenote: _The World_, Jan. 30, 1884.]
"GOOD SIR,--'Your Reviewer' is doubtless my unburied 'Arry. Why, then,
should 'his mistaking a photogravure reproduction of a pen-and-ink
drawing by Samuel Palmer for a finished etching by the same hand'
seem, 'to say the least of it, astounding'?
"Not at all! By this sort of thing was he known among us, poor
chap--and so was he our fresh gladness and continued surprise."
"Did I not make historical his enchanting encounter with Mr.
Herkomer's water-colour drawing of Mr. Ruskin at the Grosvenor, which
he described as the 'first oil portrait we have of the great master'?
Amazing that, if you like!
"Do not all remember how we leaped for joy at the reading of it?"
"Even Atlas himself laughed aloud, and, handicapped as he is with the
World, and weighted with wisdom, danced upon his plinth, a slow
measure of reckless acquiescence, as I set down in the chronicles of
all time that 'Arry, 'unable, by mere sense of smell, to distinguish
between oil and water-colour, might at least have inquired; and that
either the fireman or the guardian in the Gallery could have told him
not to blunder in the _Times_.'"
"But no, he never would ask--he liked his potshots at things; it used
to give a sort of sporting interest to his speculations upon pictures.
And so he was ever obstinate--or any one at the Fine Art Society would
have told him the difference between an etching and a photograph.--I
am, good sir, yours, etc."
Atlas, _à bientôt_.
ST. IVES, CORNWALL,
Jan. 25, 1834.
[Illustration]
_Propositions--No. 2_
A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about
the end has disappeared.
To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows
great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit
for view.
Industry in Art is a necessity--not a virtue--and any evidence of the
same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of
achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will
efface the footsteps of work.
The work of the master reeks not of the sweat of the brow--suggests no
effort--and is finished from its beginning.
The completed task of perseverance only, has never been begun, and
will remain unfinished to eternity--a monument of goodwill and
foolishness.
"There is one that laboureth, and taketh pains, and maketh haste, and
is so much the more behind."
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.
[Illustration]
_A Hint_
[Sidenote: _The World_, Feb. 17, 1886.]
Please to take note, my dear Mr. James McN. W., that your "dearest
foe," 'Arry, is a candidate for the Slade Chair of Art in the
University of Cambridge! This is said to be the age of testimonials. A
few words from you, my dear James, addressed to the distinguished
trustees, could not fail to give 'Arry a lift.
ATLAS.
_A Distinction_
Atlas, you provoke me! The wisdom of ages means but little--I have
said it. _Faut être "dans le mouvement,"_ you dear old thing, or you
are absolutely out of it!
[Sidenote: _The World_, Feb. 24, 1886.]
You are misled, and mistake mere fact for the fiction of history,
which is truth--and instructs--and is beautiful.
Now, in truth, 'Arry is dead--very dead.
Did I not, from between your shoulders, sally forth and slay
him?--thereby instructing--and making history--and avenging the
beautiful.
If within the distant Aïden, you can't descry, "with sorrow laden,"
the tiny soul of 'Arry, it is because you no longer read your own
small print, my Atlas! and the microbes of Eternity escape you.
Moreover, are not these things written in the chronicles of Chelsea,
adown whose Embankment I still, Achilles-like, do drag the body of an
afternoon?
This practice has doubtless completed the confusion of the
wearied ones of Slade--and they of the Schools, accustomed to the
culture of Colvin, whose polished scalp I with difficulty collected,
ceasing to distinguish between the quick and the dead, will probably
prop up our late 'Arry as professor, long to remain undetected in the
Chair!
Atlas, _tais-toi!_--Let us not interfere!
[Illustration]
_A Document_
Atlas--I have come upon the posthumous paper of 'Arry--his certificate
of character, and printed pretension to the Professorship of
Slade--and O! the shame of it--and the indiscretion of it!
Read, Atlas, and seek in your past for a parallel:
[Sidenote: _The World_, March 24, 1886.]
"To the Electors of the Slade Professor of Fine Art for the University
of Cambridge.--My Lord and Gentlemen,--I beg to submit my name as a
candidate for the Slade Professorship, and enclose herewith a few
testimonials ... I have also received favourable letters from the
following gentlemen ... Alma-Tadema, R.A., Marcus Stone, R.A., Briton
Rivière, R.A., John Brett, A.R.A., ... and others."
What! is the Immaculate impure?--and shall the Academy have coquetted
with the unclean?
Had Alma the classic aught in common with this 'Arry of commerce?
Believe him not, Atlas!
O Alma! O Ichabod! forgive us the thought of it!
Surely also the pots of "the Forty" do boil before the Lord, and the
flames of the chosen were unfanned by the feather of 'Arry's
goose-quill.
Again:
"My experience in art matters has been briefly as follows:
"I have worked at the subject continually in Italy, having for that
purpose travelled and stayed in that country--at least a dozen times.
I have also painted in France, Germany, and Belgium, in which
last-mentioned country I was in a portrait painter's studio."--(A
portrait by 'Arry!)
"There are several pictures of mine being exhibited in London at the
present time." (!!!)
"I have also executed a good deal of distemper....
"I have also travelled for a year in the East." ('Arry in the East!!)
"I have had, as a lecturer upon Art, considerable experience--at
working men's clubs-- ... and at the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke's College
for men, women, and children.
"For the last ten years I have written _every article upon art_ which
has appeared in the _Spectator_ newspaper"--a confession, Atlas,
clearly a confession!
"In 1880, I wrote a critical life of Giotto"--he did indeed,
Atlas!--I saw it--a book in blue--his own, and Reckitt's--all bold
with brazen letters:
"GIOTTO BY 'ARRY"
--"of which two editions were published"--bless him--and then I killed
him!
and, "I am, Gentlemen,
"Your most obedient servant,
"'ARRY, M.A.
"Trin. Coll. Camb., _Esquire_."
The pride of it!
[Illustration]
_Sacrilege_
O Atlas! What of the "Society for the Preservation of Beautiful
Buildings"?
[Sidenote: Upon the Alterations of the "White House."]
Where _is_ Ruskin? and what do Morris and Sir William Drake?
[Sidenote: _The World_, Oct. 17, 1883.]
For, behold! beside the Thames, the work of desecration continues, and
the "White House" swarms with the mason of contract.
The architectural _galbe_ that was the joy of the few, and the
bedazement of "the Board," crumbles beneath the pick, as did the north
side of St. Mark's, and history is wiped from the face of Chelsea.
Shall no one interfere? Shall the interloper, even after his death,
prevail?
Shall 'Arry, whom I have hewn down, still live among us by outrage of
this kind, and impose his memory upon our pavement by the public
perpetration of his posthumous philistinism?
Shall the birthplace of art become the tomb of its parasite in
Tite Street?
See to it, Atlas! lest, when Time, the healer of all the wounds I have
inflicted, shall for me have exacted those honours the prophet may not
expect while alive, and the inevitable blue disc, imbedded in the
walls, shall proclaim that "Here once dwelt" the gentle Master of all
that is flippant and fine in Art, some anxious student, reading, fall
out with Providence in his vain effort to reconcile such joyous
reputation with the dank and hopeless appearance of this "model
lodging," bequeathed to the people by the arrogance of 'Arry.
[Illustration]
_The Red Rag_
[Sidenote: "_Mr. Whistler, Cheyne Walk._"]
[Sidenote: _The World_, May 22, 1878.]
Why should not I call my works "symphonies," "arrangements,"
"harmonies," and "nocturnes"? I know that many good people think my
nomenclature funny and myself "eccentric." Yes, "eccentric" is the
adjective they find for me.
The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a
picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to
tell.
My picture of a "Harmony in Grey 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 grey 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?"--naïvely acknowledging that, without
baptism, there is no ... market!
But even commercially this stocking of your shop with the goods of
another would be indecent--custom alone has made it dignified. Not
even the popularity of Dickens should be invoked to lend an
adventitious aid to art of another kind from his. I should hold it a
vulgar and meretricious trick to excite people about Trotty Veck when,
if they really could care for pictorial art at all, they would know
that the picture should have its own merit, and not depend upon
dramatic, or legendary, or local interest.
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 of
colour.
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--as
combinations, evolved from the chords 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 ear, 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."
Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an
"Arrangement in Grey 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?