Whistler used to say that, had they been less young, they could have

seen only the terror of that tramp. A portrait was the price of every

plate of soup, every egg, every glass of milk on the road. The children

who hooted them had to be drawn before a bit of bread was given to

them. They slept in straw. And they walked until Whistler's light shoes

got rid of most of their soles and bits of their uppers, and Ernest's

hollands grew seedier and seedier. But they were young enough to laugh,

and one day Whistler, seeing Ernest tramping ahead solemnly through

the mud, the rain dripping from his straw hat, his linen coat a rag,

shrieked with laughter as he limped. "_Que voulez-vous?_" Ernest said

mournfully, "_les saisons m'ont toujours devancé_!" But it was the time

of the autumn fairs, and, joining a lady who played the violin and

a gentleman who played the harp, they gave entertainments in every

village, beating a big drum, announcing themselves as distinguished

artists from Paris, offering to draw portraits, five francs the full

length, three francs the half-length. At times they beat the big drum

in vain, and Whistler was reduced to charging five sous apiece for his

portraits, but he did his best, he said, and there was not a drawing to

be ashamed of.

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF WHISTLER IN THE BIG HAT

OIL

In the Charles L. Freer Collection, National Gallery of American Art

(_See page 52_)]

[Illustration: DROUET

ETCHING. G. 55

(_See page 49_)]

At last they came to Aix, where there was an American Consul who knew

Major Whistler, and advanced fifty francs to his son. At Liège, poor,

shivering, ragged Ernest got twenty from the French Consul, and the

rest of the journey was made in comfort. On his return, Whistler's

first appearance at the _Café Molière_ was a triumph. They had thought

him dead, and here he was, _le petit Américain_! And what _blague_,

what calling for coffee _pour le petit Whistler, pour notre petit

Américain_! And what songs!

"_Car il n'est pas mort, larifla! fla! fla!

Non, c'est qu'il dort.

Pour le réveiller, trinquons nos verres!

Pour le réveiller, trinquons encore!_"

That Herr Schmitz was paid and delivered up the plates the prints are

the proof. Some years after Whistler went back to Cologne with his

mother. In the evening he slipped away to the old, little hotel, where

the landlord and the landlord's daughter, grown up, recognised him and

rejoiced.

These stories, and hundreds like them, still float about the Quarter,

told not only by Whistler, but by _les vieux_, who shake their heads

over the present degeneracy of students and the tameness of student

life--stories of the clay model of the heroic statue of Géricault,

left, for want of money, swathed in rags, and sprinkled every morning

until at last even the rags had to be sold, and then, when they were

taken off, Géricault had sprouted with mushrooms that paid for a

feast in the Quarter and enough clay to finish the statue: stories

of a painter, in his empty studio, hiring a piano by the month that

the landlord might see it carried upstairs and get a new idea of his

tenant's assets; stories of the monkey tied to a string, let loose in

other people's larders, then pulled back, clasping loaves of bread and

bottles of wine to its bosom; stories of students, with bedclothes

pawned, sleeping in chests of drawers to keep warm; stories of

Courbet's _Baigneuse_ in wonderful Highland costume at the students'

balls; stories of practical jokes at the Louvre. It was the day of

practical jokes, _les charges_: and Courbet, whom they worshipped, was

the biggest _blageur_ of them all, eventually signing his death-warrant

with that last terrible _charge_, the fall of the Column Vendôme, which

Paris never forgave.

In this atmosphere, Whistler's spirit, so alarming to his mother, found

stimulus, and it is not to be wondered if his gaiety struck everyone in

Paris as in St. Petersburg and Pomfret, West Point and Washington.

[Footnote 1: See Chapter XLIV.]

CHAPTER VII: WORKING DAYS IN THE LATIN QUARTER. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN

FIFTY-FIVE TO EIGHTEEN FIFTY-NINE CONTINUED.

The stories cannot be left out of Whistler's life as a student, for

they lived in his memory. The English students brought back the

impression that he was an idler, the French thought so too, and the

English believe to-day that he was an idler always. And yet he worked

in Paris as much as he played. His convictions, his preferences, his

prejudices, were formed during those years. His admiration for Poe, a

West Point man, was strengthened by the hold Poe had taken of French

men of letters. His disdain of nature, his contempt for anecdote

in art as a concession to the ignorant public, his translation of

the subjects of painting into musical terms, and much else charged

against him as deliberate pose, can be traced to Baudelaire. It is

incomprehensible how he found time to read while a student, and yet

he knew the literature of the day. With artists and their movements

he was more familiar. He mastered all that Gleyre could teach on the

one hand, Courbet on the other. He came under the influence of Lecocq

de Boisbaudran, who was occupied with the study of values, effects of

night, and training of memory. It is absurd for anyone to say that

Whistler idled away his four full years in Paris.

The younger men in their rebellion against official art were not so

foolish as to disdain the Old Masters. They went to the Louvre to

learn how to use their eyes and their hands. There they copied the

pictures, and there they met each other. To Whistler the Frenchmen were

more sympathetic than the English, and he joined them at the Louvre.

Respect for the great traditions of art always was his standard: "What

is not worthy of the Louvre is not art," he said. Rembrandt, Hals,

and Velasquez were the masters by whom he was influenced. There are

only a few pictures by Velasquez in the Louvre, and Whistler's early

appreciation of him has been a puzzle to some, who, to account for

it, have credited him with a journey when a student to Madrid. But

that journey was not made in the fifties or ever, though he planned it

more than once. A great deal could be learned about Velasquez without

going to Spain. Whistler knew the London galleries, and in 1857 he

visited the Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester, taking Henri Martin

with him. There was a difficulty about the money for their railway

fares, and he suggested to T. Armstrong that he might borrow it from

a friend of the family who was manager of the North-Western. "But

have you paid him the three hundred francs he has already lent you?"

Armstrong asked. "Why, no," Whistler answered; "ought that to make

any difference?" And he consulted the friend as to whether it would

not be the right thing to ask for another loan. From this friend, or

somebody, he managed to get the money, and Miss Emily Chapman finds

in her diaries, which she has consulted for us, that on September 11,

1857, Rose, her sister, "went to Darwen and found Whistler and Henri

Martin staying at Earnsdale" with another sister, Mrs. Potter; "a merry

evening," the note finishes. Fourteen fine examples of Velasquez were

in the Manchester Exhibition, lent from private collections in England,

among them the _Venus_, _Admiral Pulido Pareja_, _Duke Olivarez on

Horseback_, _Don Balthazar in the Tennis Court_, some of them now in

the British National Gallery.

Whistler once described himself to us as "a surprising youth, suddenly

appearing in the group of French students from no one knew where,

with my _Mère Gérard_ and the _Piano Picture_ [_At the Piano_] for

introduction, and making friends with Fantin and Legros, who had

already arrived, and Courbet, whom they were all raving about, and who

was very kind to me."

The _Piano Picture_ was painted toward the end of his student years

in Paris, the _Mère Gérard_ a little earlier, so that this agrees with

Fantin's notes. In 1858, Fantin says, "I was copying the _Marriage

Feast at Cana_ in the Louvre when I saw passing one day a strange

creature--_personnage étrange, le Whistler en chapeau bizarre_, who,

amiable and charming, stopped to talk, and the talk was the beginning

of our friendship, strengthened that evening at the _Café Molière_."

Carolus Duran writes us, from the Académie de France in Rome, that he

and Whistler met as students in Paris; after that he lost sight of

Whistler until the days of the new _Salon_, but, though there were a

few meetings then, his memories are altogether of the student years.

Bracquemond has recalled for us that he was making the preliminary

drawing for his etching after Holbein's _Erasmus_ in the Louvre when

he first saw Whistler. Their meetings were cordial, but never led to

intimacy. With Legros Whistler's friendship did become intimate, and

the two, with Fantin, formed at that date what Whistler called their

"Society of Three."

Fantin was somewhat older, and had been studying much longer, and had,

among students, a reputation for wide and sound knowledge: "a learned

painter," Armstrong says. M. Bénédite thinks that the friendship was

useful to Fantin, but of the greatest importance to Whistler, on whose

art in its development it had a marked influence. Mr. Luke Ionides,

on the other hand, insists that "even in those early days, Whistler's

influence was very much felt. He had decided views, which were always

listened to with respect and regard by many older artists, who

seemed to recognise his genius." The truth probably is that Whistler

and Fantin influenced each other. They worked in sympathy, and the

understanding between them was complete. They not only studied in the

Louvre, but joined the group at Bonvin's studio to work from the model

under Courbet.

With Courbet, we come to an influence which cannot be doubted, much

as Whistler regretted it as time went on. Oulevey remembers Whistler

calling on Courbet once, and saying enthusiastically as he left the

house, "_C'est un grand homme!_" and for several years his pictures

showed how strong this influence was. M. Duret even sees in Courbet's

"Manifestoes" forerunners of Whistler's letters at a later date to

the papers. Courbet, whatever mad pranks he might play with the

_bourgeois_, was seriousness itself in his art, and the men who studied

under him learned to be serious, Whistler most of all.

The proof of Whistler's industry is in his work--in his pictures and

prints, which are amazing in quality and quantity for the student who,

Sir Edward Poynter believes, worked in two or three years only as

many weeks. It would be nearer the truth to say that he never stopped

working. Everything that interested him he made use of. The women he

danced with at night were his models by day: Fumette, who, as she

crouches, her hair loose on her shoulders, in that early etching, looks

the _Tigresse_ who tore up his drawings in a passion; and Finette,

the dancer in a famous quadrille, who, when she came to London, was

announced as "_Madame Finette in the cancan, the national dance of

France_." His friends had to pose for him: Drouet, in the plate, done,

he told us, in two sittings, one of two and a half hours, the other

of an hour and a half; Axenfeld, the brother of a famous physician;

Becquet, the sculptor-musician, "the greatest man who ever lived" to

his friends, to the world unknown; Astruc, painter, sculptor, poet,

editor of _L'Artiste_, of whom his wife said that he was the first

man since the Renaissance who combined all the arts, but who is only

remembered in Whistler's print; Delâtre, the printer; Riault, the

engraver. Bibi Valentin was the son of another engraver. And there is

the amusing pencil sketch of Fantin in bed on a winter day, working

away in his overcoat, muffler, and top hat, trying to keep warm: one

kept among a hundred lost. The streets where Whistler wandered, the

restaurants where he dined, became his studios. At the house near the

Rue Dauphine he etched Bibi Lalouette. His _Soupe à Trois Sous_ was

done in a _cabaret_ kept by Martin, whose portrait is in the print at

the extreme left, and who was famous in the Quarter for having won

the Cross of the Legion of Honour at an earlier age than any man ever

decorated, and then promptly losing it. Mr. Ralph Thomas says: "While

Whistler was etching this, at twelve o'clock at night, a _gendarme_

came up to him and wanted to know what he was doing. Whistler gave him

the plate upside down, but officialism could make nothing of it."

There is hardly one of these etchings that is not a record of his daily

life and of the people among whom he lived, though to make it such a

record was the last thing he was thinking of.

Whistler's first set of etchings was published in November 1858. The

prints were not the first he made after leaving Washington. On the rare

_Au Sixième_, supposed to be unique, Haden, to whom it had belonged,

wrote, "Probably the first of Whistler's etchings," but then Haden

wrote these things on others, and knew little about them. A portrait of

himself, another of his niece _Annie Haden_, the _Dutchman holding the

Glass_, are as early, if not earlier. There were twelve plates, some

done in Paris, some during the journey to the Rhine, some in London.

There was also an etched title with his portrait, for which Ernest,

putting on the big hat, sat. Etched above is "_Douze Eaux Fortes

d'après Nature par James Whistler_," and to one side, "_Imp. Delâtre,

Rue St. Jacques, 171, Paris, Nov. 1858_." Whistler dedicated the set

to _mon vieil ami Seymour Haden_, and issued and sold it himself for

two guineas. Delâtre printed the plates, and, standing at his side,

Drouet said, Whistler learned the art. Delâtre's shop was the room

described by the De Goncourts, with the two windows looking on a bare

garden, the star wheel, the man in grey blouse pulling it, the old

noisy clock in the corner, the sleeping dog, the children peeping in

at the door; the room where they waited for their first proof with the

emotion they thought nothing else could give. Drouet said that Whistler

never printed at this time. But Oulevey remembers a little press in

the Rue Campagne-Première, and Whistler pulling the proofs for those

who came to buy them. He was already hunting for old paper, loitering

at the boxes along the _quais_, tearing out fly-leaves from old books.

Passages in many plates of the series, especially in _La Mère Gérard_

and _La Marchande de Moutarde_, are, as we have said, like his work in

_The Coast Survey, No. 1_. For the only time, and as a result of his

training at Washington, his handling threatened to become mannered.

But in the _Street at Saverne_ he overcame his mannerism, while in

others, not in the series but done during these years, the _Drouet_,

_Soupe à Trois Sous_, _Bibi Lalouette_, he had perfected his early

style of drawing, biting, and dry-point. We never asked him how the

French plates were bitten, but, no doubt, it was in the traditional

way by biting all over and stopping out. They were drawn directly from

Nature, as can be seen in his portraits of places which are reversed

in the prints. So far as we know, he scarcely ever made a preliminary

sketch. We can recall none of his etchings at any period that might

have been done from memory or sketches, except the _Street at Saverne_,

the Venetian _Nocturnes_, the _Nocturne_, _Dance House_, Amsterdam,

_Weary_, and _Fanny Leyland_ portraits.

His first commissions in Paris were, he told us, copies made in the

Louvre. They were for Captain Williams, a Stonington man, familiarly

known as "Stonington Bill," whose portrait he had painted before

leaving home. "Stonington Bill" must have liked it, for when he came

to Paris shortly afterwards he gave Whistler a commission to paint as

many copies at the Louvre as he chose for twenty-five dollars apiece.

Whistler said he copied a snow scene with a horse and soldier standing

by and another at its feet, and never afterwards could remember who

was the painter; the busy picture detective may run it to ground for

the edification of posterity. There was a St. Luke with a halo and

draperies; a woman holding up a child towards a barred window beyond

which, seen dimly, was the face of a man; and an inundation, no doubt

_The Deluge_ or _The Wreck_. He was sure he must have made something

interesting out of them, he knew there were wonderful things even

then--the beginnings of harmonies and of purple schemes--he supposed it

must have been intuitive. Another Stonington man commissioned him to

paint Ingres' _Andromeda_ chained to the rock--probably the _Angelina_

of Ingres which he and Tissot are said to have copied side by side,

though a copy of an _Andromeda_ by him has been shown in New York,

and other alleged copies are now turning up. All, he said, might be

still at Stonington, and shown there as marvellous things by Whistler.

To these may be added the _Diana_ by Boucher in the London Memorial

Exhibition, owned by Mr. Louis Winans, and the group of cavaliers

after Velasquez, the one copy Fantin remembered his doing. A study of

a nun was sent to the London Exhibition, but not shown, with the name

"Wisler" on the back of the canvas, not a bad study of drapery, which

may have been, despite the name, another of his copies or done in a

sketch class.

The first original picture in Paris was, he assured us, the _Mère

Gérard_, in white cap, holding a flower, which he gave to Swinburne.

There is another painting of her, we believe, and from Drouet we heard

of a third, which has vanished. Whistler painted a number of portraits;

some it would probably be impossible to trace, a few are well known.

One--a difficult piece of work, he said--was of his father, after a

lithograph sent him for the purpose by his brother George, and he began

another of Henry Harrison, whom he had known in Russia. A third was

of himself in his big hat. Two were studies of models: the _Tête de

Paysanne_, a woman in a white cap, younger than the _Mère Gérard_, and

the _Head of an Old Man Smoking_, a pedlar of crockery whom Whistler

came across one day in the Halles, a full face with large brown hat,

for long the property of Drouet and left by him to the Louvre. But the

finest is _At the Piano_, _The Piano Picture_ as Whistler called it.

It is the portrait of his sister and his niece, the "wonderful little

Annie" of the etchings, now Mrs. Charles Thynne, who gave him many

sittings, and to whom, in return, he gave his pencil sketches made on

the journey to Alsace.

Mr. Gallatin, in _Portraits of Whistler_, and M. Duret, in the second

edition of _Whistler_, have reproduced an oil portrait entitled

_Whistler Smoking_, which was bought from a French family in 1913. The

most cursory glance at even the reproduction is enough to show that the

portrait is devoid of merit, while the statement that it was hidden

from 1860 to 1913 would require considerable further proof. The whole

thing is but a clumsy attempt to imitate the _Whistler in the Big Hat_,

as well as the etching of the same subject. Every part of it is stolen

from some other work, down to the hand or handkerchief, just indicated,

which is taken from the portrait of his mother. It is true that the

signature is on the painting, but this no longer proves anything, as a

signature is the easiest part of a work of art to forge.

The portraits "smell of the Louvre." The method is acquired from close

study of the Old Masters. "Rembrandtish" is the usual criticism passed

on these early canvases, with their paint laid thickly on and their

heavy shadows. Indeed, it is evident that his own portrait, _Whistler

in the Big Hat_, was suggested by Rembrandt's _Young Man_ in the

Louvre. To his choice of subjects, in his pictures as in his etchings,

he brought the realism of Courbet, painting people as he saw them, and

not in clothes borrowed from the classical and mediæval wardrobes of

the fashionable studio. Yet there is the personal note: Whistler does

not efface himself in his devotion to the masters. This is felt in

the way a head or a figure is placed on the canvas. The arrangement

of the pictures on the wall and the mouldings of the dado in _At the

Piano_, the harmonious balance of the black and white in the dresses of

the mother and the little girl, show the sense of design, of pattern,

which he brought to perfection in the _Mother_, _Carlyle_, and _Miss

Alexander_. There was nothing like it in the painting of the other

young men, of Degas, Fantin, Legros, Ribot, Manet; nothing like it in

the work of the older man, their leader, when painting _L'Enterrement à

Ornans_ and _Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet_. M. Duret says that Whistler's

fellow students, who had immediately recognised his etchings, now

accepted his paintings, which confirms Whistler's statement to us.

[Illustration: AT THE PIANO

OIL

In the possession of Edmund Davis, Esq.

(_See page 52_)]

[Illustration: WAPPING OIL

In the possession of Mrs. Hutton

(_See page 63_)]

_At the Piano_ was sent to the _Salon_ of 1859 with two etchings the

titles of which are not given. The etchings were hung, the picture was

rejected. It may have been because of what was personal in it; strong

personality in the young usually fares that way at official hands.

Fantin's story is:

"One day Whistler brought back from London the _Piano Picture_,

representing his sister and niece. He was refused with Legros, Ribot,

and myself at the _Salon_. Bonvin, whom I knew, interested himself in

our rejected pictures, and exhibited them in his studio, and invited

his friends, of whom Courbet was one, to see them. I recall very well

that Courbet was struck with Whistler's picture."

Two portraits by Fantin, some studies of still life by Ribot, and

Legros' portrait of his father, which had also been rejected, were

shown. The rejection was a scandal. The injustice was flagrant, the

exhibitors at Bonvin's found themselves famous, and Whistler's picture

impressed many artists besides Courbet. With its exhibition Whistler

ceased to be the student, though he was a student all his life; it was

only in his last years that he felt he was "beginning to understand,"

he often said to us.

CHAPTER VIII: THE BEGINNINGS IN LONDON. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN FIFTY-NINE

TO EIGHTEEN SIXTY-THREE.

It was now that Whistler began his endless journeys between Paris and

London. At first he stayed with his sister, Lady Haden, at 62 Sloane

Street, sometimes bringing with him Henri Martin or Legros. In 1859 he

invited Fantin, promising him glory and fortune. In his notes Fantin

wrote:

"Whistler talked about me at this moment to his brother-in-law, Seymour

Haden, who urged me to come to London; he had also talked about me to

Boxall. I should like it known that it was Whistler who introduced me

to England."

Fantin arrived in time for them to go to the Academy, then still in

the east end of the National Gallery. Whistler exhibited for the first

time, and _Two Etchings from Nature_--a perplexing title, for all his

etchings were "from Nature"--were hung in the little octagon room,

or "dark cell," reserved for black-and-white. "_Les souvenirs les

plus vifs que j'ai conservés de ce temps à Londres_," Fantin wrote

"_étaient notre admiration pour l'exposition des tableaux de Millais à

l'Academy_." Millais showed _The Vale of Rest_, and the two young men,

fresh from Paris studios, recognised in his work the realism which,

though conceived and expressed so differently, was the aim of the

Pre-Raphaelites as of Courbet.

Seymour Haden, who had already etched some of his finest plates, was

kind to his visitors. He not only ordered copies from Fantin--amongst

them one of the many Fantin made of Veronese's _Marriage Feast at

Cana_--but he bought the pictures of Legros, who was "at one moment in

so deplorable a condition," Whistler said to us, "that it needed God

or a lesser person to pull him out of it. And so I brought him over to

London, and for a while he worked in my studio. He had, before coming,

sold a church interior to Haden, who liked it, though he found the

floor out of perspective. One day he took it to the room upstairs where

he did his etchings, and turned the key. When it reappeared the floor

was in perspective according to Haden. A gorgeous frame was bought, and

the picture was hung conspicuously in the drawing-room."

Whistler thought Haden restive when he heard that Legros was coming,

but nothing was said. The first day Legros was impressed; he had

been accustomed to seeing himself in cheap frames, if in any frame

at all. But gradually he looked inside the frame, and Haden's work

dawned upon him. That he could not stand. What was he to do? he asked

Whistler. "Run off with it," Whistler suggested. "We got it down,

called a four-wheeler, and carried it away to the studio--our own

little _kopje_," for Whistler told us the story in the days of the

Boer War. Haden discovered his loss as soon as he got home, and in a

rage hurried after them to the studio. But when he saw it on an easel,

Legros repainting the perspective according to his idea, well, there

was nothing to say. Where the studio was we do not know.

Haden even endured Ernest, who had not yet caught up with the seasons,

and who went about in terror of the butler, taking his daily walks in

slippers rather than expose his boots to the servants, and enchanting

Whistler by asking "_Mais, mon cher, qu'est-ce que c'est que cette

espèce de cataracte de Niagara?_" when Haden turned on the shower-bath

in the morning. Fantin was almost as dismayed by the luxury at the

Hadens'. "What lunches!" he wrote home, "what roast beef and sherry!

And what dinners--always champagne!" And if he was distressed by the

street organs grinding out the _Miséréré_ of Verdi, he could console

himself by listening to Lady Haden's brilliant playing on the piano,

until _paradisiaque_ was the adjective he found to describe his life

there to his parents.

Whistler fell in at once with the English students whom he had known

in Paris: Poynter, Armstrong, Luke and Aleco Ionides. Du Maurier came

back from Antwerp in 1860, and for several months he and Whistler lived

together in Newman Street. Armstrong remembers their studio, with a

rope like a clothes-line stretched across it and, floating from it, a

bit of brocade no bigger than a handkerchief, which was their curtain

to shut off the corner used as a bedroom. There was hardly ever a chair

to sit on, and often with the brocade a towel hung from the line: their

decoration and drapery. Du Maurier's first _Punch_ drawing--in a volume

full of crinolines and Leech (vol. XXXIX., October 6, 1860)--shows the

two, shabby, smoking, calling at a photographer's to be met with an

indignant, "No smoking here, sirs!" followed by a severe, "Please to

remember, gentlemen, that this is not a common Hartist's Studio!" The

figure at the door, with curly hair, top hat, glass in his eye, hands

behind his back smoking a cigarette, is Whistler. Probably it was then

also that Du Maurier made a little drawing, in Mr. Howard Mansfield's

collection, of Whistler, Charles Keene, and himself, with their

autographs below; Whistler again with a glass in his eye.

"Nearly always, on Sunday, he used to come to our house," Mr.

Ionides tells us, and there was no more delightful house in London.

Alexander Ionides, the father, was a wealthy merchant with a talent

for gathering about him all the interesting people in town or passing

through, artists, musicians, actors, authors. Mr. Luke Ionides says

that Whistler came to their evenings and played in their private

theatricals, and there remains a programme designed by Du Maurier

with a drawing of himself, Whistler, and Aleco Ionides at the top,

while Luke Ionides and his sister, Mrs. Coronio, stand below with the

list of _dramatis personæ_ between. And Whistler also took part in

their masquerades and fancy-dress balls, once mystifying everybody

by appearing in two different costumes in the course of the evening

and winding up as a sweep. He never lost his joy in the memory of

Alma-Tadema, on another of these occasions, as an "Ancient Roman" in

toga and eye-glasses, crowned with flowers: "amazing," Whistler said,

"with his bare feet and Romano-Greek St. John's Wooden eye!"

Mr. Arthur Severn writes us: "My first recollection of Whistler was at

his brother-in-law's, Seymour Haden (he and Du Maurier were looking

over some _Liber Studiorum_ engravings), and then at Arthur Lewis'

parties on Campden Hill, charming gatherings of talented men of all

kinds, with plenty of listeners and sympathisers to applaud. The Moray

Minstrels used to sing, conducted by John Foster, and when they were

resting anyone who could do anything was put up. Du Maurier with Harold

Sower would sing a duet, _Les Deux Aveugles_; Grossmith half killed

us with laughter (it was at these parties he first came out). Stacy

Marks was a great attraction, but towards the end of the evening, when

we were all in accord, there were yells for Whistler, the eccentric

Whistler! He was seized and stood up on a high stool, where he assumed

the most irresistibly comic look, put his glass in his eye, and

surveyed the multitude, who only yelled the more. When silence reigned

he would begin to sing in the most curious way, suiting the action to

the words with his small, thin, sensitive hands. His songs were in

_argot_ French, imitations of what he had heard in low _cabarets_ on

the Seine when he was at work there. What Whistler and Marks did was so

entirely themselves and nobody else, so original or quaint, that they

were certainly the favourites."

"Breezy, buoyant and debonair, sunny and affectionate," he seemed to

George Boughton, who could not remember the time when "Whistler's

sayings and doings did not fill the artistic air," nor when he failed

to give a personal touch, a "something distinct" to his appearance. His

"cool suit of linen duck and his jaunty straw hat" were conspicuous in

London, where personality of dress was more startling than in Paris.

Boughton refers to a flying trip to Paris at this period, when he was

"flush of money and lovely in attire." Others recall meeting him, armed

with two umbrellas, a white and a black, his practical preparation for

all weathers. Val Prinsep speaks of the pink silk handkerchief stuck

in his waistcoat, but this must have been later. "A brisk little man,

conspicuous from his swarthy complexion, his gleaming eye-glass, and

his shock of curly black hair, amid which shone his celebrated white

lock," is Val Prinsep's description of him in the fifties.

But the white lock is not seen in any contemporary painting or etching.

It was first introduced, as far as we can discover, in his portrait

owned by the late Mr. McCulloch--the portrait a few years ago was in

Detroit--and in the etching _Whistler with the White Lock_, 1879,

though there may be earlier work showing it. We never asked him about

it, and his family, friends, and contemporaries, whom we have asked,

cannot explain it. Some say that it was a birthmark, others that he

dyed all his hair save the one lock. But he did not dye his hair. Du

Maurier, according to Dr. Williamson, attributed it to a wound, either

by bullet or sword-cut, received at Valparaiso: the wound was sewn up,

the white lock appeared almost immediately. Mr. Theodore Roussel tells

a somewhat similar story. But we think if this were so, Whistler would

have told us of it. In an exhibition of oil paintings and pastels by

Whistler held in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in March 1910,

a painting was shown entitled _Sketch of Mr. Whistler_. It was lent

by Mr. Charles L. Freer and was sold to him by an art dealer. We are

by no means certain that it is genuine, though we have only seen the

reproduction, the frontispiece of the catalogue. J. recently went to

Detroit, but in Mr. Freer's absence he was not allowed to see the

painting. If it is genuine, it is most likely a study by Whistler of

the Chinese dress in which he posed for Fantin. In Freer's sketch the

white lock appears. Though it could easily have been added later,

its presence to us seems proof that the picture is most probably not

genuine, and certainly is not contemporary, because in Fantin's head of

Whistler from the _Toast_, in _Hommage à Delacroix_, and Whistler's own

portraits of that time the white lock is not shown. Many, seeing him

for the first time, mistook the white lock for a floating feather. He

used to call it the _Mèche de Silas_, and it amused him to explain that

the Devil caught those whom he would preserve by a lock of hair which

turned white. Whatever its origin, Whistler cherished it with greatest

care.

Whistler had stumbled upon a period in England when, though painters

prospered, art was at a low ebb. Pre-Raphaelitism was on the wane. A

few interesting young men were at work: Charles Keene, Boyd Houghton,

Albert Moore; Fred Walker and George Mason. But Academicians were at

the high tide of mid-Victorian success and sentiment. They puzzled

Whistler no less than he puzzled them.

"Well, you know, it was this way. When I came to London I was received

graciously by the painters. Then there was coldness, and I could not

understand. Artists locked themselves up in their studios--opened the

doors only on the chain; if they met each other in the street they

barely spoke. Models went round with an air of mystery. When I asked

one where she had been posing, she said, 'To Frith and Watts and

Tadema.' 'Golly! what a crew!' I said. 'And that's just what they says

when I told 'em I was a-posing to you!' Then I found out the mystery;

it was the moment of painting the Royal Academy picture. Each man was

afraid his subject might be stolen. It was the era of the subject.

And, at last, on Varnishing Day, there was the subject in all its

glory--wonderful! The British subject! Like a flash the inspiration

came--the Inventor! And in the Academy there you saw him: the familiar

model--the soldier or the Italian--and there he sat, hands on knees,

head bent, brows knit, eyes staring; in a corner, angels and cogwheels

and things; close to him his wife, cold, ragged, the baby in her arms;

he had failed! The story was told; it was clear as day--amazing! The

British subject! What."

Into this riot of subject, to the Academy of 1860, _At the Piano_

was sent, with five prints: _Monsieur Astruc, Rédacteur du Journal_

_'L'Artiste,'_ portrait, and three of the Thames Set. Whistler had

given _At the Piano_, the portrait of his sister and niece, to Seymour

Haden, "in a way," he said:

"Well, you know, it was hanging there, but I had no particular

satisfaction in that. Haden just then was playing the authority on

art, and he could never look at it without pointing out its faults and

telling me it never would get into the Academy--that was certain."

However, at the Academy it was accepted, Whistler's first picture in an

English exhibition. The _Salon_ was not held then every year, and he

could not hope to repeat his success in Paris. But in London _At the

Piano_ was as much talked about as at Bonvin's. It was bought by John

Phillip, the Academician (no relation to the family into which Whistler

afterwards married). Phillip had just returned from Spain with, "well,

you know, Spanish notions about things, and he asked who had painted

the picture, and they told him a youth no one knew about, who had

appeared from no one knew where. Phillip looked up my address in the

catalogue and wrote to me at once to say he would like to buy it, and

what was its price? I answered in a letter which, I am sure, must have

been very beautiful. I said that, in my youth and inexperience, I did

not know about these things, and I would leave to him the question of

price. Phillip sent me thirty pounds; when the picture was last sold,

to Edmund Davis, it brought two thousand eight hundred!"

Thackeray, Lady Ritchie tells us, "went to see the picture of Annie

Haden standing by the piano, and admired it beyond words, and stood

looking at it with real delight and appreciation." It was the only

thing George Boughton brought vividly away in his memories of the

Academy. The critics could not ignore it. "It at once made an

impression," Mr. W. M. Rossetti wrote. As "an eccentric, uncouth,

smudgy, phantom-like picture of a lady at a pianoforte, with a

ghostly-looking child in a white frock looking on," it struck the

_Daily Telegraph_. But the _Athenæum_, having discovered the "admirable

etchings" in the octagon room, managed to see in the "_Piano Picture_,

despite a recklessly bold manner and sketchiness of the wildest and

roughest kind, a genuine feeling for colour and a splendid power of

composition and design, which evince a just appreciation of nature very

rare among artists. If the observer will look for a little while at

this singular production, he will perceive that it 'opens out' just

as a stereoscopic view will--an excellent quality due to the artist's

feeling for atmosphere and judicious gradation of light."

We quote these criticisms because the general idea is that Whistler

waited long for notice. He was always noticed, praised or blamed, never

ignored, after 1859.

Whistler went back to Paris late in that year. December 1859 is the

date of his _Isle de la Cité_, etched from the Galerie d'Apollon in the

Louvre, with Notre Dame in the distance and the Seine and its bridges

between. It was his only attempt to rival Méryon, and he succeeded

badly. The fact that he gave it up when half done shows that he thought

so and was too big an artist to be an imitator, especially of a "little

man like Méryon." Besides, he was much less in Paris now, for, though

he preferred life there, he found his subjects in London, which he soon

made his home, as it continued to be, except for a few intervals, until

his death. It was not the people he cared for, nor the customs. He was

drawn by the beauty that no one had felt with the same intensity and

understanding.

He went to work on the river. In these first years he dated his prints

and pictures, as he seldom did later, and 1859 is bitten on many of

the Thames plates. He saw the river as no one had seen it before,

in its grime and glitter, with its forest of shipping, its endless

procession of barges, its grim warehouses, its huge docks, its little

water-side inns. And as he saw it so he rendered it, as no one ever had

before--as it is. It was left to the American youth to do for London

what Rembrandt had done for Amsterdam. There were eleven plates on the

Thames during this year. To make them he wandered from Greenwich to

Westminster; they included _Black Lion Wharf_, _Tyzac_, _Whiteley and

Co._, which he never excelled at any period; and in each the warehouses

or bridges, the docks or ships, are worked out with a mass and marvel

of detail. The Pre-Raphaelites were not so faithful to Nature, so

minute in their rendering. The series was a wonderful achievement for

the young man of twenty-five never known to work by his English fellow

students, a wonderful achievement for an artist of any age.

[Illustration: THE THAMES IN ICE

OIL

In the Charles L. Freer Collection, National Gallery of American Art

(_See page 63_)]

[Illustration: ROTHERHITHE

ETCHING. G. 66

(_See page 63_)]

Those who thought he idled in Paris were as sure of his application in

London. "On the Thames he worked tremendously," Armstrong said, "not

caring then to have people about or to let anyone see too much of his

methods." He stayed for months at Wapping to be near his subjects,

though not cutting himself off entirely from his friends. Sir Edward

Poynter, Mr. Ionides, M. Legros, Du Maurier visited him. Mr. Ionides

recalls long drives down by the Tower and the London Docks to get to

the place, as out of the way now as then. He says Whistler lived in a

little inn, rather rough, frequented by skippers and bargees, close to

Wapping steamboat pier. But there is no doubt that much of his work was

done from Cherry Gardens, on the other side of the river. Unfortunately

it was not until after his death that we looked into this matter. At

any rate, if he lived at Wapping, he worked a great deal at Cherry

Gardens, also often from boats and barges, he told us, and this one

can see in the prints. Sometimes he would get stranded in the mud,

and at others cut off by the tide. "When his friends came," Armstrong

wrote us, "they dined at an _ordinary_ there used to be. People who had

business at the wharves in the neighbourhood dined there, and Jimmie's

descriptions of the company were always humorous." Mr. Ionides drove

down once for a dinner-party Whistler gave at his inn:

"The landlord and several bargee guests were invited. Du Maurier was

there also, and after dinner we had songs and sentiments. Jimmie

proposed the landlord's health; he felt flattered, but we were in fits

of laughter. The landlord was very jealous of his wife, who was rather

inclined to flirt with Jimmie, and the whole speech was chaff of a

soothing kind that he never suspected."

Another and more frequent visitor to Wapping was Serjeant Thomas,

one of those patrons who recognise the young artist and appear when

recognition is most needed. He bought drawings and prints from Holman

Hunt and Legros when they were scarcely known, and he helped Millais

through difficult days. Whistler had issued his French Set of etchings

in London in 1859: _Twelve Etchings from Nature by James Abbott

Whistler, London_. _Published by J. A. Whistler, At No. 62 Sloane

Street_ (Haden's house). The price, as in Paris, for _Artist's Proofs

on India, two guineas_. Serjeant Thomas saw the prints, got to know

Whistler, and arranged to publish them, and also the Thames etchings

which he sold separately at 39 Old Bond Street, where he had opened a

shop with his son, Edmund Thomas, as manager.

Mr. Percy Thomas, a younger son, has told us that, as a little fellow,

he often went with his father by boat to Wapping, and that his father

and brother posed for two of the figures--the third is Whistler--in

_The Little Pool_, used as an invitation card. He has also told us that

much of the printing was done at 39 Old Bond Street, where the family

lived in the upper part of the house. A press was in one of the small

rooms, and Whistler would come in the evening, when he happened to be

in town, to bite and prove his plates. Sometimes he would not get to

work until half-past ten or eleven. In those days he put his plate in

a deep bath of acid, keeping to the technical methods of the Coast

Survey, though it is said that the Coast Survey plates were banked

up with wax and the acid poured over them. This is supposed to have

been the method of Rembrandt. Serjeant Thomas, in his son's words, was

"great for port wine," and he would fill a glass for Whistler, and

Whistler would place the glass by the bath, and then work a little on

the plate and then stop to sip the port, and he would say, "Excellent!

Very good indeed!" and they never knew whether he meant the wine or the

work. And the charm of his manner and his courtesy made it delightful

to do anything for him. Serjeant Thomas brought Delâtre from Paris, the

only man, he thought, who could print Whistler's etchings as the artist

would have printed them himself. "Nobody," Ralph Thomas wrote, "has

ever printed Mr. Whistler's etchings with success except himself and M.

Delâtre," and to-day many people are of the same opinion. Whistler's

relations with the firm were pleasant while they lasted. But they did

not last long. Edmund Thomas cared less for art than the law, and in

the shop he would sit at his desk reading his law books, never looking

up nor leaving them, unless someone asked the price of a print or

drawing. A successful business is not run on those lines, and in a few

years he gave up art for the law, to his great advantage.

CHAPTER IX: THE BEGINNINGS IN LONDON. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN FIFTY-NINE TO

EIGHTEEN SIXTY-THREE CONTINUED.

Whistler, in 1860, devoted more time to painting on the river and less

to etching, though the _Rotherhithe_ belongs to this year. One picture

he described in a letter to Fantin. "_Chut! n'en parle pas à Courbet_"

was his warning, as if afraid to trust so good a subject to anyone. It

was to be a masterpiece, he had painted it three times, and he sent a

sketch which M. Duret reproduced in his _Whistler_. M. Duret, unable

to trace the picture, thought he might never have carried it beyond

the sketch. But it was finished: the _Wapping_ shown in the Academy of

1864, a proof how long Whistler kept his pictures before exhibiting

them. In 1867 he sent it to the Paris Exhibition. It was bought by Mr.

Thomas Winans, taken to Baltimore, where it has remained. Whistler

wanted to exhibit it at Goupil's in 1892, but could not get it. Never

seen in Europe since 1867, it has been forgotten. It was painted from

an inn, probably The Angel on the water-side at Cherry Gardens which

exists to-day, one of a row of old houses with overhanging balconies.

In the foreground, in a shadowy corner of the inn balcony, is a sailor

for whom a workman from Greaves' boat-building yard, Chelsea, sat;

next, M. Legros; and on the other side of M. Legros, with her back

turned to the river, the girl with copper-coloured hair, Jo, the model

for _The White Girl_ and _The Little White Girl_. On the river are the

little square-rigged ships that still anchor there; on the opposite

side is the long line of Wapping warehouses, which give the name.

Artists feared Jo's slightly open bodice would prevent the picture

being hung in the Royal Academy. But Whistler insisted, if it was

rejected on that account, he would open the bodice more and more every

year until he was elected and hung it himself.

He painted _The Thames in Ice_ this year (1860) from the same inn. It

was called, when first exhibited, _The Twenty-fifth of December, 1860,

on the Thames_. For an idle apprentice it was a strange way of spending

Christmas. Whistler told us that Haden bought it for ten pounds--ample

pay, Haden said: three pounds for each of the three days he spent

painting it, and a pound over. To Whistler the pay seemed anything

but ample. "You know, my sister was in the house, and women have their

ideas about things, and I did what she wanted, to please her!"

Two other pictures of 1860 are the portrait of Mr. Luke Ionides and

_The Music Room_. In both the influence of Courbet is evident. The

portrait, painted in the Newman Street studio, has the heavy handling

of _The Piano_, though much more brilliant. But the other picture is a

tremendous advance.

Fantin could not have been more conscientious in rendering the life

about him as he found it than Whistler in _The Music Room_; only,

the room in the London house, with its gay chintz curtains, has none

of the sombre simplicity of the interior where Fantin's sisters sit.

Fantin's home had an austerity he made beautiful; the Haden's house had

colour--_Harmony in Green and Rose_ was Whistler's later title for the

picture. He emphasised the gaiety by introducing a strong black note in

the standing figure, Miss Boot, while the cool light from the window

falls on "wonderful little Annie," in the same white frock she wears in

_The Piano Picture_. Mrs. Thynne (Annie Haden) says:

"I was very young when _The Music Room_ was painted, and beyond the

fact of not minding sitting, in spite of the interminable length of

time, I do not know that I can say more. It was a distinctly amusing

time for me. He was always so delightful and enjoyed the 'no lessons'

as much as I did. One day in _The Morning Call_ (the first name of

_The Music Room_) I did get tired without knowing it, and suddenly

dissolved into tears, whereupon he was full of the most tender remorse,

and rushed out and bought me a lovely Russia leather writing set, which

I am using at this very moment! The actual music-room still exists in

Sloane Street, though the present owners have enlarged it, and the

date of the picture must have been '60 or '61, after his return from

Paris. It was then he gave me the pencil sketches I lent to the London

Memorial Exhibition. I had kept them in an album he had also brought

me from Paris, with my name in gold stamped outside, of which I was

very proud. We were always good friends, and I have nothing all through

those early days but the most delightful remembrance of him."

This picture is described under three titles: _The Morning Call_, _The

Music Room_, and _Harmony in Green and Rose, The Music Room_; the

present confusion in Whistler's titles is usually the result of his own

vagueness. It became the property of Mrs. Réveillon, George Whistler's

daughter, and was carried off to St. Petersburg, never to return to

London until the exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1892.

It has become the fashion to say that Whistler had not mastered his

trade and could not use oil paint. These early pictures are technically

as accomplished as the work of any of his contemporaries. He never was

taught, few artists are, the elements of his trade, and some of his

paintings have suffered. _The Music Room_ and _The Thames in Ice_,

so far as we can remember, are wonderfully fresh. They were painted

more directly, more thinly, than the _Wapping_, in which the paint is

thickly piled, as in the _Piano Picture_, which has cracked, no doubt

the result of his working over it probably on a bad ground. Of two

pictures painted at the same period, the _Wapping_ is badly cracked,

and the _Thames in Ice_ is in perfect condition. But this is due to his

want of knowledge of the chemical properties of paints and mediums.

Later, he gave great attention to these matters. He kept the _Wapping_

four years before he showed it. Though started down the river in 1860,

it contains a portrait of Greaves' man, whom he did not see for two

or three years after. Walter Greaves stated, or allowed to be stated,

in a preface to the catalogue of his exhibition in May 1911, that he

met Whistler in the late fifties when Whistler lived in Chelsea and

made the Thames series of etchings. But the statement was proved to

be inaccurate, and the preface was withdrawn. We have quoted Greaves

on several occasions, but, before doing so, we have verified every

statement of importance he made to us, and we first met him some few

years ago when his memory was clearer and more reliable, and when he

possessed letters from Whistler which we have seen.

Mr. Thynne stood in 1860 for the beautiful dry-point _Annie Haden_, in

big crinoline and soup-plate hat, the print Whistler told Mr. E. G.

Kennedy he would choose by which to be remembered. It was the year also

of the portraits of Axenfeld, Riault, and "Mr. Mann." In 1861 there

were more plates on the Upper as well as the Lower Thames. Two of the

plates of 1861 were published as illustrations by the Junior Etching

Club in _Passages from Modern English Poets_, and Whistler proved the

plates at the press of Day and Son, and met the lad he called "the best

professional printer in England," Frederick Goulding.

Whistler told us that he worked about three weeks on each of the Thames

plates. He therefore must have spent on dated plates alone thirty-six

weeks in 1861, leaving but fourteen weeks for other work and for play.

Some of them are much less elaborate than the _Drouet_, which, Drouet

said, was done in five hours, so that it seems difficult to reconcile

the two statements. But it was about the _Black Lion Wharf_, one of

the fullest of detail, that we asked Whistler. We had many discussions

with him about them. Whistler maintained that they were youthful

performances, and J. as strongly maintained that that had nothing to

do with the matter; that he never surpassed the wonderful drawing and

composition and biting. He insisted that his later work in Venice and

in Holland was a great development, a great advance, and his final

answer was: "Well, you like them more than I do!" But there is no doubt

that the Thames plates, notably the _Black Lion Wharf_, have, for

artistic rendering of inartistic subjects and for perfect biting, never

been approached. Another thing that astonished J. was that he could

see such detail and put it on a copper-plate. "H'm," was Whistler's

comment, "that's what they all say."

Whistler got to know the Upper Thames when he stayed with Mr. and Mrs.

Edwin Edwards at Sunbury. Edwards figures in his dry-point _Encamping_

with M. W. Ridley, who was Whistler's first pupil, and Traer, Haden's

assistant, not "Freer," as he has long masqueraded in Mr. Wedmore's

catalogue. Ridley also is in _The Storm_ and _The Guitar-Player_. To

these visits we owe an etching of _Whistler at Moulsey_, by Edwards.

Whistler introduced Fantin, who, in a note for 1861, refers to the

"_jolies journées chez Edwards à Sunbury_." Mrs. Edwards wrote us

shortly before her death:

"Whistler often came to see me, turning up always when least expected,

perhaps driving down in a hansom cab from London. At that time there

was no railway at Sunbury; Hampton Court three miles distant. He might

send a line to be met by boat at Hampton Court. He was always very

eccentric."

Doubtless the driving down was an eccentricity. But Whistler knew he

might see some "foolish sunset," or a Nocturne, on the way. "We had a

large boat with waterproof cover," Mrs. Edwards added; "my husband and

friends several times went up the river and slept in the boat. Whistler

went once," when he did the plate _Encamping_ and possibly _Sketching_

and _The Punt_, and in Mrs. Edwards' words, "got rheumatism." It had

been his trouble since St. Petersburg. He could not risk exposure.

Whistler, though not settled in London, sent work regularly to the

Academy, where it was an unfailing shock to the critics. He showed

his _Mère Gérard_ in 1861. The _Athenæum_ described the picture as "a

fine, powerful-toned, and eminently characteristic study." The _Daily

Telegraph_ thought it "far fitter hung over the stove in the studio

than exhibited at the Royal Academy, though it is replete with evidence

of genius and study. If Mr. Whistler would leave off using mud and clay

on his palette and paint cleanly, like a gentleman, we should be happy

to bestow any amount of praise on him, for he has all the elements of a

great artist in his composition. But we must protest against his soiled

and miry ways." It seemed a good, serious study of an old woman and

nothing more, when we saw it in the London Memorial Exhibition, and the

appallingly low level of the Academy alone can explain the attention it

attracted.

Whistler was in France in the summer of 1861, painting _The Coast of

Brittany_, or _Alone with the Tide_, which might have been signed by

Courbet--an arrangement in brown under a cloudy sky, a stretch of

sand at low tide in the foreground, water-washed rocks against which

a peasant girl sleeps, a deep blue sea beyond. It was "a beautiful

thing," Whistler said years afterwards. At Perros Guirec he made his

splendid dry-point _The Forge_. Another print of this year is the rare

dry-point of Jo, who, for awhile, appeared in Whistler's work as often

as Saskia in Rembrandt's. She was Irish. Her father has been described

to us as a sort of Captain Costigan, and Jo--Joanna Heffernan, Mrs.

Abbott--as a woman of next to no education, but of keen intelligence,

who, before she had ceased to sit to Whistler, knew more about painting

than many painters, had become well read, and had great charm. Her

value to Whistler as a model was enormous, and she was an important

element in his life during the first London years. She was with him in

France in 1861-2, going to Paris in the winter to give him sittings for

the big _White Girl_, which he painted in a studio in the Boulevard des

Batignolles hung all in white. There Courbet met her, and, looking at

the copper-coloured hair, saw beauty in the beautiful. He painted her,

though perhaps not that winter, as _La Belle Irlandaise_, and as _Jo,

femme d'Irlande_. Whistler's study of Jo, _Note Blanche_, lent by Mrs.

Sickert to the Paris Memorial Exhibition, was doubtless done in 1861,

for the technique is like Courbet's. Drouet remembered breakfasts in

the studio which Whistler cooked.

He fell ill before the end of the winter. Miss Chapman says he was

poisoned by the white lead used in the picture. Her brother, a doctor,

recommended a journey to the Pyrenees. At Guéthary Whistler was nearly

drowned when bathing. He wrote to Fantin:

"It was sunset, the sea was very rough, I was caught in the huge waves,

swallowing gallons of salt water. I swam and I swam, and the more I

swam the less near I came to the shore. Ah! my dear Fantin, to feel

my efforts useless and to know people were looking on saying, 'But

the _Monsieur_ amuses himself, he must be strong!' I cry, I scream in

despair--I disappear three, four times. At last they understand. A

brave railroad man rushes to me, and is rolled over twice on the sands.

My model hears the call, arrives at a gallop, jumps in the sea like

a Newfoundland, manages to catch me by the foot, and the two pull me

out."[2]

At Biarritz he painted _The Blue Wave_, a great sea rolling in and

breaking on the shore under a fine sky, but quite unlike the _Coast of

Brittany_. Whistler painted few pictures in which the composition, the

arrangement, is more obvious. It is an extraordinary piece of work. It

has lately been said that he painted this picture after he had seen

Courbet's _Vague_, now in the Louvre. But the _Vague_ was not shown

until 1870. If there was any influence, it was all the other way. At

Fuenterrabia Whistler was in Spain, for the only time; "Spaniards from

the _Opéra-Comique_ in the street, men in _bérets_ and red blouses,

children like little Turks." He wanted to go farther, to Madrid, and he

urged Fantin to join him. Together they would look at _The Lances_ and

_The Spinners_ as together they had studied at the Louvre. In another

letter he promised to describe Velasquez to Fantin, to bring back

photographs. Such "glorious painting" should be copied. "_Ah! mon cher,

comme il a du travailler_," he winds up in his enthusiasm. But the

journey ended at Fuenterrabia. Fantin could not join him. Madrid was

put off for another spring, for ever, though the journey was for ever

being planned anew.

[Illustration: THE MUSIC ROOM

HARMONY IN GREEN AND ROSE

OIL

In the possession of Colonel F. Hecker

(_See page 64_)]

[Illustration: ANNIE HADEN

DRY-POINT. G. 62

(_See page 65_)]

Whistler sent _The White Girl_ to the Academy of 1862, with _The

Twenty-fifth of December, 1860, on the Thames_; _Alone with the Tide_;

and one etching, _Rotherithe_. _The White Girl_ was rejected. The two

other pictures and the print were accepted, hung, and praised. The

_Athenæum_ compared the _Rotherithe_ to Rembrandt. Whistler could

scarcely be mentioned as an etcher without this comparison; since

Rembrandt his were "the most striking and original" etchings, everyone

then said, Mr. W. M. Rossetti being among the first in England to say

it boldly. _Alone with the Tide_ was approved as "perfectly expressed,"

and _The Twenty-fifth of December_ as "broad and vigorous, though

perhaps vigour was pushed over the bounds of coarseness to become mere

dash." Other work he showed elsewhere was praised. _The Punt_ and

_Sketching_, published in _Passages from Modern English Poets_, were

singled out for admiration. _Thames Warehouses_ and _Black Lion Wharf_

won him recognition as "the most admirable etcher of the present day,"

at South Kensington Museum, where in 1862 an International Exhibition

was held. Whistler had no pictures, but the collection of modern

continental art was one of the finest ever seen in England.

In nothing had Whistler been so completely himself as in _The White

Girl_, and it failed to please. The artist is born to pick and choose,

and group with science, the elements in Nature that the result may be

beautiful, he wrote in _The Ten O'Clock_, and _The White Girl_ was his

first attempt to conform to a principle no one ever put so clearly

into words. It was an attempt, we know now, comparing the painting

to the symphonies and harmonies that came after. But at the time it

was disquieting in its defiance of modern conventions. It was without

subject according to Victorian standards, and the bold massing of

white upon white was more bewildering than the minute detail of the

Pre-Raphaelites. This summer (1862) the Berners Street Gallery was

opened, "with the avowed purpose of placing before the public the works

of young artists who may not have access to the ordinary galleries."

Maclise, Egg, Frith, Cooper, Poynter forced their way in. But the

Manager had the courage to exhibit _The White Girl_, stating in the

catalogue that the Royal Academy had refused it. The _Athenæum_ was

independent enough to say that it was the most prominent picture in the

collection, though not the most perfect, for, "able as this bizarre

production shows Mr. Whistler to be, we are certain that in a very few

years he will recognize the reasonableness of its rejection. It is one

of the most incomplete paintings we ever met with. A woman in a quaint

morning dress of white, with her hair about her shoulders, stands

alone in the background of nothing in particular. But for the rich

vigour of the textures, we might conceive this to be some old portrait

by Zucchero, or a pupil of his, practising in a provincial town. The

face is well done, but it is not that of Mr. Wilkie Collins' _Woman in

White_."

The criticism brought from Whistler his first letter to the press,

published in the _Athenæum_, July 5:

"62 Sloane Street. July 1, 1862.

"May I beg to correct an erroneous impression likely to be

confirmed in your last number? The Proprietors of the Berners

Street Gallery have, without my sanction, called my picture '_The

Woman in White_.' I had no intention whatever of illustrating Mr.

Wilkie Collins' novel; it so happens, indeed, that I have never

read it. My painting simply represents a girl dressed in white,

standing in front of a white curtain.--I am, &c.,

JAMES WHISTLER."

The critics were spared the sting of his wit, but they disapproved

strongly enough for him to tell his friends that _The White Girl_

enjoyed a _succès d'exécration_.

A different success awaited his Thames etchings in Paris, where they

were shown in a dealer's gallery. Baudelaire saw them and understood,

as he was the first to understand the work of Manet, Poe, Wagner, and

many others. He wrote:

"_Tout récemment, un jeune artiste américain, M. Whistler, exposait

à la galerie Martinet une série d'eaux fortes, subtiles, éveillées

comme l'improvisation et l'inspiration, représentant les bords de la

Tamise; merveilleux fouillis d'agrés, de vergues, de cordages; chaos de

brumes, de fourneaux et de fumées tire-bouchonnées; poésie profonde et

compliquée d'une vaste capitale._"

According to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Whistler soon moved to Queen's

Road, Chelsea: "I fancy that the houses in Queen's Road have been

much altered since Whistler was there in 1862-63. They were then

low (say two-storeyed), quite old-fashioned houses, of a cosy,

homely character, with small forecourts. I have a kind of idea that

Whistler's house was No. 12, but this is quite uncertain to me.[3] As

my brother and I were much in that neighbourhood, to and fro, prior

to settling down in No. 16 Cheyne Walk, we came into contact with

Whistler, who every now and then accompanied us on our jaunts. I forget

how it was exactly that we got introduced to him; possibly by Mr.

Algernon Swinburne, who was also to be an inmate of No. 16. Either (as

I think) before meeting Whistler or just about the time we met him, we

had seen one or two of his paintings. _At the Piano_ must have been

one, and we most heartily admired him, and discerned unmistakably that

he was destined for renown."

The friendship may have led to Whistler's interest in black-and-white,

for in England it was Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who

revolutionised illustration and proved it a dignified and serious form

of art. The more brilliant of the younger men were working for the

illustrated magazines, and Whistler found a place among them. He made

six drawings in 1862. Four appeared in _Once a Week_: _The Morning

before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew_, _Count Burckhardt_, _The

Major's Daughter_, _The Relief Fund in Lancashire_, intended to be

used as an illustration to the reprint of an address by Tennyson on

the subject of the famine in Lancashire, but never written because of

his illness. To this fund we believe Whistler contributed a drawing.

The two other illustrations, for _The First Sermon_, were published

in _Good Words_. They were drawn on wood in pencil, pen and wash, are

full of character, and, in the use of line, are like his etchings. They

were engraved by the Dalziel Brothers and Joseph Swain, and from Mr.

Strahan, the publisher of _Once a Week_, we have these additional facts:

"They were arranged for by Edward Dalziel, and I cannot say how he came

to know the artist or his work, as Mr. Whistler was young then, and, as

far as I know, had not contributed to any magazine.

The average price we paid to artists was nine pounds, and we reckoned

that the same amount had to be paid for engravings. As a matter of

fact, the sum paid to Mr. Whistler was nine pounds for each drawing."

We showed Whistler once _The Morning before the Massacre of St.

Bartholomew_. "Well, now, not bad, you know--not bad even then!" and he

followed, with his expressive little finger, the flowing line, pointing

to the hand lost in the draperies. This and _The Major's Daughter_ were

the two he preferred, and when J. was preparing _The History of Modern

Illustration_ Whistler picked them out as "very pretty ones" that

should be reproduced, though, if but a single example of his work could

be used, he wished _The Morning before the Massacre_ to be selected,

for it was "as delicate as an etching, and altogether characteristic

and personal." _Count Burckhardt_ he did not care for, insisting that

he would rather not be represented if this were to be the only example

in the book. "It was never a favourite," he added.

The four drawings of _Once a Week_ were reprinted in Thornbury's

_Legendary Ballads_, 1876. Thornbury implied that the drawings were

made for the book, and thought that "the startling drawings by Mr.

Whistler prove his singular power of hand, strong artistic feeling, and

daring manner."

Our copy belonged to George Augustus Sala. On the margin of _The

Morning before the Massacre_ he wrote: "Jemmy Whistler.--Clever,

sketchy, and incomplete, like everything he has done. A loaf of

excellent, fine flour, but slack-baked." So Sala believed in 1883, and

it is typical of the time.

Another important work of 1862 was _The Last of Old Westminster_. Mr.

Arthur Severn knows more about it than anyone, as his account to us

explains: "On my return from Rome to join my brother in his rooms in

Manchester Buildings, on the Thames at Westminster Bridge (where the

New Scotland Yard now is), I found Whistler beginning his picture of

Westminster Bridge. My brother had given him permission to use our

sitting-room, with its bow-windows looking over the river and towards

the bridge. He was always courteous and pleasant in manner, and it was

interesting to see him at work. The bridge was in perspective, still

surrounded with piles, for it had only just been finished. It was the

piles with their rich colour and delightful confusion that took his

fancy, not the bridge, which hardly showed. He would look steadily

at a pile for some time, then mix up the colour, then, holding his

brush quite at the end, with no mahlstick, make a downward stroke and

the pile was done. I remember his looking very carefully at a hansom

cab that had pulled up for some purpose on the bridge, and in a few

strokes he got the look of it perfectly. He was long over the picture,

sometimes coming only once a week, and we got rather tired of it. One

day some friends came to see it. He stood it against a table in an

upright position for them to see; it suddenly fell on its face, to my

brother's disgust, as he had just got a new carpet. Luckily Whistler's

sky was pretty dry, and I don't think the picture got any damage, and

the artist was most good-natured about my brother's anxiety lest the

carpet should have suffered."

_The Last of Old Westminster_ was ready for the Academy of 1863, to

which it was sent with six prints: _Weary_, _Old Westminster Bridge_,

_Hungerford Bridge_, _Monsieur Becquet_, _The Forge_, _The Pool_.

The dignity of composition in the picture and the vigour of handling

impressed all who saw it in the London Memorial Exhibition, though

they had to regret its shocking condition, cracked from end to end. It

failed to impress Academicians in 1863, and was badly hung, as were the

prints, reproductive work being then, as now, preferred to original

etching.

_The White Girl_, after its Berners Street success, was sent by

Whistler to the _Salon_. He took it to Paris, to Fantin's studio, there

having it unrolled and framed. It is hard to say why the strongest

work of the strongest young men was rejected from the _Salon_ of 1863.

Fantin, Legros, Manet, Bracquemond, Jongkind, Harpignies, Cazin,

Jean-Paul Laurens, Vollon, Whistler were refused. It was a scandal;

1859 was nothing to it. The town was in an uproar that reached the ears

of the Emperor. Martinet, the dealer, offered to show the rejected

pictures in his gallery. But before this was arranged, Napoleon III

ordered that a _Salon des Refusés_ should be held in the same building

as the official _Salon_, the _Palais de l'Industrie_. The decree

was published in the _Moniteur_ for April 24, 1863. The notice was

issued by the _Directeur-Général_ of the Imperial Museums, and the

exhibition opened on May 15. The success was as great as the scandal.

The exhibition was the talk of the town, it was caricatured as the

_Exposition des Comiques_, and parodied as the _Club des Refusés_

at the _Variétés_; everyone rushed to the galleries. The rooms were

crowded by artists, because, in the midst of much no doubt weak and

foolish, the best work of the day was shown; by the public, because of

the stir the affair made. The public laughed with the idea that it was

a duty to laugh, and because the critics said that never was _succès

pour rire_ better deserved. Zola described in _L'Oeuvre_ the gaiety and

cruelty of the crowd, convulsed and hysterical in front of _La Dame en

Blanc_. Hamerton wrote in the _Fine Arts Quarterly_:

"The hangers must have thought her particularly ugly, for they have

given her a sort of place of honour, before an opening through which

all pass, so that nobody misses her. I watched several parties, to see

the impression _The Woman in White_ made on them. They all stopped

instantly, struck with amazement. This for two or three seconds, then

they always looked at each other and laughed. Here, for once, I have

the happiness to be quite of the popular way of thinking."

On the other hand, Fernand Desnoyers, who wrote a pamphlet on the

_Salon des Refusés_, thought that Whistler was "_le plus spirite des

peintres_," and the painting the most original that had passed before

the jury of the _Salon_, altogether remarkable, at once simple and

fantastic, the portrait of a spirit, a medium, though of a beauty so

peculiar that the public did not know whether to think it beautiful

or ugly. Paul Mantz considered it the most important picture in the

exhibition, full of knowledge and strange charm, and his article in the

_Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ is the more interesting because he described

the picture as a _Symphonie du Blanc_ some years before Whistler called

it so, and pointed out that it carried on French tradition, for, a

hundred years earlier, painters had shown in the _Salon_ studies of

white upon white.

The picture hardly explained the sensation of its first appearance when

we saw it with _Miss Alexander_, the _Mother_, _Carlyle_, _The Fur

Jacket_, and _Irving_ in the London Memorial Exhibition. But it seemed

revolutionary enough in the sixties, to become the _clou_ of the _Salon

des Refusés_, though nothing was further from Whistler's intention. It

eclipsed Manet's _Déjeuner sur l'herbe_, then called _Le Bain_.

Whistler was in Amsterdam with Legros, looking at Rembrandt with

delight, at Van der Helst with disappointment, etching _Amsterdam

from the Tolhuis_, no doubt hunting for old paper and adding to his

collection of blue and white, when the news came of the reception of

his picture in Paris, and he wrote to Fantin that he longed to be there

and in the movement. It was a satisfaction that the picture, slighted

in London, should be honoured in Paris. He was all impatience to know

what was said in the _Café de Bade_, the _café_ of Manet, and by the

critics.

To add to his triumph in Paris, official honours were coming to him in

Holland and England. Some of his etchings were in an exhibition at The

Hague, though he said he did not know how they got there, and he was

given one of three gold medals awarded to foreigners--his first medal.

Though atrociously hung at the Academy, his prints were honoured at the

British Museum, where twelve were bought for the Print Room this year.

The excitement did not keep him from work, to which, as he wrote to

Fantin, wandering was a drawback. He felt the need of his studio,

of "the familiar all about him." The "familiar" he loved best was

in London, and when he returned he began to look for a house of his

own. It was fortunate for him that his mother was in England. At the

beginning of the Civil War, in which Whistler took the keenest interest

as a patriot and a "West Point man," she had been in Richmond with her

son William, serving as surgeon in the Confederate Army, had run the

blockade, and come to join her other children in London.

Whistler no longer made the Hadens' house his home. The relations

of the brothers-in-law had become strained, both being of strong

character. Haden had had much to put up with, while Whistler, the

artist, resented the criticism of Haden, the surgeon. One story we have

from Whistler explains the situation, and though he never gave a date,

it can be told here. Haden was the schoolmaster Whistler found him when

they first met; one's older relatives have a way of forgetting one can

grow up. Once, when Whistler had done something more enormous than ever

in Haden's eyes, he was summoned to the workroom upstairs, and lectured

until he refused to listen to another word. He started down the four

flights of stairs, with Haden close behind still lecturing. At last the

front door was reached. And then: "Oh, dear," said Whistler, "I've left

my hat upstairs, and now we have got to go all through this again!" As

there was no further question of Whistler living with the Hadens, it

was decided that he and his mother should live together, and some of

his most delightful years were those that followed.

[Footnote 2: See Duret's _Whistler_.]

[Footnote 3: Not only have the houses been much altered, but the name

of the street has changed, and Queen's Road is now Royal Hospital Road.

The present No. 12 corresponds to Mr. Rossetti's description, but we

think it more likely--and he does too--that Whistler lived in one of

the little brick cottages of Paradise Row. In any case, we doubt if

he had more than rooms or lodgings. He gave us to understand that the

house he took shortly after, in Lindsey Row, was his first in London.]

CHAPTER X: CHELSEA DAYS. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SIXTY-THREE TO EIGHTEEN

SIXTY-SIX.

Whistler's first house in London was No. 7 Lindsey Row, Chelsea, now

101 Cheyne Walk. It adjoins the old palace of Lord Lindsey, which still

stands, the original building divided into several houses, stuccoed

and modernised, much of its stateliness gone, though the spacious

stairway and part of the panelling have been preserved. Whistler's was

a three-storey house, with a garden in front, humble compared with

the palaces Academicians were building. "All these artists complain

of nothing but the too great prosperity of the profession in these

days," Hamerton wrote to his wife; "they tell me an artist's life is

a princely one now." But Whistler lived his own life, and from his

windows he could paint what he wanted. Only the road separated the

house from the river; opposite was Battersea Church and a group of

factory chimneys; old Battersea Bridge stretched across, and at night

he could see the lights of Cremorne.

At the end of the Row the boat-builder Greaves lived. He had worked in

Chelsea for years. He had rowed Turner about on the river, and his two

sons were to row Whistler. One of the sons, Mr. Walter Greaves, has

told us that Mrs. Booth, a big, hard, coarse Scotchwoman, was always

with Turner when he came for a boat. Turner would ask Greaves what kind

of a day it was going to be, and if Greaves answered "Fine," he would

get Greaves to row them across to Battersea Church, or to the fields,

now Battersea Park. If Greaves was doubtful Turner would say: "Well,

Mrs. Booth, we won't go far," and afterwards for the sons--boys at the

time--Turner in their memory was overshadowed by her. They had also

known Martin, the painter of big Scriptural _machines_, whose house

was in the middle of the Row. It had a balcony, and on fine moonlight

nights, or nights of dramatic skies, Greaves or one of the sons would

knock him up, and keep on knocking until they saw the old man in his

nightcap on the balcony, where he would get to work and sketch the sky

until daylight. Greaves remembered, too, Brunel, who built the _Great

Eastern_, living at the end of the Row. Of other associations, dating

a couple of centuries before, the little Moravian graveyard at the

back was a reminder, for Lindsey Palace was one of the first refuges

of Zinzendorf and the Brotherhood. A hundred years or so later Mrs.

Gaskell was born there. The Row, indeed, was a place of history. But

Whistler was to make it more famous.

[Illustration: THE WHITE GIRL SYMPHONY IN WHITE. NO. I

OIL

In the possession of J. H. Whittemore, Esq.

(_See page 67_)]

[Illustration: JO

DRY-POINT. G. 77

(_See page 68_)]

The two Greaves, Walter and Harry, painted, and Whistler let them work

with and for him. We have often heard him speak of them as his pupils.

From them he learned to row. "He taught us to paint, and we taught him

the waterman's jerk," Mr. Walter Greaves says. Whistler would start

with them in the twilight, Albert Moore sometimes his companion, and

they would stay on the river for hours, often all night, lingering in

the lights of Cremorne, drifting into the shadows of the bridge. Or

else he was up with the dawn, throwing pebbles at their windows to wake

them and make them come and pull him up or down stream. At night, on

the river and at Cremorne, he was never without brown paper and black

and white chalk, with which he made his notes for the Nocturnes and the

seemingly simple, but really complicated, firework pictures. In the

Gardens it was easy to put down what he wanted under the lamps. On the

river he had to trust to his memory, only noting the reflections in

white chalk.

Walter Greaves, in his exhibition of 1911, made the statement, or

allowed it to be made, that before he and his brother knew Whistler,

they were "painting pictures of the Thames and Cremorne Gardens, both

day and night effects." This statement Mr. Greaves was unable to

substantiate by dates and facts, and as other dates and facts given in

his catalogue were wrong, little reliance can be placed upon it. He

and his brother were Whistler's pupils, and they worked for Whistler

for many years, helping him, at any rate until after The Peacock Room.

Whistler naturally wished to control his pupils in their work as any

other master would, as he controlled and directed the work of Mr. and

Mrs. Clifford Addams, his last pupils. He also did his best to prevent

Mr. Walter Greaves and his brother from appropriating his subjects,

which letters from Whistler to Greaves prove was exactly what they

were doing. They were to carry on his tradition, and this included his

methods and even at times his colours which they used, while Whistler

as undoubtedly worked on their canvases and plates as he worked on

those of other pupils at later dates. But the statement that he refused

to allow them to exhibit is untrue, for on the few occasions when we

are able to find that Greaves did exhibit, it was because Whistler,

in his generosity, got the pictures hung. In his recent exhibition

Greaves showed a painting called _Passing under Old Battersea Bridge_,

signed and dated 1862, and he stated that he had exhibited it in the

International Exhibition at South Kensington of that year. No other

picture we have seen by him has any such date or signature on it, and

his statement that it was in the International Exhibition of 1862 has

been proved false. It is now admitted that he did not show until 1873.

There are two distinct qualities of work in the picture which must

be the work either of two people or of two periods. The piers of the

bridge are hard and tight, the background resembles Whistler's work of

years later, for neither Whistler nor Greaves had painted a Nocturne in

that manner at the time. Nevertheless, these misstatements of Greaves

were used by critics all over the world to belittle Whistler.

At one time, master and pupils attended a life class held in the

evening by M. Barthe, a Frenchman, in Limerston Street, not far from

the Row. Mr. J. E. Christie was another student, and from him we have

the following account:

"Whistler was not a regular attender, but came occasionally, and always

accompanied by two young men--brothers--Greaves by name. They simply

adored Whistler, and were not unlike him in appearance, owing to an

unconscious imitation of his dress and manner. It was amusing to watch

the movements of the trio when they came into the studio (always late).

The curtain that hung in front of the door would suddenly be pulled

back by one of the Greaves, and a trim, prim little man, with a bright,

merry eye, would step in with 'Good evening,' cheerfully said to the

whole studio. After a second's survey, while taking off his gloves, he

would hand his hat to the other brother, who hung it up carefully as

if it were a sacred thing, then he would wipe his brow and moustache

with a spotless handkerchief, then in the most careful way he arranged

his materials, and sat down. Then, having imitated in a general way the

preliminaries, the two Greaves sat down on either side of him. There

was a sort of tacit understanding that his and their studies should

not be subjected to our rude gaze. I, however, saw, with the tail of

my eye, as it were, that Whistler made small drawings on brown paper

with coloured chalks, that the figure (always a female figure) would

be about four inches long, that the drawing was bold and fine, and not

slavishly like the model. The comical part was that his satellites

didn't draw from the model at all, that I saw, but sat looking at

Whistler's drawing and copying that as far as they could. He never

entered into the conversation, which was unceasing, but occasionally

rolled a cigarette and had a few whiffs, the Greaves brothers always

requiring their whiffs at the same time. The trio packed up, and left

before the others always."

Sometimes in the evening Whistler, with his mother, would go to the

Greaves' house after dinner, and work there. Often he sent in dessert,

that they might enjoy and talk over it together. Then he would

bring out his brown paper and chalks and make studies of the family

and of himself, or sketches of pictures he had seen, working until

midnight and after. In those days he never went to bed until he had

drawn a portrait of himself, he told us. Many of the portraits are

in existence. The sister was an accomplished musician, and Whistler

delighted in music, though he was not critical, for he was known to

call the passing hurdy-gurdy into his front garden, and have it ground

under his windows. Occasionally the brothers played so that Whistler

might dance. He was always full of drolleries and fun. He would imitate

a man sawing, or two men fighting at the door so cleverly that Mrs.

Greaves never ceased to be astonished when he walked into the room

alone and unhur. He delighted in American mechanical toys, and his

house was full of Japanese dolls. One great doll, dressed like a man,

he would take with him not only to the Greaves', but to dinners at

Little Holland House, where the Prinseps then lived, and to other

houses, where he put it through amazing performances.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was, by this time, settled in Tudor House (now

Queen's House), not far from Lindsey Row, and Swinburne and George

Meredith were living with him. Mr. W. M. Rossetti came for two or three

nights every week, and Frederick Sandys, Charles Augustus Howell,

William Bell Scott, and, several years later, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton

were constant visitors.

For Rossetti Whistler had a genuine affection, and, in his early

enthusiasm, wrote of him as "_une grand artiste_" to Fantin. But later

his enthusiasm did not blind him. "A charming fellow, the only white

man in all that crowd of painters," he assured us; "not an artist,

you know, but charming and a gentleman." Mr. Watts-Dunton says that

Rossetti got tired of Whistler after awhile, and considered him a

brainless fellow, who had no more than a malicious quick wit at the

expense of others, and no genuine philosophy or humour. But Whistler

never realised any change in Rossetti's feelings towards him.

It was inevitable that Whistler and Rossetti should disagree in matters

of art. Whistler asked Rossetti why he did not frame his sonnets.

Rossetti thought that the "new French School," in which Whistler had

been trained, was "simply putrescence and decomposition." It is said

that Rossetti influenced Whistler. Whistler influenced him as much.

They influenced each other in the choice of models, in a certain

luxuriance of type and the manner of presenting it, an influence which

was superficial and transitory.

Upon many other subjects they agreed. Rossetti shared Whistler's

delight in drollery and his love of the fantastic. No one understood

better than Whistler why Rossetti filled his house and garden with

strange beasts. It was from Whistler we heard of the peacock and the

gazelle, who fought until the peacock was left standing desolate, with

his tail strewed upon the ground. From Whistler, too, we had the story

of the bull of Bashan, bought at Cremorne, and tied to a stake in

the garden, and Rossetti would come every day and talk to him, until

once the bull got so excited that he pulled up the stake and made

for Rossetti, who went tearing round and round a tree, a little fat

person with coat-tails flying, finally, by a supreme effort, rushing

up the garden steps just in time to slam the door in the bull's face.

Rossetti called his man and ordered him to tie up the bull, but the

man, who had looked out for the menagerie, who had gone about the house

with peacocks and other creatures under his arms, who had rescued

armadilloes from irate neighbours, who had captured monkeys from the

tops of chimneys, struck when it came to tying up a bull of Bashan on

the rampage, and gave a month's warning. From Whistler also we first

had the story of the wombat, bought at Jamrach's by Rossetti for its

name. Whistler was dining at Tudor House, and the wombat was brought on

the table with coffee and cigars, while Meredith talked brilliantly,

and Swinburne read aloud passages from the _Leaves of Grass_. But

Meredith was witty as well as brilliant, and the special target of his

wit was Rossetti, who, as he had invited two or three of his patrons,

did not appreciate the jest. The evening ended less amiably than it

began, and no one thought of the wombat until late, and then it had

disappeared. It was searched for high and low. Days passed, weeks

passed, months passed, and there was no wombat. It was regretted,

forgotten. Long afterwards Rossetti, who was not much of a smoker, got

out the box of cigars he had not touched since that dinner. He opened

it. Not a cigar was left, but there was the skeleton of the wombat.

Whistler and Rossetti also agreed about many of the group who met at

Tudor House, though eventually Whistler felt what appeared to him the

disloyalty of Swinburne and Burne-Jones. He was never, at any time,

so intimate with Burne-Jones as with Swinburne, who often came to

the house in Lindsey Row, not only for Whistler's sake, but out of

affection for Whistler's mother. Miss Chapman tells us that Swinburne

was once taken ill there suddenly, and Mrs. Whistler nursed him till

he was well. Miss Chapman also remembers Swinburne sitting at Mrs.

Whistler's feet, and saying to her: "Mrs. Whistler, what has happened?

It used to be Algernon!" Mrs. Whistler, who had accepted Whistler's

friends and their ways, said quietly, "You have not been to see us for

a long while, you know. If you come as you did, it will be Algernon

again." And he came, and the friendship lasted until the eighties, when

he published the article in the _Fortnightly Review_ which Whistler

could not forgive.

Meredith wrote us of these Chelsea days: "I knew Whistler and never had

a dissension with him, though merry bouts between us were frequent.

When I went to live in the country, we rarely met. He came down to stay

with me once. He was a lively companion, never going out of his way to

take offence, but with the springs in him prompt for the challenge. His

tales of his student life in Paris, and of one Ernest, with whom he

set forth on a holiday journey with next to nothing in his purse, were

_impayable_."

Quarrels and distrust never made Whistler deny the charm of Charles

Augustus Howell, remembered for the part he played in the lives of

some of the most distinguished people of his generation. Who he was,

where he came from, nobody knew. He was supposed to be associated with

high, but nameless, personages in Portugal, and sent by them on a

secret mission to England: he was said to have been involved in the

Orsini conspiracy, and obliged to fly for his life across the Channel.

According to Mr. E. T. Cook, he was descended from Boabdil il Chico,

though Rossetti called him "the cheeky." Mr. Cook says that in his

youth, as he used to tell, he had supported his family by diving for

treasure, and had lived in Morocco as the Sheik of a Tribe. But Ford

Madox Brown described him as the Münchausen of the Pre-Raphaelite

circle. The unquestionable fact is that he was a man of great personal

charm and unusual business capacity. Mr. W. M. Rossetti has written of

him: "As a salesman--with his open manner, winning address, and his

exhaustless gift of amusing talk, not innocent of high colouring and of

actual _blague_--Howell was unsurpassable."

He was secretary to Ruskin; he was Rossetti's man of affairs; he became

Whistler's, though on a less definite basis. He appears in published

reminiscences as the magnificent prototype of the author's agent. His

talk was one of his recommendations to both Rossetti and Whistler.

Rossetti rejoiced in Howell's "Niagara of lies," and immortalised them:

"_There's a Portuguese person called Howell,

Who lays on his lies with a trowel;

When I goggle my eyes,

And start with surprise,

'Tis at the monstrous big lies told by Howell._"

Whistler described him as "the wonderful man, the genius, the Gil

Blas-Robinson Crusoe hero out of his proper time, the creature of

top-boots and plumes, splendidly flamboyant, the real hero of the

Picaresque novel, forced by modern conditions into other adventures,

and along other roads."

Whistler gave Howell credit for more than picturesqueness. He had the

instinct for beautiful things, Whistler said: "He knew them and made

himself indispensable by knowing them. He was of the greatest service

to Rossetti; he helped Watts to sell his pictures and raise his prices;

he acted as artistic adviser to Mr. Howard, Lord Carlisle. He had

the gift of intimacy; he was at once a friend, on closest terms of

confidence. He introduced everybody to everybody else, he entangled

everybody with everybody else, and it was easier to get involved with

Howell than to get rid of him."

Many years passed before there was any wish on Whistler's part to

get rid of him. He was soon as frequent a visitor at Lindsey Row as

at Tudor House. For a time he lived at Putney, and Whistler used to

take his morning pull up the river to breakfast with him. Of none of

the Rossetti group did Whistler so often talk to us as of Howell,

telling us his adventures--adventures in pursuit of old furniture and

china until he was known to, and loved and hated by, every pawnbroker

in London, and seemed to spend all his time with rare and beautiful

things; adventures with creditors and bailiffs: once his collection

of blue pots saved by a device only Howell could have invented, forty

blue pots carried off in forty four-wheelers to the law-courts, where

he was complimented by the judge and awarded heavy damages by the jury;

adventures as vestryman, giving teas to hundreds of schoolchildren;

adventures at Selsea Bill, where three cottages were turned into a

house for himself and he swaggered in the village as a great personage,

finding an occupation in stripping the copper from an old wreck that

had been there for years and possibly selling it to etchers; adventures

ending eventually in _The Paddon Papers_, of which there will be

something to say when the date of their publication is reached.

Frederick Sandys' work never interested Whistler, but Sandys the man

was a delight to him, though the two lost sight of each other for many

years. Sandys was usually without a penny in his pocket, but he faced

the situation with calm and swagger. Accidents never separated him

from his white waistcoat, though he might have to carry it himself to

the laundry, or get his model, "the little girl" he called her, to

carry it for him. You were always meeting them with the brown-paper

parcel, Whistler said, and at the nearest friend's house he would stop

for five minutes and emerge from it splendid in a clean waistcoat. In

money matters he reckoned like a Rothschild. It was always, "Huh! five

hundred," that he wanted. Late one afternoon, as Whistler was going

into Rossetti's, he met Sandys coming out unusually depressed. He

stopped Whistler:

"Do, do try and reason with Gabriel, huh! He is most thoughtless. He

says I must go to America, and I must have five hundred, huh, and go!

But, if I could go, huh, I could stay!"

Once Whistler, Sandys, and Rossetti are said to have gone to Winchelsea

with W. G. Wills, Irving, and Alfred Calmour, from whom the story

comes. Whistler and Rossetti wanted to see a beautiful old house.

A grumpy old man lived in it, but Irving warned them that he would

probably ask them all to dinner. Rossetti said they must refuse, he

hated dining with strangers; Whistler was sure the wine would be bad,

Sandys as certain they would be bored by infernal chatter. But they

went to the house. Whistler knocked. The servant opened. Whistler

asked him to tell his master that "Mr. Whistler and Mr. Rossetti and

Mr. Irving wish to see the place." A rough voice was heard: "Shut the

door, Roger, I don't want these damned show people stealing my silver."

Whistler and Rossetti were furious, and thought they should demand

an apology. "He thinks we are confounded actors," Whistler said. "My

dear James, he's never heard of _you_!" was Irving's comment. The only

drawback to the story is that we doubt if Whistler knew Irving until

after he had ceased to see anything of Rossetti and Sandys.

Whistler got to know other friends of Rossetti's, and he drifted

to Ford Madox Brown's, in Fitzroy Square: "Once in a long while I

would take my gaiety, my sunniness, to Madox Brown's receptions. And

there were always the most wonderful people--the Blinds, Swinburne,

anarchists, poets and musicians, all kinds and sorts, and, in an inner

room, Rossetti and Mrs. Morris sitting side by side in state, being

worshipped, and, fluttering round them, Howell with a broad red ribbon

across his shirt-front, a Portuguese decoration hereditary in the

family."

According to his grandson, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown

thought so much of Whistler's work that once, knowing Whistler wanted

money, he sent round among his friends a circular praising Whistler's

etchings and urging their purchase.

Whistler shared Rossetti's interest in the spiritual manifestations

that, for several years, agitated the circle at Tudor House. He told us

once of the strange things that happened when he went to _séances_ at

Rossetti's with Jo, and also when he and Jo tried the same things in

his studio, and a cousin from the South, long dead, talked to him and

told him much that no one else could have known. He believed, but he

gave up the _séances_ when they threatened to become engrossing, for he

felt that he would be obliged to sacrifice to them the work he had to

do in the world.

[Illustration: THE BLUE WAVE

OIL

In the possession of A. A. Pope, Esq.

(_See page 68_)]

[Illustration: THE FORGE

DRY-POINT. G. 68

(_See page 67_)]

The chief bond between Whistler and Rossetti was their love for blue

and white and Japanese prints. Whistler was in Paris in 1856, when

Bracquemond "discovered" Japan in a little volume of Hokusai used for

packing china, and rescued by Delâtre, the printer. It passed into the

hands of Laveille, the engraver, and from him Bracquemond obtained

it. After that, Bracquemond had the book always by him; and when in

1862 Madame Desoye, who, with her husband, had lived in Japan, opened

a shop under the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, the enthusiasm spread

to Manet, Fantin, Tissot, Jacquemart and Solon, Baudelaire and the De

Goncourts. Rossetti was supposed to have made it the fashion. But the

fashion in Paris began before Rossetti owned his first blue pot or his

first colour-print. Whistler brought the knowledge and the love of the

art to London. "It was he who invented blue and white in London," Mr.

Murray Marks assured us, and Mr. W. M. Rossetti was as certain that his

brother was inspired by Whistler, who bought not only blue and white,

but sketch-books, colour-prints, lacquers, kakemonos, embroideries,

screens. "In his house in Chelsea, facing Battersea Bridge," Mr. Severn

writes, "he had lovely blue and white, Chinese and Japanese." The only

decorations, except the harmony of colour, were the prints on the

walls, a flight of Japanese fans in one place, in another shelves of

blue and white. People, copying him, stuck up fans anywhere, and hung

plates from wires. Whistler's fans were arranged for colour and line.

His decorations bewildered people even more than the work of the new

firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. The Victorian artist covered

his walls with tapestry, filled his studio with costly things, and made

the public measure beauty by price, a fact overlooked by Whistler, but

never by Morris.

Rossetti joined in the hunt for blue and white. Henry Treffy Dunn, in

his _Recollections of Rossetti_, whose assistant he was, writes that

Rossetti and Whistler "each tried to outwit the other in picking up

the choicest pieces of blue to be met with"; that both were for ever

hunting for "Long Elizas," a name in which Mr. W. M. Rossetti thought

"possibly a witticism of Whistler's may be detected." Howell rushed in

and met with the most astounding experiences and adventures. A little

shop in the Strand was one of their favourite haunts, another was near

London Bridge where a Japanese print was given away with a pound of

tea. Farmer and Rogers had an Oriental warehouse in Regent Street. The

manager, Mr. Lazenby Liberty, afterwards opened one on the other side

of the street, and here, too, Whistler went, introduced to Mr. Liberty

by Rossetti. Mr. Liberty rendered him many a service, and visited him

to the last. Mr. Murray Marks imported blue and white, and he has told

us how the fever spread from Whistler and Rossetti to the ever-anxious

collector. Rossetti asked Mr. Marks if he knew anything about blue

and white. Mr. Marks said yes; he could get Rossetti a shipload if he

chose. Mr. Marks often ran over to Holland, where blue and white was

common and cheap, and he picked up a lot, offering it to Rossetti for

fifty pounds. Rossetti happened to be hard up and could not afford

it. But he came with Mr. Huth, who bought as much as Rossetti could

not take, and the rage for it began in England, Sir Henry Thompson,

among others, commencing to collect. The rivalry between Whistler and

Rossetti lasted for several years, until Rossetti, ill and broken,

hardly saw his friends, and until Mr. Marks, in the early seventies,

bought back from Whistler and Rossetti all he had sold them.

CHAPTER XI: CHELSEA DAYS. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SIXTY-THREE TO EIGHTEEN

SIXTY-SIX CONTINUED.

In Whistler's correspondence with Fantin between 1860 and 1865,

published in part by M. Bénédite in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_

(1905), it can be seen that he was outgrowing the influence of Courbet,

and that his reaction against realism was bitter. In his revolt he

deliberately built up subjects that had nothing to do with life as he

knew it, and he borrowed the motives from Japan.

It was in the studio at No. 7 Lindsey Row--no huge, gorgeous,

tapestry-hung, _bric-à-brac_ crowded hall, but a little second

storey, or English first floor, back room--that the Japanese pictures

were painted. The method was a development of his earlier work. The

difference was in the subjects. He did not conceal his "machinery."

_The Lange Leizen_, _The Gold Screen_, _The Balcony_, the _Princesse

du Pays de la Porcelaine_ were endeavours to render a beauty he had

discovered which was unknown in Western life. There was no attempt at

the "learning" of Tadema or the "morality" of Holman Hunt. Whistler's

models were not Japanese. The lady of _The Lange Leizen_ sits on a

chair as she never would have sat in the land from which her costume

came, and the pots and trays and flowers around her are in a profusion

never seen in the houses of Tokio or Canton. In _The Gold Screen_ pose

and arrangement are equally inappropriate. The _Princesse_, in her

trailing robes, is as little Japanese. When he left the studio and took

his canvas to the front of the house and painted _The Balcony_, though

he clothed the English models in Eastern dress and gave them Eastern

instruments to play upon, and placed them before Japanese screens and

Anglo-Japanese railings, their background was the Thames with the

chimneys of Battersea. We have heard of a Chinese bamboo rack he used

for these railings, though some remember it as a studio property made

from his design. Nothing save the beauty of the detail mattered to

Whistler. It was not the real Japan he wanted to paint, but his idea of

it, just as Rembrandt painted his idea of the Holy Land.

The titles he afterwards found for these pictures are _Purple and

Rose_, _Caprice in Purple and Gold_, _Harmony in Flesh Colour and

Green_, _Rose and Silver_. Harmony was what he sought, though no

Dutchman surpassed their delicacy of detail, truth of texture,

intricacy of pattern. And yet we are conscious in them of artificial

structure as in none of his other work; the models do not live in their

Japanese draperies; Eastern detail is out of place on the banks of the

Thames; the device is too obvious.

The _Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine_ is the portrait of Miss

Christine Spartali, daughter of the Greek Consul-General in London,

whom Whistler met at Ionides', and to whose dinners and parties he

often went. There were two daughters, Christine (Countess Edmond de

Cahen) and Marie (Mrs. W. J. Stillman), both beautiful. Whistler and

Rossetti were struck by their beauty, and Whistler asked the younger

sister, Christine, to sit to him. Mrs. Stillman, who always accompanied

her, has told us the story of the picture. Before they came to the

studio Whistler had his scheme prepared. The Japanese robe was ready,

the rug and screen were in place, and he posed her at once. There are

a number of small studies and sketches in oil and pastel that show he

knew what he wanted. She sat twice a week during the winter of 1863-64.

At first the work went quickly, then it began to drag. Whistler often

rubbed it out just as she thought it finished, and day after day she

returned to find that everything was to be done over again. The parents

got tired, but not the two girls. Mrs. Stillman remembers that Whistler

partly closed the shutters so as to shut out the direct light; that

her sister stood at one end of the room, the canvas beside her; that

Whistler would look at the picture from a distance, then dash at it,

give one stroke, then dash away again. As a rule, they arrived about

half-past ten or a quarter to eleven; he painted steadily, forgetting

everything else, and it was often long after two before they lunched.

When lunch was served, it was brought into the studio, placed on a low

table, and they sat on stools. There were no such lunches anywhere.

Mrs. Whistler provided American dishes, strange in London; among other

things, raw tomatoes, a surprise to the Greek girls, who had never

eaten tomatoes except over-cooked as the Greeks liked them, and canned

apricots and cream, which they had never eaten at all. One _menu_ was

roast pheasants, followed by tomato salad, and the apricots and cream,

usually with champagne. One cannot wonder that there were occasional

deficits in the bank account at Lindsey Row. But it was not only the

things to eat and drink that made the hour a delight. Whistler, silent

when he worked, was gay at lunch. Perhaps better than his charm,

Mrs. Stillman remembers his devotion to his mother, who was calm and

dignified, with something of the sweet peacefulness of the Friends.

After lunch work was renewed, and it was four and later before they

were released.

The sittings went on until the sitter fell ill. Whistler was pitiless

with his models. The head in the _Princesse_ gave him most trouble.

He kept Miss Spartali standing while he worked at it, never letting

her rest; she must keep the entire pose, and she would not admit her

fatigue as long as she could help it. During her illness a model stood

for the gown, and when she was getting better he came one day and made

a pencil drawing of her head, though what became of it Mrs. Stillman

never knew. There were a few sittings after this, and at last the

picture was finished. The two girls wanted their father to buy it, but

Mr. Spartali did not like it. He objected to it as a portrait of his

daughter. Appreciation of art was not among the virtues of the London

Greeks. Alexander Ionides and his sons were almost alone in preferring

a good thing.

Rossetti, glad to be of service, tried to sell the picture. Whistler

agreed to take a hundred pounds, and Rossetti placed the canvas in his

studio, where it would be seen by a collector who was coming to look

at his work. The collector came, saw the _Princesse_, liked it, wanted

it. There was one objection: Whistler's signature in big letters across

the canvas. If Whistler would change the signature he would take the

picture. Rossetti, enchanted, hurried to tell Whistler. Whistler was

indignant. The request showed what manner of man the patron was, one

in whose possession he did not care to have any work of his. However,

Rossetti sold the _Princesse_ to another collector, who died shortly

afterwards, and then it was bought by Frederick Leyland, and so led to

the decoration of The Peacock Room.

It is possible that this objection helped Whistler to realise the

inharmonious effect of a large signature on a picture. It is sure that,

about this time, he began to arrange his initials somewhat after the

Japanese fashion. They were first interlaced in an oblong or circular

frame like the signatures of Japanese artists. He signed his name to

the earliest pictures, even to some of the Japanese. But with the

Nocturnes and the large portraits the Butterfly appeared, made from

working the letters J. M. W. into a design, which became more fantastic

until it evolved into the Butterfly in silhouette, and continued in

various forms. In the _Carlyle_ the Butterfly is enclosed in a round

frame, like a cut-out silhouette, behind the figure, and repeats the

prints on the wall. In the _Miss Alexander_ it is in a large semicircle

and is far more distinctly a butterfly. Then it grew like a stencil,

though in no sense was it one, as may be seen in M. Duret's portrait,

where the Butterfly is made simply in silhouette, on the background,

by a few touches of the rose of the opera cloak and the fan. It was

introduced as a note of colour, as important in the picture as any

other detail, and at times it was put in almost at the first painting

to judge the effect, scraped out with the whole thing, put in again

somewhere else, this repeated until he got it right. We have seen many

an unfinished picture with a wonderfully finished Butterfly, because it

was just where Whistler wanted it.

The same development can be traced in his etchings, in which it began

to appear as a bit of decoration. He originally signed the prints,

and signed the plates with his name and date bitten in. But later the

prints were signed with the Butterfly, followed by "_imp_," while the

Butterfly alone was etched on the copper or drawn on the stone. Then he

added the Butterfly to his signature to letters and his dedication on

prints. And the Butterfly found its way to his invitation cards, and at

last his correspondence, public and private, was usually signed with

the Butterfly alone. This was elaborated ingeniously in The _Gentle Art

of Making Enemies_, the Butterfly not only decorating, but punctuating

the paragraphs. Rumour says that Whistler went so far as to sign his

cheques with the Butterfly, and that once, having signed a cheque for

thirty-two francs in this manner, the man to whom it was paid demanded

a more conventional signature. Whistler, provoked by the suggestion of

doubt, wrote his name, knowing the bank would not then accept it, and

was more provoked when he found the rare autograph had been sold within

a day for eleven hundred and fifty francs. But rumour is probably

wrong: on all the formal letters and documents we have seen, his name,

and not the Butterfly, is used.

On the frames of early pictures Japanese patterns were painted in red

or blue on the flat gold, and a Butterfly placed on them, in relation

to the picture. He designed the frames, and they were carried out by

the Greaves, who also copied his designs at Streatham Town Hall, which

they decorated thirty years later. Shortly before his death, a few

were done by his stepson, E. Godwin. The _Sarasate_, in Pittsburg,

is an excellent example, and so is the _Battersea Bridge_ at the

Tate Gallery. Whistler applied a similar scheme to his etchings,

water-colours, and pastels, reddish or bluish lines, and at times the

Butterfly, appearing on the white or gold of their frames. Certain

people want to make out that Whistler got the idea from Rossetti.

It might as well be said that Rossetti got it from the beginning of

the world. There is nothing new in the idea. Artists always have

decorated special frames for special pictures, and Whistler only

carried on tradition when he designed frames in harmony with his work

and varied them according to the pictures for which they were used.

In after years he gave up almost entirely these painted frames, and

for his paintings substituted a simple gold frame, with parallel

reeded lines, now universally known as "the Whistler frame." For his

etchings and lithographs he chose a plain white frame in two planes.

His canvases and his panels were always of the same sizes; consequently

they always fitted his frames. And in his studio, as in few, if any

others, frequently there might be half a hundred canvases with their

faces to the wall, and only half a dozen frames. But they all fitted,

and Whistler never showed his work unframed. This was the outcome

of Japanese influence, and of his knowledge of the way the Japanese

display their art. His deference to Japanese convention went so far

that he put a branch of a tree or a reed into the foreground of his

seas and rivers as decoration, in early work, with no reference to the

picture, sometimes the only Japanese suggestion in the design.

_The Lange Leizen--of the Six Marks_ went to the Academy of 1864, with

_Wapping_. The critic of the _Athenæum_, to whom the Japanese subject

seemed "quaint" and the drawing "preposterously incorrect," could not

deny the "superb colouring" and the "beautiful harmonies," nor fail

to see in Wapping an "incomparable view of the Lower Pool of London."

"Never before was that familiar scene so triumphantly well painted,"

Mr. W. M. Rossetti wrote.

Whistler did not send to the _Salon_ of 1864, in which Fantin showed

his now famous _Hommage à Delacroix_, who had died in 1863. Whistler

was among the several admirers whom Fantin painted round the portrait

of the dead master. Whistler wanted Fantin to find a place for

Rossetti, who would be proud to pose, and Fantin was willing, but

Rossetti could not get to Paris. There was also talk of including

Swinburne. Unfortunately for both, they were left out of one of

the most celebrated portrait groups of modern times, now in the

Moreau-Nélaton Collection in the Louvre. The distinguished artists and

men of letters were there nominally out of respect to Delacroix, but

really to enable Fantin to justify his belief in the beauty of life

as it is, and his protest against the classical dictionary and studio

properties. Most of them were, or have since become, famous: Whistler,

Manet, Legros, Bracquemond, Fantin, Baudelaire, Duranty, Champfleury,

Cordier, De Balleroy. Fantin painted them in the costume of the time,

as Rembrandt and Hals and Van der Helst, from whom he is said to have

taken the idea, painted the regents and archers of seventeenth-century

Holland. Fantin's white shirt is the one concession to picturesqueness,

and the one relief to the severity of detail are the flowers held by

Whistler, a lithe, erect, youthful figure, with fine, keen face and

abundant hair. That the young American should be the centre of the

group was a distinction. When Rossetti saw the picture, he wrote to

his brother that it had "a great deal of very able painting in parts,

but it is a great slovenly scrawl after all, like the rest of this

incredible new school."

Whistler was already working out of the artificial scheme of the

Japanese pictures into a phase in which he was more himself than he

had ever been. The next year, 1865, he sent to the Academy the most

complete, the most perfect picture he ever painted, _The Little White

Girl_, which will always be recognised as one of the few great pictures

of the world. It was dated 1864, and there are reproductions showing

the date. But about 1900 he painted it out. He had been working on the

picture, he told us, and "did not see the use of those great figures

sprawling there." Jo was the model. Now, there was no masquerading in

foreign finery. Whistler painted her as he must often have seen her, in

her simple white gown, leaning against the mantel, her beautiful face

reflected in the mirror. The room was not littered with his purchases

from the little shops in the Strand and the Rue de Rivoli. Japan is in

the detail of blue and white on the mantel; the girl holds a Japanese

fan; a spray of azalea trails across her dress. But these were part

of Whistler's house, part of the reality he had created for himself,

and he made them no more beautiful than the mantel, the grate, the

reflection in the mirror. There was no building up, he painted what he

saw. And there was in the handling an advance. The paint is thinner on

the canvas, the brush flows more freely.

Swinburne saw the picture and wrote _Before the Mirror: Verses under

a Picture_. The poem was printed on gold paper, pasted on the frame,

which has disappeared, but we have a contemporary photograph showing

the arrangement, and two verses were inserted in the Academy catalogue

as sub-title. What Swinburne thought of the picture may be read in a

letter he wrote to Ruskin in the summer of 1865 (_Library Edition of

the Works of Ruskin_), in which he says that many, especially Dante

Rossetti, told him his verses were better than the painting, and that

Whistler ranked them far above it. But a closer examination of the

picture only convinced him of its greater beauty, and he would stand up

for Whistler against Whistler and everybody else.

[Illustration: THE MORNING BEFORE THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW

WOOD-ENGRAVING BY J. SWAIN FROM "ONCE A WEEK," VOL. VII, P. 210

(_See page 71_)]

[Illustration: THE LAST OF OLD WESTMINSTER

OIL

In the possession of A. A. Pope, Esq

(_See page 72_).]

Swinburne's poem and praise could not make _The Little White Girl_ at

the Academy better understood than _The White Girl_ had been in Berners

Street. The rare few could appreciate its "charm" and "exquisiteness"

with Mr. W. M. Rossetti, who found that it was "crucially tested by

its proximity to the flashing white in Mr. Millais' _Esther_," but

that it stood the test, "retorting delicious harmony for daring force,

and would shame any other contrast." But the general opinion was the

other way. The _Athenæum_ distinguished itself by regretting that

Whistler should make the "most 'bizarre' of bipeds" out of the women

he painted. There was praise for two other pictures. "Subtle beauty

of colour" and "almost mystical delicacy of tone" were discovered in

_The Gold Screen_, and "colour such as painters love" in the _Old

Battersea Bridge_, afterwards _Brown and Silver_. This is the beautiful

Battersea, with the touch of red in the roofs of the opposite shore,

the link between the early paintings on the river and the Nocturnes

that were to follow. _The Scarf_, a picture we do not recognise,

attracted less attention, and Whistler, the year before, declared "one

of the most original artists of the day" was now dismissed as one who

"might be called half a great artist."

Stranger than this was the change in the attitude of the French

critics. In 1863 they overwhelmed him with praise. Two years later they

had hardly a good word for him. Levi Legrange, forgotten as he merits,

wrote the criticism of the Royal Academy of 1865 for the _Gazette des

Beaux-Arts_, and all he could see in _The Little White Girl_ was a weak

repetition of _The White Girl_, a wearisome variation of the theme of

white; really, he said, it was quite witty of the Academicians, who

could have refused it and the two Japanese pictures, to give them good

places and so deliver them to judgment. And then he praised Horsley and

Prinsep, Leslie and Landseer. The _Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine_,

in the _Salon_, made no more favourable impression. It seemed a study

of costume to Paul Mantz, who, in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_, decided

to forget it and remember merely the mysterious seduction of _The

White Girl_ of two years before. Its eccentricity was only possible

if taken in small doses like the hom[oe]opathist's pills, according to

the incredible Jules Claretie, who, in the same article in _L'Artiste_,

laughed at Manet's _Olympia_. For more than twenty years Whistler was

hated in France.

In this _Salon_, 1865, Fantin showed his _Hommage à la Vérité--Le

Toast_, the second of his two large groups including Whistler's

portrait. In it he strayed so far from the real as to introduce an

allegorical figure of Truth, and to allow Whistler to array himself

in a gorgeous Chinese robe. "_Pense à la robe, superbe à faire, et

donne la moi!_" Whistler urged from London, and Fantin yielded. "_Je

l'ai encore revu dans l'atelier en 1865, il me posa dans un tableau

aujourd'hui détruit, 'Le Toast,' où il était costumé d'une robe

japonaise_," is Fantin's story of it in the notes to us, but Whistler,

writing at the time, speaks of the costume as Chinese. He brought it to

Paris for the sittings. Fantin was quick to regret his concessions. An

allegorical figure could not be made real, the whole thing was absurd.

When he got the canvas back he destroyed it, all but the portraits

of Whistler, Vollon, and himself. Whistler's is now in the Freer

Collection.

In the spring of 1865 Whistler was joined in London by his younger

brother. Dr. Whistler had distinguished himself in the Confederate Army

as a surgeon and by bravery in the field. He had served in Richmond

Hospitals and in Libby Prison; he had been assistant-surgeon at

Drewry's Bluff, and in 1864, when Grant made his move against Richmond,

he had been assigned to Orr's Rifles, a celebrated South Carolina

regiment. In the early winter of 1865 a few months' furlough was given

him, and he was entrusted by the Confederate Government with important

despatches to England. Sherman's advance prevented his running the

blockade from Charleston, nor was there any passing through the lines

from Wilmington by sea. He was obliged to go North through Maryland,

which meant making his way round Grant's lines. The difficulties and

dangers were endless. He had to get rid of his Confederate uniform, and

in the state of Confederate finance the most modest suit of clothes

cost fourteen hundred dollars; for a seat in a waggon he had to pay

five hundred. The trains were crowded with officials and soldiers,

and he could get a ride in them only by stealth. The roads were

abominable, for driving or riding or walking. Often he was alone, and

his one companion toward the North was a fellow soldier who had lost

a leg at Antietam and was trying to get to Philadelphia for repairs

to an artificial one. Stanton's expedition filled the country near

the Rappahannock with snares and pitfalls; to cross Chesapeake Bay

was to take one's life in one's hand; and north of the Bay were the

enrolling officers of the Union in search of conscripts. However,

Philadelphia was at last reached and a ticket for New York bought at

the railroad depot, where two sentries, with bayonets fixed, guarded

the ticket-office, and might, for all Dr. Whistler knew, have seen

him in Libby Prison. In New York he took passage on the _City of

Manchester_, and from Liverpool he hurried to London. One week later

came the news of the fall of Richmond and the Confederacy. The furlough

was over. There was no going back. It was probably about this time,

from the costume and the technical resemblance to Mr. Luke Ionides'

portrait, that Whistler painted a head of Dr. Whistler--_Portrait of my

Brother_--now owned by Mr. Burton Mansfield, though it should and might

have been in the National Gallery in Washington.

Early in September 1865, Whistler's mother was suffering from trouble

with her eyes, and went with her two sons to Coblentz to consult an

oculist, and this gave Whistler the chance to revisit some of the

scenes of the French Set of etchings. After that he spent a month or

two at Trouville, where he was joined by Courbet. Whistler's work

shows how far he had drifted away, though the two were always friends.

In _Sea and Rain_, done at Trouville, there is not a suggestion of

Courbet. But we have seen a sea by Courbet, owned by M. Duret, that

Whistler might have signed. Jo was there too. The sea-pieces he had

begun, including _Courbet on the Shore_, promised great things, he

wrote to Mr. Luke Ionides, and as the autumn went on the place was more

quiet for work, and the seas and skies more wonderful. He did not get

back to London until November. A few months later, early in 1866, he

sailed for Valparaiso.

This journey to Valparaiso is the most unaccountable adventure in his

sometimes unaccountable career. Various reasons for it have been given:

health, a quarrel, restlessness, a whim. But we tell the story as he

told it to us:

"It was a moment when many of the adventurers the war had made of

many Southerners were knocking about London hunting for something to

do, and, I hardly knew how, but the something resolved itself into

an expedition to go and help the Chilians and, I cannot say why, the

Peruvians, too. Anyhow, there were South Americans to be helped against

the Spaniards. Some of these people came to me, as a West Point man,

and asked me to join--and it was all done in an afternoon. I was off at

once in a steamer from Southampton to Panama. We crossed the Isthmus,

and it was all very awful--earthquakes and things--and I vowed, once I

got home, that nothing would ever bring me back again.

"I found myself in Valparaiso and in Santiago, and I called on the

President, or whoever the person then in authority was. After that

came the bombardment. There was the beautiful bay with its curving

shores, the town of Valparaiso on one side, on the other the long line

of hills. And there, just at the entrance of the bay, was the Spanish

fleet, and, in between, the English fleet, and the French fleet, and

the American fleet, and the Russian fleet, and all the other fleets.

And when the morning came, with great circles and sweeps, they sailed

out into the open sea, until the Spanish fleet alone remained. It

drew up right in front of the town, and bang went a shell, and the

bombardment began. The Chilians didn't pretend to defend themselves.

The people all got out of the way, and I and the officials, rode to

the opposite hills, where we could look on. The Spaniards conducted

the performance in the most gentlemanly fashion; they just set fire to

a few of the houses, and once, with some sense of fun, sent a shell

whizzing over toward our hills. And then I knew what a panic was. I and

the officials turned and rode as hard as we could, anyhow, anywhere.

The riding was splendid, and I, as a West Point man, was head of the

procession. By noon the performance was over. The Spanish fleet sailed

again into position, the other fleets sailed in, sailors landed to help

put out the fires, and I and the officials rode back into Valparaiso.

All the little girls of the town had turned out, waiting for us, and as

we rode in called us 'Cowards!' The _Henriquetta_, the ship fitted up

in London, did not appear till long after, and then we breakfasted, and

that was the end of it."