Mr. Theodore Roussel says Whistler told him that, on another occasion,

he got on one of the defending gunboats and had his baptism of fire

amid a rain of shot and shell, and that then, as we have said, the

white lock appeared, a fact which, fine as it is, Whistler omitted from

his story to us.

He made good use of his time in Valparaiso, and painted the three

pictures of the harbour which are known and two others which have

disappeared. These he gave to the steward or the purser of the ship

to bring home, and the purser kept them. Once they were seen in his

house in London by someone who recognised Whistler's work. "Why, they

must be by Whistler!" he said. "Who's Whistler?" asked the purser. "An

artist," said the other. "Oh, no," said the purser, "they were painted

by a gentleman." The purser started back for South America, and took

them with him. "And then a tidal wave met the ship and swept off the

purser, the cabin, and the Whistlers." But we believe that one of these

pictures is now in the United States.

The voyage back was vaguer than the voyage out. From this vagueness

looms one figure: the Marquis de Marmalade, a black man from Hayti,

who made himself obnoxious to Whistler, apparently by his colour and

his swagger. One day Whistler kicked him across the deck to the top of

the companion way, and there sat a lady who proved an obstacle for the

moment. But Whistler just picked up the Marquis de Marmalade, dropped

him on the step below her, and finished kicking him downstairs. After

that Whistler spent the rest of the journey, not exactly in irons, but

chiefly in his cabin.

The final adventure of the journey was in London. Whistler never told

us, but everybody else says that when he got out of the train at

Euston, or Waterloo, someone besides his friends was waiting: whether

the captain of the ship, or relations of the Marquis de Marmalade, or

an old enemy makes little difference. Somebody got a thrashing, and

this was the end to the most unaccountable episode in Whistler's life.

CHAPTER XII: CHELSEA DAYS CONTINUED. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SIXTY-SIX TO

EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-TWO.

It was late in 1866 when Whistler returned from Valparaiso. Soon after

he moved into No. 2,[4] at the east end of Lindsey Row, now

No. 96 Cheyne Walk. It was a three-storey house with an attic, part of

the old palace remodelled, and, like No. 7, it looked on the river.

Here he lived longer than anywhere else; here he painted the Nocturnes

and the great portraits; here he gave his Sunday breakfasts. He had a

house-warming on February 5 (1867), when the two Rossettis dined with

him, and Mr. W. M. Rossetti wrote in his diary:

"There are some fine old fixtures, such as doors, fireplaces, and

Whistler has got up the rooms with many delightful Japanesisms. Saw

for the first time his pagoda cabinet. He has two or three sea-pieces

new to me: one, on which he particularly lays stress, larger than the

others, a very grey unbroken sea [probably _Sea and Rain_], also a

clever vivacious portrait of himself begun."

No doubt this is the portrait in round hat, with paint-brushes in his

hand.

Mr. Greaves says that the dining-room at No. 2 was blue, with a darker

blue dado and doors, and purple Japanese fans tacked on the walls and

ceiling; other friends remember "a fluttering of purple fans." One

evening Miss Chapman was dining, and Whistler, wanting her to see

the view up the river from the other end of the bridge, told her he

would show her something "as lovely as a fan!" The studio, again the

second-storey back room, was grey, with black dado and doors; from the

_Mother_ and the _Carlyle_ one knows that Japanese hangings and his

prints were on the walls; and in it was the big screen he painted for

Leyland but kept for himself, with Battersea Bridge across the top,

Chelsea Church beyond, and a great gold moon in the deep blue sky. The

stairs were covered with Dutch metal. He slept in a huge Chinese bed.

Beautiful silver was on his table. He ate off blue and white. "Suppose

one of these plates was smashed?" Miss Chapman asked Whistler once.

"Why, then, you know," he said, "we might as well all take hands and go

throw ourselves into the Thames!"

The beauty of the decoration, as at No. 7, was its simplicity.

Rossetti's house was a museum, an antiquity shop, in comparison. The

simplicity seemed the more bewildering because it was the growth, not

of weeks, but of years. The drawing-room was not painted until the

day of Whistler's first dinner-party. In the morning he sent for the

brothers Greaves to help him. "It will never be dry in time!" they

feared. "What matter?" said Whistler, "it will be beautiful!" "We three

worked like mad," is Mr. Walter Greaves' account, and by evening the

walls were flushed with flesh-colour, pale yellow, and white spread

over doors and woodwork, and we have heard gowns and coats too were

touched with flesh-colour and yellow before the evening was at an end.

One Sunday morning Whistler, after he had taken his mother to Chelsea

Church, as he always did, again sent for his pupils and painted a

great ship with spreading sails in each of the two panels at the end

of the hall; the ships are said to be still on the wall covered up.

His mother was not so pleased when, on her return, she saw the blue

and white harmony, for she would have had him put away his brushes on

Sunday as once she put away his toys. But she had many other trials and

revelations: coming into the studio one day, she found the parlour-maid

posing for "the all-over!" The ships were in place long before the

dado of hall and stairway was covered with gold and sprinkled with

rose and white chrysanthemum petals. Miss Alexander (Mrs. Spring-Rice)

saw Whistler at work upon it when she came to sit, and he had lived

six years at No. 2. Whistler's houses were never completely decorated

and furnished; they had a look as if he had just moved in or was just

moving out. But what was decorated was beautiful.

Whistler sent to the exhibitions of 1867, in London and Paris. He

began the year by showing at the French Gallery, in January, one of

the paintings of Valparaiso: _Crépuscule in Flesh Colour and Green_.

It is the long picture of Valparaiso Harbour in the early evening,

ships moored with partly furled sails; the first painting of twilight,

and one of the first paintings carried out in the liquid manner of the

Nocturnes. There were critics to call it a poem "in colour," though

Whistler had not taught them to look for the "painter's poetry" in his

work. The upright Valparaiso, a perfect Nocturne, was done at the same

time, 1866, but not exhibited until later, and there is an unfinished

version of the same subject.

In the _Salon_ of 1867, where it had been rejected eight years before,

_At the Piano_ was accepted, and also _The Thames in Ice--Sur la

Tamise: l'Hiver_. It was the year of the French Universal Exhibition.

M. Duret writes that probably Mr. George Lucas spoke of Whistler to

Mr. Avery, the United States Art Commissioner at the Exhibition. The

result was that a number of his etchings and four pictures were hung:

_The White Girl_, _Wapping or On the Thames_, _Old Battersea Bridge_,

_Twilight on the Ocean_, the title then of the _Crépuscule in Flesh

Colour and Green_. The Hudson River School dominated American art, and

Whistler's paintings had to compete with the big _machines_ of Church

and Bierstadt. Tuckerman, in his _Book of the Artists_, quotes an

unnamed American critic who, in 1867, found that Whistler's etchings

differed from his paintings in meriting the attention they attracted,

but he could see in the _Marines_ only "blurred, foggy imperfections,"

and in _The White Girl_ only "a powerful female with red hair, and

a vacant stare in her soulless eyes. She is standing on a wolfskin

hearthrug, for what reason is unrecorded. The picture evidently

means vastly more than it expresses--albeit expressing too much.

Notwithstanding an obvious want of purpose, there is some boldness in

the handling, and singularity in the glare of the colours which cannot

fail to divert the eye and weary it."

Americans were not treated with respect by the Hanging Committee. Their

work was put in corridors and dark corners, and Whistler suffered.

French critics, enthusiastic over his pictures four years earlier, were

now no more appreciative than the American. Paul Mantz was distressed

by the "strange white apparition" upon which, at the _Salon des

Refusés_, he had lavished his praise. Burty thought that either time

exaggerated the defects of the prints or else critical eyes had lost

their indulgence, for the etchings were photographic and had a dryness

and minuteness due to the early training of "Mr. Whystler." Both wrote

in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_. Mr. Avery, however, had the sense to

appreciate the etchings, and it was probably at this time he commenced

his great collection, now in the New York Public Library.

Whistler and his brother, the Doctor, went to Paris in April. There

they heard of the sudden death of Traer, Seymour Haden's assistant,

and a member of the British Jury, on which Haden also served. Whistler

liked Traer, and the circumstances of his death and burial led to a

misunderstanding between the two brothers and the brother-in-law. The

three met. The dispute was short and sharp; the result, a summons for

the brothers to appear before a _juge de paix_. Whistler had been in

the same court a few days earlier. A workman had dropped plaster on

him as he passed through a narrow street in the Latin Quarter, and he

had met the offence in the only way possible according to his code.

Whistler sent for the American Minister, and the magistrate apologised.

When he appeared again, "_Connu!_" said the judge, and there was

no apology, but a fine. Haden said he fell through a plate-glass

window, Whistler that he knocked him through. Haden maintained that

both brothers were against him, Whistler that he demolished Haden

single-handed.

It happened just when London gossip got hold of the story of the

Marquis de Marmalade and Whistler's return from Valparaiso. Dr. Moncure

Conway, in his _Reminiscences_, recalls a dinner given by Dante

Rossetti to W. J. Stillman, in the winter of 1867, when "Whistler (a

Confederate) related with satisfaction his fisticuff with a Yankee

[really the black Marquis] on shipboard, William Rossetti remarked: 'I

must say, Whistler, that your conduct was scandalous.' (Stillman and

myself were silent.) Dante Gabriel promptly wrote:

'_There's a combative Artist named Whistler

Who is, like his own hog-hairs, a bristler:

A tube of white lead

And a punch on the head

Offer varied attractions to Whistler.'_"

It was at this time, too, that Whistler had a difference with Legros,

to which no reference would be made had it not also become a legend.

Friends tried to reconcile them and succeeded badly. The rumours

spread, and Whistler began to be talked of as quarrelsome. Haden,

when he got back to London, resigned his post as Honorary Surgeon to

South Kensington Museum, printed a pamphlet to explain, and threatened

to resign from the Burlington Fine Arts Club, of which both he and

Whistler were members, unless Whistler was expelled. The Burlington

Club wrote to Whistler that if he did not resign they would have

to consider his expulsion. Both the Rossettis considered this very

improper, and when Whistler's expulsion was voted by eighteen against

eight, William Michael Rossetti handed in his resignation at once and

Dante Rossetti sent in his two or three days later.

Whistler's manner of resenting injury had a great deal to do with the

way he was later treated in England. He explained his code to a friend:

"If a man gives you the lie to your face, why, naturally you hit him."

People who did not know him became afraid of him, and this fear grew

and was the reason of the reputation that clung to him for years and

clings to his memory.

Before Whistler's pictures went to the Royal Academy, Mr. W. M.

Rossetti saw them: "_March 31_ (1867). To see Whistler's pictures for

the R.A. To the R.A. he means to send _Symphony in White, No. III._

(heretofore named _The Two Little White Girls_), and a Thames picture;

possibly also one of the four sea pictures; and I rather recommend him

to select the largest of these, which he regards with predilection, of

a grey sea and a very grey sky."

_Battersea_ was the Thames picture; _Sea and Rain_, painted while

Whistler and Courbet worked together at Trouville, the sea picture; and

_The Two Little White Girls_ was sent under its new name, _Symphony in

White, No. III._--the first time one of his pictures was catalogued as

a Symphony, his first use of a title borrowed from musical terms to

explain his pictorial intention.

Baudelaire had given the hint in prose, Gautier had written

_Symphonies_ in verse, Murger's Bohemians had composed a _Symphonie sur

l'influence de bleu dans les arts_. In 1863 Paul Mantz had described

_The White Girl_ as a "Symphony in White." There can be no doubt that

from these things Whistler got the idea. It was the third variation

of white upon white. The difference was in the thin liquid paint.

The critic of the _Athenæum_ had the sense to thank the "painter who

endeavours by any means to show people what he really aims at." But

he was almost alone. Burty, in noticing the Academy of 1867 for the

_Gazette des Beaux-Arts_, thought the Academy's hanging Whistler at all

a fine piece of irony, and regretted the painter's failure to fulfil

his early promise.

Hamerton, in the _Saturday Review_, June 1, 1867, represented the

feeling of the insulted, solemn, bewildered Islanders: "There are many

dainty varieties of tint, but it is not precisely a symphony in white.

One lady has a yellowish dress and brown hair and a bit of blue ribbon;

the other has a red fan, and there are flowers and green leaves. There

is a girl in white on a white sofa, but even this girl has reddish

hair; and, of course, there is the flesh-colour of the complexions."

Whistler answered in a letter, not printed, however, until it appeared

in the _Art Journal_ (April 1887): "_Bon Dieu!_ did this wise person

expect white hair and chalked faces? And does he then, in his

astounding consequence, believe that a symphony in F contains no other

note, but shall be a continued repetition of F F F?... Fool!"

Whistler knew that to carry on tradition was the artist's business.

Rembrandt, Hals, Velasquez, Claude, Canaletto, Guardi, Hogarth,

Courbet, the Japanese, in turn influenced him. Some see, at this

period, the influence of Albert Moore, which, if it existed, was as

ephemeral and superficial as Rossetti's. It could be argued with more

truth that Whistler influenced Albert Moore, who, in at least two

pictures, _Harmony of Orange and Pale Yellow_, _Variation of Blue and

Gold_, borrowed Whistler's titles. Whistler also knew that the end of

all study of the masters should be to evolve something personal, and,

in the endeavour to develop his personality, he was passing through

experiments and working through difficulties. All this is in his

letters to Fantin. A fourth _Symphony in White_ was started: the _Three

Figures_. In the _Two Girls_, he wrote to Fantin, the harmony was

repeated in line and in colour, and he sent a sketch of it. He exulted

in the rhythm of line; he despaired because he could not get it right.

The picture was scraped out and rubbed down, then repainted, and with

each fresh difficulty he deplored the mistakes of his early training.

Mr. Eddy writes that Whistler used to call Ingres the "_bourgeois_

Greek." This we never heard him say, nor is there any such want of

respect in his letters to Fantin, for there he expresses regret that he

"did not study under Ingres," whose work he may have liked moderately,

"but from whom I would have learned to draw": which was absurd modesty,

for he drew better than Ingres, if not so academically, as his etchings

prove. He never execrated Courbet and denounced _ce damné Réalisme_

so violently as in the autumn of 1867. This was not quite fair, for

Realism had brought Courbet to the conclusions which Whistler, unaided,

was now reaching: that knowledge of art, ancient and modern, has no

end save the development of individuality, and that the artist is

to go to Nature for inspiration, but to take from her only life and

beauty. Whistler, in his impatience, recalled Realism as practised by

the young enthusiasts gathered about Courbet, and denied that Courbet

influenced him. "_Ca ne pouvait pas être autrement, parce que je suis

très personnel, et que j'ai été riche en qualités qu'il n'avait pas

et qui me suffisaient._" The cry of Nature had appealed to his vanity,

Whistler said, and so he had mocked at tradition, and in his early work

had copied Nature with the self-confidence of "_l'écolier débauché_."

If at one moment he boasted that the race was for Fantin and himself,

because in art, as at the Derby, "_c'est le pur sang qui gagné_," the

next he chafed over the time he had lost before discovering that art

is not the exact reproduction of Nature, but its interpretation, and

that the artist must seek his motives in Nature and weave from them a

pattern on his canvas. He praised Fantin's flowers because he saw in

them this pattern. Passages in the letters are the basis of _The Ten

O'Clock_. His definition of the relation of drawing to colour--"_son

amant, mais aussi son maître_"--suggests the later definition of the

relation of the artist to Nature: "her son in that he loves her, her

master in that he knows her." Whistler used the same ideas in his talk,

in his letters, in his pamphlets, perfecting it.

It was the period of transition. Those who saw him know how hard he

worked, and how he was discouraged. For a while he lived with Mr.

Frederick Jameson. He never spoke to us of this interval away from

Lindsey Row. Mr. Jameson says it was 1868 or 1869; most likely the

winter of 1867-68, when Mrs. Whistler went home to visit her family,

left poor by the war. Mr. Jameson lived at 62 Great Russell Street,

Bloomsbury, in rooms that had first been Burne-Jones', and afterwards

Poynter's. Mr. Jameson writes us:

"The seven months Whistler and I lived together were unproductive and

uneventful. He was working at some Japanese pictures, one of which,

quite unfinished, was hung at the London Memorial Exhibition. I have

seen large portions of it apparently finished, but they never satisfied

him, and were shaved down to the bed-rock mercilessly. The man, as I

knew him, was so different from the descriptions and presentations

I have read of him that I would like to speak of the other side of

his character. It is impossible to conceive of a more unfailingly

courteous, considerate, and delightful companion than Whistler, as I

found him. We lived in great intimacy, and the studio was always open

to me, whatever he was doing. We had all our meals together, except

when elsewhere engaged, and I never heard a complaint of anything in

our simple household arrangements from him. Any little failure was

treated as a joke. His courtesy to servants and models was particularly

charming; indeed, I can't conceive of his quarrelling with anyone

without real provocation. His talk about his own work revealed a very

different man to me from the self-satisfied man he is usually believed

to have been. He knew his powers, of course, but he was painfully aware

of his defects--in drawing, for instance. I can remember with verbal

accuracy some very striking talks we had on the subject. To my judgment

he was the most absolutely truthful man about himself that I ever met.

I never knew him to hide an opinion or a thought, nor to try to excuse

an action."

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF WHISTLER BY HIMSELF

CHALK DRAWING

Formerly in the possession of Thomas Way, Esq.

(_See page 79_)]

[Illustration:

DRY-POINT. G. 92

STUDY IN CHALK

Formerly in the possession of B. B. MacGeorge, Esq.

WEARY

(_See page 73_)]

The picture Mr. Jameson refers to was called _Three Figures, Pink and

Grey_,[5] in the London Memorial Exhibition. It alone was carried out

of the _Six_ or _Eight Schemes_ or _Projects_ in which Whistler was

trying to combine Japanese and classical motives, expressing a beauty

of form and design that haunted him, and was perhaps best realised in

some of the pastel studies. He never ceased to make these studies.

There are pastels, chalk drawings, and etchings in which the separate

figures of the _Projects_ may be found, studies for the series; one was

worked out as a fan, another like a cameo. The second version of the

_Three Figures_, enlarged from a smaller design, Whistler explained to

Mr. Alan S. Cole, was an arrangement he wanted to paint, and he then

drew, with a sweep of the brush, the back of the stooping figure to

show what he meant. W. M. Rossetti most likely referred to it when he

wrote in his diary for July 28, 1867:

"Whistler is doing on a largish scale for Leyland the subject of women

with flowers, and has made coloured sketches of four or five other

subjects of the like class, very promising in point of conception of

colour and arrangement."

The _Projects_ were his first scheme of decoration for Leyland. The

canvases are about the same size. They are painted with liquid colour,

the canvas often showing through. The handling in all save the _Venus_,

shown in the Paris Memorial Exhibition and worked on in his later

years, is more direct than anything he ever did. They have the same

relation to his pictures as the sketches of Rubens and Tiepolo to

their decorations. The _Venus_ is a single figure, the rest are groups

arranged against a balustrade, round a vase of flowers, or on the sands

by the sea. Their floating draperies give the scheme of

colour. The experience gained in making these designs was of immense

use in the Nocturnes, for the technique is the same, and the same

treatment is in the pile of drapery of the _Miss Alexander_. He did not

give up until much later this method of painting. The complete series

had never been seen publicly before the Paris Memorial Exhibition. They

belong to Mr. Freer.

During all his life, till he was given a commission for a panel in the

Boston Public Library, Whistler hoped to have the chance to execute a

great decorative scheme. When the Central Gallery at the Victoria and

Albert Museum was being decorated, Sir Henry Cole asked him to design

one of the mosaic panels. For this, in the winter of 1873, he made a

pastel, a richly robed figure carrying a Japanese umbrella. The scheme

was in blue, purple, and gold, and a pastel study for it was shown at

the London Memorial Exhibition as _Design for a Mosaic_. He spoke of

it at the time as _The Gold Girl_. The design was to be enlarged and

put on canvas by the brothers Greaves. Sir Henry Cole offered him a

studio in the Museum when he was ready to begin his cartoon. "You know,

Sir Henry Cole always liked me, and I told him he ought to provide me

with a fine studio--it would be an honour to me--and to the Museum!"

But models broke down, the fog settled over London, he wanted to get

through his Academy picture, he was called to Paris. Whether the

cartoon was finished, or whether it was found out of keeping with the

_machines_ of Royal Academicians in the Central Gallery, is not known.

But the decoration was never done.

Hamerton's _Etching and Etchers_ was published in 1868. Shortly before,

he wrote to Whistler: "I wonder whether you would object to lend me a

set of proofs for a few weeks. As the book is already advanced I should

be glad of an early reply. My opinion of your work is, on the whole, so

favourable that your reputation could only gain by your affording me

the opportunity of speaking of your work at length."

Whistler took no notice of the request at the time, but printed

it years afterwards as the _Unanswered Letter_ in _The Gentle

Art_. Hamerton, unused to being ignored by artists, expressed his

astonishment in his book: "I have been told that, if application is

made by letter to Mr. Whistler for a set of his etchings, he may,

perhaps, if he chooses to answer the letter, do the applicant the

favour to let him have a copy for about the price of a good horse."

His praise was never without qualification. He saw in Whistler a

strikingly imperfect artist, self-concentrated, without range or

poetical feeling, whose work was rarely affecting, and most of these

remarks were reprinted by Whistler with the _Unanswered Letter_ as

_Inconsequences_. In the end Whistler let Hamerton have a plate,

_Billingsgate_, in its third state, published in the _Portfolio_

(January 1878), and, two years after, in the third edition of _Etching

and Etchers_ (1880).

Hamerton, patronising in his estimate of Whistler's work, exaggerated

in his comments on Whistler's prices. Success never induced Whistler

deliberately to increase the price of his etchings by making them rare,

in the fashion of the young men of to-day. It was different with his

dry-points, the number of impressions being limited. Mr. Percy Thomas

says that Whistler would throw them on the floor at Lindsey Row and

consider them. "I think for this we must say five guineas, and for this

six, and for this I must say--ten!" But Mr. Thomas remembers only one

attempt to create a price. He had been sent from Bond Street to Lindsey

Row with prints for Whistler to sign, and the next day he returned for

them. Whistler and Mrs. Whistler were sitting together, silent and

sad, and Whistler hurried from the studio without a word. "But what is

it? What has happened?" Mr. Thomas asked, and Mrs. Whistler explained

that Whistler had thrown the prints into the fire, thinking it would

be a good thing to make them rare, and had been miserable since. If he

destroyed work he was sure to regret it. "_J'ai tant pleuré après_,"

as he wrote to Fantin. Another incident remembered by Mr. Thomas would

have altered Hamerton's idea of Whistler's business methods. Edmund

Thomas had gone to the studio and offered a sum for all the prints in

it. Whistler accepted the offer, Mr. Thomas drew a cheque, and carried

off the prints. A couple of hours later a messenger appeared with a

bundle of proofs. Whistler had come upon them, and sent word that,

according to the bargain, they belonged to Mr. Thomas.

Towards the end of the sixties, or beginning of the seventies, Mr.

Murray Marks tried to start a Fine Art Company with Alexander Ionides,

Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Morris to deal in pictures, prints, blue and

white, and decorative work. They were to sell Watts', Burne-Jones', and

Rossetti's pictures, and Whistler's etchings, possibly his paintings.

Ionides, who was to advance two or three thousand pounds, bought the

sixteen plates by Whistler now known as the Thames Set, and the prints

from them. The sum paid was three hundred pounds. A secretary was

engaged for the company, but that was the end of it. The plates became

the absolute property of Ionides. He had a hundred sets printed; he

gave one set to each of his children; the others were taken over by

Messrs. Ellis and Green, and published in 1871 as _Sixteen Etchings

of Scenes on the Thames_, price twelve guineas. Later, the plates

came into the possession of the Fine Art Society, who sold the prints

unsigned as a set in a portfolio for fourteen guineas, or, singly, from

half a guinea to two guineas and a half. Finally Mr. Keppel, of New

York, bought the coppers, had the steel facing removed, for they had

been steeled, Goulding printed a number from each, and some good prints

were obtained. The plates were then destroyed.

Official recognition of Whistler, the etcher, continued. The British

Museum bought his prints and only stopped when, some years ago, it was

discovered that the work of living artists could not be purchased for

the Print Room. The ignorance of this regulation was of value to the

Museum, where there are now one hundred and nine etchings by Whistler.

At the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, there are

sixty-one prints, besides several issued in various publications and

a second Thames Set in the Ionides Collection. For several years the

late Sir Richard R. Holmes purchased prints for Windsor Castle Library,

about one hundred and forty in all. He wrote us:

"It is difficult to say when, or how, I first began collecting

Whistler's etchings. I had a few, and then I met several while I was

looking after other things at Thibaudeau's, and, gradually, I found I

had so many that I thought it best to make the collection as complete

as I could, and got a number from Whistler himself."

[Illustration: THE LANGE LEIZEN OF THE SIX MARKS

PURPLE AND ROSE

OIL

In the John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia

(_See page 87_)]

[Illustration: HARMONY IN FLESH-COLOUR AND GREEN

THE BALCONY

OIL

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

(_See page 87_)]

Often Sir Richard went to the studio; often Whistler sent to Windsor

prints he thought should be there. The Venetian series was bought.

Finally, after Sir Richard's retirement, they were sold "to improve the

collection" at what was supposed the height of the "Whistler boom,"

and after they had been praised in the Memorial Exhibitions of London

and Paris. As King Edward VII. on his visit to the London Memorial

Exhibition expressed surprise at the few he looked at, it is certain

that his Majesty was unaware that the collection was at Windsor.

Even the portfolio, presented by Whistler to Queen Victoria with his

autograph letter asking her acceptance, was first lost, and, when

found, sold in 1906, the few prints in Princess Victoria's apartments

only being kept. The disposal of the etchings was so badly managed that

the Jubilee series brought more, when re-sold a few weeks after the

King parted with them, than his Majesty got for the whole collection.

During Whistler's lifetime important collections of his etchings were

acquired also by the Museums of Dresden, Venice, and Melbourne, and the

New York Public Library.

The success of Whistler's plates during the following years is a

contrast to the fate of his pictures, which for a long period were

neglected. He had nothing in the Academy of 1868. Mr. Jameson has told

us of his despair because the _Three Girls_ was not finished in time,

and of their wandering together about town, in and out of galleries

and museums, until at last, before Velasquez in the National Gallery,

Whistler took heart again. And he delighted in the admiration of

Swinburne in _Notes on Some Pictures of 1868_. The paintings which had

not been submitted "to the loose and slippery judgment of an academy,"

but had been seen by Swinburne in the studio and seemed to him "to have

grown as a flower grows," were evidently the _Projects_. A special

quality of Whistler's genius, Swinburne said, is "a freshness and

fullness of the loveliest life of things, with a high, clear power upon

them which seems to educe a picture as the sun does a blossom or a

fruit."

In 1869 the Academy moved to Burlington House, and there in 1870

Whistler showed _The Balcony_. From 1867 to 1870 he did not show in the

_Salon_. Whistler, like Rossetti, was never without his public, though

many years passed before he received Rossetti's rewards. He could

rely on the Ionides, Leathart, Frederick Leyland, Huth, Alexander,

Rawlinson, Anderson Rose, Jameson, Chapman, Potter. But, unlike

Rossetti, he wanted to show his work and receive for it rewards. As far

back as 1864 Fantin wrote to Edwin Edwards of Whistler's perseverance,

his determination to get into the _Salon_, a phase of his character

Fantin said he had not known. Whistler's absence from exhibitions was

not his fault. It was his hatred of rejection and fear of being badly

hung that drove him from them.

The tyranny of the Academy was no new thing. The opening of the

exhibition was every year the occasion of scandal and of protest

against an institution that rejected and still rejects distinguished

artists. One gallery after another took up the outsiders. After the

Berners Street Gallery came the Dudley, which, in 1867, added to its

show of water-colours a show of oils; in 1868, the Corinthian Gallery

in Argyll Street; in 1869, the Select Supplementary Exhibition in Bond

Street--these last two poor affairs more apt to justify than expose

the Academy. Dealers came to the rescue: the French Gallery in Pall

Mall, and the Society of French Artists, where Durand-Ruel brought

his collection in 1870, and, under the management of M. Charles

Deschamps, gave exhibitions until 1877. In the French Gallery and with

M. Deschamps Whistler showed many times. He contributed often to the

Dudley from 1871, and there the next year, 1872, exhibited for the

first time a _Nocturne_. His use of titles to explain his intention was

now so well established that in 1872, when _The White Girl_ and the

_Princesse_ were in the International Exhibition at South Kensington,

they were catalogued as _Symphony in White, No. 1._, and _Variations in

Flesh Colour, Blue, and Grey_, later changed to _Grey and Rose_; and

he supplied the explanation, printed in the "Programme of Reception."

They were "the complete results of harmonies obtained by employing the

infinite tones and variations of a limited number of colours."

His portrait of his mother was sent to the Academy of

1872--_Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's

Mother_. It was refused. Madox Brown wrote to George Rae: "I hear that

Whistler has had the portrait of his mother turned out. If so, it is a

shame, because I saw the picture, and know it to be good and beautiful,

though, I suppose, not to the taste of Messrs. Ansdell and Dobson."

Sir William Boxall threatened to resign from the Council if the

portrait was not hung, for he would not have it said that a committee

to which he belonged had rejected it. Similar threats have been

heard in recent years, and the rejected work has stayed out, and the

Academicians have stayed in. Boxall would not yield, and the picture

was hung, not well, yet not out of sight; groups, it is said, were

always gathered before it to laugh. Still, there it was, the last

picture by Whistler at the Academy, where nothing of his was again

seen, save one etching in 1879: _Putney Bridge_, published by the Fine

Art Society and probably sent by them.

The whole affair made talk. But 1872 is interesting, above all, as the

year when Whistler first exhibited a portrait as an _Arrangement_ and

an impression of night as a _Nocturne_.

As it was the last year he showed a picture in the Academy, it may

be as well to complete here our account of his relations with this

institution. It is said that he put his name down, or allowed it to be

put down, for election. He was never elected. Other Americans were,

for the Royal Academy is so broad in its constitution that an artist

need not be an Englishman, need not be resident in Great Britain, need

not have shown on its walls to become a member or honorary member. But

though during all these years and until the day of his death Whistler

would have accepted election, we have never heard that he obtained a

single vote. George Boughton, an American artist and a member of the

Royal Academy, explained the Academic attitude when he said that if

Whistler had "behaved himself" he would have been President. Even this

concession Boughton qualified: "Now, if anyone knowing Whistler and me

should go about thinking me serious in imagining that he would make a

good President--even of an East End boxing club--such persons live in

dense error."

The only comment to make is that Boughton did not understand Whistler,

and, in company with the Academy, had not the least artistic sense, or

even business appreciation in this matter.

Whistler would have accepted election for one reason only--because of

the official rank it would have given him in England. Other Americans

hustled to get it; he expected it as an honour which he deserved. He

knew himself to be more distinguished than any member of the Royal

Academy. Though recognition was withheld during his lifetime, several

Academicians attempted to secure for the Academy a posthumous glory

by endeavouring to get together an exhibition of his works the winter

after his death. It would, indeed, have been irony if the Academy had,

in return for its neglect of Whistler, got the _kudos_ and cash as

their reward. Another instance of what Americans call "graft" is in the

absence from the Chantrey Collection of a picture by Whistler, and the

presence of the work of the Academicians who administer the Fund. The

Trustees, although they have bought their own work, paying as much as

one thousand pounds to Sir Edward J. Poynter, three thousand to Sir

Hubert von Herkomer, three thousand and fifty to Lord Leighton, two

thousand to Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., over two thousand to Mr. Frank

Dicksee, two thousand to Sir W. Q. Orchardson, two thousand to Vicat

Cole, who are or were members of the Council of the Academy, never even

offered the sixty pounds for which they might have bought Whistler's

_Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge_, since purchased for

two thousand by public subscription and given to the Tate Gallery. Is

it any wonder that Whistler, disgusted with such conduct, especially

on the part of his fellow countrymen, members of the Academy, and

others, who might have elected him, left as his only written request

relative to his pictures we have seen, the wish that none should ever

find a place in any English Gallery? Death did not spare him Academical

jealousy. Not content with ignoring him during his lifetime, officially

insulting his memory after his death, Sir Edward Poynter, then

Director, when he hung _Old Battersea Bridge_ in the National Gallery,

affixed to it, or allowed to be affixed, a label on which Whistler's

name was misspelt, Whistler described as of the British School, the

title of the picture incorrectly given, while Whistler's decorated

frame was hung upside down. The picture has since, by the irony of

fate, been placed in the Gallery of Modern British Art!

[Footnote 4: He never lived at No. 3, as Walter Greaves has wrongly

stated.]

[Footnote 5: See Chapter XXXV.]

CHAPTER XIII: NOCTURNES. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-TWO TO EIGHTEEN

SEVENTY-EIGHT.

Whistler was the first to paint the night. The blue mystery that veils

the world from dusk to dawn is in the colour-prints of Hiroshige. But

the wood-block cannot give the depth of darkness, the method makes a

convention of colour. Hiroshige saw and felt the beauty and invented a

scheme by which to suggest it on the block, but he could not render the

night as Whistler rendered it on canvas.

Though colour-prints suggested the Nocturnes, they were only the

suggestion. Whistler never copied Japanese technique. But Japanese

composition impressed him--the arrangement, the pattern, and at times

the detail. The high or low horizon, the line of a bridge over a

river, the spray of foliage in the foreground, the golden curve of a

falling rocket, the placing of a figure on the shore, the signature in

the oblong panel, show how much he learned. He abandoned the Japanese

convention in a few years, but he never gave up, he developed rather,

what he always spoke of as the Japanese method of drawing.[6] He

translated Japanese art--translate is the word--though he said that

he "carried on tradition." His idea was not to go to the Japanese as

greater than himself, but to learn what he could from them and make

another work of art; a work founded on tradition no less than theirs,

and yet as Western as theirs was Eastern.

[Illustration: LA PRINCESSE DU PAYS DE LA PORCELAINE

ROSE AND SILVER

OIL

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

(_See page 87_)]

[Illustration: VARIATIONS IN VIOLET AND GREEN

OIL

In the possession of Sir Charles McLaren, Bart.

Showing frame designed by Whistler

Plaque inscribed Whistler at bottom not by artist

(_See page 90_)]

Night, beautiful everywhere from Valparaiso to Venice, is never more

beautiful than in London. First he painted the Thames in the grey day,

but, as time went on, he painted it in the blue night. Only those who

have lived by the river for years, as we have, can realise the truth

as well as the beauty of the Nocturnes. He still, like Courbet, "loved

things for what they were," but he chose the exquisite, the poetic. The

foolishness of Nature never appealed to him. But Courbet was no more a

realist than Whistler if realism means truth.

The long nights on the river were followed by long days in the studio.

In the end he gave up making notes. It was impossible for him to work

in colour at night, and he had to trust to his memory. In his portraits

and his pictures done by day he had a model. But looking at colour and

arrangement by night, and retaining the memory until the next morning

simply means a longer interval between observation and execution. And,

carrying on the tradition of the Japanese and the method of drawing

from memory advocated by Lecoq de Boisbaudran, and practised by many

of his most distinguished contemporaries in France, Whistler developed

his powers of observation. Even then, as he said, to retain the memory

of the subject required as hard training as a football player goes

through. His method was to go out at night, and all his pupils or

followers agree in this, stand before his subject and look at it, then

turn his back on it and repeat to whoever was with him the arrangement,

the scheme of colour, and as much of the detail as he wanted. The

listener corrected errors when they occurred, and, after Whistler had

looked long enough, he went to bed with nothing in his head but his

subject. The next morning, as he told his apprentice, Mrs. Clifford

Addams, if he could see upon the untouched canvas the completed

picture, he painted it; if not, he passed another night in looking at

the subject. However, it was not two nights' observation alone, but

the knowledge of a lifetime that enabled him to paint the Nocturnes.

This power to see a finished picture on a bare canvas is possessed by

all great artists. But the greater the artist the more he sees and the

better he presents it.

Whistler said "Nature put him out," because the arrangement as he found

it put him out; Nature is never right. Few painters have understood

the art of selection, and here Hiroshige and the other Japanese were

of use. He went to Nature for the motive, to the Japanese for the

design. This was why he said Nature was at once his master and his

servant. The Nocturnes looked so simple to a public trained by Ruskin

to believe that signs of labour are the chief merits in a picture, that

they seemed unfinished--just knocked off. Yet his letters to Fantin are

full of regret for his slowness: "_Je suis si lent.... Les choses ne

vont pas vite.... Je produis peu parceque j'efface tout!_" No one knew

the hard work that produced the simplicity. In no other paintings was

Whistler as successful in following his own precepts and concealing

traces of toil. One touch less and nothing would be left; one touch

more and the spell would be broken, and night stripped of mystery. To

give the silhouette of bridge or building against the sky; the lines

of light trailing through the water or leading to infinite distance;

the boats, ghosts fading into the ghostly river; the fall of rockets

through shadowy air--to give all these things, and yet to keep them

shrouded in the transparency of darkness was the problem he set himself

in the Nocturnes painted in the little second-storey back room at

Chelsea. It was the night he saw and studied at Cremorne, darker, more

mysterious for the sudden flare of the fireworks, for the glow in which

little figures danced, for the hint of draperies passing in and out of

the shadows--night that toned the tawdry gardens and their vulgar crowd

into beauty.

Now everyone can see, and "night is like a Whistler," for Whistler

compelled people to look at his pictures, until it has become

impossible to look at night without seeing the Nocturnes. He painted

the impression that night made on him, and the great artist, like the

great author, moves people until they think they see things as he does.

Even in that ever-quoted passage from _The Ten O'Clock_, he does not

pretend to see Nature as people see her or as Nature seems to be; his

concern is with the impression that Nature at night made on him, and in

this he was an impressionist.

The brothers Greaves bought his materials and prepared his canvas and

colours. "I know all these things because I passed days and weeks in

the place standing by him," Walter Greaves has said to us. Whistler

remade his brushes, heating them over a candle, melting the glue and

pushing the hair into the shape he wanted. Greaves says that the

colours were mixed with linseed oil and turpentine. Whistler told us

that he used a medium composed of copal, mastic, and turpentine. The

colours were arranged upon a palette, a large oblong board some two

feet by three, with the butterfly inlaid in one corner and sunken boxes

for brushes and tubes round the edges. This palette was laid upon a

table. He had at various periods two or three; and at least one stand,

with many tiny drawers, upon which the palette fitted. At the top of

the palette the pure colours were placed, though, more frequently,

there were no pure colours at all. Large quantities of different tones

of the prevailing colour in the picture to be painted were mixed, and

so much of the medium was used that he called it "sauce." Greaves says

that the Nocturnes were mostly painted on a very absorbent canvas,

sometimes on panels, sometimes on bare brown holland, sized. For the

blue Nocturnes, the canvas was covered with a red ground, or the panel

was of mahogany, which the pupils got from their boat-building yard,

the red forcing up the blues laid on it. Others were done on a warm

black, and for the fireworks there was a lead ground. Or, if the night

was grey, then, Whistler said, "the sky is grey, and the water is grey,

and, therefore, the canvas must be grey." Only once within Greaves'

memory was the ground white. The ground for his Nocturnes, like the

paper for his pastels, was chosen of the prevailing tone of the picture

he wanted to paint or of a colour which would give him that tone, not

to save work, but to avoid fatiguing the canvas.

When Whistler had arranged his colour-scheme on the palette, the

canvas, which the pupils prepared, was stood on an easel, but so much

"sauce" was used that frequently it had to be thrown flat on the floor

to keep the whole thing from running off. He washed the liquid colour

on, lightening and darkening the tones as he worked. In the Nocturnes,

the sky and water are rendered with great sweeps of the brush of

exactly the right tone. How many times he made and wiped out that

sweeping tone is another matter. When it was right, there it stayed.

With his life's knowledge of both the effects he wanted to paint and

the way to paint them, at times, as he admits himself, he completed

a Nocturne in a day. In some he got his effect at once, in others it

came only after endless failures. If the tones were right, he took

them off his palette and kept them until the next day, in saucers,

or gallipots, under water, so that he might carry on his work in the

same way with the same tones. Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt tells us that when

she lived in Cheyne Walk, she remembers "seeing the Nocturnes set out

along the garden wall to bake in the sun." Some were laid aside to

dry slowly in the studio, some were put in the garden or on the roof

to dry quickly. Sometimes they dried out like body-colour in the most

unexpected fashion. It was a time of tireless research. He had to

invent everything, though he profited by the technical training he had

gained in painting the _Six Projects_.

Whistler first called his paintings of night Moonlights. Nocturne was

Mr. Leyland's suggestion, as we have heard from Mrs. Leyland, and her

son-in-law, Val Prinsep, stated in the _Art Journal_ (August 1892),

that Whistler wrote to Leyland:

"I can't thank you too much for the name Nocturne as the title for

my Moonlights. You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the

critics, and consequent pleasure to me; besides it is really so

charming, and does so poetically say all I want to say and _no more_

than I wish."

Whether to mystify, or because he saw something new in his pictures,

Whistler repeatedly changed their titles, especially of the Nocturnes,

and repeatedly exhibited different pictures with the same title. It

is true, as Mr. Bernard Sickert writes: "such alterations made by the

artist himself stultify the whole idea, and prove that the analogy with

music does not hold consistently. Any musician would tell us that we

could not change the title of Symphony in C minor to Sonata in G major

without making it an absurdity."

That he should either not have realised this fact, or else have

disregarded it deliberately, is the more extraordinary because every

Nocturne represents a different effect rendered in a different

fashion. Although he altered his titles, nothing offended him more

than when others tampered with them or stole them.

The painting of the Nocturnes continued for many years, and in many

places. But the greater number were painted when he lived at Lindsey

Row, most from his windows, and few took him beyond Battersea and

Westminster. He resented it when people suggested literary titles for

them, and he put his resentment into words that "make history" in _The

Red Rag_, one of the most interesting documents in _The Gentle Art_,

published originally in the _World_ (May 22, 1878):

"My picture of a _Harmony in Grey and Gold_ is an illustration of my

meaning--a snow scene with a single black figure and a lighted tavern.

I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure,

placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. All that I know

is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture.

Now this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp. They say, 'Why

not call it "Trotty Veck," and sell it for a round harmony of golden

guineas?'"

Lord Redesdale told us that it was he who suggested this title, gaily.

Whistler assured another of his friends that he had only to write

"Father, dear Father, come home with me now" on the painting for it

to become the "picture of the year." Subject, sentiment, meaning were

for him in the night itself--the night in its loveliness and mystery.

There is no doubt that he carried tradition further and made greater

advance in the Nocturnes than in any of his paintings. The subjects are

the simplest--factories, bridges, boats and barges, shops, gardens--but

in his hands they became things of beauty that will live for ever. The

Nocturnes are not all moonlights; we remember only a few in which the

moon appears, some are illumined only by flickering lamplight. They are

not invariably pictures of night, but at times of dawn or of twilight.

Nocturnes, however, is the name Whistler chose for all, and by it they

will always be known.

[Footnote 6: See Chapter XXII.]

CHAPTER XIV: PORTRAITS. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-ONE TO EIGHTEEN

SEVENTY-FOUR.

While Whistler was painting the Nocturnes, he was working on the large

portraits. The _Mother_ was the first. We cannot say when he began it.

He wrote of it to Fantin, promising to send a photograph, in 1871, but

it was not shown until 1872. How many were the sittings, how often the

work was scraped down or wiped out, no one will ever know. We have

some interesting technical details from Walter Greaves. The portrait

was painted on the back of a canvas, as J. saw when it was sent to the

London Memorial Exhibition, as Otto Bacher saw when the picture was in

Whistler's studio in 1883:

"I noticed that it was painted on the back of a canvas, on the face of

which was the portrait of a child. My remark, 'Why, you have painted

your mother on the back of a canvas!' received simply the reply: 'Isn't

that a good surface?'"

There was scarcely any paint used, Greaves says, the canvas being

simply rubbed over to get the dress, and, as at first the dado had

been painted across the canvas, it shows through the skirt. Harper

Pennington says that the canvas, being absorbent, was stained all

through from the painting on the face. But this does not alter Greaves'

statement. That wonderful handkerchief in the tired old hands, Greaves

describes as "nothing but a bit of white and oil."

What Whistler wanted was to place upon canvas a beautiful arrangement,

a beautiful pattern, of colour and line. No painter since Hals and

Velasquez thought so much of placing his figure on the canvas inside

the frame. No painter since Velasquez understood so well the value

of restrained line and restrained colour. The long, vertical and

horizontal lines in the background, the footstool, the matting, the

brushwork on the wall, add quietness to the portrait, tranquillity

to the pose that could be kept for ever; a contrast to the frenzied

squirms preferred by his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.

Hamerton thought he must have found this pose, or the hint for it,

in the Agrippina at the Capitol in Rome, or in Canova's statue of

Napoleon's mother at Chatsworth. If Whistler found it anywhere, except

in his own studio, it could only have been at Haarlem, where Franz

Hals' old ladies sit together with the same serenity and are painted

in much the same scheme. Whistler had been to Holland and seen the

beautiful group, and he was haunted by it.

Whistler wrote to Fantin that if the _Mother_ marked any progress, it

was in the science of colour. What he wanted people to see in it, he

explained in _The Red Rag_:

"Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an

_Arrangement in Grey and Black_. Now that is what it is. To me it is

interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public

to care about the identity of the portrait?"

And yet Swinburne was not alone in realising its "intense pathos of

significance and tender depth of expression," while to a few Whistler

gave a glimpse of the other side, as to Mr. Harper Pennington:

"Did I ever tell you of an occasion when Whistler let me see him with

the paint off--with his brave mask down? Once standing by me in his

studio--Tite Street--we were looking at the _Mother_. I said some

string of words about the beauty of the face and figure, and for

some moments Jimmy looked and looked, but he said nothing. His hand

was playing with that tuft upon his nether lip. It was, perhaps, two

minutes before he spoke. 'Yes,' very slowly, and very softly--'Yes, one

does like to make one's mummy just as nice as possible!'"

Whistler told us that Madame Venturi, a friend of Carlyle's, determined

that he too should be painted.

"I used to go often to Madame Venturi's--I met Mazzini there, and

Mazzini was most charming--and Madame Venturi often visited me, and one

day she brought Carlyle. The _Mother_ was there, and Carlyle saw it,

and seemed to feel in it a certain fitness of things, as Madame Venturi

meant he should--he liked the simplicity of it, the old lady sitting

with her hands in her lap--and he said he would be painted. And he came

one morning soon, and he sat down, and I had the canvas ready and the

brushes and palette, and Carlyle said: 'And now, mon, fire away!' That

wasn't my idea how work should be done. Carlyle realised it, for he

added: 'If ye're fighting battles or painting pictures, the only thing

to do is to fire away!' One day he told me of others who had painted

his portrait. 'There was Mr. Watts, a mon of note. And I went to his

studio, and there was much meestification, and screens were drawn

round the easel, and curtains were drawn, and I was not allowed to see

anything. And then, at last, the screens were put aside and there I

was. And I looked. And Mr. Watts, a great mon, he said to me, "How do

you like it?" And then I turned to Mr. Watts, and I said, "Mon, I would

have ye know I am in the hobit of wurin' clean lunen!"'"

Carlyle told people that he sat there talking and talking, and that

Whistler went on working and working and paid no attention to him

whatever. Whistler found Carlyle a delightful person, and Carlyle

found him a workman. And it has been said that they used to take walks

together, but of this we have no record.

Before the portrait was finished, Whistler had begun to paint Miss

Alexander, and another story is of a meeting at the door between the

old man coming out and the little girl going in. "Who is that?" he

asked the maid. "Miss Alexander, who is sitting to Mr. Whistler."

Carlyle shook his head. "Puir lassie! Puir lassie!" Mrs. Leyland, at

whose portrait also Whistler was working, remembered that Carlyle

grumbled a good deal. Whistler, in the end, had, it is said, to get

Phil Morris to sit for the coat. Walter Greaves' memories are of

impatience in the studio, especially when Carlyle saw Whistler working

with small brushes, so that Whistler either worked with big brushes or

pretended to. William Allingham wrote of the sittings in his diary:

"Carlyle tells me he is sitting to Whistler. If C. makes signs of

changing his position, W. screams out in an agonised tone: 'For God's

sake, don't move!' C. afterwards said that all W.'s anxiety seemed

to be to get the coat painted to ideal perfection; the face went for

little. He had begun by asking two or three sittings, but managed to

get a great many. At last C. flatly rebelled. He used to define W. as

the most absurd creature on the face of the earth."

Around this portrait many legends are gathering. Mr. F. Ernest Jackson

has told us that a few years ago, one evening in Hyde Park, he was

seated on a bench sketching, and an old man came up to him and, seeing

he was an artist, asked if he knew Whistler. Then the old man said

that his father had posed for the picture. Whether this was Carlyle

revisiting the haunts of his walks or a pure invention we do not know.

Another tale is that Whistler never painted the picture, which is the

work of an anonymous Academician, done as a bet that he could do a

Whistler--it is a pity the Academician never did any more.

If Carlyle liked the portrait of the _Mother_, he must have liked his

own. There is the same quiet balance, the same careful spacing. Take

away either the circular print or the Butterfly in its circle, and the

repose is gone. But with such care has every detail been arranged, one

never thinks of the balance, the arabesque, the pattern. It is done,

and all traces of the thought and the work are gone. One sees only

the result Whistler meant should be seen. It has been criticised for

showing a want of invention. But if the background and the arrangement

are somewhat the same as in the _Mother_, it was because he was

deliberately carrying out the same scheme. It was his _Arrangement in

Grey and Black, No. II_. In the London Memorial Exhibition it hung

opposite the _Mother_, and as they were seen together, the pose and

colour and design belonged as inevitably to the nervous old man as to

the old lady in her beautiful tranquillity. Whistler is also said to

have made a study of Carlyle's head, owned by Mr. Burton Mansfield, and

there is a small study of the pose on the back of a canvas, once owned

by Greaves.

The _Harmony in Grey and Green; Portrait of Miss Alexander_, a

commission from Mr. W. C. Alexander, was painted at the same time,

and proves how little Whistler's invention was at fault. There was no

repetition. The little girl, in her white and green frock, holding

at her side her grey feathered hat, butterflies hovering about her,

the weariness of the pose expressed in the pouting red lips, as she

stands by the grey wall with its long lines of black, is as familiar

as Velasquez' Infantas. Less known is Whistler's care in every detail

to make it a masterpiece. He, or his mother, gave Mrs. Alexander

directions as to the quality of the muslin for the gown, where it was

to be bought, the width of the frills, the ruffles at the neck, the

ribbon bows, the way the gown was to be laundried. And only after

repeatedly seeing and studying the picture, does one learn his care

in weaving the colour through the design. He called the portrait

_Harmony in Grey and Green_, but the colours which bind the arrangement

together, which play all through it, are green and gold. So wonderfully

are these colours used like threads in tapestry that one does not see

them, one feels the result. As always, there was the great simple

design; the pose of Velasquez, the decoration of Japan, worked out

in his own way. The gold runs along the top of the dado; tiny gold

buckles fasten the rosettes of the shoes; there is a gold pin in the

hair; the gold of the daisies is repeated in the butterflies which

flutter above the head; a note of gold is in the pile of drapery, and

the floor has a suggestion of gold in the matting. Green plays the same

note. The green sash is carried down by the green feather of the hat,

lost in the shadow, which is filled with green and gold. And the green

of the daisies is repeated in the green of the drapery. It is not until

one has gone all over the picture that these things become evident. The

shoes look perfectly black, and so does the dado, and yet there is no

pure black anywhere. The whole is bound together by this grey, green,

black, and gold scheme running through the composition. It is a perfect

harmony. And so subtle is it, that only the result is evident, never

the means by which it was obtained.

The story of the sittings we have from Miss Cicely Alexander (Mrs.

Spring-Rice):

"My father wanted him to paint us all, I believe, beginning with

the eldest (my sister, whom he afterwards began to paint, but whose

portrait was never finished). But after coming down to see us, he wrote

and said he would like to begin with 'the light arrangement,' meaning

me, as my sister was dark. So I was the first victim, and I'm afraid

I rather considered that I was a victim all through the sittings, or

rather standings, for he never let me change my position, and I believe

I sometimes used to stand for hours at a time. I know I used to get

very tired and cross, and often finished the days in tears. This was

especially when he had promised to release me at a given time to go to

a dancing-class, but when the time came I was still standing, and the

minutes slipped away, and he was quite absorbed and had quite forgotten

all about his promise, and never noticed the tears; he used to stand

a good way from his canvas, and then dart at it and then dart back,

and he often turned round to look in a looking-glass that hung over

the mantelpiece at his back--I suppose, to see the reflection of his

painting. Although he was rather inhuman about letting me stand on for

hours and hours, as it seemed to me at the time, he was most kind in

other ways. If a blessed black fog came up from the river, and I was

allowed to get down, he never made any objection to my poking about

among his paints, and I even put charcoal eyes to some of his sketches

of portraits done in coloured chalks on brown paper, and he also

constantly promised to paint my doll, but this promise was never kept.

I was painted at the little house in Chelsea, and at the time he was

decorating the staircase; it was to have a dado of gold, and it was all

done in gold-leaf, and laid on by himself, I believe; he had numberless

little books of gold-leaf lying about, and any that weren't exactly of

the old-gold shade he wanted, he gave to me.

"Mrs. Whistler was living then, and used to preside at delightful

American luncheons, but I don't remember that she ever came into the

studio--a servant used to be sent to tell him lunch was ready, and

then he went on again as before. He painted, and despair filled my

soul, and I believe it was generally teatime before we went to those

lunches, at which we had hot biscuits and tinned peaches, and other

unwholesome things, and I believe the biscuits came out of a little

oven in the chimney, though I can't quite think how that could have

been. The studio was at the back of the house, and the drawing-room

looked over the river, and we seldom went into it, but I remember that

he had matting on the floor, and a large Japanese basin with water and

goldfish in it. I never met Mr. Carlyle in the studio, although he

was being painted at the same time, but he shook hands with me at the

private view at the Grosvenor Gallery, where the two portraits were

exhibited for the first time. [This must have been at Whistler's own

exhibition in 1874.] I didn't appreciate that honour at the time, any

more than I appreciated being painted by Mr. Whistler, and I'm afraid

all my memories only show that I was a very grumbling disagreeable

little girl. Of course, I was too young to appreciate Mr. Whistler

himself, though afterwards we were very good friends when I grew older,

and when he used to come to my father's house and make at once for the

portrait with his eye-glass up."

It is said that tears were not only the little girl's, but Whistler's,

and that there were seventy sittings before he finished. Mrs.

Spring-Rice writes nothing about the number of times the picture was

rubbed out and recommenced. He was beginning to put in the entire

scheme at once, but on such large canvases this was difficult. Walter

Greaves says that the picture was painted on an absorbent canvas, and

on a distemper ground. There is also a study for the head.

Whistler was as minute in his directions for the portrait of Miss

May Alexander. He recommended to Mrs. Alexander a milliner who sold

wonderful "picture hats"; he suggested that he should paint the

portrait in the house at Campden Hill, so that he could see the effect

of the picture in the drawing-room where it was to hang. But it remains

a sketch of a girl in riding-habit, drawing on her gloves, at her side

a pot of flowers, the one detail carried out. He made a number of other

sketches in oils, chalk, pen and ink, of the children, and there is a

study for Miss May's head also. But only the _Arrangement in Grey and

Green_ was finished.

Frederick Leyland, the wealthy shipowner, who had met Whistler as

early as 1867, about this time commissioned Whistler to paint his

four children, Mrs. Leyland, and himself. Leyland had not yet bought

his London house, but often came up to town, and Whistler made long

visits at Speke Hall, Leyland's place near Liverpool. Mrs. Whistler

spent months there. The record of his visits is in the etchings and

dry-points of _Speke Hall_ and _Speke Shore_, _Shipping at Liverpool_,

_The Dam Wood_, and the portraits in many mediums. Speke Hall, Whistler

said, put him in better mood for work. The house was not far from the

sea, where he found much to do. But the beach was flat, at low tide

the sea ran away from him, and at high tide the skies were wrong or

the wind blew, and when the sea failed he turned to the portraits. The

big canvases travelled with him, backward and forward, from Speke Hall

to London, and the sittings were continued in both places. They all

sat to him. The children hated posing as much as they delighted in the

painter. The son, after three sittings, refused to sit again, which

is to be regretted, for the pastel of him, lounging in a chair, with

big hat pushed back and long legs stretched out, is full of boyhood.

There are pastels of the three little girls, sketches in pen and ink

and pencil, one among the few studies for etchings, and the dry-points.

Of Florence Leyland, a large, full-length oil was started, the first

of his _Blue Girls_ in which he wished to paint blue on blue as he had

painted white on white. Another portrait of her was never finished and,

we believe, never exhibited until it was purchased, in 1906, for the

Brooklyn Museum. The full-length of Leyland was the only one completed.

Of this there is a small oil study.

[Illustration: SYMPHONY IN WHITE. NO. II

THE LITTLE WHITE GIRL

OIL

In the National Gallery, London

Showing the original frame with early Butterflies and Swinburne's

verses on it.

Photograph loaned by W. H. Low, Esq.

(_See page 92_)]

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF DR. WHISTLER

OIL

In the possession of Burton Mansfield, Esq.

(_See page 95_)]

Whistler painted Leyland standing, in evening dress, with the ruffled

shirt he always wore, against a dark background, the first arrangement

of black on black. Leyland was good about standing, we know from Mrs.

Leyland, but he had not much time, and few portraits gave Whistler

more trouble. Leyland told Val Prinsep that Whistler nearly cried over

the drawing of the legs. Greaves says that "he got into an awful mess

over it," painted it out again and again, and finally had in a model

to pose for it nude. It was finished in the winter of 1873. In the

portrait of Leyland he began to suppress the background, to put the

figures into the atmosphere in which they stood, without accessories.

The problem was the atmospheric envelope, to make the figures stand in

this atmosphere, as far within their frames as he stood from them when

he painted, a problem at which he worked as long as he lived.

Mrs. Leyland had more leisure than her husband, and the sittings

amused her. She had sat to Rossetti, she was to sit to others. She

was beautiful, with wonderful red hair. Whistler made a dry-point of

her, _The Velvet Gown_, and in black velvet she wanted to be painted.

But he preferred a dress in harmony with her hair, and designed rose

draperies falling in sweeping curves, and he placed her against a

rose-flushed wall with a spray of rose almond blossoms at her side.

In no other portrait did he attempt a scheme of colour at once so

sumptuous and so delicate. The pose was natural to her, she said,

though he made a number of pastel schemes before he painted it. Her

back is turned, her arms fall loosely, her hands clasped behind her,

her head in profile. Mrs. Leyland remembered days when, at the end of

the pose, the portrait looked as if it needed only a few hours' work.

But in the morning she would find it rubbed out and all the work to be

done again. Notwithstanding the innumerable sittings, one of Whistler's

models, Maud Franklin, whom he so often etched and painted, was called

in to pose for the gown. Whistler knew what he wanted, and nothing else

would satisfy him. It must be beautiful to be worthy of the weariness

it caused her, he told Mrs. Leyland, and he was trying for the little

more that meant perfection. The portrait was never finished, and yet

it could not be lovelier. It was a problem, not of luminous dark, but

of luminous light, and the accessories have not been suppressed. The

matting on the floor, the dado, and the spray of almond blossoms are

more elaborately carried out than the detail of any other portrait.

What worried him, and probably prevented the picture being finished,

were the hands, almost untouched. It was not that he could not draw

hands, for they are beautifully drawn sometimes, notably in the

etchings. But he rarely painted them well. He nearly always left them

to the last, and some of his later pictures were unfinished because he

could not get the hands right. In the _Sarasate_, _The Little White

Girl_, the _Symphony in White, No. III._, the hands are beautifully

painted. Some one has said that an artist is known by his painting of

hands. These three pictures prove that Whistler could paint hands, but

it is as true that he did not paint them when he could help it.

The portrait of Mrs. Louis Huth was not only begun but finished during

these years. It is Holbein-like in its dignity, its sobriety, the flat

modelling, the exquisite rendering of the lace at the throat and the

wrists. Mrs. Huth wears the black velvet Mrs. Leyland wanted to wear,

and the background is black of wonderful, luminous, intense depth.

She, too, stands with her back turned, and her head in profile. In

this portrait, as in the full-length Leyland, Whistler carried out his

method of putting in the whole subject at once. The background was

as much a part of the design as the figure. If anything went wrong

anywhere the whole had to come out and be started again. It was a

difficult problem, but the theory taught by Gleyre, and developed in

the Nocturnes, was perfected in the portraits of _Frederick Leyland_

and _Mrs. Huth_.

Mrs. Leyland sometimes met Mrs. Huth as they came and went, and this

fixes the date of the portrait. Mrs. Huth was not strong, and Whistler

exhausted the strongest who posed for him. Almost daily, during one

summer, he kept her standing for three hours without rest. At last she

rebelled. Watts, she said, who had painted her had not treated her

in that way. "And still, you know, you come to me!" was Whistler's

comment. He had some mercy, however, and at times a model stood for her

dress.

After the Academy of 1874 opened with nothing of his in it, Whistler

took matters into his own hands, and, like Courbet in 1855, and Manet

in 1867, organised a show of his own--his first "one man" show. The

gallery was at No. 48 Pall Mall, and the collection included these

large portraits, a few Nocturnes, one or two earlier paintings, and one

or two of the _Projects_. Thirteen in all. There were fifty etchings.

The walls were grey, the exhibits were well spaced, there were palms

and flowers, blue pots and bronzes. He designed the card of invitation,

the simple card he always used, and his mother and Greaves wrote the

names and addresses, "all making Butterflies as hard as we could,"

Walter Greaves says, rushing out and posting the cards until the

letter-boxes of Chelsea were in a state of congestion. The private view

was on June 6. The catalogue is vague.

The exhibition was a shock to London. The decorations seemed an

indiscretion, for no one before had suggested to people, whose standard

was the Academy, that a show of pictures might be beautiful. The work

scandalised a generation blinded by the yearly Academic bazaar; they

could not see the beauty of flat modelling and flesh low in tone, they

preferred the "foolish sunset" to the poetry of night. But the pictures

could have been forgiven more easily than the titles. From the moment

he exhibited them as _Arrangements_ and _Nocturnes_, his reputation for

eccentricity was established. He wrote in _The Gentle Art_:

"I know that many good people think my nomenclature funny and myself

'eccentric'. Yes, 'eccentric' is the adjective they find for me. The

vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as

a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell....

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight,

and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of

colour."

Well received at first, his position in public favour had of late hung

in the balance. The exhibition weighed in the scales against him,

and for almost twenty years to come, ridicule was his portion. The

_Athenæum_ and the _Saturday Review_ ignored the show. The _Pall Mall_

saw in it more intellect than imagination. Here and there was a polite

murmur of "noble conception" and "Velasquez touch." Of all that was

said Whistler singled out for notice then, and preservation afterwards,

the comments of a forgotten journal, the _Hour_. It has been wondered

why he noticed papers of small importance. When he answered the critics

and kept the correspondence, it was "to make history," he said, and

he selected what he thought important, though it might come from an

unimportant source. The _Hour_ suggested that the best work was not

of recent date; Whistler wrote to remove "the melancholy impression";

and notice and letter "make history," for it was about this time that

English critics, following the lead of the French, were beginning to

say that he did not fulfil his early promise, and it is recorded in

_The Gentle Art_.

The pictures of this period that remain may seem few in number. But

others were completed or in progress, and disappeared before they

were exhibited or seen outside the studio. We have reason to believe,

however, that some have been recently discovered and eventually will

not be lost to the world.

CHAPTER XV: THE OPEN DOOR. THE YEAR EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-FOUR AND AFTER.

"Whistler laughed all his troubles away," it has been said. When the

Academy rejected him, and the critics sneered at his pictures hung in

other galleries, and the public took the critics seriously, he laughed

the louder, and felt the more. English ears shrank from his laugh--"his

strident peacock laugh," Sir Sidney Colvin called it.

"He was a man who could never bear to be alone," Mr. Percy Thomas

remembers. "The door in Lindsey Row was always open," and Whistler

liked to think that his friends' doors were open to him. Lord

Redesdale, who came to live in the Row in 1875, said that Whistler was

always running in and out. Through his own open door strange people

drifted. If they amused him he forgave them however they presumed, and

they usually did presume. There was a man who, he told us, came to dine

one evening, and, asking to stay overnight, remained three years:

"Well, you know, there he was; and that was the way he had always

lived--the prince of parasites! He was a genius, a musician, the first

of the 'Æsthetes,' before the silly name was invented. He hadn't

anything to do; he didn't do anything but decorate the dinner-table,

arrange the flowers, and then play the piano and talk. He hadn't any

enthusiasm; that's why he was so restful. He was always ready to go to

Cremorne with me. At moments my mother objected to such a loafer about

the house. And I would say to her, 'Well, but, my dear mummy, who else

is there to whom we could say, "Play," and he would play, and "Stop

playing," and he would stop right away!' Then I was ill. He couldn't be

trusted with a message to the doctor or the druggist, and he was only

in the way. But he had the good sense to see it, and to suggest it was

time to be going; so he left for somebody else! It never occurred to

him there was any reason he shouldn't live like that."

We have heard of many others. One, to whom Whistler entrusted the money

for the weekly bills, gave lunches to his friends and sent flowers and

chocolates right and left, while Whistler's debt multiplied.

Artists and art students came in through the open door to see and

to learn, and were welcomed. If they came to loaf and to play, they

paid for it. They ran errands, posted letters, sat in the corner,

interviewed greater bores than themselves. They had to give up their

time, and then the end came, and out they went.

One story in Chelsea is of Barthe, who not only taught art but sold

tapestry. Whistler bought a number of things from him. "But vill he

pay, zis Vistlaire, vill he pay?" Barthe asked, and at last one evening

he went to Lindsey Row. A cab was at the door. The maid said Whistler

was not in, but Barthe heard his voice and pushed past, and said

afterwards:

"Upstairs, I find him, before a little picture painting, and behind

him ze bruzzers Greaves holding candle. And Vistlaire he say, 'You ze

very man I vant; hold a candle!' And I hold a candle. And Vistlaire he

paint, and he paint, and zen he take ze picture, and he go downstair,

and he get in ze cab, and he drive off, and we hold ze candle, and I

see him no more. _Mon Dieu, il est terrible, ce Vistlaire!_" But he was

paid the next day.

Few men depended more on companionship than Whistler, and to few was

the companionship women alone can give more essential. All his life

he retained his _coeur de femme_, and most of his friends were women.

For years, until her health broke down, his mother was with him. Many

wondered, with Val Prinsep, who thought Whistler "always acting a

part," whether "behind the _poseur_, there was not quite a different

Whistler. Those who saw him with his mother were conscious of the fact

that the irrepressible Jimmy was very human. No one could have been a

better son, or more attentive to his mother's wishes. Sometimes old

Mrs. Whistler, who was a stern Presbyterian in her religion, must

have been very trying to her son. Yet Jimmy, though he used to give a

queer smile when he mentioned them, never in any way complained of

the old lady's strict Sabbatarian notions, to which he bowed without

remonstrance."

The models drifting in and out of the open door were mostly women.

He liked to have them with him, and felt it necessary to see them

about the studio, for, as he watched their movements, they would take

the pose he wanted, or suggest a group, an arrangement. An admirable

example is the _Whistler in his Studio_, done in the first house

in Lindsey Row. It was a beautiful study, he wrote to Fantin, for

a big picture like the _Hommage à Delacroix_, with Fantin, Albert

Moore, and himself, the "White Girl" on a couch, and _la Japonaise_

walking about, grouped together in his studio: all that would shock

the Academicians. The colour was to be dainty; he in pale grey, Jo in

white, _la Japonaise_ in flesh-colour, Albert Moore and Fantin to give

the black note. The canvas was to be ten feet by six. If he ever did

more than the study of the two girls and himself, it has disappeared.

The painting was owned by Mr. Douglas Freshfield, and now belongs to

the Chicago Art Institute, and is as dainty as Whistler described it.

He holds the small palette he sometimes used with raised edges to keep

the liquid colour from running off, he wears the long-sleeved white

waistcoat in which he worked, and he painted from the reflection in

the mirror, for his brush is in his left hand. The two women most

likely are the two models for _Symphony in White, No. III._, who have

stopped posing. Another version of this studio interior is in the

City of Dublin Art Gallery, but Whistler repudiated it. Mr. Gallatin

says that Sir Hugh Lane, who presented the picture to the Dublin

Gallery, gave it a very different record, holding that it was well

known in Chelsea, that Whistler liked it, and eventually painted for

Mr. Freshfield the version now in the Chicago Art Institute. The

truth of the matter, however, is that not only did Whistler repudiate

the Dublin picture, but, when it was shown as the original in the

Whistler Memorial Exhibition in London, Mr. Freshfield demanded that

this description be at once withdrawn or he would remove the picture

and sue the International Society, who organised the Exhibition, for

false statements and damages. Sir Hugh Lane did not produce during

his lifetime one scrap of proof in corroboration of statements denied

by Whistler, nor has any proof been produced since his death. Another

reason to doubt Lane's description is that Whistler never copied one

of his pictures, and the Dublin Gallery's version is a slavish copy,

save in the colour scheme. Whistler never painted it. There is nothing

else of the kind so complete as _Whistler in his Studio_, but there are

innumerable studies of figures, reading or sewing, not posing, though

the minute he started to draw them they had to pose. Everybody who was

with him, and somebody always was, had to sit and be painted, etched,

or drawn.

Refugees from France in 1870 drifted through the open door, artists

whose work was stopped by the Commune and who came to England to take

it up again. There were Dalou, Professor Lantéri, and Tissot who, at

Lindsey Row, found the inspiration for his pictures on the river.

Fantin stayed in Paris, but later told stories of the siege which

Whistler repeated to us. He asked Fantin what he did. "Me?" replied

Fantin, "I hid in the cellar. _Je suis poltron, moi._" One of Fantin's

many letters to Edwin Edwards shows Whistler's hold over those who

were drawn to him for a better reason than curiosity. It was long

since Fantin had heard from Whistler, for whom, however, he wrote, his

affection was that of a man for a mistress still loved despite the

trouble she might give. He did not understand women, they frightened

him, "_mais au fond, tout au fond, je sens que si j'étais aimé, je

serais l'esclave le plus soumis et serais peut-être capable de toutes

les plus grandes folies. Je sens que c'est la même chose pour Whistler:

s'il savait comme il pourrait avoir un ami dévoué et aimant en moi.

Malgré tout, il est séduisant._"

And yet they saw less of each other as the years went on, perhaps

because Fantin became more of a hermit, while Whistler's door opened

wider.

Journalists and critics hurried to Lindsey Row once they knew the

door was open. Mr. Walter Greaves, who sometimes showed the studio,

remembers doing the honours for Tom Taylor. Whistler told Mr. Sidney

Starr that, while the _Miss Alexander_ was in the studio, Tom Taylor

came:

"There were other visitors. Taylor said, 'Ah, yes, um,' then remarked

that the upright line in the panelling of the wall was wrong, and the

picture would be better without it, adding, 'Of course, it's a matter

of taste.' To which Whistler replied, 'I thought that perhaps for once

you were going to get away without having said anything foolish; but

remember, so that you may not make the mistake again, it's not a matter

of taste at all, it is a matter of knowledge. Good-bye.'"

Journalists and critics filled columns with praise of forgotten

masterpieces by unknown Academicians, but seldom spared space for the

work in Whistler's studio. Their gossip after the visit was about the

man, not his pictures.

Poets, the younger literary men, came in through the open door. Mr.

Edmund Gosse, introduced by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, has described to us his

impressions of the bare room with little in it but the easel, and of

the small, alert, nervous man with keen eyes and beautiful hands who

sat before it, looking at his canvas, never moving but looking steadily

for twenty minutes or half an hour, perhaps, and then, of a sudden,

dashing at it, giving it one touch, and saying, "There, well, I think

that will do for to-day!" an astonishing experience to one used to

tapestried studios and painters more industrious with their hands than

their brains.

The fashionable world, royalty, crowded through the open door. Lindsey

Row was lined with the carriages of Mayfair and Belgravia. Whistler

was the fashion, if his pictures were not, and he could say nothing,

he could do nothing, that did not go the rounds of drawing-rooms and

dinner-tables. "Ha, ha! I have no private life!" he told a man who

threatened him with exposure. And, from this time onward, he never had.

He knew what his popularity meant. It was among the numbers who

gathered about him because he was the fashion, that he could not afford

to have friends.

If the frequent use of the name "Jimmie" by people in speaking and

writing of him implies a friendliness on his part with every Tom,

Dick, and Harry, nothing could be further from the fact. His friends,

who were his contemporaries, called him "Jimmie," but rarely to his

face, and the rest who did once had not the courage to a second time.

We remember a foolish youth who, meeting him at our table, addressed

him in free and easy fashion as "Whistler." He said nothing. He only

looked, but the youth did not forget the Mr. after that. Whistler was

the last man to allow familiarity or to make friends. He understood how

to keep at a distance those he did not know or did not want to know.

[Illustration: NOCTURNE

BLUE AND GOLD, VALPARAISO BAY

OIL

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

(_See page 99_)]

[Illustration: SYMPHONY IN WHITE. NO. III

OIL

In the possession of Edmund Davis, Esq.

(_See page 102_)]

It was thought that he could not live without fighting, that to him

"battle was the spice of life." But he never fought until fighting was

forced upon him. There were no fights, just as there was no mystery,

at first. Every man was a friend until he proved himself an enemy.

Whistler's temper was violent. Few who ever saw him roused can forget

the fire of his eyes, the fury of his face, the sting of his tongue.

He was terrible then, and lost all control of himself. But there was

always good cause for his rage, and once the storm had passed he

laughed this, as all his other troubles, away and when the fighting

began enjoyed it. He liked a fight, roared over it. Lord Redesdale told

us Whistler would come to him in the morning at breakfast, or in the

evening after dinner, to read the latest correspondence, discovering

the dullness of the enemy.

Whistler delighted in society, finding in it the change most men find

in sport or travel. He hated anything that stopped his work. Hunting

and fishing were an abomination. We never heard of his attempting to

shoot, except once at the Leylands', when, he said: "I rather fancied I

shot part of a hare, for I thought I saw the fluff of its fur flying.

I knew I hit a dog, for I saw the keeper taking out the shot!" His

solicitor, Mr. William Webb, tried once to teach him to ride a bicycle.

"Learn it? No," he said to us. "Why, I fell right off--but I fell in

a rose-bush!" Motoring offended him and he abused J. for taking it

up. But people amused him, and he enjoyed the "parade of life." This

is the explanation of the dandyism that has shocked more than one of

his critics. Whistler was never content with half-measures. He would

not have played the social game at all had he not been able to play it

well, and if taking infinite pains with his appearance means dandyism,

then he was a dandy. The very word pleased him, and he used it often,

in American fashion, to express perfection or charm or beauty. Never

was any man more particular about his person and his dress. He was

as careful of his hair as a woman, though there was no need of the

curling-tongs with which he has been reproached; the difficulty was to

restrain his curls and keep them in order. The white lock gave just

the right touch. However fashion changed, he always wore the moustache

and little imperial which other West Point men of his generation

retained through life. Even his thick bushy eyebrows were trained,

and they added to the humorous or sardonic expression of the deep

blue eyes from which many shrank. His beautiful hands and nails were

beautifully kept. In his dress was always something a little different

from that of other men. His clothes were speckless, faultless, fitting

irreproachably. He preferred pumps to boots, short sack-coats to

tailed coats. His linen was of the finest, and a little Butterfly was

embroidered on his handkerchief; and his near-sightedness was a reason

for the monocle of which he knew how to make such good use. He was long

at his toilet, minute in every detail. Before entering a drawing-room

we have seen him pause to adjust his curls and his cravat. So it was

with everything. There was dandyism in his delicate handwriting, and

the same care went to the arrangement of his cards of invitation and

his letters; he would consider even the placing of his signature on a

receipt. And he devoted no less attention to his breakfasts and dinners

that made the talk of the town. He respected the art of cookery--the

"Family Bible" he called the cook-book; he ate little, but that little

had to be perfect both in cooking and serving.

From the beginning at Lindsey Row he gave these breakfasts and dinners.

Mr. Luke Ionides remembers calling one afternoon when "Jimmy was busy

putting things straight; he asked me if I had any money. I told him I

had twelve shillings. He said that was enough. We went out together,

and he bought three chairs at two-and-sixpence each, and three bottles

of claret at eighteenpence each, and three sticks of sealing-wax of

different colours at twopence each. On our return he sealed the top of

each bottle with a different coloured wax. He then told me he expected

a possible buyer to dinner, and two other friends. When we had taken

our seats at the table, he very solemnly told the maid to go down and

bring up a bottle of wine, one of those with the red seal. The maid

could hardly suppress a grin, but I alone saw it. Then, after the meat,

he told her to fetch a bottle with the blue seal; and with dessert the

one with the yellow seal was brought, and all were drunk in perfect

innocence and delight. He sold his picture, and said he was sure the

sealing-wax had done it."

All his life he invented wines and was continually making "finds." We

remember his discovery of a wonderful Croûte Mallard at the Café Royal,

and an equally wonderful Pouilly supplied by his French barber, who had

been one of Napoleon III.'s generals or Maximilian's _aides-de-camp_.

Another thing at the Café Royal besides the _menu_ was the N on the

wine-glasses, which were said to have come from the Tuileries in 1870,

but, no matter how many have been broken, it is still there. Though he

liked good wine, he drank as little as he ate. One of the innumerable

stories often repeated may give a different idea. After a dinner in

somebody's new house he slipped on the stairs and fell. As he was

helped up, he was asked if he had hurt himself. "No," he said, "but

it's all the fault of the damned teetotal architect." Those who dined

with him, or with whom he dined, knew that he was one of the most

abstemious of men. On the other hand, it was astonishing how quickly

some things went to his head. In later days when J. would stop with him

at Frascati's, on the way home from the studio, the talk grew gayer,

the "Ha! Ha!" louder with the first sip of his absinthe.

We have the story of his first dinner-party from Mr. Walter Greaves,

whose workman was sent to Madame Venturi's to borrow, and came back

hung about with, pots and kettles and pans, and from Mrs. Leyland,

who lent her butler and at the last moment, with her sister, put up

muslin curtains at the windows. Guests remember Whistler's alarm when

a near-sighted young lady in white mistook the Japanese bath, filled

with water-lilies, for a divan, and tried to sit on the goldfish; and

Leyland's disgust when Grisi's daughter, whom he took in to dinner,

would talk to him not of music, but of Ouida's novels. Everyone found

the _menu_ "a little eccentric, but excellent." The earliest _menu_ we

have seen is one, in Mr. Walter Dowdeswell's possession, of a dinner

in the eighties, as simple as it is characteristic of Whistler, and we

give it: _Potage Potiron_; _Soles Frites_; _Boeuf à la Mode_; _Chapon

au Cresson_; _Salade Laitue_; _Marmalade de Pommes_; _Omelette au

Fromage_.

Mr. Alan S. Cole's diary is the record of dinners in the seventies, of

the company, and the talk:

"_November 16_ (1875). Dined with Jimmy; Tissot, A. Moore, and Captain

Crabb. Lovely blue and white china, and capital small dinner. General

conversation and ideas on art unfettered by principles. Lovely Japanese

lacquer.

"_December 7_ (1875). Dined with Jimmy; Cyril Flower, Tissot, Story.

Talked Balzac--_Père Goriot--Cousine Bette--Cousin Pons--Jeune Homme de

Province à Paris--Illusions perdues_.

"_January 6_ (1876). With my father and mother to dine at Whistler's.

Mrs. Montiori, Mrs. Stansfield, and Gee there. My father on the innate

desire or ambition of some men to be creators, either physical or

mental. Whistler considered art had reached a climax with Japanese and

Velasquez. He had to admit natural instinct and influence, and the

ceaseless changing in all things.

"_March 12_ (1876). Dined with Jimmy. Miss Franklin there. Great

conversation of Spiritualism, in which J. believes. We tried to get

raps, but were unsuccessful, except in getting noises from sticky

fingers on the table.

"_March 25_ (1876). Round to Whistler's to dine. Mrs. Leyland and Mrs.

Galsworthy and others.

"_September 16_ (1876). Dined with W. Eldon there. Hot discussion about

Napoleon (_Napoléon le petit_, by Hugo). The Commune, with which J.

sympathised [some fellow-feeling for Courbet, the reason perhaps].

Spiritualism.

"_December 29_ (1876). To dine with J.--the Doctor. Goldfish in bowl.

Japanese trays--storks and birds. He read out two or three stories

by Bret Harte: _Luck of Roaring Camp_, _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_,

_Tennessee's Partner_. Chatted as to doing illustration for a catalogue

for Mitford, and as to his Japanese woman, and a decorated room for the

Museum.

"_February 18_ (1878). To Whistler's. Mark Twain's haunting jingle in

the tramcar: 'Punch, brothers, punch with care; punch in the presence

of the passenjaire!'

"_March 27_ (1878). Dined with Whistler, young Mills and Lang, who

writes. He seemed shocked by much that was said by Jimmy and Eldon."

Whistler delighted not only in Mark Twain's, but in all jingles. He had

an endless stock and recited them in the most unexpected places and at

the most inappropriate moments. He went to the trouble to write down

for us the lines of the _Woodchuck_:

"_How much wood would the woodchuck chuck

If the woodchuck could chuck wood?

Why! just as much as the woodchuck would

If the woodchuck could chuck wood!_"

And as we read them in the familiar writing, we wonder why they never

seemed foolish, but quite right, as he chanted them. In the Haden

correspondence, published in _The Gentle Art_, a new version of Peter

Piper may be found. He loved to quote the _Danbury News_ man and the

_Detroit Free Press_. He never lost his joy in American humour, and

because there is something of the same spirit in Rossetti's limericks

he never tired of repeating them, especially the two beginning:

"_There is an old person named Scott

Who thinks he can paint and cannot,_"

and

"_There is an old painter called Sandys

Who suffers from one of his glands._"

Whistler invented Sunday breakfasts. The day was unusual in London and

also the hour--twelve instead of nine. "Nothing exactly like them has

ever been in the world. They were as much himself as his work," George

Boughton wrote. Whistler arranged the table, seeing that everything

placed on it was beautiful: the blue and white, the silver, the linen,

the Japanese bowl of goldfish or the vase of flowers in the centre. If

his resources failed, he borrowed from Lord Redesdale, or, after his

brother was married, from Mrs. William Whistler, whose Japanese lacquer

was his admiration. He prepared the _menu_, partly American, partly

French, and wholly bewildering to joint-loving Britons. His description

of the British breakfasts he was asked to were amazing: "Beef, the

people or the rats had been gnawing, beer, and cheese rinds, salad

without dressing and tarts without taste. Quite British!" His buckwheat

cakes are not forgotten. He would make them himself, if the party were

informal, and he never spoke again to one man who ventured to dislike

them.

Sometimes eighteen or twenty sat down to breakfast, more often half

that number. All were people Whistler wanted to meet, people who

talked, people who painted, people who wrote, people who bought, people

who were distinguished, people who were royal, people who were friends.

From Mr. Cole we have notes of the company and talk at some of the

breakfasts:

"_June 17_ (1877). To breakfast at J.'s. F. Dicey, young Potter, and

Huth there. He showed some studies from figures--light and elegant--to

be finished.

"_June 29_ (1879). To Whistler's for breakfast. Much talk about

_Comédie-Française_ and Sarah Bernhardt.

"_July 8_ (1883). Breakfast at W.'s. Lord Houghton, Oscar Wilde, Mrs.

Singleton, Mrs. Moncrieff, Mrs. Gerald Potter, Lady Archie Campbell,

the Storys, Theodore Watts, and some others. Mrs. Moncrieff sang well

afterwards. Lord Houghton asked me about my father's memoirs. Margie

[Mrs. Cole] sat by him."

The breakfasts remain "charming" in Mrs. Moncrieff's memory. And

"charming" is Lady Colin Campbell's word. Lady Wolseley writes us that

she remembers "a flight of fans fastened up on the walls, and also that

the table had a large flat blue china bowl, or dish, with goldfish

and nasturtiums in it." Mrs. Alan S. Cole recalls a single tall lily

springing from the bowl; though invited for twelve, it was wiser,

she adds, not to arrive much before two, for to get there earlier

was often to hear Whistler splashing in his bath somewhere close to

the drawing-room. This was Mr. W. J. Rawlinson's experience once. He

had been asked for twelve, and got there a few minutes before as for

breakfast in Paris. Several guests had come, others followed, a dozen

perhaps; one was Lord Wolseley. For Whistler they waited--and they

waited and they waited. At about half-past one they heard a splashing

behind the folding-doors. There was a moment of indignation. Then

Howell hurried in, beaming on them. "It's all right, it's all right!"

he said, "Jimmie won't be long now; he is just having his bath!" Howell

talked and they waited, and two struck before Whistler appeared,

smiling, gracious, all in white, for it was hot, and they went down to

breakfast. As soon as he came in he was so fascinating that the waiting

was forgotten. We have heard but of one person who did not like the

breakfasts, an artist who went one morning, and his story was that he

drove down to Chelsea from St. John's Wood, and found Whistler alone,

and they went into the dining-room, and there was an egg on toast for

Whistler and another egg on toast for himself, and that was all. Then

Whistler wanted to show him pictures, but he was furious, and he said,

"No, Whistler, I have paid three shillings and sixpence for a cab to

come here, and I have eaten one egg, and I will look at no pictures!"

Sir Rennell Rodd writes us of the breakfasts at 13 Tite Street, "with

the inevitable buckwheat cakes, and green corn, and brilliant talk. One

I remember particularly, for we happened to be thirteen. There were two

Miss C.'s, the younger of whom died within a week of the breakfast; and

an elderly gentleman, whose name I forget, who was there, when he heard

of it at his club, said, 'God bless my soul!' had a stroke, and died

too."

J. was once only at a Chelsea breakfast, in 1884, at Tite Street, when

Mr. Menpes was present. But we often breakfasted in Paris at the Rue du

Bac, and in London at the Fitzroy Street studio. It made no difference

who was there, who sat beside you, Whistler dominated everybody and

everything in his own as in every house he visited. Though short and

small--a man of diminutive stature the usual description--his was the

commanding presence. When he talked everyone listened. At his table he

had a delightful way of waiting upon his guests. He would go round with

a bottle of Burgundy in its cradle, talking all the while, emphasising

every point with a dramatic pause just before or just after filling a

glass. We remember one Sunday in Paris in 1893--Mr. and Mrs. Edwin A.

Abbey and Dr. D. S. MacColl the other guests--when he told how he hung

the pictures at the annual Liverpool exhibition in 1891:

"You know the Academy baby by the dozen had been sent in, and I got

them all in my gallery; and in the centre, at one end, I placed

the birth of the baby--splendid; and opposite, the baby with the

mustard-pot, and opposite that the baby with the puppy; and in the

centre, on one side, the baby ill, doctor holding its pulse, mother

weeping. On the other by the door, the baby dead, the baby's funeral,

baby from the cradle to the grave, baby in heaven, babies of all kinds

and shapes all along the line; not crowded, you know, hung with proper

respect for the baby. And on varnishing day, in came the artists, each

making for his own baby. Amazing! His baby on the line. Nothing could

be better! And they all shook my hand, and thanked me, and went to

look--at the other men's babies. And then they saw babies in front of

them, babies behind them, babies to right of them, babies to left of

them. And then, you know, their faces fell; they didn't seem to like

it--and--well--ha! ha!--they never asked me to hang the pictures again

at Liverpool! What!"

As he told it he was on his feet, pouring out the Burgundy, minutes

sometimes to fill a glass. There were minutes between one guest and the

next; he seemed never to be in his chair; it was fully two hours before

the story and breakfast came to an end together. But though no one else

had a chance to talk, no one was bored. It was the same wherever he

went if the people were sympathetic. If they were not, he could be as

glum as anybody, especially if he was expected to "show off"; or, he

could go fast asleep. In sympathetic houses he not only led the talk,

he controlled it. There is a legend that he and Mark Twain met for the

first time at a dinner, when they simultaneously asked their hostess

who that noisy fellow was? For there was noise, there was gaiety, and

everybody was carried away by it, even the servants.

Whistler was an artist in his use of words and phrases, making them as

much a part of his personality as the white lock and the eye-glass. His

sudden "What," his familiar "Well, you know," his eloquent "H'm! h'm!"

were placed as carefully as the Butterfly on his card of invitation,

the blue and white on his table. No man was ever so eloquent with

his hands, he could tell a whole story with his fingers, long, thin,

sensitive--"alive to the tips, like the fingers of a mesmerist," Mr.

Arthur Symons writes of them. No man ever put so much into words as he

into the pause for the laugh, into the laugh itself, the loud, sharp

"Ha, ha!" and into the deliberate adjusting of his eye-glass. So much

was in his manner that it is almost impossible to give an idea of his

talk to those who never heard it. We have listened to him with wonder

and delight, and afterwards tried to repeat what he said, to find

it fall flat and lifeless without the play of his expressive hands,

without the malice or the music of his laugh. This is why the stories

of him in print often make people marvel at the reputation they have

brought him. Not that the talk was not good; it was. His wit was quick,

spontaneous. "Providence is very good to me sometimes," was his answer

when we asked him how he found the telling word. He has been compared

to Degas, who, it is said, led up the talk to a witticism prepared

beforehand; Whistler's wit met like a flash the challenge he could

not have anticipated. He loved a good story, made the most of it,

treated it with a delicacy, a humour that was irresistible. He could

be fantastic, malicious, audacious, serious, everything but dull or

gross. He shrank from grossness. No one, not his worst enemies, can

recall a story from him with a touch or taint of it. The ugly, the

unclean revolted him.

We have heard of Sundays when Whistler sketched the people who were

there, hanging the sketches in his drawing-room. One Sunday he made the

dry-point of Lord (then Sir Garnet) Wolseley. Lord Wolseley himself has

forgotten it: "I fear, beyond the recollection of an agreeable luncheon

at his house at Chelsea, I have no reminiscence," he wrote to us. And

Lady Wolseley thinks "Lord Wolseley may have gone to him for sittings

early, and have breakfasted with him. I have a vague impression." But

Howell was summoned that Sunday from Putney to amuse the sitter and

prevent his hurrying off, and he put the date in his diary:

"_November 24_ (1877). Went to Whistler's, met Sir Garnet Wolseley.

Whistler etched him; got two first proofs, second one touched, 42_s._

Met Pellegrini and Godwin."

Whistler went everywhere, and knew everybody, though he did not allow

everybody to know him. When somebody said to him, "The Prince of Wales

says he knows you," Whistler's answer was, "That's only his side." He

lived at a rate that would have killed most men, and at an expense in

details that was fabulous. "I never dined alone for years," he said.

If no one was coming to him, if no one had invited him, he dined at

a club. He was a familiar figure, at different periods, in the Arts,

Chelsea, and Hogarth Clubs, the Arundel, the Beaufort Grill Club, or,

for supper, at the Beefsteak Club. Many of his letters, for a period,

were dated from "The Fielding." He was once put up at the Savile, he

told us, but heard no more about it; and at the Savage, but that, he

said, "is a club to belong to, never to go to." At the Reform, had

he thought of it, he lost all chance of election one night when his

laugh woke up the old gentleman whose snores were equally loud in

the reading-room. An amusing proof of the number of his clubs is Mr.

Alden Weir's story of passing through London and being asked to dine

by Whistler, who suggested first one club, then another, and drove him

about to half a dozen or more, at each getting out of the cab alone and

coming back to say nobody of any account was there, or the dinner was

not good, or some other excuse; and, at last, with an apology, driving

him home to Chelsea, where a large party waited and an excellent

dinner was served, and Mr. Weir was the one guest not in evening dress,

for Whistler kept the party waiting still longer while he changed.

In the Lindsey Row days Whistler sometimes dined in a cheap French

restaurant, "good of its kind," with Albert Moore and Homer Martin, a

man he delighted in. Many artists dined there, he said, and would sit

and talk until late. "But then, you know, the sort of Englishman who is

entirely outside all these things, and likes to think he is 'in it,'

began to come too, and that ruined it."

To Pagani's, in Great Portland Street, a tiny place then, he went with

Pelligrini and others. He was often at the Café Royal in the eighties

with Oscar Wilde; towards the end, Mr. Heinemann, Mr. E. G. Kennedy,

and we were apt to be with him, when, if he ordered the dinner, _Poulet

en casserole_ was the principal dish, and sweet champagne the wine.

Never shall we forget a dinner there, in 1899, to Mr. Freer, who had

just bought a picture. We and Mr. Heinemann were the other guests.

Much as Whistler wished to be amiable to Mr. Freer, he was tired, and,

somehow, the dinner was not right, and there were scenes in our corner

behind the screen. Mr. Freer felt it necessary to entertain the party,

which he did by talking pictures like a new critic, and Japanese prints

like a cultured school-ma'am. Whistler slept loudly and we tried to be

attentive, until at length, at some psychological moment in Hiroshige's

life or in Mr. Freer's collection, Whistler snored such a tremendous

snore that he woke himself up, crying: "Good Heavens! Who is snoring?"

Whistler had the faculty of being late when invited to dinner. One

official evening, he arrived an hour after the time. "We are so hungry,

Mr. Whistler!" said his host. "What a good sign!" was his answer. At

times he felt "like a little devil," and he told us of one of these

occasions:

"I arrived. In the middle of the drawing-room table was the new

_Fortnightly Review_, wet from the press; in it an article on Méryon

by Wedmore, and there was Wedmore--the distinguished guest. I felt the

excitement over the great man, and the great things he had been doing.

Wedmore took the hostess in to dinner; I was on her other side, seeing

things, bent on making the most of them. And I talked of critics,

of Wedmore, as though I did not know who sat opposite. And I was

nudged, my foot kicked under the table. But I talked. And whenever the

conversation turned on Méryon, or Wedmore's article, or other serious

things, I told another story, and I laughed--ha ha!--and they couldn't

help it, they all laughed with me, and Wedmore was forgotten, and I was

the hero of the evening. And Wedmore has never forgiven me."

Whistler went a great deal to the theatre in the seventies and

eighties, and was always at first nights. Occasionally he acted in

amateur theatricals. In 1876 he played in _Under the Umbrella_, at the

Albert Hall, and was elated by a paragraph on his performance in the

_Daily News_. He showed himself at private views and at the ceremonies

society approves. To see and to be seen was part of the social game,

and the world, meeting him everywhere, mistook him for the Butterfly

for which he seemed to pose.

CHAPTER XVI: THE PEACOCK ROOM. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-FOUR TO

EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-SEVEN.

For a year after the exhibition in Pall Mall, Whistler did not show

any paintings. Artists said his pictures were not serious because

not finished. Whistler retorted that theirs "might be finished,

but--well--they never had been begun." Such remarks were not favoured

by hanging committees. Probably Royal Academicians were honest, though

malicious. Lord Redesdale remembered one whose work is forgotten, who

used to say that Whistler was losing his eyesight, that he could not

see there was no paint on his canvas. Mr. G. A. Holmes told us that a

few artists in Chelsea, though they disliked him personally, thought

him a man with new ideas who threw new light on art; Henry Moore said

to Mr. Holmes that Whistler put more atmosphere into his pictures than

any man living. But Academicians, as a rule, were afraid of him and

Whistler would tell Mr. Holmes: "Well, you know, they want to treat me

like a sheet of note-paper, and crumple me up!"

His prints were hung in exhibitions, many lent by Anderson Rose to the

Liverpool Art Club in October 1874, and a few months afterwards to

the Hartley Institution at Southampton. Shortly before the Liverpool

show opened, Mr. Ralph Thomas issued the first catalogue of Whistler's

etchings: _A Catalogue of the Etchings and Dry-points of James Abbott

MacNeil Whistler, London, Privately Printed by John Russell Smith, of

36 Soho Square_. Of the fifty copies printed, only twenty-five were

for sale, so that it became at once rare. Mr. Percy Thomas etched

Whistler's portrait of himself with his brushes as frontispiece. Mr.

Ralph Thomas described the plates, and as he had been with Whistler

when many were made and printed, he was far better qualified than any

of his successors. It is much to be regretted that Wedmore did not

follow Thomas's excellent beginning.

In 1875, Whistler exhibited pictures in the few galleries that would

hang him. In October he sent to the Winter Exhibition at the Dudley

Gallery a _Nocturne in Blue and Gold, No. III._, which is impossible to

identify, and _Nocturne in Black and Gold--The Falling Rocket_, which

Ruskin presently identified beyond possibility of doubt: the impression

of fireworks in the gardens of Cremorne. But at the Dudley it created

no sensation. F. G. Stephens, in the _Athenæum_, was almost alone in

its praise. A month later, November 1875, _Chelsea Reach--Harmony in

Grey_, and many studies of figures on brown paper were at the Winter

Exhibition of the Society of French Artists, and three Nocturnes in the

Spring Exhibition (1876) of the same Society. Thus Whistler managed

without the Royal Academy.

[Illustration: SEA BEACH WITH FIGURES STUDY FOR THE SIX PROJECTS

PASTEL

(_See page 105_)]

[Illustration: WHISTLER'S TABLE PALETTE

(_See page 115_)]

[Illustration: THE THREE FIGURES

PINK AND GREY

OIL

In the possession of Alfred Chapman, Esq.

(_See page 105_)]

When Irving appeared as Philip II. in 1874, Whistler was struck with

the tall, slim, romantic figure in silvery greys and blacks, and got

him to pose. Mr. Bernhard Sickert thinks it extraordinary that Whistler

failed to suggest Irving's character. We think it more extraordinary

for Mr. Sickert to forget that Whistler was painting Irving made up as

Philip II. and not as Henry Irving. Mr. Cole saw the picture on May 5,

1876, and found Whistler "quite madly enthusiastic about his power of

painting such full-lengths in two sittings or so." The reproduction

in M. Duret's _Whistler_ differs in so many details from the picture

to-day, that at first we wondered if two portraits were painted. M.

Duret tells us that his reproduction is from a photograph lent him

by George Lucas. Probably, M. Duret writes, the photograph was taken

while Whistler was painting the picture, which afterwards he must have

altered. On comparing the photograph carefully with the picture, we

do not believe there were two portraits, but there were many changes.

In the photograph the cloak is thrown back over the actor's right

shoulder, showing his arm. In the exhibited picture his arm is hidden

by the cloak, and his hand, which before seems to have been thrust into

his doublet, rests upon the collar of an order. The trunks, apparently,

were much altered, especially the right, and the legs are far better

drawn, the left foot entirely repainted. Though Whistler was acquiring

more certainty in putting in these big portraits at once, he was

becoming more exacting, and he made repeated changes. When the _Irving_

was hung at the Grosvenor Gallery, Mrs. Stillman remembers that three

different outlines of the figure were visible. The portrait was not a

commission. It is said that Irving refused the small price Whistler

asked for it, but later, seeing his legs sticking out from under a pile

of canvases in a Wardour Street shop, recognised them and bought the

picture for ten guineas. Mr. Bram Stoker writes that, at the time of

the bankruptcy, Whistler sold it to Irving "for either twenty or forty

pounds--I forget which." The facts are that Whistler sold the _Irving_

to Howell, for "ten pounds and a sealskin coat," Howell recorded in

his diary, and that from him it passed into the hands of Mr. Graves,

the printseller in Pall Mall, who sold it to Irving for one hundred

pounds. After Irving's death, it came up for sale at Christie's, and

fetched five thousand pounds, becoming the property of Mr. Thomas,

of Philadelphia. On the death of Mr. Thomas it was purchased for the

Metropolitan Museum in New York.

A portrait of Sir Henry Cole was begun this spring. Mr. Alan S. Cole,

in his diary (May 19, 1876), speaks of "a strong commencement upon a

nearly life-size portrait of my father. Looking at it reflected in

a glass, and how the figure stood within the frame." This was never

finished. Whistler's executrix says it was burned.

Lord Redesdale told us of a beautiful full-length of his wife in

Chinese blue silk Whistler called fair, his word then for everything he

liked. With two or three more sittings and a little work, it would have

been finished. But it was a difficult moment, men were in possession

at No. 2 Lindsey Row, and he slashed the canvas. The debt was small,

thirty pounds or so, and the price agreed upon for the portrait was two

hundred guineas. Lord Redesdale would gladly have settled the matter,

but Whistler said nothing. A portrait started of Lord Redesdale, in

Van Dyck costume, and several Nocturnes were torn off stretchers and

slashed. _The Fur Jacket_, _Rosa Corder_, _Connie Gilchrist with the

Skipping Rope--The Gold Girl_, _Effie Deans_, were being painted. _The

Fur Jacket, Arrangement in Black and Brown_ his final name for it, is

the portrait of Maud, Miss Franklin, who now becomes more important

in his life and in his art. It is of great dignity. The dress is put

in with a full, sweeping brush in long flowing lines, classic in the

fall of the folds; the pale, beautiful face looks out like a flower

from the depth of the background. In many portraits Whistler was

rebuked for sacrificing the face to the design; here the interest is

concentrated on the face, and that is why the shadowy figure has been

criticised as a mere ghost, a mere rub-in of colour, on the canvas.

That he carried the work as far as he thought it should be carried is

certain when it is contrasted with _Rosa Corder_, also an _Arrangement

in Black and Brown_, in which the jacket, the feathered hat in her

hand, the trailing skirt, the face in severe profile, are more solidly

modelled. M. Blanche has stated that Whistler, in Cheyne Walk, saw

Miss Rosa Corder in her brown dress pass a door painted black, and

was struck with the scheme of colour. This may be true, for, as we

have shown, chance often suggested the effect or arrangement. _Connie

Gilchrist--The Gold Girl_, a popular dancer at the Gaiety, attracted

Whistler by her stage dress, which revealed her slight girlish form in

its delicate youthful beauty. He posed her in the studio as he had seen

her on the stage, skipping. But the movement which told on the stage by

its simplicity its spontaneity, became in the picture artificial. The

figure has the elegance of the little pastels, it is placed with the

distinction of the _Miss Alexander_, but the suspended action gives the

sense of incompleteness. A long line swept down the back of the figure

proves he meant to change it.

The above was written before the painting was bought by George A. Hearn

and presented to the Metropolitan Museum of New York. Whistler for

years had been endeavouring to get possession of it in order to destroy

it. It had been seized at his bankruptcy, and for long was the property

of Henry Labouchere. That Whistler was dissatisfied is shown by that

long black line from the girl's head to her heels. After it had hung

for some time in the Metropolitan Museum the line was removed, and

what is left of the picture Whistler wanted to destroy can now be seen

on the walls.

Always the pictures he was painting were in his mind. He memorised them

as he did the Nocturnes, and over and over, instead of telling what he

was painting, he would make, to show those he knew would understand,

pen or wash sketches of the work he was engaged on, leaving the

sketches, many of which exist, with his friends. There are records of

the kind of most of these portraits.

No portraits were shown in 1876, for other work engrossed him. It was

the year of The Peacock Room.