impression by undue emphasis on certain appearances. My acquaintance
with him was after 1890, though I had met him some years before. At
no time was I impressed with his “flashing” eye, or his “claw-like”
hands, or his “white lock,” or his “dandified” costume. They were not
marked features unless one were looking for them. He was slightly
built, refined-looking, and carried himself well, even gracefully. The
Chase portrait of him is so foolish that even Chase could not show it
without apologies and explanations; and as for the Boldini portrait,
it is thoroughly Mephistophelian. About the latter, Whistler said:
“They say that looks like me; but I hope I don’t look like that.” The
portrait is a typical Boldini, with all that that implies of vulgarity
and insinuation. But Whistler looked like a gentleman, not like a
_boulevardier_.
His manner was courteous and his disposition usually good-natured. I
never saw anything of his waspishness, nor heard any of his vitriolic
retorts. He talked soberly and very sensibly unless aroused or driven
into a corner by argument. Then he would fight back viciously enough
and with excellent wit. From some quick answers to foolish people he
finally became known for repartee and his name was used as a peg upon
which many sharp sayings were hung, and he quite innocent of them.
The only bright retort from him that I ever heard was made at my own
expense. I recount it as illustrative of his brightness.
One night at the Pennells’, Whistler had been grumbling in an amusing
way over art criticism and art critics. No one answered him. He had the
floor entirely to himself and the rest of us were content to smile.
Near eleven o’clock, as I rose to go, and Whistler and Pennell went
with me to the door, I ventured to say that art critics were not very
different from other people, that they did the best they could, but
were human and often erred. It was good-natured deprecation of his
point of view, which he met by putting his hand on my shoulder and
saying with equal good nature:
“Oh, my dear Van Dyke, don’t misunderstand. We none of us think of you
as an art critic.” Everybody laughed, myself included. There was not
a particle of venom in it. I had written about him in praise in the
early eighties when others were abusing him and he had thanked me for
it; I was in his good books. To be sure, the retort was hardly new.
John Brougham had launched it at Lester Wallack many years before. But
the cleverness of it lay in its application.
Whistler liked to talk, especially if there was an audience of half a
dozen. He was then very willing to fill space in the spot-light and
conduct the session, especially if art was up for discussion. Another
night, at a Pennell dinner, a very clever man--one of the editors of
the _Daily Telegraph_--was present. He had recently returned from
the far North--beyond Spitzbergen--and had been telling us about the
brilliancy of the Northern color. Whistler, beside whom I sat, was not
interested and kept tugging at my arm, telling me that it was mere raw
color and not art. To that I finally had to make reply that I cared
not a rap whether the color was artistic or not, that I was interested
in the mere fact of its brilliancy. With that he flung around in his
chair, turning his back on me, much as a child might do, and remained
silent until the subject changed.
But it is an error to infer that because he was often witty and
occasionally petty, wit and pettishness were his outstanding
characteristics. By setting forth unrelieved chapters of his stories
and sayings the impression has been produced that he started a new
quarrel each morning before breakfast and shot envenomed shafts until
sunset. That his witticisms were scattered over a period of forty years
is neither stated nor implied. As a matter of fact, he was almost
always in a serious mood, and, with his knowledge and gift of language,
talked most sensibly and persuasively. I remember many interesting
and informing talks with him when there was no jesting and not even
smiling. In his own studio, with his own pictures on the easel and he
explaining his intention and its development on the canvas, he was at
his best. He was then a reasonable, sensible painter, with none of the
pose of the _Ten O’Clock_ and none of the vanity of _The Gentle Art of
Making Enemies_. I have never met a more striking contradiction in an
individual, and it always seemed to me that the Whistler of the sharp
tongue and pen was not the true Whistler but merely a character assumed
for the occasion.
His published writings, as one reads them to-day, are extravagantly
brilliant, but hardly sincere, even from a Whistlerian point of view.
Take from the _Ten O’Clock_, for instance, the oft-quoted sentence:
“There never was an artistic period, there never was an art-loving
nation.” A measure of truth lies under that, but Whistler knew that
he exaggerated it, overstated it. Again the statement that “Art
happens--no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the
vastest intelligence cannot bring it about, and puny efforts to make
it universal end in quaint comedy and coarse farce.” Here is another
half-truth, but so arbitrarily insisted upon that one infers that
art is really an isolated and unrelated phenomenon on the earth.
Whistler knew better than that. Nothing “happens” in this world.
There is a cause for every effect. Once more the remark about “the
unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset.” But
he himself never was so foolish as to believe such nonsense. It was
merely a rococo way of saying that art could not handle a sunset in
a satisfactory manner, and that his art, in particular, preferred a
twilight or a midnight. The _Ten O’Clock_ indeed explains Whistler’s
art better than any other, and, of course, that was why it was written.
His own limitations and necessities could not have been better set
forth than by the sentence: “Nature is very rarely right; to such
an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually
wrong.” He wanted to put a conventionalized nature into a decorative
pattern, and he justified it by saying that a realistic nature is
“usually wrong.” It is somewhat of a piece with his remark that “there
are too many trees in the country.” There were--for Whistler’s art.
But it is useless to point out the superficial in the Whistler
arguments--the falseness of analogy, for instance, in comparing
national art with national mathematics. That statement was made to
produce a laugh, and it succeeded. It is even stupid to point out the
want of logic or historical truth in the _Ten O’Clock_. One might as
well try to break Whistler’s own butterfly on a wheel. The lecture
was written and delivered to astonish the natives. And it did. It
was a charming bit of extravagance, beautifully written for platform
delivery, and a delightful piece of literature for fireside reading.
Had it been logical, temperate, well-guarded in its utterances, it
would have fallen flat. It fitted the occasion, was a work of art in
itself, and no more “happened” than Whistler’s pictures and etchings.
That he wrote extremely well makes it all the more unfortunate that he
wrote at all. The letters of _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_ are
amusing, but leave an impression of flippancy and mere cleverness.
These were qualities rightly enough used in a rough-and-tumble
newspaper quarrel, but the reader does not leave them there.
Unwittingly he looks for the same qualities in Whistler’s portraits and
pastels, perhaps reads them into the art itself. Worse yet, he possibly
arrives at the conclusion that the art is of less interest than the
quarrels, of less moment than the passing gibe of the “foolish sunset,”
or the casual irrelevance of “dragging in Velasquez.” Once more, it is
a pity that Whistler the painter has to be confused with Whistler the
critic-baiter. However well one comes out of a fight, it is generally
with rumpled plumage and a lack of dignity. Whistler could well have
afforded to go his way in silence. Why did he have to kick at every
cur that barked at his heels? Degas said he acted as though he had no
talent, and Degas was right.
After these books of bickerings one comes back to Whistler’s pictures
with relief, for they at least are serious. That is not, however, to
say that they are the greatest this, or the most wonderful that, in
all painting. They are far from being impeccable, but they are not the
wherewithal to suckle fools and chronicle small beer. No competent
person nowadays thinks them other than very sincere art. His brothers
of the craft have, indeed, so elevated them and him, so pedestalled and
niched them both, that it is very doubtful if they can long hold out
in their rarefied atmosphere. Again and again has the world been told
that he was a faultless draftsman, that his brush was equal to that of
Velasquez, and that his needle outdid Rembrandt. He did not believe so
himself, nor, soberly considered, does his art affirm it.
The Pennell book contains photographs of a number of pictures labelled
“destroyed,” and there were scores of canvases that never got so far as
even to be photographed. Many of the pictures that escaped destruction
are faulty in drawing, lacking in construction, out of proportion, or
smitten with stiffness in the joints. Connie Gilchrist on the stage
skipped the rope delightfully, but in Whistler’s portrait called “The
Gold Girl” she is petrified. The “Sarasate” seems pinched in scale,
the “Irving as Philip” is unbelievable in construction, the “Leyland”
legs had to be redrawn from a model. Whistler glorified the people of
Velasquez because “they stand upon their legs.” In his studio, showing
his own portraits, his first question about each figure was: “How does
it stand?” And then: “Does it stand easily, stand firm, stand in? Is
it placed right on the canvas, has it enough body, enough atmospheric
setting?” These were questions that had to do with realistic or
representative appearance. Again and again he rubbed out the whole
day’s work or destroyed the picture entirely. And he could write of
himself to his printer in the severest terms, thus: “No, my drawing or
sketch or whatever you choose, is damnable and no more like the superb
original than if it had been done by the worst and most incompetent
enemy.... There must be no record of this abomination.”
This, in measure, is the experience of every artist. He produces
with difficulty and has scores of failures. It was not to Whistler’s
discredit that he was so severe a judge of himself, but perhaps it
dispels the delusion of his being an impeccable craftsman. Besides,
there was an unusual reason for his lack of success with many pictures.
It has been already suggested that he strove to harmonize the
conflicting traditions of the West and the East. He was born and bred
to the realism of the third dimension--to the protrusion or recession
in space of planes, figures, lights, and colors. Midway in his career
he took up with the decorative in Eastern art and strove to show the
representative figure of the French with the flattened formula of the
Japanese.
Whistler was thus on a seesaw the greater part of his artistic life,
trying to maintain a balance between these two formulas. With almost
every picture it was too much realism or too much decoration. To make
the union more perfect he began the remorseless cutting down of the
subject, reaching a limit in his nocturnes which were finally reduced
to little more than night-sky effects. He cut out modelling and outline
until the portrait of “Mrs. Leyland” became a mere tonal scheme, as
flat almost as the wall at the back. Light, too, was dimmed and color
lost its brilliancy in a prevailing harmony of low tones. Finally,
the brush which had been heavily loaded in his Courbet days and ran
freely (as witness the dress patterns even in the later “Lange Leizen”)
became thin, watery, absorbent, almost diaphanous in its feathery
imperceptible touch. On top of all this, and to further blend the
representative into the decorative and draw the picture together, there
occasionally came a thin wash of transparent gray or brown, covering
the whole canvas and binding the drawing, the light, the color into one
tonal envelope. In the final analysis, the canvas was rightly enough
called an arrangement, a harmony, a symphony, a nocturne--what you
will. Anything else was merely suggestion.
The etchings were not so amenable to Japanese pattern as the paintings,
water-colors, and pastels, yet even in them there was the disposition,
not so much toward flattening the planes as eliminating details, making
suggestion answer for realization, and, later on, the further attempt
to produce a tone effect by small scratchings and hatchings on the
plate. The inclination is perhaps better shown in his lithotints, such
as that of “The Thames” (Lithotint W. 125), than in the etchings.
The decorative arrangement was his view of what art should be and was
more or less manifested in everything he did. Even the _Ten O’Clock_
is more decorative than realistic. The arrangement of the sentences
and paragraphs is charming, and whether they mean anything or not is
of small importance. Of course Whistler would have objected to being
thus hung by his own rope, but he deliberately subordinated the sense
of his sentences to their rhythm and tone. People who write (even art
critics) are aware of what constitutes pattern and color in words and
they are well pleased that the _Ten O’Clock_ was not representative but
just as it is--that is, decorative and delightful. The painter people,
however, seem to regard it as the inspired gospel of art and every word
of it true. From which one may infer that the artist, when outside
of his _métier_, can look at the wrong thing with that persistence
sometimes thought peculiar to the unattached writer.
In the final analysis Whistler’s fame must rest upon his pictures,
though a certain amount of notoriety will probably always be given
his sayings and a proper admiration accompany his writings. As a
painter and an etcher he has a now-unquestioned place and he will
hold it. Nothing in nineteenth-century art is quite of a kind with
his. It stands alone in its aim and purpose, belongs to no art
movement of the time, proclaims the ideals of no race or people. As
for the usual motives of painting, Whistler scorned them or denied
them. He cared nothing about classicism or romanticism, nothing about
sentiment, feeling, passion, or action. The dramatic, the tragic, the
domestic, the illustrative were foreign to him. Even nature put him
out. The country bored him, and the sea was only so much blue paint
in a pattern. He was a maker of beautiful schemes of color and line,
with just enough of human interest about them to lend a meaning and
occasionally a touch of intimacy.
That seems like reducing his art to a very simple affair, but, on the
contrary, within the self-imposed limitations there was room for the
greatest variety. He did portraits, figures, genre pieces, sea-pieces,
river-views; he worked in oils, water-colors, pastels; he etched
many plates that are to-day the joy of connoisseurs, and he vastly
improved the almost forgotten art of lithography. The breadth of his
accomplishment was wide and the excellence of it high. Nothing that he
ever did but has some note of color, some wave of line, some fastidious
arrangement or grouping that serves as a mark of distinction. He did
hundreds of pastels and water-colors no larger than one’s hand, that
contain lovely figures and draperies, as, for example, the “Annabel
Lee”; or gave suggestions of the sea or shore akin to “The Blue Wave,”
or spread sky patterns comparable to the “Battersea Bridge.” These
pictures are now widely scattered, and one does not realize how truly
decorative their planning until he meets them to-day, hanging singly
or in pairs, in some drawing-room. There they put other modern work
out of countenance by the way they do not “break through the wall” but
enhance and beautify it. It is household art of a most distinguished
character in that it goes in the household and takes its place without
quarrelling with everything about it. I have already quoted La Farge to
the effect that in using the word “decorative” he was saying the best
thing he could about a picture. There he and Whistler were in perfect
agreement.
The deriding of Whistler was not indulged in by press and public
alone. The painter people--the inspired ones, who by reason of their
calling are the only ones competent to judge of art--stoned him, too.
Royal academicians dealt him harder knocks than plebeian critics.
But he always had a following of his own, and before he died the
following had grown into a procession. Since his death his influence
has been more far-reaching than that of any modern. His pictures
were not only adopted, assimilated, imitated in England and France
but all over Europe. Here in America the exhibitions still show his
color schemes and arrangements as comprehended by his admiring young
converts. Without taking on pupils, as Couture and Gleyre had done, he
nevertheless became far more of a _chef d’Ecole_ than either of them.
That is what he would have called perhaps handing on the tradition. He
believed that he himself was an inheritor and a transmitter--one of the
links in the great art chain.
But it was not the American tradition that Whistler handed on. We
claim him as one of us because he was born here, but his art does
not represent us in any way. His Thames nocturnes are not those of
the Hudson, his portraits are not of our people, and his decorative
patterns never were seen in American life or art. He handed on the
blended traditions of Gleyre and Hiroshige, not the legend of Copley
and Stuart and Durand. That may be matter for regret in history but it
surely is not to be regretted in art. For Whistler gave us a new and a
beautiful point of view in painting. Realist, idealist, impressionist,
cubist, futurist--none of the terms describe him or even suggest his
work. As an artist he was unique, and his art, instead of reproducing
a species, stemmed out into a new variety of surpassing loveliness and
beauty. We would not be without it. We are not sure that its “name and
fame will live forever,” as the Pennells put it, but it will live.
VIII
WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE
A distribution and pigeonholing of our nine American painters as
regards aim and tendency would perhaps place Inness, Wyant, and Martin
among the most intelligent and sympathetic of the earlier men; Homer,
La Farge, and Whistler the most detached and self-sufficient of the
middle men, and Chase, Alexander, and Sargent the most facile and
best trained of the younger men. The last three may, indeed, stand as
epitomizing the art movement which took form and gave tongue in the
Society of American Artists.
That movement was epoch-making. There was awakening to the fact that
painting in America as a craft was not technically understood, that it
was not properly taught--could not be taught in America. With that came
the departure for Europe of many young students and their training in
the studios of Munich and Paris. When the Society of American Artists
finally got under way in the early eighties its initial reason for
existence was that its members at least knew how to paint. They had
been abroad and learned the grammar of their art and were now returned
to show their countrymen the finished craftsman. Sargent’s influence
was largely through the example of his portraits and Alexander’s vogue
was to come a little later; but Chase was the one that arrived early in
the day, carried the banner, and announced that art had come to town.
All three of these men grounded themselves in technical method which
seemed the necessity of the hour, and all three of them have remained
so bedded in method that their art has rarely risen above it or
beyond it. Chase, more radical than the others, proclaimed his belief
that method was art itself and that a brilliant, dashing manner took
precedence over matter. He would not admit that art was more than a
surface expression. His belief was, of course, properly adjusted to his
own mental equipment. He and Whistler, with many another artist, could
cleverly compound for qualities
“they were inclined to
By damning those they had no mind to.”
Unconsciously, no doubt, every one’s tendency is to regard his own
limitations as self-imposed and his work right in kind if not in
degree. Perhaps that is what Chase meant in a talk at the National Arts
Club some years ago when he said: “They say I am conceited. I don’t
deny it. I believe in myself. I do and I must.” As philosophy that may
not be very profound but as a working faith, paint-brush in hand, it is
superb. With such faith and purpose Chase produced scores of pictures
that showed his declared point of view, and trained hundreds of pupils
not only in his enthusiasm but in his own crisp, clean handling. He was
a painter from beginning to end, and exemplified the aim and carry of
the Society of American Artists better than any one artist of his time.
He came out of the near West, having been born in Williamsburg,
Indiana, in 1849. The village was a small one, less than two hundred
inhabitants when Chase was a boy, and what elementary schooling he
received there may be imagined. His parents were Indiana people,
and the home influence probably did not incline him to art. He saw
illustrations in magazines and books and that put the childish wish
in his head to “make pictures for books.” He drew with colored
pencils, had the little water-color cubes known to all children, and
soon made a local reputation among schoolmates and family friends
for drawing portraits. At twelve his parents moved to Indianapolis,
and at sixteen he entered his father’s shoe-store as a clerk. The
biographies of painters[12] almost always afford such incidents as
these. They are supposed to indicate genius trying to orient itself,
but perhaps they are no more than vacillations of the youthful mind. At
that time Chase had not definitely decided upon art as a career. At
nineteen he thought to be some day a naval officer. As a preliminary
step he enlisted as a sailor at Annapolis, and was assigned to the
training-ship _Portsmouth_. He probably did not know what else to do
and it was an adventure at least; but he soon discovered that it was
also a mistake. His father got him out of it and together they went
back to the family shoe-shop in Indianapolis.
[12] There is an excellent biography of Chase--_The Life and Art of
William Merritt Chase_, by Katharine Metcalf Roof, New York, 1917.
There was some more experimental portraiture, with members of the
household and the family calf as models, and then Chase was sent to
a local painter by the name of Benjamin Hayes, who accepted him as a
pupil. Art definitely began for him then and there. He was with Hayes
several months--long enough to take a studio and set up as a painter on
his own account. At twenty he went to New York with a letter to J. O.
Eaton, whose pupil he became and with whom he remained for two years.
He seems to have had an early liking for independent quarters, for
while a student in New York he set up another studio in Twenty-third
Street. After his two years with Eaton he once more went back to the
paternal roof, then in St. Louis. Here he occupied a studio with J.
W. Pattison, and for a year painted pictures, principally pictures of
still-life. Then he happened to see a picture by John Mulvaney, and
that gave him the idea of going abroad for study.
Some St. Louis patrons advanced money to him and he went to Munich--a
city at that time perhaps more frequented by art students than Paris.
Duveneck, Dielman, Currier, Shirlaw were there, and Chase at once
entered into the student life of the city. He was enrolled in the
school of the Munich Royal Academy, with Kaulbach at its head, and he
was also a student under Piloty; but the outside influence of Leibl
was potent upon all the Munich students at that time, Chase included.
In addition he studied to his profit the old masters in the Alte
Pinacothek, especially Van Dyck, and was susceptible to impressions
from Duveneck and perhaps Habermann, a German student friend. Some
years ago in a European retrospective exhibition I was struck by
a Habermann portrait that was practically a duplicate of Chase’s
“Ready for the Ride,” but whether it was Chase following Habermann or
Habermann following Chase, I could not determine.