decoration, or where he obtained his knowledge of it. But the scheme
was first proposed to Mr. W. C. Alexander for his house on Campden
Hill, and Whistler put down a few notes in pen and ink. The work went
no further, and he arranged, instead, a harmony in white for the
drawing-room, replaced afterwards by Eastern tapestries. Then Leyland
bought his house in Prince's Gate. Leyland's ambition was to live the
life of an ancient Venetian merchant in modern London, and he began
to remodel the interior and fill it with beautiful things. He bought
the gilded staircase from Northumberland House, which was being pulled
down. He commissioned Whistler to suggest the colour in the hall, and
paint the detail of blossom and leaf on the panels of the dado. "To
Leyland's house to see Whistler's colouring of Hall--very delicate
cocoa colour and gold--successful," Mr. Cole wrote, March 24. Leyland
covered the walls of drawing- and reception-rooms with pictures. He
had work by Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Crivelli. He owned Rossetti's
_Blessed Damosel_ and _Lady Lilith_, Millais' _Eve of St. Agnes_,
Ford Madox Brown's _Chaucer at King Edward's Court_, Windus' _Burd
Helen_, Burne-Jones' _Mirror of Venus_ and _Wine of Circe_. He bought
Legros, Watts, and Albert Moore. Whistler's _Princesse du Pays de la
Porcelaine_ was his, and he hung it in the dining-room amidst his
splendid collection of blue and white china.
Norman Shaw was making the alterations to the house, and another
architect, Jeckyll, was suggested by Mr. Murray Marks to decorate the
dining-room and arrange the blue and white. Some say that originally
Morris and Burne-Jones were to do the dining-room, but that when
Whistler stepped in they vanished. Jeckyll put up shelves to hold
the china, and Whistler designed the sideboard. The _Princesse_ was
placed over the mantel, and space left at the opposite end of the room
for another painting by Whistler, who wished the _Three Figures, Pink
and Grey_ to face the _Princesse_. The walls were hung with Norwich
leather. The shelves were divided by perpendicular lines endlessly
repeated, and the panelled ceiling, with its pendant lamps, was heavy.
Whistler maintained that the red border of the rug and the red flowers
in the centre of each panel of the leather killed the delicate tones of
his picture. Leyland agreed. The red border was cut off the rug, and
Whistler gilded, or painted, the flowers on the leather with yellow and
gold. The result was horrible; the yellow paint and gilding "swore"
at the yellow tone of the leather. Something else must be done, and
again Leyland agreed. The something else developed into the scheme of
decoration first submitted to Mr. Alexander: The Peacock Room.
He told us one evening, when talking of it: "Well, you know, I just
painted as I went on, without design or sketch--it grew as I painted.
And towards the end I reached such a point of perfection--putting in
every touch with such freedom--that when I came round to the corner
where I had started, why, I had to paint part of it over again, or the
difference would have been too marked. And the harmony in blue and gold
developing, you know, I forgot everything in my joy in it!"
He had planned a journey to Venice, and new series of etchings there
and in France and Holland. The journey was postponed. At the end of the
season, the Leylands went to Speke Hall. Whistler remained at Prince's
Gate. Town emptied, he was still there, spending his days on ladders
and scaffolding, or lying in a hammock painting. His two pupils helped
him: "We laid on the gold," Mr. Walter Greaves says, and there were
times when the three were found with their hair and faces covered with
it. Whistler's description of this whirlwind of work was "the show's
afire," an expression he used for years when things were going. He was
up before six, at Prince's Gate an hour or so after, at noon jumping
into a hansom and driving home to lunch, then hurrying back to his
work. At night he was fit for nothing but bed, "so full were my eyes of
sleep and peacock feathers," he told us. He thought only of the beauty
growing in his hands. Autumn came. Lionel Robinson and Sir Thomas
Sutherland, with whom he was to have gone to Venice, started without
him. He could not drop the work at Prince's Gate.
[Illustration: NOCTURNE
BLUE AND GREEN
OIL
In the National Gallery, London
(_See page 112_)]
[Illustration: NOCTURNE
BLUE AND SILVER
OIL
In the possession of the Executors of Mrs. F. R. Leyland
(_See page 112_)]
A record of his progress is in the short notes of Mr. Cole's diary:
"_September 11_ (1876). Whistler dined. Most entertaining with his
brilliant description of his successful decorations at Leyland's.
"_September 20._ To see Peacock Room. Peacock feather devices--blues
and golds--extremely new and original.
"_October 26._ To see room which is developing. The dado and panels
greatly help it. Met Poynter, who spoke highly of Whistler's decoration.
"_October 27._ Again to see room with Moody. He did not like the
varnished surface and blocky manner of laying on the gold.
"_October 29._ To Peacock Room. Mitford (Lord Redesdale) came.
"_November 10._ The blue over the brown (leather) background is most
admirable in effect, and the ornament in gold on blue fine. W. quite
mad with excitement.
"_November 20._ With Prince Teck to see Whistler and the room. Left P.
T. with Jimmy.
"_November 29._ Golden Peacocks promise to be superb.
"_December 4._ Peacocks superb.
"_December 8._ Article in _Morning Post_ on Peacock Room.
"_December 9._ Whistler in a state over article in _Morning Post_.
Leyland much perturbed as I heard.
"_December 15._ Whistler now thinking of cutting off the pendant
ceiling lamps in Peacock Room.
"_December 17._ My father and Probyn to see room. Jimmy much disgusted
at my father's telling him that, in taking so much pains over his work,
and in the minuteness of his etched work, he really was like Mulready,
who was equally scrupulous."
Lord Redesdale told us that, returning from Scotland, he went to
Prince's Gate. Whistler was on top of a ladder, looking like a little
imp--a gnome.
"But what are you doing?"
"I am doing the loveliest thing you ever saw!"
"But what of the beautiful old Spanish leather? And Leyland? Have you
consulted him?"
"Why should I? I am doing the most beautiful thing that ever has been
done, you know, the most beautiful room!"
Everybody wanted to see it. Whistler held a succession of receptions
at Prince's Gate. He was flattered when the Princess Louise and the
Marquis of Westminster came, he wrote to his mother at Hastings, for
they set the fashion, kept up the talk in London. Boughton said in his
_Reminiscences_: "He often asked me round to The Peacock Room, and I
see him still up on high, lying on his back often, working in 'gold
on blue' and 'blue on gold' over the whole expanse of the ceiling,
and, as far as I could see, he let no hand touch it but his own." Mrs.
Stillman, however, remembers the two pupils working while she drank tea
with Whistler. Lady Ritchie let us have her impressions of a visit:
"Long, long after the Paris days, Mr. Whistler danced when I would
rather have talked. Some one, I cannot remember who, it was probably
one of Mr. Cole's family, told me one day when I was walking up
Prince's Gate that he was decorating a house by which we were passing,
and asked me if I should like to go in. We found ourselves--it was like
a dream--in a beautiful Peacock Room, full of lovely lights and tints,
and romantic, dazzling effects. James Whistler, in a painter's smock,
stood at one end of the room at work. Seeing us, he laid down his
brushes, and greeted us warmly, and I talked of old Paris days to him.
'I used to ask you to dance,' he said, 'but you liked talking best.' To
which I answered, 'No, indeed, I liked dancing best,' and suddenly I
found myself whirling half-way down the room."
Jeckyll came, and his visit was tragic. When he saw what had been done
to his work, he hurried home, gilded his floor, and forgot his grief in
a mad-house.
Whistler received the critics on February 9, 1877. A leaflet, for
distribution, was written, it is said, by Whistler, though the wording
does not suggest it, and printed by Thomas Way. It explains that, with
the Peacocks as motive, two patterns, derived from the eyes and the
breast feathers, were invented and repeated throughout, sometimes one
alone, sometimes both in combination; along the dado, blue on gold,
over the walls, gold on blue, while the arrangement was completed by
the birds, painted in their splendour, in blue on the gold shutters,
in gold on the blue space opposite the chimney-place. "Called and
found Whistler elated with the praises of the Press of The Peacock
Room," is Mr. Cole's note on the 18th of the month. Even then it was
not finished. On March 5, Mr. Cole was "late at Prince's Gate with
Whistler, consoling him. He trying to finish the peacocks on shutters.
With him till 2 A.M., and walked home."
Whistler made no change in the architectural construction of the room.
It was far from beautiful, with its perpendicular lines, its heavy
ceiling, its hanging lamps, and its spaces so broken up that only
on the wall opposite the _Princesse_ and on the shutters could he
carry out his design in its full splendour and stateliness, and give
gorgeousness of form as well as colour; only there could he paint the
peacocks that were his motive, so that it is by artificial light, with
the shutters closed, that the room is seen in completeness. He could
do no more than adapt in marvellous fashion the eye of the peacock,
the throat and breast feathers to the broken surfaces. But in spite of
drawbacks, The Peacock Room is the "noble work" he called it to his
mother, the one perfect mural decoration of modern times. It was his
first chance, and it is a lasting reproach to his contemporaries that
there was no one to offer him another until too late.
Whistler, who in his pictures avoided literary themes, resorted to
symbolism in his gold peacocks on the wall facing the _Princesse_. One,
standing amid flying feathers and gold, clutches in his claws a pile of
coins; the other spreads his wings in angry but triumphant defiance:
"the Rich Peacock and the Poor Peacock," Whistler said, symbolising the
relations between patron and artist.
Leyland had been away from Prince's Gate for months. He had seen his
beautiful leather disappear beneath Whistler's blue and gold. He had
heard of receptions and press views to which no invitations had been
issued by him or to him, and he was annoyed at having his private house
turned into a public gallery. The crisis came when Whistler, thinking
himself justified by months of work, asked two thousand guineas for the
decoration of the room. Leyland, who had sanctioned only the retouching
of the leather, could restrain himself no longer. Like many generous
men, he had a strict, if narrow, sense of justice. The original
understanding was that Whistler should receive five hundred guineas.
This grew to a thousand as the scheme developed. But when, at the end,
Whistler demanded two thousand, and there was no contract, Leyland
sent Whistler one thousand pounds, not even guineas. To Whistler this
was an insult. He felt he had been treated not as an artist, but as a
tradesman. He never forgave Leyland, though, at one moment, Leyland
was prepared to pay the whole sum if Whistler would leave the house.
Whistler refused, preferring to make Leyland a gift of the decoration
than not finish the panel of the Peacocks, and he told Mr. Cole:
"You know, there Leyland will sit at dinner, his back to the
_Princesse_, and always before him the apotheosis of _l'art et
l'argent_!"
And this was what happened. Leyland knew that, in return for the loss
of his leather and his irritation with Whistler, he had been given
something beautiful, and he kept the dining-room as Whistler left
it, toning down not a flying feather, not a piece of gold in that
triumphant caricature. Until the colour fades from the panel, the world
cannot forget the quarrel. Whistler never forgot it, and his resentment
against Leyland never lessened. It may be that he was over-sensitive,
certainly he put himself in the wrong by his conduct to Leyland. But he
could no more help his manner of avenging what he thought an insult,
than the meek man can refrain from turning the other cheek to the
chastiser. It will ever be to Leyland's credit that he left the work
alone.
A few years ago the room was removed from the house in Prince's
Gate, bought by Messrs. Brown and Phillips, sold by them to Messrs.
Obach, who exhibited it in their Bond Street gallery, and it was then
purchased by Mr. Charles L. Freer and taken to Detroit. As he owns the
_Princesse_, The Peacock Room is probably once again just as it was
when Whistler finished it.
CHAPTER XVII: THE GROSVENOR GALLERY. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-SEVEN
AND EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-EIGHT.
Many exhibitions had been organised in opposition to the Royal Academy,
but on too small a scale to contend against that rich and powerful
institution. Sir Coutts Lindsay, the founder of the Grosvenor Gallery,
brought to it money, a talent for organisation, and a determination
to show the best work in the right way. Nothing could have been more
in accord with Whistler's ideas. He dropped in to smoke with Mr.
Cole on the evening of March 19, 1876, "in great excitement over Sir
Coutts Lindsay's gallery for pictures--very select exhibition, which
he carried to an extreme by saying that it might be opened with only
one picture worthy of being shown that season." Sir Coutts Lindsay
proposed to exhibit no pictures save those he invited, and he might
have succeeded had he ignored the Academy, and made the Grosvenor as
distinct from it as the International Society of Sculptors, Painters
and Gravers was under Whistler's presidency. He had the daring to
invite Whistler, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, Walter Crane,
Watts; but the weakness to include Millais, Alma-Tadema, Poynter,
Richmond, Leighton. "To those whose work he wanted, he gave little
dinners," Mr. Hallé has told us, and a very strange lot some of them
seemed to Sir Coutts probably, to his butler certainly. One evening the
butler could endure it no longer, and he came into the drawing-room and
whispered: "There's a gent downstairs says 'e 'as come to dinner, wot's
forgot 'is necktie and stuck a fevver in his 'air," for at this period
Whistler, Mr. Hallé says, never wore a necktie when in evening dress.
The white lock bewildered others. Mrs. Leyland remembered his going to
her box at the opera once, where the attendant leaned over and said:
"Beg your pardon, sir, but there's a white feather in your hair, just
on top!"
At first, Burne-Jones and the followers of the Pre-Raphaelites
were most in evidence at Sir Coutts Lindsay's exhibitions, and the
"greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery" element prevailed. But the
Grosvenor, by the time its traditions were taken over by the New
Gallery, was little more than an overflow from the Academy.
Shortly before the first exhibition in 1877, Whistler's brother, the
doctor, was married to Miss Helen Ionides, a cousin of Aleco and Luke
Ionides. The wedding (April 17, 1877) was at St. George's, Hanover
Square, and the Greek Church, London Wall. It brought to Whistler
a good friend for the troubled years that were to come, and Mrs.
Whistler's house in Wimpole Street was for long a home to him.
The first Grosvenor was a loan exhibition, and opened in May 1877.
Whistler sent _Nocturne in Black and Gold--The Falling Rocket_ shown
at the Dudley; _Harmony in Amber and Black_, the first title of _The
Fur Jacket; Arrangement in Brown_; Irving as Philip II. of Spain, with
the title _Arrangement in Black, No. III_. From Mrs. Leyland came
_Nocturne in Blue and Silver_; from Mr. W. Graham another _Nocturne
in Blue and Silver_--changed later by Whistler to _Blue and Gold, Old
Battersea Bridge_, now at the Tate Gallery; from the Hon. Mrs. Percy
Wyndham, _Nocturne in Blue and Gold_, at Westminster. The _Carlyle_ was
included, but it arrived too late to be catalogued. Boehm lent his bust
of Whistler in terra-cotta, done in 1872, considered at the time a good
portrait.
Whistler's work was also seen in a frieze, described by Mr. Walter
Crane: "Whistler designed the frieze--the phases of the moon on the
coved ceiling of the West Gallery which has disappeared since its
conversion into the Æolian Hall, with stars on a subdued blue ground,
the moon and stars being brought out in silver, the frieze being
divided into panels by the supports of the glass roof. The 'phases'
were sufficiently separated from each other."
We have heard of this decoration from no one else. Probably it was
overshadowed by the crimson silk damask and green velvet hangings,
the gilded pilasters and furniture, the monumental chimneypiece, of
which complaints were heard from every side. The sumptuousness of the
background was disastrous to the pictures. Whistler's suffered less
than others, but were not liked the more on that account. Before the
private view (April 30, 1877), Sir Coutts Lindsay had expressed his
disappointment in the _Irving_ and the Nocturnes. At the private view
the crowd gathered in front of Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, Millais,
Leighton, Poynter, Richmond. The critics sneered at Whistler, or
patronised him. The _Athenæum_ grudged meagre lines to this "whimsical,
if capable, artist and his vagaries." The _Times_ smiled with
condescension at "Mr. Whistler's compartment, musical with strange
Nocturnes," wondered how Irving enjoyed "being reduced to a mere
arrangement," and deplored the theory that, in practice, covered
"an entire absence of details, even details generally considered so
important to a full-length portrait as arms and legs. In fact, Mr.
Whistler's full-length arrangements suggest to us a choice between
materialised spirits and figures in a London fog."
But no criticism was so insolent as the notice of the Grosvenor which
Ruskin delivered from his circulating pulpit, _Fors Clavigera_ (July 2,
1877).
Ruskin, though social subjects engrossed him, was still the art
critic powerful to the public, to himself infallible. He had made
the Pre-Raphaelites, he set to work to unmake Whistler. Already he
was attacked by the mental malady, the "morbid excitement" in Mr.
Collingwood's words, that obscured the last years of his life; he
had been very ill in the winter of 1877. Nothing else could pardon
his malice and insolence. He reserved his chief abuse for Whistler's
_Falling Rocket at Cremorne_, with the sudden burst of fire and shower
of gold and detail disappearing in the illimitable darkness of night.
That fireworks in a place of entertainment could have in them the
elements of beauty was a truth Ruskin could not grasp, and with this
wonderful canvas before him, he remained blind to the splendour of the
subject and the mastery of the painter: "I have seen and heard much of
cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask
two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."
Boughton, in his _Reminiscences_, tells that Whistler first chanced
upon this criticism when they were alone together in the smoking-room
of the Arts Club. "It is the most debased style of criticism I have had
thrown at me yet," Whistler said. "Sounds rather like libel," Boughton
suggested. "Well--that I shall try to find out!" Whistler replied.
Till now, his answer to abuse of his work had been the lash of his wit.
But if critics had tried him by their stupidity, never, before Ruskin,
had they outraged him by their venom. The insult appeared in a widely
read print; he sought redress in the most public fashion possible in
England, and sued Ruskin for libel.
The immediate result was that he found it harder to sell his pictures.
To buy his Nocturnes was to be ridiculed, Mr. Rawlinson, one of the few
who risked it, assures us. Whistler laughed away the new anxiety, and
devoted more time to black-and-white. He had hoped to go to Venice, but
the preparations for the trial kept him in London. And now Howell made
himself as useful to Whistler as he had been to Rossetti:
"Well, you, know, it happened one summer evening, in those old days
when there was real summer, I was sitting looking out of the window in
Lindsey Row, and there was Howell passing, and Rosa Corder was with
him. And I called to them and they came in, and Howell said: 'Why,
you have etched many plates, haven't you? You must get them out, you
must print them, you must let me see to them--there's gold waiting.
And you have a press!' And so I had, in a room upstairs, only it was
rusty, it hadn't been used for so long. But Howell wouldn't listen to
an objection. He said he would fix up the press, he would pull it. And
there was no escape. And the next morning, there we all were, Rosa
Corder, too, and Howell was pulling at the wheel, and there were basins
of water, and paper being damped, and prints being dried, and then
Howell was grinding more ink, and, with the plates under my fingers, I
felt all the old love of it come back. In the afternoon Howell would go
and see Graves, the printseller, and there were orders flying about,
and cheques--it was all amazing, you know! Howell profited, of course.
But he was so superb. One evening we had left a pile of eleven prints
just pulled, and the next morning only five were there. 'It's very
strange,' Howell said, 'we must have a search. No one could have taken
them but me, and that, you know, is impossible!'" There is a record of
this period in the etching, _Lady at a Window_, with Rosa Corder, or
Maud, by the garret window, looking at a print, the press behind her.
It was a period of what he called his "fiendish slavery to the press."
There were new plates. In 1878 _St. James's Street_ was reproduced by
lithography in the "Season Number" of _Vanity Fair_. The _Athenæum_
objected to it because it was "not done as Leech or Hogarth would have
done it." The _World_ mistook the reproduction for the original, and
so invited from Whistler one of the letters following each other fast:
"Atlas has the wisdom of ages, and need not grieve himself with mere
matters of art." _Adam and Eve--Old Chelsea_ has a special interest,
for it marks the transition from his early manner in the Thames Set to
the later handling in the Venetian. A plate was made from the _Irving
as Philip of Spain_, the only portrait Whistler reproduced on copper,
and it was not a success. His plates of Jo and Maud were never from
pictures, though often studies for pictures he proposed to paint. The
dry-point of his _Mother_ has no relation to the portrait. He was
bored to death with copying himself, he would say, and, twenty years
afterwards, when he undertook a lithograph of his _Montesquiou_ and
failed, he said that "it was impossible to produce the same masterpiece
twice over," that "the inspiration would not come," that when he was
not working at a new thing from Nature he was not applying himself, "it
was as difficult as for a hen to lay the same egg twice."
In 1878 he made his first experiments in lithography. His attention had
been called to it by Mr. Thomas Way, who did more than any other man
to revive the art in England. Lithography, appropriated by commerce,
was almost forgotten as a means of artistic expression. In France, it
was given over for cheaper and quicker methods of illustration; in
England it was overweighted by the ponderous performances of Haghe and
Nash, hedged about by trade unions, and reduced to the perfection of
commonplace. Lithographers here and there preserved its best traditions
and regretted the degradation. Mr. Thomas Way determined to interest
artists again in a medium that had yielded such splendid results. He
prepared stones for them, explained processes, and would not hear
of difficulties. Some artists experimented, but lithography did not
pay while the anecdote in paint fetched a fortune. Mr. Way appealed
to Whistler, who tried the stone, grasped its possibilities, and was
delighted. In his first five lithographs he did things never attempted
before and found the medium adapted to him. He made nine this year
on the stone, though his later work was mostly done on lithographic
paper. He proposed to publish this first series as _Art Notes_, but
there was no demand, and the plan fell through. _The Toilet_ and the
_Broad Bridge_ were printed in _Piccadilly_ (1878), edited by Mr.
Watts-Dunton, and they had hardly appeared when the magazine came to
an end. Neither Whistler nor lithography then meant success for any
enterprise.
In 1878, the _Catalogue of Blue and White Nankin Porcelain Forming the
Collection of Sir Henry Thompson_ was published. Mr. Murray Marks and
Mr. W. C. Alexander own delicate little designs of blue and white by
Whistler for Mr. Marks, but never used. They were a good preparation
for the drawings which, in collaboration with Sir Henry Thompson, he
made to illustrate the Catalogue. Some are in brown, some in blue,
reproduced by the Autotype Company. Nineteen of the twenty-six are by
Whistler, simple and direct, the modelling in the drawing by the brush
as the Japanese would have given it. As a rule there are neither
shadows nor attempts at relief. The series is a refutation of the
assertion that he could not draw. Whenever he attempted drawing of this
sort, or etchings like _The Wine Glass_, he eclipsed Jacquemart and
all his contemporaries. Worried, anxious, the libel case hanging over
him, his debts increasing, the general distrust in his work growing,
Whistler, nevertheless, gave to the catalogue his usual care. We have
seen another set of the drawings, which differ slightly from those
reproduced, and with which, evidently, he was not satisfied. The book
was edited by Mr. Murray Marks, and issued by Messrs. Ellis and White,
of 29 New Bond Street, in May, and Mr. Marks exhibited the drawings and
the porcelain, with the book, in his shop, 395 Oxford Street. The show
was not a success, the book was a loss, though only two hundred and
twenty copies were printed. Now it is almost impossible to get.
Of personal notice, Whistler had more than enough. He was caricatured
this year in _The Grasshopper_ at the Gaiety--it was in the days of
Edward Terry and Nellie Farren. A large full-length, thought by many
more a portrait than a caricature, was painted by Carlo Pellegrini,
an Italian artist who lived in England and, under the names of
"Singe" and "Ape," contributed to _Vanity Fair_ caricatures which,
unlike the characterless, artless scrawls of his more popular amateur
successors, were works of art and, therefore, appreciated by Whistler.
The painting shows Whistler in evening dress, no necktie, and a gold
chain to his monocle; and in a scene parodying the studios and artists
of the day, it was pushed in on an easel, some say by Pellegrini,
with the announcement, "Here is the inventor of black-and-white!" It
was a failure, and no wonder. It was impossible to see the point. The
painting now belongs to Mr. John W. Simpson of New York. Whistler was
also caricatured in _Vanity Fair_ by "Spy," Leslie Ward, then rapidly
rivalling "Ape" in popularity, and to be so caricatured was, in London,
to achieve notoriety.
To the second Grosvenor in 1878 he sent, in defiance to Ruskin, another
series of Nocturnes, Harmonies, and Arrangements. Among them was the
_Arrangement in White and Black, No. I._, the large, full-length
portrait of Miss Maud Franklin, that sometimes figures in catalogues
and articles as _L'Américaine_. We believe it was never shown in
England again. It passed in the early eighties into the collection
of Dr. Linde, at Lübeck, where it remained until 1904, was then sold
through Paris dealers to an American, and remains one of the least
known of Whistler's large full-lengths. We saw it in the spring of 1904
at M. Duret's apartment in the Rue Vignon. It is the only portrait,
except the _Connie Gilchrist_ and The _Yellow Buskin_, in which
Whistler attempted to give movement to the figure. Miss Franklin wears
a white gown in the ugly fashion of the late seventies, and walks
forward, one hand on her hip, the other holding up her skirt. But she
fails to fulfil Whistler's precept that the figure must keep within
the frame. She seems walking out of the depths of the background,
breaking through the envelope of atmosphere. The problem was difficult,
an unusual one for Whistler, and, interesting as is the result, the
portrait hardly ranks with the greatest. When shown in 1878, it did not
help to reconcile the critics. The _Athenæum_ said: "Mr. Whistler is
in great force. Last year some of his life-size portraits were without
feet; here we have a curiously shaped young lady, ostentatiously
showing her foot, which is a pretty large one." It was a "vaporous
full-length" in the opinion of the _Times_, babbling nonsense about
the Nocturnes and glad to turn from Whistler's "diet of fog to the
broad table of substantial landscape spread for us by Cecil G. Lawson."
Whistler contributed a drawing of the _Arrangement in White and Black_
to Blackburn's _Grosvenor Notes_, an illustrated catalogue published
for the first time in 1878. For many years Whistler made these little
sketches in pen and ink after his pictures for illustrated catalogues,
and for papers that illustrated notices of the exhibitions, an aid to
the identification of works where the titles fail.
CHAPTER XVIII: THE WHITE HOUSE. THE YEAR EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-EIGHT.
In the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878, Whistler's only exhibit was
the section of a room that may have been his design for Mr. Alexander,
or more likely was his decoration for the White House which E. W.
Godwin, the architect, was building for him in Tite Street, Chelsea.
He called it a _Harmony in Yellow and Gold_, and others spoke of it as
the _Primrose Room_. It seems to have been simply a room painted in
gold and yellow, the peacock pattern again used, but this time in gold
on yellow and yellow on gold. There was simple furniture in yellow of
a darker tone than the walls, also a chimneypiece which, twelve years
or so afterwards, was found by Mr. Pickford Waller in a second-hand
furniture shop and bought. The stove was taken out; two panels, with
a pattern suggested for the dado, were turned into doors, and the
chimneypiece is now a cabinet with Whistler's decorations almost
untouched.
A few years ago Messrs. Obach had in their possession a set of glass
panels for a door from the house of Anderson Rose, stated to be
by Whistler, but there is no evidence of Whistler's work in them.
Recently a set of Empire chairs were shown in New York said to have
been decorated by Whistler for Wickham Flower, and so described at
Christie's where they were sold, but Messrs. Christie do not guarantee
the articles in their sales. To those who know Whistler's work there
was no trace of it in the chairs, and we have it on Mrs. Flower's
authority that the decorations were by Henry Treffy Dunn.
Mr. Sheridan Ford, in the suppressed edition of _The Gentle Art_,
writes that, at Sir Thomas Sutherland's request, Whistler designed a
scheme of decoration for his house, but that its "startling novelty
caused such evident anxiety," Whistler carried it no further. Some
houses he did decorate later on--those of Mrs. William Whistler, Mr.
William Heinemann, Senor Sarasate, Mrs. Walter Sickert, Mrs. D'Oyly
Carte, Mr. Menpes. But the decoration was simply the colour-scheme.
Whistler mixed the colour, which was usually put on by house-painters.
He frequently suggested the furniture, but of design, as in The Peacock
Room, there was nothing, not even in any of his own houses after the
White House. To one friend, thinking of decorating, who asked his
advice, his answer was, "Well, first burn all your furniture." Often
he gave elaborate directions as to what colours should be used and how
they were to be applied. Mrs. D'Oyly Carte wrote us:
[Illustration: THE MOTHER
ARRANGEMENT IN GREY AND BLACK
OIL
In the Musée du Luxembourg
(_See page 118_)]
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF THOMAS CARLYLE
ARRANGEMENT IN GREY AND BLACK. NO. II
OIL
In the Corporation Art Gallery, Glasgow
(_See page 119_)]
"It would not be quite correct to say that Mr. Whistler designed the
decorations of my house, because it is one of the old Adam houses in
Adelphi Terrace, and it contained the original Adam ceiling in the
drawing-room and a number of the old Adam mantelpieces, which Mr.
Whistler much admired, as he did also some of the cornices, doors and
other things. What he did do was to design a colour-scheme for the
house, and he mixed the colours for distempering the walls in each
case, leaving only the painters to _apply_ them. In this way he got
the exact shade he wanted, which made all the difference, as I think
the difficulty in getting any painting satisfactorily done is that
painters simply have their stock shades which they show you to choose
from, and none of them seem to be the kind of shades that Mr. Whistler
managed to achieve by the mixing of his ingredients. He distempered
the whole of the staircase light pink; the dining-room a different and
deeper shade; the library he made one of those yellows he had in his
drawing-room at the Vale, a sort of primrose which seemed as if the sun
was shining, however dark the day, and he painted the woodwork with it
green, but not like the ordinary painters' green at all. He followed
the same scheme in the other rooms. His idea was to make the house gay
and delicate in colour."
When he left No. 2 Lindsey Row he suggested the colour arrangement
throughout the house for the new tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Morse,
got his man Cossens to do the distempering, and, Mrs. Morse writes
us, "was so afraid that we should do it wrongly that he personally
superintended the work and mixed the colour himself, though in
consequence of this a whole wash for the dining-room was spoilt, as he
forgot to stir it up at the right moment. There was great discussion
about gold size."
To decoration Whistler applied his scientific method of painting, and
on his walls, as in his pictures, black was often the basis. Colour
for him was as much decoration as pattern was for William Morris, and
in the use of flat colour for wall decoration Whistler has triumphed.
His theory of interior decoration, though people do not realise it, has
been universally adopted, even his use of distemper, in which he was
only carrying on the beautiful tradition of whitewashing walls. Not
only can this simple scheme be made more appropriate as a background
than Morris' hangings and stencillings, but it has the virtue of
utility and cheapness, which Morris for ever preached but never
practised. In the painting of pictures, the idea of the Pre-Raphaelites
was decoration--that is, convention. Their decoration was either
wilfully or ignorantly founded on the realism of the Middle Ages.
The great decorators of Italy were the realists of their day, their
realism, except in the case of the greatest, Piero della Francesca, is
now regarded as convention, and it is the Pre-Raphaelites who stirred
up these dead bones. In France, Puvis de Chavannes developed Italian
methods, adapting them to modern subjects and modern wants, retaining
the convention of flatness and simplicity. Whistler believed that
a portrait or a Nocturne should be as decorative as a conventional
design; that, by the arrangement of his subjects, and by their colour,
they should be made decorative, and not by conventional setting and
conventional lines. He also believed that walls should be in flat tones
and not covered with pattern. Pictures then placed upon them were shown
properly and did not struggle with the pattern. Lady Archibald Campbell
writes us a few lines proving that he could make people understand his
aims when they were willing to learn from him:
"The fundamental principles of decorative art with which Whistler
impressed me, related to the necessity of applying scientific methods
to the treatment of all decorative work; that to produce harmonious
effects in line and colour grouping, the whole plan or scheme should
have to be thoroughly thought out so as to be _finished_ before it was
practically begun. I think he proved his saying to be true, that the
fundamental principles of decorative art, as in all art, are based on
laws as exact as those of the known sciences. He concluded that what
the knowledge of a fundamental base has done for music, a similarly
demonstrative method must do for painting. The musical vocabulary which
he used to distinguish his creations always struck me as singularly
appropriate, though he had no knowledge of music."
Before the Ruskin case came into court, the idea of opening an
_atelier_ for students occurred to Whistler, and it was because the
painting-room at No. 2 Lindsey Row was too small that he asked Godwin
to build the house, ever since known as the White House, in Tite
Street. Up to this time he had never had a studio in Chelsea. His
pictures had been painted in rooms without a top-light, partly, no
doubt, that he might paint his sitters under natural conditions. Even
in his later studios of the Rue Notre-Dame des Champs in Paris, and
Fitzroy Street in London, shades and screens were drawn so that the
light might come in as from an ordinary window. He was trying to put
the figure into the atmosphere that surrounded it, not to cut it out
of this atmosphere. But he needed more space for the _atelier_, which
promised success. Among artists, there were always a few who believed
in Whistler. Duranty only expressed the prevailing feeling when, in the
_Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ (1878), he referred to Whistler's influence on
British painters represented in the Universal Exhibition.
The White House, low, three-storeyed, simple in ornament, is modest
compared to many houses in Tite Street. It has been much changed, but
the general plan survives. When it was built, it shared the fate, of
everything associated with Whistler. The white brick of the walls, the
green slate of the roof, the stone facings, the blue door and woodwork
were as "eccentric" and "fantastic" as Whistler himself to art-critical
journalists. To architectural papers they were the cause of debate and
calling of names. To the Metropolitan Board of Works the simplicity
of design was suspiciously plain, and mouldings in specified places
were insisted upon in return for the licence to build. Discussion
followed discussion, because the studio was the most important feature
of the interior and placed at the top of the house, because windows
and doors were made where they were wanted "and not with Baker Street
regularity," because Godwin and Whistler liked the lovely effect of
the green tiles with the white walls. Harry Quilter, who bought the
house in 1879 and altered it, probably ruined the colour-scheme which
Whistler had arranged, and the interior decoration, if it was ever
carried out, does not now exist.
Whistler's tenancy of the Lindsey Row house came to an end on June
25 (1878), but he could not leave it in time for the new tenants. He
did not get out of the studio until October. It was surprising that
he moved at all. The moment was one of debts and difficulties. He
was alone. His mother was ill at Hastings, he had just broken his
engagement with Leyland's sister-in-law,[7] and he had quarrelled with
Leyland. The criticism of the last few years told severely upon the
sale of his pictures--upon himself. Howell, who had "started cheques
and orders flying about" and attended to business details, kept a diary
during part of 1877 and all of 1878. To look through it is to share
Whistler's indignation that so great an artist should be reduced to
such shifts. In Kensington and St. John's Wood palaces, Academicians
could not turn pictures out fast enough for the competing crowd;
Whistler was often compelled to borrow a few shillings. There are
legends of his taking a hansom and driving to find somebody to lend
him half a crown to pay for it, and before he had found anybody and
could get rid of the cab the fare had mounted to half a guinea.
Howell's diary shows that he had to raise money before he could lend
it to Whistler. Sometimes larger sums than he could manage were
arranged by Anderson Rose, Whistler's patron and solicitor. As "ill
and worried," Howell describes Whistler on one of the visits to Mr.
Rose, and there was every reason he should be. A Mr. Blott figures
in other transactions. Whistler's letters to him have been sold and
published, and it would be useless to ignore their relations. Money for
the White House had to be obtained. To Mr. Blott he gave his _Carlyle_
as security for a hundred and fifty pounds, agreeing to pay interest,
offering other pictures as security if a sum of four hundred could be
advanced. Cheques were protested, writs were threatened. The pictures
he could not sell went wandering about as hostages. The _Mother_ for
awhile was with Mrs. Noseda, the Strand printseller. We have heard that
she would have sold it for a hundred pounds. Mr. Rawlinson, who saw
it either there or at Mr. Graves', has told us that nobody could have
bought it under such circumstances, after having seen it in Whistler's
bedroom, where it had hung and been shown by him with reverence. When
Whistler heard that Mrs. Noseda was offering the picture for this
price, he is said to have gone at once to remonstrate, and by his
vehemence to have made her ill.
One man who helped him through these troubled times was Henry Graves,
head of the firm in Pall Mall. Graves, introduced to Whistler by
Howell, agreed to engrave the portrait of Carlyle in mezzotint, and
Howell bought the copyright of the engraving from Whistler for eighty
pounds and six proofs. W. Josey was commissioned to make the plate.
Three hundred signed proofs of a first state were to be printed. The
plate would not stand so large an edition; it was steel-faced and, as
the steel-facing of mezzotint was not possible, turned out a failure.
The attempt to remove the steel ruined the ground, and Josey had to
be called in to go over it again. In the first state, the floor was
perfectly smooth, but, the steel-facing taken off, a spot appeared
in the plate which never could be got out and remained there through
the edition. After every seventy proofs printed, Josey had to work
on the plate and bring it back, as well as he could, to its original
condition. Whistler did not like the first proofs and offered to show
the printers how to do them. Mr. A. Graves went with him to Holdgate's,
the printer, in London Street. Whistler brought his own ink, put on an
apron, inked the plate as he would an etched one, while the whole shop
looked on. When the plate, wiped and ready, was put through the press,
it came out a shadow, the ink being far too weak. Whistler did not
try a second time. Mr. Graves preserved the proof, writing on it that
Whistler pulled it, and sold it for three guineas, to whom he does not
remember. Eventually Whistler was satisfied, for Howell, on December 2,
1878, gave Whistler what he calls his first proof, and the diary says:
"Whistler and the Doctor were delighted." It is also recorded in the
diary that one of Whistler's six proofs was sold to Lord Beaconsfield.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF CICELY HENRIETTA, MISS ALEXANDER
HARMONY IN GREY AND GREEN
In the National Gallery, London
(_See page 121_)]
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF F. R. LEYLAND
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK
OIL
In the Charles L. Freer Collection, National Gallery of American Art
(_See page 124_)]
The print of the _Carlyle_ was very successful. At Howell's suggestion,
Graves agreed to give Whistler a thousand pounds for a portrait of
Disraeli, and the copyright: a plate to be made from it also.
Mr. Alan S. Cole says Whistler went to see Disraeli:
"_September 19_ (1878). Called on J., who told me of his interview with
Lord Beaconsfield as to painting a portrait of him. He had been down at
Hughenden--saw the old gentleman, who, however, declined."
Whistler's version was:
"Everything was most wonderful. We were the two artists
together--recognising each other at a glance! 'If I sit to any one, it
will be to you, Mr. Whistler,' were Disraeli's last words as he left me
at the gate. And then he sat to Millais!"
This scheme falling through, Graves commissioned Josey to engrave the
_Mother_, and afterwards the _Rosa Corder_, painted as a commission
from Howell. Whistler told us he offered the portrait as a present to
Howell, who declined and insisted on paying a hundred guineas for it,
the amount entered in Howell's diary as paid to Whistler on September
9, 1878. It was sold to R. A. Canfield in 1903 for two thousand pounds,
and now belongs to Mr. Henry C. Frick. Though these mezzotints were
successful when published, collectors thought as little of them as they
did at the time of those of a century earlier, and for years proofs
signed by both artist and engraver could be picked up for less than the
published price.
After the two pictures had been engraved by Josey, Howell deposited in
the same way three of the Nocturnes with Graves: _The Falling Rocket_,
_The Fire Wheel_, _Old Battersea Bridge--Blue and Gold_, and also
_The Fur Jacket_. These pictures were not engraved. Whistler had not
a minute to spare from legal troubles and impatient creditors. "Poor
J. turned up depressed--very hard up, and fearful of getting old," Mr.
Cole wrote in his diary for October 16, 1878. Whistler had reason for
depression. It was now that Howell's diary records his purchase of the
_Irving_ for ten pounds and a sealskin coat. There is nothing more
tragic in the story of Rembrandt's bankruptcy.
[Footnote 7: Mrs. Leyland told us of this engagement. We know nothing
more about it.]
CHAPTER XIX: THE TRIAL. THE YEAR EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-EIGHT.
The action Whistler _v._ Ruskin, was heard on November 25-26, 1878.
John Ruskin, leader of taste, critic of art, prophet, and propounder
of the gospel of "the Beautiful," led not only a devout following, but
that enormous public which believes blindly in Britons. Whistler knew
that either he or Ruskin must settle the question whether an artist may
paint what he wants in his own way, though this may not be understood
by the patron, the critic, the Academy, or the real British judge, the
man in the street; whether the artist should rule or be ruled. The case
was, Whistler said, "between the Brush and the Pen." His motives were
ignored, the proceedings made a jest, and the verdict treated as a
farce. Few could, or do, realise that he was in earnest, that the trial
was a defence of his principles, and the verdict a justification of his
belief.
At the time Whistler was to the British public a charlatan, a
mountebank. Ruskin was to the People a preacher, the professor of art.
Whistler denied the right of Ruskin, master of English literature,
populariser of pictures, to declare himself infallible, as he did,
his head turned by his success in defence of the Pre-Raphaelites and
booming of Turner. As to his discoveries, Turner was a full R.A. and
Carpaccio had been accepted for centuries before he "discovered"
them. Ruskin did but popularise Carpaccio, and buy and sell Turner.
So good a friend of Ruskin's as W. M. Rossetti said that he was
"substantially wrong in the Whistler matter," that his mind broke down
at times, and that his mental troubles began in 1860. His conceit and
his vanity can be explained in no other way. Unfortunately he lived
in the only country where his arrogant pretensions would then have
been countenanced, though, owing to the present acceptance of England
and everything English, he has become something of a fetish abroad,
now that he is exposed and discredited at home. He was rich, he was a
University man, he contributed long letters to the _Times_. He was a
typical new British patron of the arts, for to him the financial side
of connoisseurship was of the greatest importance--"two hundred guineas
for flinging a pot of paint." Moreover, he was a master of English;
therefore he could commit any absurdity. As Whistler said, political
economists considered him a great art critic, and artists looked upon
him as a great political economist. Sometimes we have wondered if
there was not another reason for Ruskin's venom. He never appreciated
the great artists of the world, save certain Italians recognised long
before. His estimate of Velasquez and Rembrandt, and his comparison
between Turner and Constable, prove how little his now unheeded sermons
were ever worth. While he failed to comprehend Charles Keene, he went
into ecstasies over Kate Greenaway. He loved Stacy Marks and hated
Snyders. Whistler, knowing this, may have laughed. Mr. Collingwood
wrote that, long before the trial, Whistler "had made overtures to the
great critic through Mr. Swinburne, the poet; but he had not been taken
seriously." It is certain Ruskin was not taken seriously by the great
artist. Swinburne suggested a meeting in a letter of August 11, 1865,
to which we have referred (published in the _Library Edition of the
Works of John Ruskin_), but in such words that we gather there must
have been some sort of misunderstanding already between Whistler and
Ruskin. Swinburne wanted to take Ruskin to the studio and represented
Whistler as desirous of meeting him. It is likely that Whistler,
knowing Ruskin's power in the Press, was willing to be written about by
him, and also that Ruskin cherished whatever reason for dislike he had
for Whistler.
Anderson Rose prepared the case, and we know the pains and trouble
Whistler took over it. Judge Parry has shown us letters to his father
which prove this. Whistler warned Rose there was no use in making him
out a popular painter; better show the jury that the Academy and
Academicians were against him. He thought, at first, that the artists
would be on his side and would unite with him to drive the false
prophet out of the temple. But Ruskin the critic was to them more
powerful than Whistler the painter, and when the time came they sneaked
away, all except Albert Moore. Besides, there was the hope that the
Yankee would lose. Whistler told us "they hoped they could drive me out
of the country, or kill me! And if I hadn't had the constitution of a
Government mule, they would!"
Charles Keene, whom Whistler considered the greatest English artist
since Hogarth, could write on November 24, 1878:
"Whistler's case against Ruskin comes off, I believe, on Monday. He
wants to subpoena me as a witness as to whether he is (as Ruskin says)
an impostor or not. I told him I should be glad to record my opinion,
but begged him to do without me if he could. They say it will most
likely be settled on the point of law without going into evidence, but
if the evidence is adduced, it will be the greatest lark that has been
known for a long time in the courts."
Keene did not dare to stand up for Whistler and for art, and the
bitterness is in those last words--"a lark!"
In the Exchequer Division at Westminster the action for libel, in
which "Mr. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, _an_ artist, seeks to
recover damages against Mr. John Ruskin, _the_ well-known author and
art critic," came up before Baron Huddleston and a special jury. Our
account is compiled chiefly from the reports published in the _Times_
and the _Daily News_, November 26 and 27, 1878, from _The Gentle Art_,
and from what Whistler, Mr. Rossetti, Armstrong, Mr. Graves, and others
who were present have told us. According to Lady Burne-Jones, Ruskin
had been delighted at the prospect of the trial:
"It's nuts and nectar to me, the notion of having to answer for myself
in court, and the whole thing will enable me to assert some principles
of art economy which I've never got into the public's head by writing:
but may get sent over all the world vividly in a newspaper report or
two. Meanwhile _I've_ heard nothing of the matter yet, and am only
afraid the fellow will be better advised."
Nuts and nectar turned to gall and vinegar. In the early winter of 1878
rumours of his ill-health reached the papers. Lady Burne-Jones adds
that, when the action was brought, "although he had quite recovered
from his illness, he was not allowed to appear"--a curious sort of
recovery. But he was well enough on the morning of the 26th to write to
Charles Eliot Norton that "to-day I believe the comic Whistler lawsuit
is to be decided."
The court was crowded. Mr. Serjeant Parry and Mr. Petheram were
counsel for the plaintiff, and the Attorney-General (Sir John Holker)
and Mr. Bowen for the defendant. Mr. Serjeant Parry opened the case
for Whistler, "who has followed the profession of an artist for many
years, while Mr. Ruskin is a gentleman well known to all of us, and
holding perhaps the highest position in Europe or America as an art
critic. Some of his works are destined to immortality, and it is the
more surprising, therefore, that a gentleman holding such a position
could traduce another in a way that would lead that other to come
into a court of law to ask for damages. The jury, after hearing the
case, will come to the conclusion that a great injustice has been
done. Mr. Whistler, in the United States, has earned a reputation as
a painter and an artist. He is not merely a painter, but has likewise
distinguished himself in the capacity of etcher, achieving considerable
honours in that department of art. He has been an unwearied worker in
his profession, always desiring to succeed, and if he had formed an
erroneous opinion, he should not have been treated with contempt and
ridicule. Mr. Ruskin edits a publication called _Fors Clavigera_, that
has a large circulation among artists and art patrons. In the July
number of 1877 appeared a criticism of the pictures in the Grosvenor,
containing the paragraph which is the defamatory matter complained
of. Sir Coutts Lindsay is described as an amateur, both in art and
shopkeeping, who must take up one business or the other. Mannerisms
and errors are pointed out in the work of Burne-Jones, but whatever
their extent, his pictures 'are never affected or indolent. The work is
natural to the painter, however strange to us, wrought with the utmost
conscience and care, however far, to his or our desire the result may
seem to be incomplete. Scarcely so much can be said for any other
pictures of the modern schools. Their eccentricities are almost always
in some degree forced, and their imperfections gratuitously, if not
impertinently, indulged. For Mr. Whistler's own sake, no less than for
the protection of the purchaser Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have
admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of
the artist so nearly approaches the aspect of wilful imposture. I have
seen and heard much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected
to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint
in the public's face.' Mr. Ruskin pleaded that the alleged libel was
privileged as being a fair and _bona fide_ criticism upon a painting
which the plaintiff had exposed to public view. But the terms in which
Mr. Ruskin has spoken of the plaintiff are unfair and ungentlemanly,
and are calculated to do, and have done him, considerable injury, and
it will be for the jury to say what damages the plaintiff is entitled
to."
Whistler was the first witness. He said: "I studied in Paris with
Du Maurier, Poynter, Armstrong. I was awarded a gold medal at The
Hague.... My etchings are in the British Museum and Windsor Castle
collections. I exhibited eight pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery in the
summer of 1877. No pictures were exhibited there save on invitation. I
was invited by Sir Coutts Lindsay to exhibit. The first was a _Nocturne
in Black and Gold--The Falling Rocket_. The second, a _Nocturne in
Blue and Silver_ [since called _Blue and Gold--Old Battersea Bridge_].
The third, a _Nocturne in Blue and Gold_, belonging to the Hon. Mrs.
Percy Wyndham. The fourth, a _Nocturne in Blue and Silver_, belonging
to Mrs. Leyland. The fifth, an _Arrangement in Black--Irving as Philip
II. of Spain_. The sixth, a _Harmony in Amber and Black_. The seventh,
an _Arrangement in Brown_. In addition to these, there was a portrait
of Mr. Carlyle. That portrait was painted from sittings Mr. Carlyle
gave me. It has since been engraved, and the artist's proofs were all
subscribed for. The Nocturnes, all but two, were sold before they
went to the Grosvenor Gallery. One of them was sold to the Hon. Percy
Wyndham for two hundred guineas--the one in _Blue and Gold_. One I sent
to Mr. Graham in lieu of a former commission, the amount of which was a
hundred and fifty guineas. A third one, _Blue and Silver_, I presented
to Mrs. Leyland. The one that was for sale was in _Black and Gold--The
Falling Rocket_."
Curiously, the only one for sale was pounced on by Ruskin. The coxcomb
was trying to get two hundred guineas, and the British commercial
critic spotted it.
Asked whether, since the publication of the criticism, he had sold a
Nocturne, Whistler answered: "Not by any means at the same price as
before."
The portraits of Irving and Carlyle were produced in court, and he is
said to have described the _Irving_ as "a large impression--a sketch;
it was not intended as a finished picture." We do not believe he said
anything of the sort.
He was then asked for his definition of a Nocturne: "I have perhaps,
meant rather to indicate an artistic interest alone in the work,
divesting the picture from any outside sort of interest which might
have been otherwise attached to it. It is an arrangement of line,
form, and colour first, and I make use of any incident of it which
shall bring about a symmetrical result. Among my works are some night
pieces; and I have chosen the word Nocturne because it generalises and
simplifies the whole set of them."
_The Falling Rocket_, though it is difficult here to follow the case,
was evidently produced at this point upside down; Whistler describing
it as a night piece, said it represented the fireworks at Cremorne.
_Attorney-General_: "Not a view of Cremorne?"
_Whistler_: "If it were called a view of Cremorne, it would certainly
bring about nothing but disappointment on the part of the beholders.
(Laughter.) It is an artistic arrangement."
_Attorney-General_: "Why do you call Mr. Irving an _Arrangement in
Black_?" (Laughter.)
The judge interposed, though in jest, for there was more laughter, and
explained that the picture, not Mr. Irving, was the _Arrangement_.
_Whistler_: "All these works are impressions of my own. I make them my
study. I suppose them to appeal to none but those who may understand
the technical matter."
And he added that it would be possible to see the pictures in
Westminster Palace Hotel close by, where he had placed them for the
purpose.
_Attorney-General_: "I suppose you are willing to admit that your
pictures exhibit some eccentricities. You have been told that over and
over again?"
_Whistler_: "Yes, very often." (Laughter.)
_Attorney-General_: "You send them to the gallery to invite the
admiration of the public?"
_Whistler_: "That would be such vast absurdity on my part that I don't
think I could." (Laughter.)
_Attorney-General_: "Can you tell me how long it took you to knock off
that Nocturne?"
_Whistler_: "I beg your pardon?" (Laughter.)
_Attorney-General_: "I am afraid that I am using a term that applies
rather perhaps to my own work...."
_Whistler_: ... "Let us say then, how long did I take to 'knock off'--I
think that is it--to knock off that Nocturne; well, as well as I
remember, about a day.... I may have still put a few more touches to it
the next day if the painting were not dry. I had better say, then, that
I was two days at work on it."
_Attorney-General_: "The labour of two days, then, is that for which
you ask two hundred guineas?"
_Whistler_: "No; I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime."
_Attorney-General_: "You don't approve of criticism?"
_Whistler_: "I should not disapprove in any way of technical criticism
by a man whose life is passed in the practice of the science which he
criticises; but for the opinion of a man whose life is not so passed, I
would have as little regard as you would if he expressed an opinion on
law."
_Attorney-General_: "You expect to be criticised?"
_Whistler_: "Yes, certainly; and I do not expect to be affected by it
until it comes to be a case of this kind."
The Nocturne, the _Blue and Silver_, was then produced.
_Whistler_: "It represents Battersea Bridge by moonlight."
_The Judge_: "Is this part of the picture at the top Old Battersea
Bridge? Are those figures on the top of the bridge intended for people?"
_Whistler_: "They are just what you like."
_The Judge_: "That is a barge beneath?"
_Whistler_: "Yes, I am very much flattered at your seeing that. The
picture is simply a representation of moonlight. My whole scheme was
only to bring about a certain harmony of colour."
_The Judge_: "How long did it take you to paint that picture?"
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF MRS. F. R. LEYLAND
SYMPHONY IN FLESH-COLOUR AND PINK
OIL
In the possession of H. C. Finch, Esq.
(_See page 125_)]
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF MISS LEYLAND
PASTEL
In the possession of the Executors of Mrs. F. R. Leyland
(_See page 124_)
_Whistler_: "I completed the work in one day, after having arranged the
idea in my mind."[8]
"The court adjourned, and the jury went to see the pictures at the
Westminster Palace Hotel. When, on their return, the _Nocturne in Black
and Gold--The Falling Rocket_, was produced, the Attorney-General asked:
"How long did it take you to paint that?"
_Whistler_: "One whole day and part of another."
_Attorney-General_: "What is the peculiar beauty of that picture?"
_Whistler_: "It would be impossible for me to explain to you, I am
afraid, although I dare say I could to a sympathetic ear."
_Attorney-General_: "Do you not think that anybody looking at the
picture might fairly come to the conclusion that it had no particular
beauty?"
_Whistler_: "I have strong evidence that Mr. Ruskin did come to that
conclusion."
_Attorney-General_: "Do you think it fair that Mr. Ruskin should come
to that conclusion?"
_Whistler_: "What might be fair to Mr. Ruskin, I cannot answer. No
artist of culture would come to that conclusion."
_Attorney-General_: "Do you offer that picture to the public as one of
particular beauty, fairly worth two hundred guineas?"
_Whistler_: "I offer it as a work that I have conscientiously executed
and that I think worth the money. I would hold my reputation upon this,
as I would upon any of my other works."
Mr. W. M. Rossetti was the next witness. He was Ruskin's friend as well
as Whistler's, and the position was not pleasant. But, he has written
us, he was "compelled to act, willy-nilly, in opposition to Ruskin's
interest in the action."
_Rossetti_: "I consider the _Blue and Silver_ an artistic and beautiful
representation of a pale but bright moonlight. I admire Mr. Whistler's
pictures, but not without exception. I appreciate the meaning of the
titles. The _Falling Rocket_ is not one of the pictures I admire."
_Attorney-General_: "Is it a gem?" (Laughter.)
_Rossetti_: "No."
_Attorney-General_: "Is it an exquisite painting?"
_Rossetti_: "No."
_Attorney-General_: "Is it very beautiful?"
_Rossetti_: "No."
_Attorney-General_: "Is it a work of art?"
_Rossetti_: "Yes, it is."
_Attorney-General_: "Is it worth two hundred guineas?"
_Rossetti_: "Yes."
Albert Moore said that Whistler's pictures were beautiful, and that no
other painter could have succeeded in doing them. The _Black and Gold_
he looked upon as simply marvellous, the most consummate art. Asked
if there was eccentricity in the picture, he said he should call it
originality.
W. G. Wills testified to the knowledge shown in the pictures; they were
the works of a man of genius.
Mr. Algernon Graves was in court to give evidence to the popularity
of the _Carlyle_. As the picture was not catalogued when exhibited at
the Grosvenor, Baron Huddleston ruled that there was no proof of its
having been exhibited in 1877, and he was not called. These were the
only witnesses for Whistler, though we have seen a letter he wrote to
Anderson Rose suggesting Haweis, who had preached "a poem of praise"
about The Peacock Room, and Prince Teck, who might be asked to swear
that he "thought it a great piece of art." We have also seen the draft
of a letter to Tissot upon whose aid he relied.
The Attorney-General submitted there was no case. But Baron Huddleston
could not deny that the criticism held Whistler's work up to ridicule
and contempt; that so far it was libellous, and must, therefore, go to
the jury. It was for the Attorney-General to prove it fair and honest
criticism.
The Attorney-General's address to the jury began with praise of Ruskin,
it went on with ridicule of the testimony for the plaintiff, it
finished with contempt for Whistler and his work.
"The Nocturnes were not worthy the name of great works of art. He had
that morning looked into the dictionary for the meaning of coxcomb,
and found that the word carried the old idea of the licensed jester
who had a cap on his head with a cock's comb in it. If that were the
true definition, Mr. Whistler should not complain, because his pictures
were capital jests which had afforded much amusement to the public. He
said, without fear of contradiction, that if Mr. Whistler founded his
reputation on the pictures he had shown in the Grosvenor Gallery, the
_Nocturne in Black and Gold_, the _Nocturne in Blue and Silver_, his
_Arrangement of Irving in Black_, his representation of the _Ladies
in Brown_, and his _Symphonies in Grey and Yellow_, he was a mere
pretender to the art of painting."
In Ruskin's absence, Burne-Jones was the first witness called for
the defence. Lady Burne-Jones says, in her _Memorials of Edward
Burne-Jones_, that on November 2, Ruskin had written to him:
"I gave your name to the blessed lawyer, as chief of men to whom they
might refer for anything which, in their wisdom, they can't discern
unaided concerning me."
She adds that for her husband: "Few positions could have been more
annoying or difficult for the paragraph containing the sentence in
question--one of Ruskin's severest condemnations--was practically
a comparison between Mr. Whistler's work and Edward's own. But the
subject covered so much wider ground than any personality that Edward
was finally able to put this thought aside, and did with calmness what
he had undertaken to do, namely--endorse Ruskin's criticism that good
workmanship was essential to a good picture."
Walter Crane stated in his _Reminiscences_ that he met Burne-Jones
at dinner at Leyland's not long before the trial; and that then
Burne-Jones would not see Whistler's merit as an artist. "He seemed
to think there was only one _right_ way of painting.... Under the
circumstances he could hardly afford to allow any credit to Whistler."
In court Burne-Jones temporised. He admitted Whistler's art, but
regretted the want of finish in Whistler's pictures; so strengthening
the impression of the laziness, levity, or looseness of Whistler. In
his "deliberate judgment" Mrs. Leyland's _Blue and Silver_ was a work
of art, but a very incomplete one. "It did not show the finish of a
complete work of art," yet "it is masterly. Neither in composition,
detail, nor form has the picture any quality whatever, but in colour it
has a very fine quality.... _Blue and Silver--Old, Battersea Bridge_,
in colour is even better than the other. It is more formless, it is
bewildering in form. As to composition and detail, there is none
whatever. It has no finish. I do not think Mr. Whistler intended it to
be regarded as a finished picture."
_Mr. Bowen_: "Now, take the _Nocturne in Black and Gold--The Falling
Rocket_, is that, in your opinion, a work of art?"
_Burne-Jones_: "No, I cannot say that it is. It is only one of a
thousand failures that artists have made in their efforts to paint
night."
_Mr. Bowen_: "Is that picture in your judgment worth two hundred
guineas?"
_Burne-Jones_: "No, I cannot say it is, seeing how much careful work
men do for much less. Mr. Whistler gave infinite promise at first, but
I do not think he has fulfilled it. I think he has evaded the great
difficulty of painting, and has not tested his powers by carrying
it out. The difficulties in painting increase daily as the work
progresses, and that is the reason why so many of us fail. We are none
of us perfect. The danger is this, that if unfinished pictures become
common, we shall arrive at a stage of mere manufacture and the art of
the country will be degraded."
Mr. Frith, R.A., was next called. Truly, Ruskin found himself with
strange supporters. Frith was chosen, we have been told, because Ruskin
wanted some one who could not be thought biased in his favour.
_Mr. Bowen_: "Are the pictures works of art?"
_Frith_: "I should say not."
_Mr. Bowen_: "Is the _Nocturne in Blue and Gold_ a serious work of art?"
_Frith_: "Not to me. It is not worth, in my opinion, two hundred
guineas. _Old Battersea Bridge_ does not convey the impression of
moonlight to me in the slightest degree. The colour does not represent
any more than you could get from a bit of wallpaper or silk."
In cross-examination he contradicted himself, and said that he thought
Mr. Whistler had "very great power as an artist."
Ruskin's final supporter was Tom Taylor, critic of the _Times_. No, he
said, the _Nocturne in Black and Gold_ was not a good picture, and, to
prove it, he read his own criticism in the _Times_, and his assertion
there that the Nocturnes were worth doing because they were the only
things that Whistler could do.
A portrait by Titian was then shown, in order to explain Burne-Jones'
idea of finish, and the jury, mistaking it for a Whistler, would have
none of it.
Mr. Bowen, in summing up the case, said that all that Ruskin had done
was to express an opinion on Whistler's pictures--an opinion to which
he adhered. This was about all he could say except, in conclusion, to
appeal to the jury. There was no defence. Mr. Serjeant Parry, in his
reply, pointed out that they had not dared to ask if Whistler deserved
to be stigmatised as a wilful impostor, and that even if Ruskin had
not been well enough to attend the court "he might have been examined
before a commission. His decree has gone forth that Whistler's pictures
were worthless. He has not supported that by evidence. He has not
condescended to give reasons for the view he has taken, he has treated
us with contempt, as he treated Whistler. He has said: 'I, Mr. Ruskin,
seated on my throne of art, say what I please and expect all the world
to agree with me.' Mr. Ruskin is a great writer, but not as a man;
as a man he has degraded himself. His tone in writing the article
is personal and malicious. Mr. Ruskin's criticism of Mr. Whistler's
pictures is almost exclusively in the nature of a personal attack, a
pretended criticism of art which is really a criticism upon the man
himself, and calculated to injure him. It was written recklessly,
and for the purpose of holding him up to ridicule and contempt. Mr.
Ruskin has gone out of his way to attack Mr. Whistler personally, and
must answer for the consequences of having written a damnatory attack
upon the painter. This is what is called pungent criticism, stinging
criticism, but it is defamatory, and I hope the jury will mark their
disapproval by their verdict."
The Judge pointed out that "there are certain words by Mr. Ruskin,
about which I should think no one would entertain a doubt: those words
amount to a libel. The critic should confine himself to criticism and
not make it a veil for personal censure or for showing his power. The
question for the jury is, did Mr. Whistler's ideas of art justify the
language used by Mr. Ruskin? And the further question is whether the
insult offered--if insult there has been--is of such a gross character
as to call for substantial damages? Whether it is a case for merely
contemptuous damages to the extent of a farthing, or something of that
sort, indicating that it is one which ought never to have been brought
into court, and in which no pecuniary damage has been sustained; or
whether the case is one which calls for damages in some small sum as
indicating the opinion of the jury that the offender has gone beyond
the strict letter of the law."
After an hour's deliberation, the jury gave their verdict for the
plaintiff--damages one farthing. The Judge emphasised his contempt by
giving judgment for Whistler without costs; that is, both sides had to
pay.
It is said that Whistler wore the farthing on his watch-chain. We never
saw it, we never knew him to wear a watch-chain. But he made a drawing
of the farthing for _The Gentle Art_.
"The whole thing was a hateful affair," Burne-Jones wrote to Rossetti,
and many agreed with him, though for other reasons. The _Times_, the
_Spectator_, and the _Portfolio_ pronounced the verdict satisfactory to
neither party, virtually a censure upon both. Mr. Graves, who watched
the trial without the responsibility he was disposed to meet, says:
"I have always felt that, had the plaintiff's counsel impressed upon
the jury that Mr. Ruskin had mentioned the price asked for the picture,
a matter that has always been outside the critic's province, as well as
criticising them as works of art, the result to Mr. Whistler would have
been more in his favour. Mr. Tom Taylor was never asked whether he had
ever criticised the price as well as the quality."
Armstrong has told us of the suppression of important letters: "A
little while before the trial I met Whistler one evening at the Arts
Club, and he told me of his hopes of a favourable result. My sympathies
were entirely on his side. He assured me that he had evidence, which
I believe could not fail to be effective, in the shape of letters
from Leighton, P.R.A.; Burton, Director of the National Gallery; and
Poynter, R.A., then Director for Art at S.K., speaking highly of the
moonlight pictures. These letters seemed to me most important, for
they were from people in official positions, whose good words would
have weighed with the British jurymen. Nothing was said about these
letters in the newspaper reports, and I asked Jimmie the reason for
this omission of the strongest evidence on his side. He told me that
the writers of the letters had objected to their being put in, and so
he had refrained from using them, and without the personal testimony
of the writers they would not have been accepted as evidence in court.
After the trial I saw Holker and asked him if he had been helping to
smirch any more poor artists. He replied that he was bound to do the
best he could for his client. I told him he would never have allowed
the exhibition of the pictures in court if he had been Whistler's
counsel, and he asked: 'Why didn't Jimmie have me?' I explained that I
had recommended his being retained, but it was objected that his fee
would be too heavy, and he said, 'I'd have done it for nothing for
Jimmie.' I was very sorry that Mr. Ruskin was not punished."
Arthur Severn wrote us that, at the Ruskin trial, he "was on the
opposite side, although my sympathies were rather with Whistler, whose
_Nocturne in Black and Gold_ I knew to be carefully painted. Whenever
we met he was most courteous, understanding my position. During the
trial one of the Nocturnes were handed across the court over the
people's heads, so that Whistler might verify it as his work. On its
way, an old gentleman with a bald head got a tap from the frame, then
the picture showed signs of falling out of its frame, and when Serjeant
Parry turned to Whistler and said 'Is that your work, Mr. Whistler?'
the artist, putting his eye-glass up and with his slight American
twang, said, 'Well, it was, but if it goes on much longer in that way,
I don't think it will be.' And when Ruskin's Titian was shown, 'Oh,
come, we've had enough of those Whistlers,' said a juryman. I thought
Whistler looked anxious whilst the jury was away. Another trial came
on so as not to waste time. The court was dark, and candles had to
be brought in--it seemed to be about some rope, and huge coils were
on the solicitors' table. A stupid clerk was being examined. Nothing
intelligent could be got out of him, and at last Mr. Day, one of the
counsel (afterwards the judge), said, 'Give him the rope's end,' which
produced great laughter in court, in which Whistler heartily joined.
Then, suddenly, a hush fell; the jury returned a verdict for Whistler,
damages one farthing."
There was a report of an application for a new trial. A desire was
expressed that friends of artist and critic might adjust the dispute.
But Whistler made no application, called for no arbitration. He
accepted his farthing damages. The British public rallied to their
prophet, and got up a subscription for the rich man. It was managed
by the Fine Art Society. The account was opened at the Union Bank of
London in the names of Burne-Jones, F. S. Ellis, and Mr. Marcus B.
Huish, and by December 10 a subscription list was published, amounting
already to one hundred and fifty-one pounds, five shillings and
sixpence, headed by Burne-Jones, five guineas. The costs were estimated
at three hundred and eighty-five pounds, and Mr. E. T. Cook says that
eventually they were paid by his friends.
According to W. M. Rossetti, "Whistler wrote to Anderson Rose, saying
it would be at least equally appropriate for a band of subscribers to
pay his costs; and, he added, 'And in the event of a subscription I
would willingly contribute my own mite.'"
Mr. J. P. Heseltine started a fund for Whistler, and a list was opened
at the office of _L'Art_, 134 New Bond Street. But nothing came of it,
except that Whistler sent one of his pastels to Mr. Heseltine. For
Whistler, the poor man, the costs were not paid, and he went through
the bankruptcy court.
Letters flowed into the papers. There were interviews. Witticisms went
the rounds. Whistler is reported to have said, "Well, you know, I
don't go so far as to Burne-Jones, but really somebody ought to burn
Jones' pictures!" A few journalists did not forget that Whistler was
an artist, a few people were sympathetic, a few congratulations were
received at the White House. If Whistler was disappointed he kept it
to himself. He would have liked better to get his costs and damages,
he said. But the verdict was a moral triumph. He had gone into court
not for damages but to vindicate his position, and, therefore, that of
artists.
Whistler explained this position in _Whistler_ v. _Ruskin--Art and
Art Critics_ (December 1878), the first of his series of pamphlets in
brown-paper covers. It was printed by Spottiswoode, though his idea was
to have it lithographed by Way, and published by Chatto and Windus.
He dedicated it to Albert Moore. It is a protest against the folly of
the Pen in venturing to criticise the Brush. Literature is left to the
literary man, science to the scientist, why then should art be at the
mercy of "the one who was never in it," but whose boast it is that he
is doing good to art. The critics "are all 'doing good'--yes, they all
do good to Art. Poor Art! what a sad state the slut is in, and these
gentlemen shall help her." Ruskin resigned the Slade Professorship.
He wrote to Dean Liddell from Brantwood (November 28, 1878) that the
result of the Whistler trial left him no option. "I cannot hold a chair
from which I have no power of expressing judgment without being taxed
for it by British Law." Unless he continued to be the Pope and the
Prophet he believed himself, he could not go on. He could not stand
criticism, and he collapsed when his criticism was questioned. The
trial, he wrote, made his professorship a farce. Whistler suggested
that Ruskin might fill a Chair of Ethics instead. "_Il faut vivre_,"
was the cry of the art critic but Whistler said, "_Je n'en vois pas la
nécessité_."
Whistler won. The trial was a triumph. But he had to pay heavily for
his victory.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF MRS. LOUIS HUTH
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK. NO. II
OIL
In the possession of the Executors of the Family
(_See page 126_)]
[Illustration: FANNY LEYLAND
STUDY FOR THE ETCHING. G. 108
PENCIL SKETCH
Formerly in the possession of J. H. Wren, Esq.
(_See page 124_)]
[Footnote 8: This picture then belonged to Mr. Graham, and some years
after at his sale at Christie's was received with hisses. It was
purchased by Mr. Robert H. C. Harrison for sixty pounds, and at the
close of the London Whistler Memorial Exhibition was sold for two
thousand guineas to the National Arts Collection Fund, by whom it was
presented to the nation. It now hangs in the National Gallery. See
Chapter XXIX.]
CHAPTER XX: BANKRUPTCY. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-EIGHT AND EIGHTEEN
SEVENTY-NINE.
Whistler's financial affairs were in hopeless confusion. The builder's
estimate for the White House was largely exceeded, the cost of the
trial had to be paid for, the _atelier_ waited for pupils, and the
debts brought from Lindsey Row were many. He wrote to his mother at
Hastings of his economies and his hopes to pay his debts, but he did
not know the meaning of economy. There is a legend of a grocer who had
let a bill for tomatoes and fruit run up to six hundred pounds, and
when, after the trial, he insisted on settlement, Whistler said:
"How--what--why--why, of course, you have sent these things--most
excellent things--and they have been eaten, you know, by most
excellent people. Think what a splendid advertisement. And sometimes,
you know, the tomatoes are not quite up to the mark, the fruit, you
know, not quite fresh. And if you go into these unseemly discussions
about the bill--well, you know, I shall have to go into discussions
about all this--and think how it would hurt your reputation with all
these extraordinary people. I think the best thing is not to refer
to the past--I'll let it go, and in the future we'll have a weekly
account--wiser, you know."
The grocer left without his money, but was offered in payment two
Nocturnes, one the upright Valparaiso. Another story of the same grocer
is that he arrived with his account as a grand piano was being carried
in. Whistler said he was so busy he couldn't attend to the matter just
then, and the grocer thought if grand pianos were being bought, it
must be all right. To a dealer in rugs Whistler would have given three
Nocturnes in payment, but the dealer refused and spent the rest of his
life regretting it.
It was nothing unusual for bailiffs to be in possession, or for bills
to cover the walls. The first time this happened, Whistler said to the
people whom he invited to dine that they might know his house by the
bills on it. When someone complained that creditors kept him walking up
and down all night, Whistler was amused:
"Dear me! Do as I do! Leave the walking up and down to the creditors!"
Of the bailiffs he made a new feature at his breakfasts. Mrs. Lynedoch
Moncrieff has told us of a Sunday when two or three men waited with
Whistler's servant, John, and she said to Whistler:
"I am glad to see you've grown so wealthy."
"Ha, ha! Bailiffs! You know, I had to put them to some use!"
Mr. Rossetti and his wife once found the same "liveried attendants."
"'Your servants seem to be extremely attentive, Mr. Whistler, and
anxious to please you,' one of the guests said. 'Oh yes,' was his
answer, 'I assure you they wouldn't leave me.'"
Others remember a Sunday when the furniture was numbered for a sale.
When breakfast was announced by a bailiff, Whistler said: "They are
wonderful fellows. You will see how excellently they wait at table, and
to-morrow, you know, if you want, you can see them sell the chairs you
sit on every bit as well. Amazing."
Mrs. Edwin Edwards wrote us that when three men were in possession,
he treated them while his friends carted away his pictures out of the
back door. Others say that the bailiffs, multiplied to seven, were
invited into the garden, and given beer with a little something in
it. No sooner had they tasted than down went their heads on the table
round which they sat. People dining with Whistler that evening were
taken into the garden to see the seven sleepers of Ephesus: "Stick pins
in them, shout in their ears--see--you can't wake them!" All evening
it rained and it rained, and it thundered, and it lightened, and it
hailed. All night they slept. Morning came and they slept. But at the
hour when he had given them their glass the day before, they all woke
up and asked for more.
One of the bailiffs at the end of a week, demanded his money. Whistler
said:
"If I could afford to keep you I would do without you."
"But what is to become of my wife and family if I don't get my wages,
sir?"
"Ha ha! You must ask those who sent you here to answer that question."
"Really, Mr. Whistler, sir, I need the money."
"Oh ho! Have a man in yourself."
Whistler said "it was kind of them to see to such tedious affairs." One
he asked: "And how long will you be 'the man in possession?'"
"That, Mr. Whistler, sir, depends on your paying Mr. ----'s bill.
"Awkward for me, but perhaps more for you! I hope you won't mind it,
though, you know, I fear your stay with me will be a lengthy one.
However, you will find it not entirely unprofitable, for you will see
and hear much that may be useful to you."
When things got more desperate, bills covered the front of the house,
announcing the sale. Whistler, begging the bailiffs to be at home,
went one night to dine. It was stormy, and, returning late, he found
that the rain had washed the bills loose and they were flapping in the
wind. He woke up the bailiffs, made them get a ladder, and paste every
bill down again. He had allowed them to cover his house with their
posters, but, so long as he lived in it, no man should sleep with it in
a slovenly condition.
Early in May 1879, Whistler was declared bankrupt. His liabilities were
four thousand six hundred and forty-one pounds, nine shillings and
three pence, and his assets, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-four
pounds, nine shillings and four pence. In his long overcoat, longer
than ever, swinging his cane lengthening in defiance, his hat set
jauntily on his curls, he appeared in the City:
"Ha ha! Well, you know, here I am in the City! Amazing! You know, on
the way, I dropped in to see George Lewis, being in the neighbourhood,
and, you know, ha ha, he gave me a paper for you to sign!"
It was a petition in bankruptcy.
The creditors met at the Inns of Court Hotel in June. Sir Thomas
Sutherland was in the chair, and Leyland, the chief creditor, and
various Chelsea tradesmen attended. The only novelty in the proceedings
was a speech by Whistler on plutocrats, men with millions, and what he
thought of them, and it was with difficulty he was called to order. A
committee of examiners was appointed, composed of Leyland, Howell, and
Thomas Way.
Leyland was not let off by Whistler. As Michael Angelo, painting the
walls of the Sistine Chapel, plunged the critic who had offended him
into hell, so Whistler immortalised the man by whom he thought himself
wronged. He painted three pictures. The first was _The Loves of the
Lobsters--an Arrangement in Rats_, the most prominent lobster in the
shirt-frills of Leyland. "Whom the gods wish to make ridiculous, they
furnish with a frill!" he said, and the saying was repeated until it
reached Leyland, as he meant it should. The second was _Mount Ararat_,
Noah's Ark on a hill, with little figures all in frills. The third
was the _Gold Scab--Eruption in Frilthy Lucre_, a creature, breaking
out in scabs of golden sovereigns, wearing the frill, seated on the
White House playing the piano. The hideousness of the figure is more
appalling because of the colour, the design. A malicious joke begun
in anger, Mr. Arthur Symons has described it, from which "beauty
exudes like the scent of a poisonous flower." Years after, when it
was exhibited at the Goupil Gallery, one of the serious new critics
regretted that Whistler allowed himself to be influenced by Beardsley.
These caricatures alone were in the studio when Leyland and the
committee made the inventory. Augustus Hare wrote (May 13, 1879) of a
visit in the meantime:
"This morning I went with a very large party to Whistler's studio. We
were invited to see the pictures, but there was only one there, _The
Loves of the Lobsters_. It was supposed to represent Niagara, and
looked as if the artist had upset the inkstand, and left Providence
to work out its own results. In the midst of the black chaos were
two lobsters curveting opposite each other, and looking as if they
were done with red sealing-wax. 'I wonder you did not paint the
lobsters making love before they were boiled,' aptly observed a lady
visitor. 'Oh, I never thought of that,' said Whistler. It was a joke,
I suppose. The little man, with his plume of white hair ('the Whistler
tuft' he calls it) waving on his forehead, frisked about the room,
looking most strange and uncanny, and rather diverted himself over our
disappointment in coming so far and finding nothing to see. People
admire like sheep his pictures in the Grosvenor Gallery, following each
other's lead because it is the fashion."
Worried as he was, Whistler sent to the Grosvenor of 1879 the _Portrait
of Miss Rosa Corder_, _Portrait of Miss Connie Gilchrist_, _The
Pacific_, _Nocturne in Blue and Gold_, six etchings, two studies in
chalk, and three pastels. His etching, _Old Putney Bridge_, was at the
Royal Academy. The critics talked the usual nonsense, and have since
repented it. Mr. (now Sir) Frederick Wedmore distinguished himself by
an article: _Mr. Whistler's Theories and Mr. Whistler's Art_, in the
_Nineteenth Century_ (August 1879), and afterwards reprinted in _Four
Masters of Etching_ (1883). He could appreciate Whistler's work as
little as he could understand _Art and Art Critics_, and from its wit
was--and is--still smarting. Whistler he placed as:
"Long ago an artist of high promise. Now he is an artist often of
agreeable, though sometimes of incomplete and seemingly wayward
performance.... That only the artist should write on art by continued
reiteration may convince the middle-class public that has little of the
instinct of art. But, sirs, not so easily can you dispense with the
services of Diderot and Ruskin."
Wedmore had apparently never heard of Cennini and Dürer, Vasari and
Cellini, Da Vinci and Reynolds and Fromentin, who remain, while Diderot
and Ruskin and Wedmore himself are discredited or forgotten. He
regretted that Whistler's "painted work is somewhat apt to be dependent
on the innocent error that confuses the beginning with the end." He
condemned the _Portrait of Henry Irving_ as a "murky caricature of
Velasquez," the _Carlyle_ as "a doleful canvas." The Nocturnes were
"encouraging sketches," with "an effect of harmonious decoration, so
that a dozen or so of them on the upper panels of a lofty chamber
would afford even to the wallpapers of William Morris a welcome and
justifiable alternative.... They suffer cruelly when placed against
work not, of course, of petty and mechanical finish, but of patient
achievement. But they have a merit of their own, and I do not wish to
understate it."
Whistler had "never mastered the subtleties of accurate form"; "the
interest of life--the interest of humanity" had little occupied him,
_but_ Wedmore hoped that the career, begun with promise, "might not
close in work too obstinately faithful to eccentric error." By his
etchings his name might "aspire to live," though, "for his fame, Mr.
Whistler has etched too much, or at least has published too much,"
though there is "commonness and vulgarity" in the figures in many
prints, though he "lacked the art, the patience, or the will to
continue" others.
"The future will forget his disastrous failures, to which in the
present has somehow been accorded, through the activity of friendship,
or the activity of enmity, a publicity rarely bestowed upon failures at
all."
In the same month and year, August 1879, an American, Mr. W. C.
Brownell, published in _Scribner's Monthly_ an article on _Whistler
in Painting and Etching_. He treated Whistler and his work with a
seriousness in "significant" contrast to Wedmore's clumsy flippancy.
This was the first intelligent American article in Whistler's support,
and it was illustrated by wood-engravings of his paintings and prints.
Amidst the torrent of abuse, it came when Whistler most needed it. But
it was not taken seriously, and much was made of Mr. Brownell's slip in
describing the dry-point _Jo_ as a portrait of Whistler's brother.
Whistler, left homeless by his bankruptcy, revived the plan for the
journey to Venice, and a series of etchings there. He suggested
it to Ernest G. Brown, Messrs. Seeley's representative when the
_Billingsgate_ was published in the _Portfolio_, and now with the Fine
Art Society who, at his persuasion, had brought out four of the London
plates this year: _Free-Trade Wharf_, _Old Battersea Bridge_, _Old
Putney Bridge_, and _The Little Putney, No. 1_. They liked the new
scheme so well that they gave Whistler a commission for twelve plates
in Venice to be delivered in three months' time. One hundred proofs
of each were to be printed, and he was to receive, we believe, twelve
hundred pounds.
By September 7 (1879), Whistler apparently in great spirits, though
"everything was to be sold up," was "arranging his route to Venice"
says Mr. Cole. From the receiver he had permission to destroy
unfinished work. Copperplates were scratched and pictures smeared with
glue, stripped off their stretchers and rolled up. Then he packed his
trunk, wrote over his front door: "Except the Lord build the house,
they labour in vain that build it. E. W. Godwin, F.S.A., built this
one," and started for Venice.
The White House was sold on September 18, 1879, to Mr. Harry Quilter,
who paid for it two thousand seven hundred pounds in money at the time,
and later in Whistler's jeers. The public laughed at the furniture
and effects, "at which even a broker's man would turn up his nose. If
ever the seamy side of a fashionable artist's existence was shown, it
was during that auction in Chelsea.... Truly, if Ruskin had wished to
have his revenge, he might have enjoyed it at the White House, when
his prosecutor's specially built-to-order abode was characterised as
a disgrace to the neighbourhood by Philistinic spectators, and its
contents supplied material for the rude jokes of Hebrew brokers and the
special correspondent of the _Echo_."
"Two wooden spoons, a rusty knife handle and two empty oil tins,"
was one of the lots. Rolls of canvases were carried off for a few
shillings. Out of them came a _Valparaiso_, a _Cremorne Gardens_, the
portrait of Sir Henry Cole, a _White Girl_ and a _Blue Girl_, the
portrait of Miss Florence Leyland, in such a condition that nothing
now remains but the two blue pots of flowers on either side. The
_Cremorne Gardens_, a few years after Whistler's death, was sold by T.
R. Way for twelve hundred pounds to Mr. A. H. Hannay. Then an effort
was made to sell it, through London dealers, for almost four times
the price to the Melbourne Gallery, where there were no Whistlers and
where, therefore, those who had Whistler's interests at heart thought
it would not represent him worthily. Later on the painting was sold to
the Metropolitan Museum, New York. It was first cleaned by T. R. Way,
and when we saw it and had it photographed for the earlier edition of
this book, it contained portraits of both Leyland and Whistler. It has
since been cleaned again and the portraits have completely disappeared.
Whether the Metropolitan is responsible for the vandalism we do not
know. But we do know that it is this way history is wiped from the face
of the earth by the restorer. Thomas Way, at the sale, bought _The
Lobsters_ and _Mount Ararat_. Other pictures went astray or disappeared
temporarily, for a few intelligent people were at the sale. Whistler
wrote to Mrs. William Whistler from Venice begging her to trace and
find them, which she was unable to do. But they are turning up now.
Whistler's china, prints, and a few pictures were reserved for a sale
at Sotheby's, on Thursday, February 12, 1880. The title-page of the
catalogue is: "_In Liquidation. By order of the Trustees of J. A. McN.
Whistler. Catalogue of the Decorative Porcelain, Cabinets, Paintings
and other Works of Art of J. A. McN. Whistler. Received from the White
House, Fulham, comprising Numerous Pieces of Blue and White China; the
Painting in Oil of_ Connie Gilchrist, Dancing with a Skipping-Rope,
_styled_ A Girl in Gold, _by Whistler; A Satirical painting of a
Gentleman, styled_ The Creditor, _by Whistler. Crayon Drawings and
Etchings, Cabinets, and Miscellaneous Articles_." When Leyland learned
that the _Gold Scab--The Creditor_, was in the sale he did his best to
have it removed. Dealers and amateurs were there: Way, Oscar Wilde,
Huish, The Fine Art Society, Dowdeswell, Lord Redesdale, Deschamps,
Wickham Flower, and Howell were purchasers. Howell secured the Japanese
screen, the background of the _Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine_. The
Japanese bath fell to Mr. Jarvis. _The Creditor_ was bought by Messrs.
Dowdeswell for twelve guineas, vanished, turned up in the King's Road,
Chelsea, years later, and was purchased by Mr. G. P. Jacomb-Hood for
ten pounds, and is now in the collection of Mrs. Spreckles in San
Francisco. It is one of the documents Mr. Freer should have--and could
have had--as he should have the _Whistler_ with the brushes, the _Mrs.
Leyland_, the _Dr. Whistler_, and others which would add enormously to
the historic value as well as artistic completeness of his collection.
_Connie Gilchrist_ was sold to Mr. Wilkinson for fifty guineas.
Whistler's bust by Boehm was bought by Way for six guineas. A crayon
sketch, catalogued as a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, was knocked down
for five guineas to Oscar Wilde, who asked her to sign it, which she
did, writing that it was very like her. It might have been handed down
as her portrait, had it not appeared at Oscar Wilde's sale, and found
its way back to Whistler, who declared that Madame Bernhardt never sat
to him. The sale at Sotheby's realised three hundred and twenty-eight
pounds, nineteen shillings.
CHAPTER XXI: VENICE. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-NINE AND EIGHTEEN
EIGHTY.
For years Whistler wanted to go to Venice. When he got there he found
it a difficult place to work in. It was cold, and he felt the cold. It
is almost impossible to hold a copper-plate or a needle with numbed
fingers, and Venice in ice made him long for London in fog. He would
gladly have exchanged the Square of St. Mark's for Piccadilly, a
gondola for a hansom. Even Ruskin says this.
Affairs in London worried him. He wrote for news of the vanished
pictures. He knew that his letters had got into second-hand
bookshops--even letters to his mother. He was ill and the Doctor was
far away.
Venice he thought beautiful, most beautiful after rain when, he wrote
his mother, the colour and reflections were gorgeous. The Venetian
masters interested him. At the Scuola di San Rocco he is remembered
climbing up for a closer look at the Tintorettos. Veronese and Titian
were great swells; Canaletto and Guardi, great masters. He went to St.
Mark's for Mass at Christmas, though he wrote that the ceiling of The
Peacock Room was more splendid than the dome. But, as he told Fantin
years before, it was a waste of time to search for new subjects, and
all subjects were new to him in Venice. Countess Rucellai (Miss Edith
Bronson) writes that "he used to say Venice was an impossible place
to sit down and sketch, 'there was something still better round the
corner.'"
Mr. Henry Woods says: "He wandered for motives, but no matter how much
he wandered, and appeared to loaf, when he found a subject he worked
with a determination that no cold and cheerlessness could daunt. I
remember his energy--and suffering--when doing those beautiful pastels,
nearly all done during the coldest winter I have known in Venice, and
mostly towards evening when the cold was bitterest! He soon found out
the beautiful quality of colour there is here before sunset in winter.
He had a strong constitution. He was only unwell once with a bad cold."
The Fine Art Society asked him to make twelve plates in three months.
The plates were not started for weeks, and the Fine Art Society
demanded what he was doing. The answer was at first silence and then
a request for more money. The Fine Art Society began to doubt and
Whistler was furious. Then reports came that he was doing enormous
plates they had not ordered. Howell and others said that Whistler would
never come back, and Academicians laughed at the idea of the Society
getting either plates or their money from such a "charlatan." With each
new suggestion of doubt, Whistler's fury grew. "Amazing their letters
and mine, but, perhaps, not for the public." The delay was his care.
Even Frank Duveneck, most procrastinating of mortals, made his Venetian
etchings, and Otto Bacher changed his style and did his Venetian
plates, before Whistler found his subjects.
It amused him to tell the American Consul that idleness is the virtue
of the artist, but it was a virtue he denied himself. It was "the same
old story" he wrote his mother, "I am at my work the first thing at
dawn and the last thing at night." He could not stand the Venetian
crowd, and he worked as much as possible out of windows. He did little
from gondola or sandolo. To the tourist, a gondola is a thing of joy;
to the worker, it is a terrible, unstable studio, and even in the old
days it cost a hundred francs a month, but then, the gondolier was your
slave.
He mostly left the monuments of Venice, as of London, alone. In London
he preferred Battersea and Wapping to Westminster and St. Paul's; in
Venice little canals and _calli_, doorways and gardens, beggars and
bridges made a stronger appeal to him than churches and palaces. He
deliberately avoided the motives of Guardi and Canaletto. To reproduce
the masterpieces of the masters is, he said, an impertinence, and he
found for himself "a Venice in Venice."
Whistler, Mr. Howard Walker tells us, took a room in the Palazzo
Rezzonico, where he would paint the sunset and then swear at the sun
for setting. We know of no work done from the palace, though _The
Palaces_ which he etched are on the opposite side of the Grand Canal.
Mr. Ross Turner remembers that he found Whistler in a small house with
a small garden in front near the Frari, no doubt "the quarters" of
which Otto Bacher speaks, and Mr. Turner remembers, too, that canvases
were hanging on the wall, and a large one, with a big gondolier
sketched on it, stood by the door. He was living then in the Rio San
Barnaba, and there Maud came to join him. She could tell the whole
story, but she will not.
Bacher says Whistler wore a "large, wide-brimmed, soft, brown hat
tilted far back, suggesting a brown halo. It was a background for his
curly black hair and singular white lock.... A dark sack-coat almost
covered an extremely low turned-down collar, while a narrow black
ribbon did service as a tie, the long, pennant-like ends of which,
flapping about, now and then hit his single eye-glass."
Bacher describes him in evening dress without a tie, and Mr. Forbes
recalls his coming without one to the Bronson's, and Bronson saying it
was sad to see artists so poor that they could not afford a necktie.
Bacher also quotes Whistler as always substituting "Whistler" for "I"
in his talk, which we never knew him to do and it seems little like him.
Several of Duveneck's pupils followed on from Florence in 1880, and
they lived in the Casa Jankovitz, the house that juts out squarely at
the lower end of the Riva degli Schiavoni, all Venice in front of it.
Whistler was enchanted with the place when he went to see them, and
moved there. He had one room, the windows looking over the Lagoon, and
from them the etchings and pastels of the Riva and the Lagoon were
made. Many things are told of this room, of plates bitten on the top of
the bureau, the acid running down, and the scramble to save his shirts
in the drawers beneath. Other stories are of the printing-press on
which Canaletto's plates may have been pulled and many of Duveneck's
and Bacher's were; the press which used to work up to a certain point
and then go with such a rush that it had to be stopped, for fear the
bed would come out on the floor.
There was a large colony of foreign artists and art lovers and a club,
English in name, really cosmopolitan, in Venice, where Whistler met
Rico, Wolkoff, Van Haanen, Tito, Blaas, if he had not already met them
on the Piazza. Alexander, Rolshoven, De Camp, and Bacher were with
Duveneck. Harper Pennington came in the autumn, and Scott, Ross Turner,
Blum, Woods, Bunney, Jobbins, and Logsdail were amongst the other men
he knew. The American Consul Grist, and the Vice-Consul Graham, were
persons of importance, and the United States Consulate a meeting-place.
Mrs. Bronson lived in Casa Alvisi, the Brownings and the Curtises had
houses in Venice, and with all three families Whistler became intimate.
Londoners turned up. Harry Quilter told of one encounter:
"In the spring of 1880 I spent a few weeks in Venice. I had been
drawing for about five days, in one of the back canals, a specially
beautiful doorway, when one morning I heard a sort of war-whoop, and
there was Whistler, in a gondola, close by, shouting out as nearly
as I can remember: 'Hi, hi! What! What! Here, I say, you've got my
doorway!' 'Your doorway? Confound your doorway!' I replied. 'It's my
doorway, I've been here for the last week.' 'I don't care a straw, I
found it out first. I got that grating put up.' 'Very much obliged to
you, I'm sure; it's very nice. It was very good of you.' And so for a
few minutes we wrangled, but seeing that the canal was very narrow, and
that there was no room for two gondolas to be moored in front of the
chosen spot, mine being already tied up exactly opposite, I asked him
if he would not come and work in my gondola. He did so, and, I am bound
to say, turned the tables on me cleverly. For, pretending not to know
who I was, he described me to myself, and recounted the iniquities of
the art critic of the _Times_, one ''Arry Quilter.'"
Everybody says Whistler was penniless in Venice, always borrowing, why,
we do not know, unless the money went to pay for things in London. But
there were dinners and Sunday breakfasts. Many were given in a little
open-air _trattoria_, near the Via Garibaldi. The Panada, the noisiest
of noisy restaurants, was one of his haunts, and there was another
opposite the old post-office. The food, "nothing but fowl," he wrote,
tired him so that he surprised himself by spending a fortune on tea,
and carrying home strange pieces of fat, which he tried to fry into
resemblance of the slices of bacon served by Mrs. Cossens, his Chelsea
housekeeper. Mr. Scott says:
"If Whistler could not lay a table, he knew how to turn out tasty
little dishes over a spirit-lamp; and it was not long before the
inevitable Sunday breakfasts were instituted in that little room.
_Polenta à l' Américaine_, which he had induced the landlady to prepare
under his direction, we used to eat with such sort of treacle, alias
golden syrup, as could be obtained. Fish was cheaper and more plentiful
then than now in the Water City, and the lanky serving-women could
fry with the best of the famous Ciozzotte. The 'thin red wine' of the
country, in large flasks at about sixpence a quart, was plentiful, and
these simple things, with the accompanying 'flow of soul' made a feast
for the gods. There was no room for many guests at one time, but Henry
Woods, Ruben, W. Graham, Butler, and Roussoff were often with us."
Days were spent on the Lido, and, doubtless he went to Chioggia,
Murano, Burano, and Torcello. These little journeys were more costly
and difficult then than now, and there are no plates except of the
_Lido_ and the _Murano Glass-Furnace_, and no pastels except one or two
on the Lido.
Whistler loved the nights at the never-closed clubs in the Piazza,
Florian's and the Quadri, or the Orientale on the Riva, where the
coffee was just as good and two _centessimi_ cheaper. Around these
nights endless legends are growing, and like all the legends, they
are such a part of Whistler they cannot be ignored. No one delighted
in them more than he, no one ever told them so well. They became the
favourite yarns of Duveneck's boys, to which we listened many an
evening when we came to Venice four years later. It was then we first
heard of Wolkoff, or Roussoff as he is known in Bond Street, and his
boast that he could make pastels like Whistler's and the Americans'
bet of a champagne dinner that he couldn't, and the evening in the
Casa Jankovitz, when Rico, Duveneck, Curtis, Bacher, Woods, and Van
Haanen recognised Wolkoff's work and every time one of his pastels
was produced cried: "Take it away!" The Russian said to Whistler
after dinner: "You know, you scratch a Russian, and you find a
Tartar!" "Ha ha!" said Whistler, "I've scratched an artist and found
an ama-Tartah!" Another story was of the tiny glass figure, or maybe
a little black baby from the shrine of St. Anthony at Padua, dropped
into Whistler's glass of water at the _café_, where it looked like a
little devil bobbing up and down, so that Whistler, when he saw it,
thought something was wrong with his eyes, and sipped the water and
shook the glass, and the more he sipped and shook the more the little
devil danced, and finally he upset the glass over everybody, and the
little demon fell in his lap. And there was another of the night when
a _barca_, with a transparency showing Nocturnes and a band playing
"Yankee-Doodle," moved up and down the Grand Canal and along the Riva,
never stopping until it was greeted with a loud "Ha ha!" from the
darkness. And we heard of the day when Whistler, seeing Bunney on a
scaffold struggling with St. Mark's, his life-work for Ruskin, fastened
a card, "I am totally blind," to his coat-tail. And we were told of
the hot noon when Whistler, leaning out of his window, discovering a
bowl of goldfish below on the window-ledge of his landlady, against
whom he had a grudge, let down a fishing-line, caught the fish, fried
them, dropped them back into the bowl, and watched the return of their
owner, who was sure her fish had been fried by the sun. And the story
of Blum and Whistler, without a _schei_, crossing the Academy Bridge,
Blum sticking in his eye a little watch with a split second-hand that
went round so fast the keeper thought he had the evil eye, and they got
over without paying; or of the boys' farewell _fête_ to Whistler in
August when it was rumoured he was going, and in a coal barge, which
Bacher transforms into a "fairy-like floating bower festooned with the
wealth of autumn," a feast of melons and salads and Chianti was spread
and eaten as they drifted up the Grand Canal with the tide, the lights
of their lanterns bringing everyone to stare, until the rain drove them
under the Rialto, where they spent the rest of the night, and then
Whistler didn't go after all. When Whistler left they say he asked the
authors of these adventures up to his room and showed them a number
of prints, and said, "Now, you boys have been very good to me all
this time and I want to do something for you," and he turned over his
prints carefully, and said, "I have thought it out," and he took one,
a spoiled one, and he counted their heads, and he cut it into as many
pieces as there were people, and presented a fragment to each, and as
they marched downstairs all they heard was "Ha ha!" These, and hundreds
like them, are the legends you hear on the Piazza.
Two friends of the Venetian days, Mr. Harper Pennington and Mr. Ralph
Curtis, have sent us their impressions. Mr. Harper Pennington writes
us: "He gave me many lessons there in Venice. He would hook his arm in
mine and take me off to look at some Nocturne that he was studying or
memorising, and then he would show me how he went about to paint it--in
the daytime. He let me--invited me, indeed, to stand at his elbow as
he set down in colour some effect he loved from the natural things in
front of us. What became of many such--small canvases, all of them--I
do not know. _The St. George Nocturne_, Canfield has. Who owns _The
Façade of San Marco_?[9]
"There was an upright sunset, too, looking from my little terrace on
the Riva degli Schiavoni over towards San Giorgio, and others that I
saw him work on in 1880."
Mr. Curtis gives us other details: "Shortly before his return to
England with some of the etchings and the pastels, he gave his friends
a tea-dinner. As seeing the best of his Venetian work was the real
feast, the hour for the _hors d'oeuvre_, consisting of sardines,
hard-boiled eggs, fruit, cigarettes, and excellent coffee prepared
by the ever-admirable Maud, was arranged for six o'clock. Effective
pauses succeeded the presentation of each masterpiece. During these
_entr'actes_ Whistler amused his guests with witty conjectures as to
the verdict of the grave critics in London on 'these things.' One of
his favourite types for sarcasm used to be the eminently respectable
Londoner who is '_always_ called at 8.30, closed-shaved at a quarter
to 9, and in the City at 10.' 'What will he make of _this_? Serve him
right too! Ha ha!'
"Whistler was a constant and ever-welcome guest at Casa Alvisi, the
hospitable house of Mrs. Bronson, whom he often called _Santa Cattarina
Seconda_. During happy years, from lunch till long past bedtime, her
house was the open rendezvous for the rich and poor, the famous and the
famished, _les rois en exil_ and the heirs-presumptive to the thrones
of fame. Whistler there had his place, and he held the floor. One night
a curious contrast was the great and genial Robert Browning commenting
on the projected form of a famous 'Jimmy letter' to the _World_.
"Very late, on hot _scirocco_ nights, long after the concert crowd had
dispersed, one little knot of men might often been seen in the deserted
Piazza, sipping refreshment in front of Florian's. You might be sure
that was Whistler in white duck, praising France, abusing England, and
thoroughly enjoying Italy. He was telling how he had seen painting
in Paris revolutionised by innovators of powerful handling: Manet,
Courbet, Vollon, Regnault, Carolus Duran. He felt far more enthusiasm
for the then recently resuscitated popularity of Velasquez and Hals.
"The _ars celare artem_ of Terborgh and Vermeer always delighted
him--the mysterious technique, the discreet distinction of execution,
the 'one skin all over it,' of the minor masters of Holland was one
of his eloquent themes. To Whistler it was a treat when a Frenchman
arrived in Venice. If he could not like his paint, he certainly enjoyed
his language. French seemed to give him extra exhilaration. From
beginning to end he owed much to the French for first recognising what
he had learned from Japan."
[Footnote 9: Mr. J. J. Cowan was for some years the owner, and he sold
it to the French Gallery.]
CHAPTER XXII: VENICE. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-NINE AND EIGHTEEN
EIGHTY CONTINUED.
Nothing in Whistler's life is more astonishing than the praise and
blame raised by the Venetian pastels on their exhibition in London.
Artists fought over them. To some, they were original, they gave the
character of Venice; to others, they were cheap, anybody could do
them. Both were wrong, as both always were. "Anybody" cannot do them;
he had been making pastels: the subject, not the method, was new. Had
some of the combatants visited the Academy at Venice, they might have
discovered his inspiration in the drawings of the Old Masters, where
he had found it years before at the Louvre. He was only carrying on
tradition.