evening of December 19, 1891. Whistler was presented with a parchment
of greetings signed by a hundred members as "a record of their high
appreciation of the distinguished honour that has come to him by the
placing of his mother's portrait in the national collection of France."
Whistler said in reply that he was gratified by this token from his
brother artists: "It is right at such a time of peace, after the
struggle, to bury the hatchet--in the side of the enemy--and leave it
there. The congratulations usher in the beginning of my career, for an
artist's career always begins to-morrow."
He promised to remain for long one of the Chelsea artists, a promise
Chelsea artists showed no desire to keep him to. He was a member of the
Club until he went to Paris. When, later, Mr. (now Sir John) Lavery
proposed him as an Honorary Member, there was not enough enthusiasm to
carry the motion. And when, still later, it was further proposed that
the Chelsea Arts Club should officially recognise the Whistler Memorial
they refused, and the comment of one man was, "What had an English Club
to do with a memorial by a Frenchman to a Yankee in London?"
Early in 1892 Mr. Croal Thomson arranged with Whistler for an
exhibition of _Nocturnes, Marines, and Chevalet Pieces_ to be held at
the Goupil Gallery in London, or, as Whistler called it, his "heroic
kick in Bond Street." Mr. Croal Thomson says his first idea was to show
the portraits only. But he soon found that Whistler wanted to include
all the paintings and was going to take the matter in hand, and that
he was "only like the fly on the wheel" once the machinery was set in
motion.
One reason of the success of the exhibition, which surprised not only
Mr. Croal Thomson but all London, was Whistler's care when selecting
his pictures to secure variety. The collection was a magnificent
refutation of everything that the critics had been saying about him for
years. They dismissed his pictures as sketches, and he confronted them
with _The Blue Waves_, _Brown and Silver--Old Battersea Bridge_, _The
Music Room_, which had not been seen in London since the early sixties.
They objected to his want of finish and slovenliness in detail, and
his answer was the Japanese pictures, full of an elaboration the
Pre-Raphaelites never equalled, and finished with an exquisiteness of
surface they never attempted. He was told he could not draw, and he
produced a group of his finest portraits. He was assured he had no
poetic feeling, no imagination, and he displayed the Nocturnes, with
the factories and chimneys transformed into a fairyland in the night.
He was as careful in arranging the manner in which the pictures should
be presented. His letters to Mr. Croal Thomson from Paris, where he
spent the greater part of 1892, were minute in his directions for
cleaning and varnishing the paintings, and putting them into new frames
of his design. Indeed, the correspondence on the subject, which we have
seen, is a miracle of thoughtfulness, energy, and method.
Mr. Croal Thomson tells us: "Mr. Whistler laboured almost night and
day: he wrote letters to every one of the owners of his works in oil
asking loans of the pictures. Some, like Mr. Alexander and all the
Ionides connection, acceded at once, but others made delays, and even
to the end several owners declined to lend. On the whole, however, the
artist was well supported by his early patrons, and the result was a
gathering together of the most complete collection of Mr. Whistler's
best works--forty-three pictures in all.
"The arrangement of the pictures was entirely Mr. Whistler's, for
although he wished several young artists to come to the Gallery the
evening the works were to be hung, through some mischance they did not
arrive, and I was therefore alone with Mr. Whistler and received a
great lesson in the art of arranging a collection."
In the face of so complete a series, in such perfect condition, and
so well hung, criticism was silenced. We remember the Press view, and
the dismay of the older critics who hoped for another "crop of little
jokes," and the triumph of the younger critics who knew that Whistler
had won. The papers, daily, weekly, and monthly, almost unanimously
admitted that the old game of ridicule was played out and praised the
exhibition without reserve. The rest, headed by Sir Frederick Wedmore,
have since been trying to swallow themselves. Mr. Croal Thomson recalls
that:
"Mr. Whistler was not present at the private view. He knew that many
people would expect to see him and talk enthusiastic nonsense, and
he rightly decided he was better away, and I was left to receive
the visitors. Some hundreds of cards of invitation were issued, and
it seemed as if every recipient had accepted. Crowds thronged the
galleries all day, and it is impossible to describe the excitement.
I do not know how it fared with the artist and his wife during the
day, but about five o'clock in the evening Mr. and Mrs. Whistler came
in, though they would not enter the exhibition; they remained in a
curtained-off portion of the Gallery near the entrance. One or two
of their most intimate friends were informed by me of the presence
of the painter, and a small reception was held, for a little while,
but, of course, by that time the battle was won, and there were only
congratulations to be rendered to the master."
J. was taken into the little curtained-off room, and later there was
a triumphal procession to the Arts Club. Whistler declared that even
Academicians had been seen prowling about the place lost in admiration,
that it needed only to send a season ticket to Ruskin to make the
situation perfect, and that, "Well, you know, they were always pearls I
cast before them, and the people were always--well, the same people."
It is said Whistler first intended to print the catalogue without
comment or quotation from the Press, but the chance to expose the
critics was too good, and previous critical verdicts were placed
under the titles of the pictures. Two hundred and fifty copies were
printed by Thomas Way, and in a letter to Way's manager, Mr. Morgan,
he calls the catalogue "perfect." But he also points out that there
are errors, and insists that by no accident or disaster shall any of
the first printed batch of two hundred and fifty copies get about,
and he further says that he proposes to come to the printing office
and destroy them. We know of only four copies, one our own--now in
the Library of Congress--of this unbound first edition that have been
preserved. The other editions, five in all, are in the usual brown
paper covers. As an instance of his care, Mr. William Marchant, then
with Goupils', remembers his spending an afternoon over the arrangement
of the few words on the cover. In the second edition the word "by"
disappeared from the title-page and "Kindly Lent Their Owners" was
printed. This was not intentional on Whistler's part, for we possess a
letter in which he asks that it may be put back at once, and also that
the "Moral" at the end of the catalogue, "Modern _British_ (!) art will
now be represented in the National Gallery of the Luxembourg by one
of the finest paintings due to the brush of an _English artist_ (!),"
should be credited not to him, but to the _Illustrated London News_.
Before the edition was exhausted the "Kindly Lent Their Owners" had
become famous, though it did not appear in subsequent editions. But
it reappeared when the catalogue was reprinted in _The Gentle Art_.
The extracts he quoted were cruel, but the critics had been cruel. The
sub-title, "_The Voice of a People_" explains his object in publishing
them. The catalogue ended with the quotation from the _Chronique des
Beaux-Arts_:
"_Au musée du Luxembourg, vient d'être placé de M. Whistler, le
splendide Portrait de Mme. Whistler mère, une oeuvre destinée à
l'éternité des admirations, une oeuvre sur laquelle la consécration des
siècles semble avoir mis la patine d'un Rembrandt, d'un Titien, où d'un
Vélasquez._"
This, in later editions, was followed by the "Moral" duly credited to
the _Illustrated London News_.
Before the show closed the pictures were photographed, and twenty-four
were afterwards published in a portfolio called _Nocturnes, Marines,
and Chevalet Pieces_, by Messrs. Goupil. Whistler designed the cover
in brown. There were a hundred sets, each photograph signed by him,
published at six guineas, and two hundred unsigned at four guineas.
An immediate result of the exhibition was that sitters came. One of
the first was the Duke of Marlborough, who gave him a commission for a
portrait and asked him and Mrs. Whistler to Blenheim for the autumn.
Whistler wrote the Duke one of his "charming letters," then heard of
his sudden death, and said:
"Now I shall never know whether my letter killed him, or whether he
died before he got it. Well, they all want to be painted because of
these pictures, but why wouldn't they be painted years ago when I
wanted to paint them, and could have painted them just as well?"
And he was besieged by Americans, Whistler said, who were determined
"to pour California into his lap," a determination to which he had no
objection. His "pockets should always be full, or my golden eggs are
addled." He thought it would be "amazing fun" to be rich. Once, driving
with Mr. Starr, he said:
"Starr, I have not dined, as you know, so you need not think I say
this in any but a cold and careful spirit: it is better to live on
bread and cheese and paint beautiful things than to live like Dives
and paint pot-boilers. But a painter really should not have to worry
about 'various,' you know. Poverty may induce industry, but it does
not produce the fine flower of painting. The test is not poverty, it's
money. Give a painter money and see what he'll do; if he does not paint
his work is well lost to the world. If I had had, say, three thousand
pounds a year, what beautiful things I could have done."
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF PABLO SARASATE
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK
OIL
In the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh
(_See page 223_)]
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF LADY COLIN CAMPBELL
HARMONY IN WHITE AND IVORY
OIL (DESTROYED)
From a photograph lent by Pickford R. Waller, Esq.
(_See page 262_)]
No one could know better than Mr. Croal Thomson how complete was this
success:
"I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that the exhibition
marked a revolution in the public feeling towards Whistler. His
artistic powers were hitherto disputed on every hand, but when it was
possible for lovers of art to see for themselves what the painter
had accomplished the whole position was changed. I will be pardoned,
I hope, in stating that whereas up to that time the pictures of Mr.
Whistler commanded only a small sum of money, after the exhibition
a great number of connoisseurs desired to acquire his works, and
therefore their money value immediately increased.
"In the Goupil collection all the pictures were contributed by private
owners, and none were offered for sale. I may say in passing that,
as a matter of fact, the crowds of visitors were so great that no
transaction of any serious kind was carried through in the Gallery
between the hanging of the pictures and their dispersal--that is, for
nearly five weeks there was practically no record of business.
"But the exhibition altered all this, and it is revealing no secrets
to say that within a year after the exhibition was closed I had aided
in the transfer of more than one-half of the pictures from their first
owners. Mr. Whistler, to whom I always referred before concluding any
transaction, came to the conclusion that there was hardly a holder of
his pictures in England but who would sell when tempted by a large
price. It may be that these owners had become affected by the continual
misunderstanding and abuse of Mr. Whistler's works, and that when they
were offered double or three times the sum for which they had their
pictures insured they thought they had better take advantage of the
enthusiasm of the moment. They did not realise that this enthusiasm
would continue to enlarge, and that what seemed to them as original
purchasers of the pictures to be a great price is only about one-fourth
of their present money value.
"It was the artist's wish that a similar exhibition should be held in
Paris, but the project fell through, and from more recent experience it
would appear as if the London public, sometimes so severely scoffed at
by Mr. Whistler, was really more appreciative than the Parisian public,
and, therefore, perhaps after all more intelligent."
Whistler sold _The Falling Rocket_ for eight hundred guineas, and
wished that Ruskin could know that it had been valued at "four pots
of paint." The Leyland sale, May 28, 1892, brought the _Princesse du
Pays de la Porcelaine_ and smaller works into the auction-room, and,
though the _Princesse_ fetched only four hundred and twenty guineas,
this was four times as much as Whistler received. What would he have
said to the five thousand Mr. Freer paid for it within a year of his
death? The sixty or eighty pounds Mr. Leathart paid Whistler for the
_Lange Leizen_ increased to six or eight hundred when he sold it. Mr.
Ionides had bought _Sea and Rain_ for twenty or thirty pounds, and now
asked three hundred. Fifty pounds, the price of the _Blue Wave_ when
Mr. Gerald Potter had it from Whistler, multiplied to a thousand when
it was his turn to dispose of it. Fourteen hundred pounds was given
by Arthur Studd for _The Little White Girl_ and a Nocturne, the two
having cost Mr. Potter about one hundred and eighty pounds, and we have
been told that Arthur Studd was recently offered six thousand pounds
for _The Little White Girl_ alone. Whistler resented it when he found
that fortunes were being made "at his expense" by so-called friends,
and he complained that they were turning his reputation into pounds,
shillings, and pence, travelling over Europe and holiday-making on
the profits. The previous sentence was written when our book first
appeared. During 1918 and 1919, there has been a fabulous increase in
the selling price of Whistler's work. We do not know what amount was
paid by Mr. Frick for the _Lady Meux_, the _Rosa Corder_, and the _Mrs.
Leyland_ which he recently purchased. Some of the reports of prices are
greatly exaggerated, no doubt. A few owners of Whistlers do appreciate
them. But nearly all collectors in the United States regard art as
they do stocks. They buy for a rise, and appreciate only the monetary
value of the works they possess. One of the most striking cases is that
of Mr. Howard Mansfield, whom Whistler, during many years, furnished
with some of his most interesting prints, aided and directed in their
collection, hoping, of course, that they would be left to a museum. But
Mr. Mansfield sold his collection for an enormous price, altogether out
of proportion to what Whistler received. Surprising statements have
been circulated about the sale of pictures. The announcement of the
price recently paid for the _Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine_ is as
incorrect as the title given to the painting, which is simply a small
slight sketch and different version of the important subject owned by
Mr. Freer. The bigger the lie, the more impressive is such a statement
concerning the prices asked and obtained--the merit of the work is of
secondary importance. This is a fair specimen of American commercial
art criticism.
Whistler, after the trade in his work began, suggested that a work of
art, when sold, should still remain the artist's property; that it
was only "lent its owner." It was now his frequent demand to owners
and condition to purchasers that his pictures should be available
for exhibition when and where and as often as he pleased. This is
illustrated in the following letter which Mr. H. S. Theobald, K.C.,
writes us:
"... About 1870 I began to get such of his etchings as I could, and
somewhere early in the eighties I became the fortunate possessor of
some thirty or forty drawings and pastels through the Dowdeswells.
Whistler became aware of my ownership of these, and they sometimes
brought him to my house, which was then in Westbourne Square. The
pictures, owing to stress of space, hung mostly on the staircase, and
Whistler would stand in rapt admiration before them, with occasional
ejaculations of 'how lovely,' 'how divine,' and so on. On one of these
occasions he asked my wife if she had had her portrait taken. 'But of
course not,' he added, 'as I have not painted you.'
"My intercourse with the Master was limited to occasions when he wanted
to borrow the pictures. His manner of proceeding was somewhat abrupt.
Some morning a person would appear in a four-wheel cab and present
Whistler's card, on which was written, 'Please let bearer have fourteen
of my pictures.' Sometimes, but not often, there was a preliminary
warning from Whistler himself. But though the pictures went easily, it
was a labour of Hercules to retrieve them. Once when I went to fetch
them at his studio by appointment, after a previous effort, also by
appointment, which was not kept, I found the studio locked, but after
a search among the neighbours I got the key, and then I found some two
or three hundred pictures stacked round the room buried in the dust
of ages. Whistler loved his pictures but he certainly took no care of
them. On that occasion I remember I took away by mistake in exchange
for one of my pictures, a Nocturne that did not belong to me, though it
was very like one of mine. You can imagine the Master's winged words
when he found this out. I could only cry _mea culpa_ and bow my head
before the storm. It was the risk to which I feared the pictures were
exposed which made me harden my heart."
Whistler was as anxious to keep his pictures out of exhibitions
when for some reason he did not care to have them shown. The large
_Three Girls_ (_Three Figures, Pink and Grey_, in the London Memorial
Exhibition) was at Messrs. Dowdeswell's in the summer of 1891. He
had before this tried to get possession of it in order that he might
destroy it, and he had offered to paint the portrait of the owner and
his wife in exchange. His offer was refused, and while the picture was
at Messrs. Dowdeswell's, he wrote a letter to the _Pall Mall Gazette_
(July 28, 1891), to explain that it was a painting "thrown aside for
destruction." An impudent answer from a critic led to a more explicit
statement of his views on the subject:
"All along have I carefully destroyed plates, torn up proofs and burned
canvases that the truth of the quoted word shall prevail, and that the
future collector shall be spared the mortification of cataloguing his
pet mistakes. To destroy, is to remain."
When this picture, with a number of studies for it, was sent to the
London Memorial Exhibition, it was found very interesting and it was
hung, and we think it fortunate that it was not destroyed. But had the
Committee known it was the picture he wished destroyed it never would
have been exhibited by the International Society.
In the summer of 1892, Whistler was invited by the Duke of Argyll to
contribute to the British Section at the World's Columbian Exposition
to be held in Chicago the following year, and the picture mentioned for
the purpose was the _Carlyle_. The portrait had been skied in a corner
the previous winter at the Victorian Exhibition in the New Gallery,
of which Mr. J. W. Beck was Secretary, as he was now of the Fine
Arts Committee for Chicago. Whistler wrote to Mr. Beck, sending his
"distinguished consideration to the Duke and the President" (Leighton)
with the assurance "that I have an undefined sense of something
ominously flattering occurring, but that no previous desire on his part
ever to deal with work of mine has prepared me with the proper form of
acknowledgment. No, no, Mr. Beck! Once hung, twice shy!"
When the letter was sent to the papers and printers made "sky" of
the "shy" Whistler was enchanted. Mr. Smalley told the story of the
invitation in the _Times_, after Whistler's death, under the impression
that he had been invited to show at Burlington House. That Whistler
never was invited to show anything there we know, and we have the
further testimony of Sir Fred Eaton, Secretary of the Academy, that "No
such proposal as Mr. Smalley speaks of was ever made to Mr. Whistler,
and it is difficult to understand on what grounds he made such a
statement."
It is an amusing coincidence that this would seem to be confirmed by
the fate of a letter addressed to Whistler, "The Academy, England,"
which, after having gone to the newspaper of that name, was next sent
to Burlington House, and, finally, reached Whistler with "Not known at
the R.A.," written on the cover. Here was one of the little incidents
that Whistler called "the droll things of this pleasant life," and he
sent the cover for reproduction to the _Daily Mail_ with the reflection:
"In these days of doubtful frequentation it is my rare good fortune to
be able to send you an unsolicited official and final certificate of
character."
Whistler did not depend upon the British Section at the Chicago
Exposition. Americans made up for the official blunders of 1889.
Professor Halsey C. Ives, chief of the Art Department, wrote letters
that Whistler found most courteous, and everything was done to secure
his pictures and prints. He was splendidly represented by The _Yellow
Buskin_, the _Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine_, _The Fur Jacket_,
among paintings, and by etchings of every period. The medal given him
was the first official honour from his native land, where never before
had so representative a collection of his work been seen.
Towards the end of 1892 the appreciation of America was expressed in
another form. The new Boston Library was being built, and Messrs.
McKim, Meade, and White were the architects. It was determined that
the interior should be decorated by the most distinguished American
artists. Mr. Sargent and Mr. Abbey were commissioned to do part of
the work, and they joined with Mr. McKim and St. Gaudens in trying to
induce Whistler to undertake the large panel at the top of the stairs.
He made notes and suggestions for the design, which, he told us, was
to be a great peacock ten feet high; but the work was put off, and,
in the end, nothing came of the first opportunity given him for mural
decoration since The Peacock Room.
CHAPTER XXXVI: PARIS. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN NINETY-TWO AND EIGHTEEN
NINETY-THREE.
Whistler went to live in Paris again in 1892. Moving from London was a
complicated affair, and, during several months, he and Mrs. Whistler
and his sister-in-law, Mrs. Whibley, were continually running backward
and forward, before they settled in the Rue du Bac. We saw him whenever
he came to London and whenever we were in Paris, and, as we were there
often, we saw much of him.
A group of artists and art critics, whose appreciation of Whistler had
not waited for the turning of the tide, were in the habit of going
together to Paris for the opening of the _Salon_. In 1892, R. A. M.
Stevenson, Aubrey Beardsley, Henry Harland, D. S. McColl, Charles W.
Furse, Alexander and Robert Ross, among others, were with us, and to
all it was a pleasure to find Whistler triumphing as he had triumphed
earlier in the spring in London. His pictures at the Champ-de-Mars
were the most talked about and the most distinguished in an unusually
good _Salon_. Many came straight from the Goupil Exhibition. Whistler
called it "a stupendous success all along the line," and said that,
coming after the Goupil "heroic kick," it made everything complete and
perfect. He was pleased also with the fact that he was elected a full
_Sociétaire_, and this year a member of the jury.
In the autumn, J., returning to Paris after a long summer in the
South of France, found Whistler in the Hôtel du Bon Lafontaine, a
house, Whistler said, full of bishops, cardinals, and _monsignori_,
and altogether most correct, to which he had moved from the Foyot,
inhabited by Senators, after a bomb had exploded in the kitchen window.
J. says:
"He was not too comfortably established, in one or two small rooms.
He was full of the apartment in the Rue de Bac, which I was taken to
see, though there was nothing to see but workmen and packing-boxes.
In the midst of the moving, he was working, and one day I found him
in his bedroom with Mallarmé, whose portrait in lithography he was
drawing, and there was scarcely room for three. This portrait is the
frontispiece to Mallarmé's _Vers et Prose_.
"It was the first time I had ever seen Whistler working on a
lithograph. He had great trouble with this portrait, which he did more
than once, not altogether because, as M. Duret says, he could not get
the head right, but because he was trying experiments with paper. He
was thoroughly dissatisfied with the mechanical grained paper which
he had used for the _Albermarle_ and the _Whirlwind_ prints, and he
was then afraid of trusting to the post the paper that Way was sending
him. He had found at Belfont's or Lemercier's some thin textureless
transfer paper, thin as tissue paper, which delighted him, though it
was difficult to work on. When he was doing the Mallarmé, he put the
paper down on a roughish book cover. He liked the grain the cover gave
him, for it was not mechanical, and, when the grain seemed to repeat
itself, he would shift the drawing, and thus get a new surface. I do
not know whether he used this thin paper to any extent, but he said he
found it delightful, if difficult, to work on. He used that afternoon a
tiny bit of lithographic chalk, holding it in his fingers, and not in a
crayon-holder as lithographers do.
"The next day, he took me to the printers, Belfont's and Lemercier's,
where he introduced me to M. Duchâtel and M. Marty, who was preparing
_L'Estampe Originale_, devoting himself to the revival of artistic
lithography in France. As I remember, the talk was technical, when
not of the wonders of the apartment in the Rue du Bac--where 'Peace
threatens to take up her abode in the garden of our pretty pavilion,'
Mr. Starr quotes Whistler as saying--and the studio in the Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs, which I did not see until later on. He was also
planning his colour lithographs, and he explained to me his methods,
though very few colour-prints were made until the next year. He also
told me what he thought of printing etchings in colour--that it was
abominable, vulgar, and stupid. Good black or brown ink, on good old
paper, had been good enough for Rembrandt, it was good enough for him,
and it ought to be good enough in the future for the few people who
care about etching. To-day, when the world is swamped with the childish
print in colour and the preposterous big copper plate, it may be well
to remember Whistler's words. His reason for rejecting the etching
in colour is as simple and rational as his reason for making the
lithograph in colour. Lithography is a method of surface printing; the
colour, rolled on to the surface of the stone, is merely rubbed on to,
and scraped off on, the paper. In etching or engraving, the colour is
first hammered into the engraved plate with a dabber and then forced
out by excessive pressure, fatal to any but the strongest or purest of
blacks and browns; and colours, whether printed from one plate or a
dozen, must have the freshness, the quality, squeezed out of them."
He was back in London at the end of December (1892) eating his
Christmas dinner with his future brother-in-law. He stayed only a
few days, but long enough to arrange to show _Lady Meux: White and
Black_ in the first exhibition of the Portrait Painters at the Grafton
Gallery, early in 1893, and a number of his Venice etchings with the
destroyed plates at the Fine Art Society's.
"We were again in Paris for the _Salon_ of 1893, and found Whistler
living in the Rue du Bac. Beardsley, MacColl, and 'Bob' Stevenson
were with us. MacColl and I went to see Whistler in the new studio.
It was at the top of one of the highest buildings in the Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs, No. 86. As the _concierge_ said, in directing
visitors, '_On ne peut pas aller plus loin que M. Vistlaire!_' The
climb always seemed to me endless, and must have done much harm to
Whistler's weak heart, though benches were placed on some of the
landings where, if he had time, he could rest. When we got to the sixth
storey MacColl knocked. There was a rapid movement across the floor,
and the door was opened a little. Whistler held his palette and brushes
between himself and us, and there were excuses of models and work. But
MacColl felt the brushes, and they were dry, and so we got in.
"The studio was a big, bare room, the biggest studio Whistler ever had.
A simple tone of rose on the walls, a lounge, a few chairs, a whitewood
cabinet for the little drawings and prints and pastels; the blue screen
with the river, Chelsea church, and the gold moon; two or three easels,
nothing on them; rows and rows of canvases on the floor with their
faces to the wall; in the further corner a printing press--rather a
printing shop--with inks and papers on shelves; a little gallery above,
a room or two opening off; a model's dressing-room under it, and in
front, when you turned, the great studio window, with all Paris toward
the Pantheon over the Luxembourg gardens. There was another little
room or entrance-hall at the top of the stairs, and opposite another,
a kitchen. On the front was a balcony with flowers.
[Illustration: ANNABEL LEE PASTEL
In the Charles L. Freer Collection, National Gallery of American Art
(_See page 280_)]
[Illustration: THE CONVALESCENT WATER-COLOUR
In the possession of Dr. J. W. MacIntyre
(_See page 274_)]
"Carmen, his model, was there, and while he showed us some of his work
she got breakfast, and we stayed a good part of the day. Mrs. Whistler
came up later. I think she breakfasted with us. I have no recollection
of what he talked about. But I am sure it was of what they had been
saying in London, of what they were saying in Paris, of what he was
doing. That is what it always was. We were all asked to lunch the
following Sunday at the house.
"The apartment, No. 110 Rue du Bac, was on the right-hand side, just
before you reached the _Bon Marché_, going up the street, from the
river. You went through a big _porte cochère_ by the _concierge's_
box, down a long, covered tunnel, then between high walls, until you
came to a courtyard with several doors, a bit of an old frieze in one
place and a drinking-fountain. Whistler's door was painted blue, with
a brass knocker. I do not suppose that then there was another like it
in Paris. Inside was a little landing with three or four steps down
to the floor a few feet lower than the courtyard. This room contained
nothing, or almost nothing, but some trunks (which, as in his other
houses, gave the appearance of his having just moved in, or being
just about to start on a journey) and a settee, always covered with a
profusion of hats and coats. Opposite the entrance a big door opened
into a spacious room, decorated in simple, flat tones of blue, with
white doors and windows, furnished with a few Empire chairs and a
couch, a grand piano, and a table which, like the blue matting-covered
floor, was littered with newspapers. Once in a while there was a
picture of his on the wall. For some time, the _Venus_ hung or stood
about. There were doors to the right and left, and on the far side, a
glass door opened on a large garden, a real bit of country in Paris.
It stretched away in dense undergrowth to several huge trees. Later,
over the door, there was a trellis designed by Mrs. Whistler, and there
were flowers everywhere. 'In his roses he buried his troubles,' Mr.
Wuerpel writes of the garden, and there were many birds, among them,
at one time, an awful mocking-bird, at another a white parrot which
finally escaped, and, in a temper, climbed up a tree where no one could
get it, and starved itself to death to Whistler's grief. At the bottom
of the garden were seats. The dining-room was to the right of the
drawing-room. It was equally simple in blue, only there was blue and
white china in a cupboard and a big dining-table, round which were more
Empire chairs and in the centre a large, low blue and white porcelain
stand, on it big bowls of flowers, over it, hanging from the ceiling, a
huge Japanese something like a birdcage.
"From Paris, in May, I went down to Caen and Coutances, coming back a
few weeks later. Beardsley was still in Paris, or had returned, and we
were both stopping at the Hôtel de Portugal et de l'Univers, then known
to every art student. Wagner was being played at the Opera, almost for
the first time. Paris was disturbed, there were demonstrations against
Wagner, really against Germany. We went, Beardsley wild about Wagner
and doing, I think, the drawing of _The Wagnerites_. He had come over
to get backgrounds in the rose arbours and the dense alleys of the
Luxembourg gardens, where Whistler had made his lithographs. Coming
away from the Opera, we went across to the Café de la Paix at midnight.
The first person we saw was Whistler. He was with some people, but they
left soon, and we joined him. Beardsley also left almost at once, but
not before Whistler had asked us to come the next Sunday afternoon to
the Rue du Bac. Then, for the first time, I learned what he thought of
'æstheticism' and decadence.'
"'Why do you get mixed up with such things? Look at him! He's just like
his drawings, he's all hairs and peacock's plumes--hairs on his head,
hairs on his fingers' ends, hairs in his ears, hairs on his toes. And
what shoes he wears--hairs growing out of them!'
"I said, 'Why did you ask him to the Rue du Bac?'
'Oh--well--well--well!' And then it was late, or early, and the last
thing was, 'Well, you'll come and bring him too.'
"Years later, in Buckingham Street, Whistler met Beardsley, and got
to like not only him, as everybody did, but his work. One night when
Whistler was with us, Beardsley turned up, as always when he went to
see anyone, with his portfolio of his latest work under his arm. This
time it held the illustrations for _The Rape of the Lock_, which he
had just made. Whistler, who always saw everything that was being
done, had seen the _Yellow Book_, started in 1894, and he disliked it
as much as he then disliked Beardsley, who was the art editor; he had
also seen the illustrations to _Salomé_, disliking them too, probably
because of Oscar Wilde; he knew many of the other drawings, one of
which, whether intentionally or unintentionally, was more or less a
reminiscence of Mrs. Whistler, and he no doubt knew that Beardsley had
made a caricature of him which a Follower carefully left in a cab. When
Beardsley opened the portfolio and began to show us _The Rape of the
Lock_, Whistler looked at them first indifferently, then with interest,
then with delight. And then he said slowly, 'Aubrey, I have made a very
great mistake--you are a very great artist.' And the boy burst out
crying. All Whistler could say, when he could say anything, was 'I mean
it--I mean it--I mean it!'
"On the following Sunday Beardsley and I went to the Rue du Bac,
Beardsley in a little straw hat like Whistler's. Whistler was in
the garden and there were many Americans, and Arsène Alexandre and
Mallarmé, some people from the British Embassy, and presently Mr.
Jacomb Hood came, bringing an Honourable Amateur, who asked the
Whistlers, Beardsley, and myself to dinner at one of the _cafés_ in the
Champs-Elysees. As we left the Rue du Bac, Whistler whispered to me,
'Those hairs--hairs everywhere!' I said to him, 'But you were very nice
and, of course, you'll come to dinner.' And, of course, he did not.
"I was working in Paris, making drawings and etchings of Notre-Dame.
I was in one of the high old houses of lodgings and studios, with
cabmen's _cafés_ and restaurants under them, on the Quai des Grands
Augustins. I had gone there because of the view of the Cathedral. Most
of the time I was at work up among the Devils of Notre-Dame, using
one of the towers as a studio by permission of the Government and the
Cardinal-Archbishop. One morning--it was in June--I heard the puffing
and groaning of someone climbing slowly the endless winding staircase,
and the next thing I saw was Whistler's head on the stairs. When he
got his breath and I had got over my astonishment, I began to ask why
he had come, or he began to explain the reason. He had learned where I
was staying, and he said he had been to the hotel, which, was, well! I
think it reminded him of his days _au sixième_, for that was the floor
I was on. He left a note written on the _buvette_ paper, in which he
said, 'Jolly the place seems to be!' After he had climbed up to my
rooms, the _patron_ told him where he possibly would find me, and then
the people at the foot of the tower said I was up above.
"He told me why he had come up. He was working on a series of etchings
of Paris. Some were just begun, others ready to bite, but a number
ought to be printed, and would I help him? I was pleased, and I said
I would. I took him about among the strange creatures that haunt the
place, introduced him to the old keeper with his grisly tales of
suicides and of sticking to the tower through the Commune, even when
the church was on fire, and showed him the awful bell that, at noon,
suddenly crashed in our ears, the uncanny cat that perched on crockets
and gargoyles, tried to catch sparrows with nothing below her, and made
from one parapet to another flying cuts over space when visitors came
up. But he did not like it, and was not happy until we were seated in
the back room of a restaurant across the street. He talked about the
printing, saying that I could help him, and he could teach me.
"Next morning I was at the Rue du Bac at nine. After I had waited for
what seemed hours, and had breakfasted with him and Mrs. Whistler
and we had a cigarette in the garden, where there was an American
rocking-chair for him--well, after this it was too late to go to the
studio. He brought out some of the plates which he had been working
on--the plates of little shops in the near streets--and we looked at
them, and that was all. So it went on the next day, and the next,
until on the third or fourth things came to a head, and I told him
that charming as this life was, either we must print or I must go back
to my drawing. In five minutes we were in a cab on our way to the
studio. He understood that, much as I admired his work and appreciated
him, I could not afford to pay for this appreciation and admiration
with my time. From the moment this was plain between us, there was no
interruption to our friendship for the rest of his life.
"We set to work. He peeled down to his undershirt with short sleeves,
and I saw in his muscles one reason why he was never tired. He put on
an apron. The plates, only slightly heated, if heated at all, were
inked and wiped, sometimes with his hand, at others with a rag, till
nearly clean, though a good tone was left. He painted the proofs on
the plate with his hand. I got the paper ready on the press and pulled
the proof, he inking and I pulling all the afternoon. As each proof
came off the press, he looked at it, not satisfied, for they were
all weak, and saying 'we'll keep it as the first proof and it will
be worth something some day.' Then he put the prints between sheets
of blotting-paper, and that night or the next, after dinner, trimmed
them with scissors and put them back between the folded sheets of
blotting-paper which were thrown on the table and on the floor. Between
the sheets the proofs dried naturally and were not squashed flat.
"The printing went on for several days, he getting more and more
dissatisfied, until I found an old man, Lamour, at the top of an old
house in the Rue de la Harpe, who could reground the plates. But
Whistler did not rebite them and never touched them until long after in
England.
"A number of plates had not been bitten and one hot Sunday afternoon
he brought them into the garden at the Rue du Bac. A chair was placed
under the trees and on it a wash-basin into which each plate was put.
Instead of pouring the diluted acid all over the plate in the usual
fashion drops were taken from the bottle on a feather, and the plate
painted with acid. The acid was coaxed, or rather used as one would
use water-colour, dragged and washed about. Depth and strength were
got by leaving a drop of acid on the lines where they were needed.
There was a little stopping-out of passages where greater delicacy was
required; when there was any, the stopping-out varnish was thinned
with turpentine, and Whistler, with a camel's-hair brush, painted
over the parts that did not need further biting. To me, it was a
revelation. Sometimes he drew on the plate. Instead of the huge crowbar
used by most etchers he worked with a perfectly balanced, beautifully
designed little needle three or four inches long, made for him by an
instrument-maker in Paris. He always carried several in a little silver
box. The ground on all the plates was bad and came off, and the proofs
he pulled afterwards in the studio were not at all what he wanted.
These were almost the last plates he etched.
"He was not painting very much, few people came to the studio, and he
went out little. No one was in the Rue du Bac but Mrs. Whistler for a
while, and there were complications with the servants and others--how
people who kept such hours, or no hours, could keep servants would
have been a mystery had not servants worshipped him. Almost daily the
_petit bleu_ asking me to dinner would come to me. Or Whistler would
appear in the morning, if I had not been to him the day before. In
those early June days I seldom met anyone at the house and we never
dressed for dinner, possibly because I had no dress clothes with me; he
would insist on my coming, telling me not to mind the stains or the
inkspots! One evening in the garden with them I found a little man,
a thorough Englishman in big spectacles, with a curious sniff, who
was holding a hose and watering the plants. He was introduced to me
as Mr. Webb, Whistler's solicitor, though in the process we came near
being drenched by the wobbling hose. It was that evening I first heard
the chant of the missionary brothers from over the great wall. A bell
sounded, and as the notes died away a wailing chant arose, went on for
a little, then died away as mysteriously as it came. Always, when it
did come, it hushed us. At dinner we should be cosy and jolly, Whistler
had said in asking me, and we were, and it was arranged that we should
go the next day to Fontainebleau.
"They called for me at the hotel in the morning. We drove to the Lyons
station, Whistler, his wife, Mr. Webb, and I. And Whistler had the
little paint-box which always went with him, though on these occasions
it was the rarest thing that he ever did anything, and we got to
Fountainebleau. We lunched in a garden. We didn't go to the palace, but
drove to Barbizon, stopping at Siron's, through the forest. I don't
think the views or the trees interested him at all. He was quiet all
the way, but no sooner were we back than we must hunt for 'old things':
'here was a palace and great people had lived here, there might be
silver, there might be blue and white, though really, now, you know,
you can find better blue and white, and cheaper silver, under the noses
of the Britons in Wardour Street than anywhere.' We did not find any
blue and white, or silver. But there were three folio volumes of old
paper, containing a collection of dried leaves, which we bought and
shared, and they were to him more valuable than the palace and the
Millet studio, which we never saw.
"It was late when we got back. The servants had gone to bed, and
Marguery's and the places where he liked to dine were shut. So we
bought what we could in the near shops and sat down in the Rue du Bac
to eat the supper we had collected. After we had finished I witnessed
his and Mrs. Whistler's wills, which Mr. Webb had brought with him from
London, and for this the long day had been a preparation.
"If I did not always accept Whistler's invitations he would reproach
me as an awful disappointment and a bad man. If I did not go to the
dinner, to which I was bidden at an hour's notice, he would tell me
afterwards of the much cool drink and encouraging refreshment he
had prepared for me. He always asked me to bring my friends. Mr. J.
Fulleylove had come over to 'do' Paris and I took him to the Rue du
Bac; '_les Pleins d'Amour_,' Whistler called him and Mrs. Fulleylove,
whose eyes he was always praising. They were working at St. Denis and
so was I, and one day Whistler and Mrs. Whistler came in the primitive
steam tram that starts from the Madeleine to see the place. We
lunched--badly--and he was bored with the church, though he had brought
lithograph paper and colours to make a sketch of it.
"One Sunday Mr. E. G. Kennedy posed in the garden for his portrait on
a small canvas or panel, and all the world was kept out. I had never
before seen Whistler paint. He worked away all afternoon, hissing to
himself, which, Mrs. Whistler said, he did only when things were going
well. If Kennedy shifted--there were no rests--Whistler would scream,
and he worked on and on, and the sun went down, and Kennedy stood
and Whistler painted, and the monks began their chant, and darkness
was coming on. The hissing stopped, a paint-rag came out, and, with
one fierce dash, it was all rubbed off. 'Oh, well,' was all he said.
Kennedy was limbered up and we went to dinner.
"After that, almost every night we dined together through that lovely
June, either with him in the Rue du Bac, or he came with Kennedy or me
to Marguery's or La Pérouse--once to St. Germain--or somewhere that was
delightful.
"The summer was famous in Paris for the 'Sarah Brown Students'
Revolution,' the row that grew out of the _Quat'z Arts_ Ball. Whistler
did not take the slightest interest in the demonstrations, in fact, did
not believe they were taking place, though I used to bring him reports
of the doings which culminated on July 4, my birthday, when he was to
have given me a dinner at Marguery's. I told him the streets of the
Quarter were barricaded and full of soldiers, but though he ridiculed
the whole affair, he decided to dine at home and to put off by telegram
the dinner he had ordered. I went round to the Boulevard St. Germain
to send the wire and found it barred with soldiers and police, and the
entire boulevard, as far as one could see, littered with hats and caps,
sticks and umbrellas. There had been a cavalry charge and this was the
result. We dined merrily, but Kennedy and I left early. There was a
great deal of rioting through the night, but that was the end of it.
"Mrs. Whistler had not been well, and they suddenly made up their minds
to go to Brittany, or Normandy, or somewhere on the coast. It was not
altogether a successful journey. Nature had gone back on him, he wrote
me, probably because of his exposure of her 'foolish sunsets'; the
weather was for tourists, the sea for goldfish in a bowl--the studio
was better than staring at a sea of tin. And the terrible things they
had eaten in Brittany made them ill. But the lithographs at Vitré
were made, also the _Yellow House, Lannion_, and the _Red House,
Paimpol_--his first elaborate essays in colour.
"Only a few impressions of the _Yellow House_ were ever pulled owing
to some accident to the stone. One of these I wanted to buy. Whistler
heard of it 'Well, you know, very flattering, but altogether absurd,'
he told me, and the print came with an inscription and the Butterfly."
CHAPTER XXXVII: PARIS CONTINUED. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN NINETY-THREE AND
EIGHTEEN NINETY-FOUR.
After this summer, we both saw still more of Whistler whenever we were
in Paris. At the Rue du Bac we were struck by the few French artists at
his Sunday afternoons and the predominance of Americans and English.
It seemed to us that French artists might have been more cordial and
the French nation more sensible of the fact that a distinguished
foreign artist had come to France. During his life at least one or
two Americans, one a rich amateur, were made Commanders of the Legion
of Honour, while he remained an Officer. Others were made foreign
Members of the Academy of Fine Arts, but this, the highest honour for
artists in France, was never offered to him, nor was he elected to
International Juries.
With a few French and foreign artists his relations were friendly:
Boldini, Helleu, Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin, Alfred Stevens, Aman-Jean;
but the greater number were content to express their appreciation
at a distance. Mrs. Whistler spoke little French, and few French
artists speak any English. The men whom Whistler saw most were not
painters. Viélé-Griffin, Octave Mirbeau, Arsène Alexandre, the Comte de
Montesquiou, Rodenbach came to the Rue du Bac. Old friends, Drouet and
Duret, were sometimes there, though not often--his intimacy with them
and Oulevey was not really renewed until after Mrs. Whistler's death.
But of all who came, none endeared himself so much to Whistler as
Stéphane Mallarmé, poet, critic, friend, admirer. Once, at Whistler's
suggestion, he visited us in London, and, looking from our windows to
the Thames, declared he could understand Whistler better. Official
people strayed in from the Embassies, mostly English. American authors
and American collectors appeared on Sundays. Mr. Howells, once or
twice, came with his son and his daughter, of whom Whistler made
a lithograph. Journalists, English and American, wandered in. And
English and American artists came, or tried to come, in crowds. The
younger men of the Glasgow School, James Guthrie and John Lavery, were
welcomed. Then there were the Americans living in Paris: Walter Gay,
Alexander Harrison, Frederick MacMonnies, Edmund H. Wuerpel, John W.
Alexander, Humphreys Johnston, while Sargent and Abbey rarely missed an
opportunity of calling at the Rue du Bac.
Whistler was hardly less cordial to students. Milcendeau has told us
how he took his work--and his courage--with him and went to Whistler,
but, reaching the door, stood trembling at the thought of meeting
the Master and showing his drawings. As soon as Whistler saw the
drawings his manner was so charming--as if they were just two artists
together--that fear was forgotten, and Whistler proved his interest
by inviting Milcendeau to send the drawings to the International.
Whistler met American and English students not only at home, but at the
American Art Association in Montparnasse, then a bit of old Paris--a
little white house with green shutters, which the street had long
since left on a lower level, and at the back a garden where, under the
great trees, the cloth was laid in summer; just the house to please
Whistler. He sometimes went to the club's dinners and celebrations.
At one dinner on Washington's Birthday, after professional professors
and popular politicians had delivered themselves, he was finally and
rather patronisingly asked to speak by the President, who was either
an ambassador or a dry-goods storekeeper, the usual patron of American
art and supporter of American art institutions. Whistler said: "Now, as
to teaching. In England it is all a matter of taste, but in France at
least they tell you which end of the brush to stick in your mouth."
Mr. MacMonnies remembers another evening: "A millionaire friend of
Whistler's and mine spoke to me of giving a dinner to the American
artists in Paris, or rather to Whistler, and inviting the Paris
American artists. I dissuaded him, by saying they all hated one another
and would pass the evening more cheerfully by sticking forks into one
another under the table if they could. Better to invite all the young
fry--the American students. He gladly went into it. You can imagine
the wild joy of the small fry, who had, of course, never met Whistler.
Some got foolishly drunk, others got bloated with freshness, but they
all had a rare time, and Whistler, who sat at the head, more than any,
and he was delightfully funny. The millionaire was enchanted, and also
a distinguished American painter, who sat opposite to Whistler and who
was much respected by the youth. At one pause Whistler said, 'I went
to the Louvre this morning'--pause, all the youths' faces wide open,
expecting pearls of wisdom and points--'and I was amazed'--pause;
everybody open-eared--'to see the amazing way they keep the floors
waxed!'"
There is a story that one day at lunch-time he went into the courtyard
of the _Ecole des Beaux-Arts_ and walked slowly round, only to be
followed in a few minutes by a single line of students, each carrying a
mahlstick as he carried his cane, and as many as had them wearing two
_sous_ pieces for eye-glasses. He stopped and looked at the statues he
wanted to see and they stopped and looked, and they followed him, until
the circuit of the court was made, when they bowed each other out,
and it was not till long after that they learned who he was. American
students, if not so filled with their own sense of humour, are said to
have mobbed him on one occasion when he went to a _crémerie_, upsetting
tables and chairs to see him.
Mr. Walter Gay, who was much with Whistler during these years, gives us
his impressions:
"I first knew Whistler in the winter of '94, when he was established
in Paris, with the recently married Mrs. Whistler, in his apartment
of the Rue du Bac. The marriage was a happy one; she appreciated
fully his talent, he adored her, and when she died a few years later
was crushed at her loss. In spite of the great influence exercised
by Whistler on contemporary art, he was never lionised in Paris as
he had been in London; Paris is not a place for lions, there are
already too many local celebrities. Perhaps one of the reasons why
the French artists held aloof from Whistler was Mrs. Whistler's very
British attitude towards the nation. Once at a dinner of French artists
given at our house in honour of Whistler, Mrs. Whistler expressed the
most Gallophobe sentiments, complaining loudly of the inhospitality
of the French towards her husband. Although sixty years when I knew
him, he had the enthusiasm and energy of early years. His handsome
grey-blue eyes sparkled with the fire of youth--they were young eyes
in an old face. I think it strange that no one ever seems to emphasise
his singular beauty. Not only were his features finely cut, but the
symmetry of his figure, hands, and feet, retained until late in life,
was remarkable; in youth he must have been a pocket Apollo. His
conversational powers were extraordinary--he had a Celtic richness
of vocabulary.... He was supersensitive to criticism. Those who were
either indifferent or antipathetic to him, his imagination instantly
transformed into hidden enemies. That weakness of the artistic
temperament, _la folie de la persécution_, was deeply rooted in his
nature....
"No one can realise, who has not watched Whistler paint, the agony his
work gave him. I have seen him after a day's struggle with a picture,
when things did not go, completely collapse as from an illness. His
drawing cost him infinite trouble. I have known him work two weeks on
a hand, and then give it up discouraged.... My last interview with
Whistler took place in the spring of 1903, in London, about two months
before his death. Hearing that he was far from well, I went to see
him, and found that the rumour was only too well grounded. I spent the
afternoon with him; he was singularly gentle and affectionate, and
clung to me pathetically as though he too realised that it was to be
our last meeting in this world.
"Whatever his detractors may charge against him, it seems to me that
Whistler's faults and weaknesses sprang from an unbalanced mentality;
he was a _déséquilibré_, the common defect of great painters. The
unusual combination of artistic genius, literary gifts, and social
attractions which made up Whistler's personality was unique; there was
never anybody like him. And there is another quality of his which must
not be forgotten in the summing up of his character; underneath all his
vagaries and eccentricities one felt that indefinable yet unmistakable
being--a gentleman."
Mr. Alexander Harrison shows a different side of Whistler: "My meetings
with him were frequent and friendly. On one occasion, in a moment of
excitement, I had the audacity to tell him that I felt he ought to have
acted differently _vis-à-vis_ a jury of reception. His eyes flamed
like a rattlesnake's and I apologised, but insisted, and then dodged a
_little_. I afterwards realised that my naïve frankness had not lowered
me in his esteem, as to the last he was nice to me, having understood
that my admiration for his work was no greater than my affectionate
regard for him. I have never known a man of more sincere and genuine
impulse in ordinary human relations."
Now that Whistler was established for life, as he hoped, in a
fine studio, he was making up for the first unsettled years after
his marriage. He began a number of large portraits in the Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs. In 1893, Mr. A. J. Eddy, known, we believe, to
fame and Chicago as "the man Whistler painted," asked Whistler to paint
his portrait. He could stay in Paris only a few weeks, and Whistler
liked his American frankness in saying that his portrait must be
done by a certain date, and, though unaccustomed to be tied to time,
Whistler agreed. His description of Mr. Eddy was, "Well, you know, he
is the only man who ever did get a picture out of me on time, while I
worked and he waited!" Mr. Eddy writes of a sitter, no doubt himself,
who was with Whistler "every day for nearly six weeks and never heard
him utter an impatient word; on the contrary, he was all kindness."
And Mr. Eddy describes Whistler painting on in the twilight until it
was impossible to distinguish between the living man and the figure
on the canvas. He recalls the memory of those "glorious" days spent
in the studio, of the pleasant hour at noon when painter and sitter
breakfasted there together, of the long sittings, and the dinner
after at the Rue du Bac, or in one of the little restaurants where no
Parisian was more at home than Whistler. But steadily as the work went
on, the picture was not sent to Chicago until the following year. Mr.
J. J. Cowan, whose portrait dates from this time, tells us that for
_The Grey Man_, a small full-length, he gave sixty sittings, averaging
each three to four hours. He, like Whistler, was not in a hurry, but,
unlike Whistler, he eventually got tired, and a model was called in and
posed in Mr. Cowan's clothes. The last sittings were in London, three
years after. Even then Whistler wrote Mr. Cowan that the head needed
just the one touch, with the sitter there, so that perfection might be
assured. Another portrait was of Dr. Davenport of Paris.
The portraits of women were more numerous, and they promised to be
as fine as those done in the seventies and eighties. The work was
interrupted by the tragedy of Whistler's last years, and the more
important were never completed. For one, Miss Charlotte Williams,
of Baltimore, sat, but the painting disappeared, and only the
rare lithograph of her remains. Another lost portrait was a large
full-length of Miss Peck, of Chicago, now Mrs. W. R. Farquhar, which
we saw in many stages, and at last, as it seemed to us, finished.
She was painted standing, in evening dress, with her long white,
green-lined cloak thrown back a little, as he had painted Lady Meux.
It was full of the charm of youth, and the colour was a harmony in
silver and green. Miss Kinsella, a third American girl who posed in
the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and in Fitzroy Street, secured her
portrait after Whistler's death. We remember it in the Fitzroy Street
studio, when it was so perfect that one more day's work would ruin
it. In no other did he ever paint flesh with such perfection. Face
and neck had the golden tone of Titian, with a subtlety of modelling
beyond the Venetian's powers, for in his later years it was to surpass
the Venetians he was trying. One day when E. went to the studio he had
just scraped down neck and bust, for no reason except that he could not
get the hand to come right with the rest. It was to be lovelier than
ever, he said. It was never repainted. It remains but a shadow of its
loveliness. When M. Rodin saw it at the London Memorial Exhibition, he
praised neck and bust to J. as "a beautiful suggestion of lace," so
beautiful in tone and modelling it still is. That posing for Whistler
was difficult we know from these ladies and many of his other sitters,
as well as from our experience. Over and over, when he wanted to work
on their portraits, he would telegraph to the last address he happened
to have, though sometimes the telegrams did not reach them till weeks
after in some distant part of the world. The fact that his sitters
were not always waiting for him not only upset him temporarily, but
sometimes stopped the subject altogether. One incident in connection
with the portrait of Miss Kinsella amused him. She holds an iris in
her hand. A real flower was got, but the flower would fade, and irises
were not easy to obtain. So he went to Liberty's to get some stuff of
the purple-violet tone he wanted out of which to make a flower. He
explained what he needed to the shopman, who solemnly informed him that
Messrs. Liberty only kept "art colours."
Portraits of Mrs. Charles Whibley were in progress about the same time:
_L'Andalouse, Mother of Pearl and Silver_, the unfinished _Tulip, Rose
and Gold_, and _Red and Black, The Fan_. Two others of this period are
of Mrs. Walter Sickert, _Green and Violet_, the second for which she
sat, and Lady Eden, _Brown and Gold_. He was also painting his own
portrait in the white jacket, which was changed into a black coat after
Mrs. Whistler's death, and a full-length in a long brown overcoat shown
in 1900 and not since.
The large canvases had to be left when he shut up the studio, but he
could carry his little portfolio of lithographic paper and box of
chalks everywhere, and during those two or three years he developed the
art of lithography as no one had before, he and Fantin-Latour being the
two chief factors in the revival of lithography in the nineties. He was
determined, he said, to make "a roaring success of it." In the streets
and at home he was constantly at work, and the result is the series of
lithographs of the shops and gardens and galleries of Paris and many
portraits. His interest in technique was tireless. He experimented on
transfer-paper and on stone. He hunted old paper as strenuous people
hunt lions. Drawings and proofs were for ever in the post between Paris
and London, where the Ways were transferring and printing for him, and
friends were for ever bringing paper from London or carrying drawings
tremblingly back from Paris. He was deep in experiments with colour,
and a few of the lithographs for _Songs on Stone_, already announced
by Mr. Heinemann, were at last ready. They were proved in Paris by
Belfont, but his shop closed in 1894, printer and stones vanished,
and this was the end of the proposed publication. Since Whistler's
death mysterious prints in black-and-white from the key stones have
turned up in Germany, but only a few prints in colour remain, no two
alike, trials in colour. He had looked for great things: "You know, I
mean them to wipe up the place before I get done," he said, and their
loss was a severe disappointment. Other lithographs, made then or
later, were published in the _Studio_, the _Art Journal_, _L'Estampe
Originale_, _L'Imagier_, the _Pagenat_, and one in our _Lithography
and Lithographers_. He never wanted to keep his work, no matter in
what medium, from the public. With commissions and experiments keeping
him busy in Paris, Whistler was, as he wrote to us in London, working
from morning to night, and in a condition for it he wouldn't change for
anything. He was compelled to change it only too soon.
CHAPTER XXXVIII: TRIALS AND GRIEFS. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN NINETY-FOUR TO
EIGHTEEN NINETY-SIX.
In 1894 interruptions came, some slight, but one so serious that life
and work were never the same again.
A tedious annoyance was caused by Du Maurier's _Trilby_ in _Harper's
Magazine_. Du Maurier represented the English students at Carrel's
(Gleyre's) as veritable Crichtons, while Whistler, under the name of
Joe Sibley, was ridiculed. Du Maurier's drawings left no doubt as to
the identity, for in one Whistler wears the _chapeau bizarre_ over his
curls. Another shows him running away from a studio fight, and the
text is more offensive. Joe Sibley is "'the Idle Apprentice,' the King
of Bohemia, _le roi des truands_, to whom everything was forgiven, as
to François Villon, _à cause de ses gentillesses_.... Always in debt
... vain, witty, and a most exquisite and original artist ... with an
unimpeachable moral tone.... Also eccentric in his attire ... the most
irresistible friend in the world as long as his friendship lasted,
but that was not for ever.... His enmity would take the simple and
straightforward form of trying to punch his ex-friend's head; and when
the ex-friend was too big he would get some new friend to help him....
His bark was worse than his bite ... he was better with his tongue than
his fists.... But when he met another joker he would just collapse
like a pricked bladder. He is now perched on such a topping pinnacle
(of fame and notoriety combined) that people can stare at him from two
hemispheres at once."
Du Maurier had posed as a friend for years, and in the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ Whistler protested against the insult. Du Maurier, to an
interviewer, expressed surprise; he thought the description of Joe
Sibley would recall the good times in Paris, and he pretended to be
amazed that Whistler did not agree. He claimed that he was one of
Whistler's victims, and quoted Sheridan Ford's pirated edition of _The
Gentle Art_:
"It was rather droll. Listen: 'Mr. Du Maurier and Mr. Wilde happening
to meet in the rooms where Mr. Whistler was holding his first
exhibition of Venice etchings, the latter brought the two face to
face, and, taking each by the arm, inquired, "I say, which one of you
two invented the other, eh?"' The obvious retort to that, on my part,
would have been that, if he did not take care, I would invent _him_,
but he had slipped away before either of us could get a word out.... I
did what I did in a playful spirit of retaliation for this little jibe
about me in his book."
The editor of _Harper's_ had not understood the offensive nature of the
passages. Whistler called his attention to them, and an apology was
published in the magazine (January 1895), the number was suppressed,
and Du Maurier was compelled to omit them, and to change Joe Sibley to
Bald Anthony in the book. Whistler, when the changes were submitted to
him, was satisfied. But he said:
"Well, you know, what would have happened to the new Thackeray if I
hadn't been willing? But I was gracious, and I gave my approval to
the sudden appearance in the story of an Anthony, tall and stout and
slightly bald. The dangerous resemblance was gone. And I wired--well,
you know, ha ha!--I wired to them over in America compliments and
complete approval of author's new and obscure friend, Bald Anthony!"
_Trilby_ was burlesqued at the Gaiety, and Whistler was dragged in as
_The Stranger_. His hat, overcoat, eye-glass, curls, and cane were
copied, but no one paid the slightest attention, and _The Stranger_
vanished after the first night.
Sometimes Whistler found insult where none was intended, as in the
case of a _Bibliography_ compiled in 1895 for the _Library Bulletin_
of the University of the State of New York--all the copies burnt, we
hear, in the fire at the State Capitol, Albany. It was an appreciation,
but it contained inaccuracies and quoted as authorities critics he
objected to, and he was more vexed by it than there was need. Another
annoyance was an anonymous article in _McClure's Magazine_; _Whistler,
Painter and Comedian_ (September 1896). He demanded an apology and
the suppression of the article, and both were granted. And so it went
on to the end; he was continually coming upon references to himself,
disfigured by misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and malice.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF MISS KINSELLA THE IRIS, ROSE AND GREEN
OIL
In the possession of Miss Kinsella
(_See page 325_)]
[Illustration: WHISTLER AT HIS PRINTING PRESS IN THE STUDIO, RUE
NOTRE-DAME-DES-CHAMPS
From a photograph by M. Dornac
(_See page 311_)]
These worries occupied his time and tried his temper. But he was
overwhelmed late in 1894 by a trouble infinitely more tragic. His wife
was taken ill with the terrible disease, cancer. They came to London to
consult the doctors in December. First they stayed at Long's Hotel in
Bond Street, Mrs. Whistler surrounded by her numerous sisters, the two
Paris servants, Louise and Constant, in attendance; then Mrs. Whistler
was under a doctor's care in Holles Street, and Whistler stopped with
his brother in Wimpole Street. Those who loved him would like to forget
his misery during the weeks and months that followed. Work was going on
somehow; not painting, that waited in Paris, but lithography--several
portraits of Lady Haden, a drawing in Wellington Street, and others.
But he told Mr. Way afterwards that he wanted them all destroyed; he
should not have worked when his heart was not in it: "It was madness on
my part." He brought proofs to show us. Almost every afternoon he would
take J. to Way's, where the lithographs were being transferred to the
stone and printed. He would lunch or dine with us, keeping up his brave
front, though we knew what was in his heart. He had not been in his
"Palatial Residence" two years before it was closed, and the canvases
were left untouched in the "Stupendous Studio." New honours and new
successes came: in 1894 the Temple Gold Medal from the Pennsylvania
Academy, in 1895 a Gold Medal from Antwerp, and innumerable
commissions. It was just as fortune smiled that the blow fell.
The Eden trial, which struck many as an unnecessary and almost farcical
episode in his life, distracted him during these tragic months. His
work ceased for weeks at a time, and he devoted himself to the case.
His journeys to Paris were frequent and his correspondence enormous.
The case was fought out in the courts of France. It arose out of the
uncertainty as to the price which Sir William Eden should pay for his
wife's portrait. He was introduced to Whistler by Mr. George Moore, to
whom Whistler had mentioned one hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds
for a sketch in water-colour or pastel. Whistler became interested
in his sitter and made a small full-length oil, for which he would
have asked a far larger sum. His irritation can be understood when
Sir William Eden attempted to make him accept as "a valentine"--for
it was paid on February 14--one hundred pounds in a sealed envelope.
Whistler felt that the amount should have been left to him to decide.
He refused to give up the picture, he cashed the cheque, and he did not
return the money until legal proceedings were taken by the Baronet.
Before the case came into court he wiped out the head. Even his friends
thought that Whistler made a grave mistake and prejudiced his case
when he cashed the cheque, instead of throwing it after the Baronet,
who, on his hasty retreat from the studio, Whistler said, protested
and threatened all the way down the six flights, while he from the top
urged the Baronet not to expose his nationality by so unseemly a noise
in a public place.
Whistler went to Paris for the trial before the Civil Tribunal on March
6, 1895. His advocates were Maître Ratier, by whose side he sat in
court, and Maître Beurdeley, a collector of his etchings. Sir William
Eden failed to appear. Whistler was ordered to deliver the portrait
as painted, a penalty to be imposed in case of delay; to refund
twenty-five hundred francs, his lowest price; to pay in addition one
thousand francs damages. The judge stated that he was in honour bound
not to deface the portrait after he had completed it, and that an
artist must carry out his contract.
To Whistler the judgment was unjust; he appealed in the Cour de
Cassation, and the matter dragged on until after Mrs. Whistler's death.
In England "An Artist" (J.) tried to raise a fund to pay the expenses
of the trial, in order "to show in some practical form artists'
appreciation for the genius of James McNeill Whistler." His appeal was
responded to by only one other artist, Mr. Frederick MacMonnies, and
was as unsuccessful as the subscription started after the Ruskin trial
in 1878.
Mr. George Moore had been the go-between when the portrait was
commissioned, Sir William Eden's ally in the legal business, and a
conspicuous figure in the newspaper muddle. After the trial Whistler
wrote Moore a scathing letter. Moore's answer was to taunt Whistler
with old age. This was published in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and
reprinted in French papers. Whistler was in France and he sent Moore
a challenge. Whistler's seconds were M. Octave Mirbeau and M.
Viélé-Griffin. Their challenge remained unanswered, but after several
days Moore relieved his feelings to a reporter. London looked upon the
challenge as Whistler's crowning joke. It was no joke to Moore, who was
sufficiently conversant with French manners to know how his conduct
would be received in Paris. Whistler's seconds sent a _procès verbal_
to the Press, stating that they had waited eight days for an answer,
and not having received one, they considered their mission terminated.
Thus before the world Whistler kept up the game, though in the Rue du
Bac life was a tragedy. Mrs. Whistler had returned more ill than ever.
Miss Ethel Philip was married from the house early in the summer to Mr.
Charles Whibley, and her sister, Miss Rosalind Birnie Philip, took her
place.
After the trial Whistler went back to work. He sent _The Little White
Girl_ to the International Exhibition at Venice; he exhibited the
second portrait of Mrs. Sickert at the Glasgow Institute; he chose six
lithographs for the Centenary Exhibition in Paris. A head of Carmen,
his model, was ready for the Portrait Painters in London. When in the
late summer he returned to England, and, with Mrs. Whistler, settled at
the Red Lion Hotel, Lyme Regis, he arranged a show of his lithographs
in London. The Society of Illustrators, of which he was Vice-President,
was preparing an anthology, _The London Garland_, edited by W. E.
Henley, illustrated by members, and published by Messrs. Macmillan. J.
asked him to contribute an illustration to a sonnet of Henley's. But
he had to abandon this plan and allow a Nocturne to be reproduced. He
made several lithographs at Lyme Regis: glowing forges, dark stables
with horses an animal painter would envy, the smith, and the landlord.
"Absolute failures, some," he told us sadly; "others, well, you know,
not bad!" Two of the pictures painted at Lyme Regis are masterpieces:
_The Little Rose of Lyme Regis_ and _The Master Smith_. In these he
solved the problem of carrying on his work as he wished until it was
finished. There also he painted the only large landscape we know of:
the white houses of the town, the hill-side with trees beyond.
While he was still in Dorset a prize was awarded him at Venice.
Several prizes in money were given in different sections to artists
of different nationalities. Whistler was awarded two thousand five
hundred francs by the City of Murano, the seventh on the list. He knew
the "enemies," foresaw the prattle there would be of the seventh-hand
compliment, and forestalled it by explaining in the Press how the
prizes had been awarded, his being equal to the first.
The exhibition of his lithographs was held at the Fine Art Society's
in December 1895. Seventy were shown, mostly of the work of the last
few years, and J. wrote an introduction to the catalogue, the only
time he asked anybody to "introduce" him. There were no decorations in
the gallery, nor was the catalogue in brown paper, save twenty-five
copies, but the prints were in his frames. English artists became
interested in lithography because they were asked to contribute to the
Centenary Exhibition in Paris, and, at the call of Leighton, they tried
their hands at it, more or less unsuccessfully. The contrast was great
between their work shown at Mr. Dunthorne's gallery and Whistler's,
whose prints alone are destined to live.
Whistler derived little pleasure from his triumph. The winter was
spent moving from place to place. His plans were made to go to New
York to consult an American specialist, forgetting as well as he could
"the vast far-offness" of America. But he stayed in London, first at
Garlant's Hotel, then in apartments in Half-Moon Street, later at the
De Vere Gardens Hotel, and then at the Savoy. Work of one sort or
another marked these moves: the lithograph of _Kensington Gardens_
from the De Vere Hotel; at the Savoy most pathetic drawings of his
wife, _The Siesta_ and _By the Balcony_, and the Thames from the
hotel windows. He had during the first months no studio in London. He
worked for a while in Mr. Walter Sickert's; Mr. Sargent lent his early
in 1896, when there was talk of a lithograph of Cecil Rhodes and a
portrait of Mr. A. J. Pollitt, of whom he made a lithograph, though the
painting, begun later in Fitzroy Street, was destroyed.
He interested himself in the experiments of others. In the winter of
1895 J. was asked by the _Daily Chronicle_ to edit the illustration
of a series of articles on London in support of the Progressive
County Council. It was an event of importance to illustrators,
process-men, and printers: the first effort in England for the artistic
illustration of a daily paper. The _Daily Graphic_ was illustrated,
but its draughtsmen were trained to adapt their drawings to the
printer. The scheme now was to oblige the printer to adapt himself to
the illustrator. Every illustrator of note in London contributed.
Burne-Jones' frontispiece to William Morris' _News from Nowhere_ was
enlarged and printed successfully. J. asked Whistler to let him try
the experiment of enlarging one of the Thames etchings. Whistler was
interested. _Black Lion Wharf_ was selected and printed in the _Daily
Chronicle_, February 22, 1895, the very day of the month, Washington's
Birthday, when, ten years later, the London Memorial Exhibition
opened. With its publication the success of the series was complete,
not politically, for the twenty-four drawings were said to have lost
the Progressives twenty-five seats. The etching stood the enlarging
superbly. J. made the proprietors pay for the print, the first time
Whistler was paid for the use of one of his works not made as an
illustration.
Whistler came to us almost daily. Late one afternoon he brought his
transfer-paper, and made a lithograph of J. as he sprawled comfortably,
and uncomfortably had to keep the pose, in an easy-chair before the
fire. Whistler made four portraits in succession of J. and one of E.,
each in an afternoon. He drew on as the light faded, and the portrait
of E. was done while the firelight flickered on her face and on his
paper. Then he told us he had taken a studio in Fitzroy Street to
paint a large full-length of J. in a Russian cloak--_The Russian
Schube_--which he thought the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts might
like to have. But J. was called away, Mrs. Whistler grew rapidly worse,
the scheme was dropped never to be taken up again.
On other afternoons he and J. would go to Way's, where the Savoy
drawings were put on the stone. The lithotint of _The Thames_ was
done on a stone sent to the hotel. Drawings made in Paris, Lyme
Regis, London were transferred and gone all over with chalk, stump,
scraper. He worked in a little room adjoining Mr. Way's office, the
walls of which were covered with pastels and water-colours by him and
C. E. Holloway. There he drew the portraits of Mr. Thomas Way in the
firelight, never stopping until dark, when Mr. Way would bring out some
rare old liqueur, and there was a rest before he hurried back to the
Savoy. His nights were spent sitting up by his wife. He slept a little
in the morning and usually came to us in the afternoon, at times so
exhausted that we feared more for him than for her.
The studio at No. 8 Fitzroy Street was a huge place at the back of the
house, one flight up, reached by a ramshackle glass-roofed passage.
The portrait of Mr. Pollitt was started and one of Mr. Robert Barr's
daughter, which has disappeared. Mr. Cowan sat again, and another was
begun of Mr. S. R. Crockett, who describes the sittings:
"I don't think he liked me at first. Someone had told him I was a
Philistine of Askelon.... He told me lots about his early times in
London and Paris, but all in fragments, just as the thing occurred to
him. Like an idiot, I took no notes. Lots, too, about Carlyle and his
sittings, as likely to interest a Scot. He had got on unexpectedly well
with True Thomas, chiefly by letting him do the talking, and never
opening his mouth, except when Carlyle wanted him to talk. Carlyle
asked him about Paris, and was unexpectedly interested in the _cafés_,
and so forth. Whistler told him the names of some--Riche, Anglais,
Véfour, and Foyot and Lavenue on the south side. Carlyle seemed to be
mentally taking notes. Then he suddenly raised his head and demanded,
'Can a man get a chop there?'
"Concerning my own sittings, he was very particular that I should
always be in good form--'trampling' as he said--otherwise he would
tell me to go away and play.... Mr. Fisher Unwin had arranged for a
lithograph, but Whistler said he would make a picture like a postage
stamp, and next year all the exhibitions would be busy as anthills with
similar 'postage stamp' portraits. 'Some folk think life-size means six
foot by three; I'll show them!' he said more than once. I wanted to
shell out as he went on, and once, being flush (new book or something),
I said I had fifty pounds which was annoying me, and I wished he would
take it. He was very sweet about it, and said he understood. Money
burnt a hole in his pocket, too, but he could not take any money, as he
might never finish the work. Any day his brush might drop, and he could
not do another stroke.
"It was a bad omen! His wife grew worse. He sent me word not to come.
She died, and I never saw him after. I wish you could tell me what
became of that picture. He called it _The Grey Man_."
This is another example of Whistler's repetition of titles. Mr.
Cowan's portrait, painted the same year, was _The Grey Man_ too. Of
Mr. Crockett's, Whistler said to us that Crockett was delighted with
it as far as it had gone, and he was rather pleased with it himself.
He painted several of these small full-lengths, which were to show
the fallacy of the life-size theory and of the belief that the
importance of a portrait depends on the size of the canvas. Kennedy,
after the portrait destroyed in Paris, stood for a second, now in the
Metropolitan Museum; Mr. Arnold Hannay for another; C. E. Holloway for
_The Philosopher_, which Whistler considered particularly successful.
In the spring Whistler moved his wife from the Savoy to St. Jude's
Cottage, Hampstead Heath, rented from Canon and Mrs. Barnett. After
this he began to give up hope. It was a sad day when for the first time
he admitted, "We are very, very bad." And we understood that the end
was near the afternoon when he, the most fastidious, appeared wearing
one black and one brown shoe, and explaining that he had a corn. But,
indeed, many times it seemed as if in his despair he did not know what
he was doing. The last day Mr. Sydney Pawling met him walking, running
across the Heath, looking at nothing, seeing no one. Mr. Pawling,
alarmed, stopped him. "Don't speak! Don't speak! It is terrible!" he
said, and was gone. That was the end.
Mrs Whistler died on May 10 and was buried at Chiswick on the 14th. We
have heard that the funeral was arranged for the 13th, but Whistler,
objecting to the date, postponed it a day, and Mrs. Whistler was buried
on her birthday. He never would do anything on the 13th if he could
help it.
We were abroad, but the first Sunday after E.'s return he came and
asked her to go with him to the National Gallery. There he showed her
the pictures "Trixie" loved, standing long before Tintoretto's _Milky
Way_, her favourite. There was no talk about pictures--Canaletto was
barely looked at--there was no talk about anything, and the tragedy
that could not be forgotten was never referred to. But M. Paul Renouard
was in the Gallery and came to Whistler with the word of comfort, from
which he shrank. During the first few months after Mrs. Whistler's
death, in the shock of his sorrow and loss, Whistler made her sister,
Miss Rosalind Birnie Philip, his ward, and drew up a new will
appointing her his heiress and executrix; eventually cancelling his
former bequests, and leaving everything to her absolutely.
CHAPTER XXXIX: ALONE. THE YEAR EIGHTEEN NINETY-SIX.
Whistler stayed a short time at Hampstead with his sisters-in-law,
and then went to Mr. Heinemann at Whitehall Court, where he remained,
on and off, for two or three years, spending only the periods of Mr.
Heinemann's absence at Garlant's Hotel or in Paris. He was with us day
after day. Little notes came from the studio to ask if we would be in
and alone in the evening, and, if so, he would dine with us. At first
he would not join us if we expected anyone. He liked to sit and talk,
he said, but he could not meet other people. He saw few outside the
studio, except Mr. Heinemann, Mr. Kennedy, and ourselves. We went to
the studio, and often he and J. sketched together in the streets.
For these sketching expeditions Whistler prepared beforehand the
colours he wanted to use, and if the day turned out too grey or too
radiant for his scheme nothing was done. The chosen colours were
mixed, and little tubes, filled with them, were carried in his small
paint-box, which held also the tiny palette with the pure colours
arranged on it, his brushes, and two or three small panels. Many
studies were made. The most important was of St. John's, Westminster.
He loved the quiet corner, now destroyed, and he went there many
times. He worked away, his top hat jammed down on his nose, sitting
on a three-legged stool, his paint-box on his knee, the panel in it,
beginning at once in colour on the panel, usually finishing the sketch
in one afternoon, though he took two over the church. The painting was
simply done, commencing with the point of interest, the masses put
in bigly, the details worked into them. Just as in the studio, five
minutes after he had begun he became so absorbed in his work that he
forgot everything else until it grew too dark to see. When ladies would
come and recognise him, he stopped, got up, and spoke to them, always
charmingly.
[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION TO LITTLE JOHANNES
PORTRAIT
DRAWINGS ON WOOD
In the Pennell Collection, Library of Congress, Washington
(_See page 270_)]
[Illustration: WATER-COLOUR LANDSCAPE
Loaned by Mrs. Mortimer Menpes]
He made little journeys during the summer, one to Rochester and
Canterbury, with Mrs. Whibley and Miss Birnie Philip. But, disgusted
with the inns and the food, he came back after a day or so. Another was
with Mr. Kennedy, who writes us:
"It was agreed that Whistler and myself should go to France. Neither of
us had any idea _where_ we were going except to Havre. We arrived in
the early morning, and after he got shaved and had coffee, we took the
boat to Honfleur, which, as you know, has a tidal service. 'Do you know
where we are going?' I said to him. 'No, I don't,' said he. 'Well,'
said I, 'there is a white-whiskered, respectable-looking old gentleman;
perhaps he knows the lay of the ground. Tip him a stave.'
"So Whistler asked him about the hotels in Honfleur. There were
two--the Cheval Blanc on the quay, and the Ferme de St. Siméon on
the outskirts. The Cheval was so dirty that I got the only cab, and,
piling the luggage on it ourselves, drove off to the farm. Fortunately,
there were two vacant rooms, and we stayed there a week. The cooking
was excellent, and, of course, _Madame_ knew who _Monsieur Vistlaire_
was. Whistler used to kick up a row every night with me about the
'ridiculous British' to divert his mind, I imagine, and sometimes my
retorts were so sharp that I said to myself, 'All is over between us
now.' But he used to bob up serenely in the morning, as if nothing had
happened, and after _déjeuner_ he would take his small box of colours
and paint in the large church. I used to stroll about the town and look
in occasionally to see that he came to no harm. It was here that he
said he was going over to Rome some day, and when I said, 'Don't forget
to let me know, so that I may be on hand to see you wandering up the
aisle in sackcloth and ashes, with a candle in each hand, or scrubbing
the floor!' he said, in a tone of horrified astonishment, 'Good God!
O'K.,[11] is it possible? Why, I thought they would make me a hell of a
swell of an abbot, or something like that.'
"It was amusing to see him manoeuvre to get near the big kitchen fire,
overcoat on. He was a true American in his liking for heat, and the
way he would sidle into the kitchen, which opened on out-of-doors, all
the time mildly flattering _Madame_, was very characteristic. We went
to Trouville one day on the diligence, and had a capital _déjeuner_ at
the Café de Paris, before which Whistler said, 'We must do this _en
Prince_, O'K.!' 'All right, your Highness, I'm with you!' Afterwards,
on the beach, he went to sleep on a chair, leaning back against a
bath-house, his straw hat tipped on his nose. It was funny, but sleep
after luncheon was a necessity to him. Coming back to London, in the
harbour of Southampton, after listening to the usual unwearying talk
against the British, I said, 'Oh, be reasonable!' 'Why should I?' said
he."
The Ferme de St. Siméon has been called the Cradle of Impressionism.
It was here that Boudin lived and most of the Impressionists came, and
round about they found their subjects.
Later on Whistler spent a few days at Calais in the Meurice, Sterne's
Hotel, where he was miserable. Then he tried to find J. at Whitby,
where they missed each other, and where he said the glitter of the
windows made the town look like the Crystal Palace.
Whistler recovered slowly, and journeys helped him less than work in
the studio, where, by degrees, he returned to the schemes so sadly
interrupted. We remember his coming to us with Mr. Kennedy one Sunday
afternoon, bringing up our three flights of stairs _The Master Smith_
to show it to us once again before it went to America. Mr. Kennedy
had captured it, fearful of a touch being added. It was placed on one
chair, Whistler, on another facing it, wretched at the thought of
parting with it. It was always a wrench to let a picture go.
After a while he did not mind meeting a few people. A man he liked to
see was Timothy Cole. There was a great scheme that he should make a
series of drawings on wood and Cole engrave them. Cole brought the
blocks prepared for him to draw on. But that is the last we or Cole
heard about it, though we saw the blocks frequently at Fitzroy Street.
Mr. Cole says:
"I did not speak to him more than once after I had given him the wood
blocks. I did not think it prudent to press him about the matter,
fearing he might get disgusted and give it up.... The blocks were the
size of the _Century_ page."
Cole gave Whistler some of his prints, and they pleased Whistler very
much, though he rarely cared to own the pictures and prints of other
artists. Once when an etcher gave him a not very wonderful proof, he
tore it up, saying, "I do not collect etchings, I make them! I do not
collect the works of my contemporaries!" With the exception of his
portrait by Boxall we never saw a scrap of anyone else's work about
his studio or his house, save the forgery someone sent him which he
kept and hung for a while. Another side to Mr. Cole was his endless
practical jokes. He used to do extraordinary things, to Whistler's
amusement. On one point only they were not in sympathy: Mr. Cole's
theories of diet. One evening at dinner Cole told us that he and his
family were living chiefly on rhubarb tops, they have such a "foody"
taste, his son thought. "Dear me, poor fellow," said Whistler, "it
sounds as if once, long long ago, he had really eaten, and still has
a dim memory of what food is!" "And spinach," Cole added, "it's fine.
We eat it raw, it's wonderful the things it does for you!" "But what
does it do for you?" Whistler asked, and Cole began a dissertation on
the juices of the stomach. "Well, you know," Whistler told him, "when
you begin to talk about the stomach and its juices, it's time to stop
dining." After that, Cole managed to dismiss his theories and dine like
other people when with us.
Professor John Van Dyke was in London that fall, and Whistler was
willing to come to meet him. A long darn in a tablecloth afterwards
bore witness to the animation of one of those dinners--Whistler's
knife brought down sharply on the table to emphasise his argument. The
subject was _Las Meniñas_, which he had never seen, which everyone
else had seen. Velasquez painted the picture just as you see it,
he maintained; no one agreed. Perspectives and plans were drawn on
the unfortunate cloth, chairs were pushed back, the situation grew
critical. Whistler was forced to yield slowly, when, of a sudden,
his eyes fell on Van Dyke's feet in long, pointed shoes, then the
American fashion, their points carried to a degree of fineness no
English bootmaker could rival. "My God, Van Dyke, where did you get
your shoes?" Whistler asked. We could not go on fighting after that;
defeat was avoided. Though Whistler had never been to Madrid, it seemed
as if he had seen the pictures, so familiar was he with them, and
though he was at times not right about them, his interest was endless.
We remember "Bob" Stevenson telling him, to his great delight, how,
one summer day with J. in the Long Gallery of the Prado where _Las
Meniñas_ then hung, an old peasant dressed in faded blue-green came
and sat down on the green bench in front, and straightway he became
part of the picture, so true was its atmosphere. There are legends of
Whistler's descent into a _Casa des Huespedes_ in Madrid with Sargent
and J., but J. never was there and Sargent denies it. It is another
legend. Whistler could get more from a glance at a photograph than most
painters from six months' copying.
Another evening Claude was the subject--Claude compared to Turner.
Whistler could never see the master Englishman adored in Turner; not
because of Ruskin, for Mr. Walter Greaves told us that years before the
Ruskin trial Whistler "reviled Turner." Mr. Cole in 1896 was engraving
Turners in the National Gallery, and Whistler insisted on their
inferiority to the Claudes, so amazingly demonstrated in Trafalgar
Square, where Turner invited the comparison disastrous to him. The
argument grew heated, and Whistler adjourned it until the next morning,
when he arranged to meet Cole and J. in the Gallery. Whistler compared
the work of the two artists hanging side by side, as Turner wished:
"Well, you know, you have only to look. Claude is the artist who knows
there is no painting the sun itself, and so he chooses the moment
after the sun has set, or has hid behind a cloud, and its light fills
the sky, and that light he suggests as no other painter ever could.
But Turner must paint nothing less than the sun, and he sticks on a
blob of paint--let us be thankful that it isn't a red wafer, as in
some of his other pictures--and there isn't any illusion whatever, and
the Englishman lifts up his head in ecstatic conceit with the English
painter, who alone has dared to do what no artist would ever be fool
enough to attempt! And look at the architecture. Claude could draw a
classical building as it is; Turner must invent, imagine architecture
as no architect could design it, and no builder could put it up, and as
it never would stand up--the old amateur!"
They went on to the Canalettos and Guardis Whistler could not weary
of--to Canaletto's big red church and the tiny Rotunda at Vauxhall
with the little figures, from which Hogarth learned so much. Whistler
always acknowledged Guardi's influence, though it had not led him in
Venice to paint pictures like Guardi or Canaletto either. And he never
tired of pointing out that great artists like Guardi and Canaletto
and Velasquez, who were born and worked in the South, did not try to
paint sunlight, but kept their work grey and low in tone. That day at
the National Gallery, before he could finish explaining the similarity
between his work and Guardi's, the talk came to an end, for half the
copyists in the room had left their easels. He stopped. He could not
talk to an audience which he was not sure was sympathetic. Sure of
sympathy, he would talk for ever in praise of the luminosity of Claude,
the certainty of Canaletto, the wonderful tone of Guardi, the character
and colour of Hogarth. Another Italian about whom he was enthusiastic
was Michael Angelo Caravaggio, admiring his things in the Louvre.
Whistler maintained that the exact knowledge, the science, of the Old
Masters was the reason of their greatness. The modern painter has a
few tricks, a few fads; these give out, and nothing is left. Knowledge
is inexhaustible. Tintoretto did not find his way until he was forty.
Titian was painting in as masterly a manner in his last year as in his
youth. And speaking of the cleverness--a term he hated--of the modern
man, he said:
[Illustration: THE MASTER SMITH OF LYME REGIS
OIL
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
(_See page 331_)]
[Illustration: THE SMITH
PASSAGE DU DRAGON
LITHOGRAPH. W. 73
(_See page 326_)]
"Think of the finish, the delicacy, the elegance, the repose of a
little Terborgh, Vermeer, Metsu. These were masters who could paint
interiors, chandeliers, and all the rest; and what a difference between
them and the clever little interiors now!"
In the autumn Whistler established Miss Birnie Philip and her mother in
the Rue du Bac and returned to Mr. Heinemann's flat at Whitehall Court,
making it so much his home that before long he was laughingly alluding
to "my guest Heinemann." It is not likely that the two would ever have
parted had not Mr. Heinemann married and even then Whistler stayed with
him as long as his health remained good, dependent on the friendship
formed late in life with a man many years younger. When Mr. Heinemann
was away he complained that London was duller and blacker than ever.
Whistler shrank from condolence in his great grief or from a revival of
the memories of those terrible weeks. His host was careful or we would
invite Whistler to us if anybody was expected at Whitehall Court. After
three or four years Mr. Heinemann's married life ended abruptly, and
Whistler at once suggested that they should go back to the old way.
Mr. Heinemann took another flat in Whitehall Court with this idea. But
before the plan could be realised Whistler died.
In the autumn of 1896 Mr. Henry Savage Landor, back from Japan and
Korea, also stayed with Mr. Heinemann; "a rare fellow, full of real
affection," Whistler said of him. They sat up for hours together night
after night. Whistler slept badly, and Mr. Landor can do with less
sleep than most people. There was a skull in the drawing-room that
Mr. Landor tells us Whistler sketched over and over again, while they
talked till morning. When they drew the curtains it was day; then
Whistler dressed, breakfasted, and went to the studio. He brought us
stories of Mr. Landor; the way in which he would start for the ends of
the earth as if to stroll in Piccadilly, "leaving the costume of travel
to the Briton crossing the Channel"; or, in light shoes, "outwalk the
stoutest-shod gillie over Scotch moors." Then Whistler brought us
Mr. Landor, with whom our friendship dates from the morning when, at
Whistler's request, he sat Japanese fashion on the floor in front of
our fire, a rug wrapped round him for kimono, and devoured imaginary
rice with pencils for chopsticks. When Mr. Landor had his horrible
experiences in Thibet and the story of his tortures was telegraphed
to Europe, Whistler was the first to send him a cable rejoicing at
his escape. Whistler also took a fancy while in Whitehall Court to
Mr. Heinemann's brother Edmund who was, Whistler said, "something in
the City," who saw to one or two investments for him, and whom he
christened the "Napoleon of Finance" and described as "sitting in a
tangled web of telegraphs and telephones." He never had invested money
before, and it was with pride that he deposited at the bank his scrip
and collected his dividends. To end a discussion about the City Mr.
Edmund Heinemann once said to him, "You ain't on the Stock Exchange!"
"Well," said Whistler, "you just thank your stars, Eddy, I ain't,
because if I was there wouldn't be much room for you! What!"
Evening after evening he would linger in the studio until he could see
no longer; keeping dinner waiting at Whitehall Court, so that no time
could ever be fixed. Arriving, he would mix cocktails, an art in which
he excelled and must have learned in the days when he stayed away from
the Coast Survey. If it did not suit him to dine at Whitehall Court
he would write or wire to say he could dine with us if we liked; or
that he had amazing things to tell us; should he come? or that he was
sure we were both wanting to see him; or Heinemann's servant, Payne,
would announce his coming; or he would drive straight from the studio,
reaching us sometimes before the notes he had sent, or with the wires
unsent in his pocket; almost the only time we have known him willingly
not to dress for dinner. On rare occasions he came in after we had
dined, demanded the _fortune du pot_ of our small establishment, and
was content no matter how meagre that fortune might prove, though if it
included "a piece of American cake," or anything sweet, he was better
pleased. He grumbled only over our Sunday supper, which was cold in
English fashion, out of deference to Bowen, our old English servant.
Then he would bring Constant, his valet, model, and cook, to make an
onion soup or an omelette. Constant was succeeded by a little Belgian
called Marie, who was supposed to look after the studio, and who, when
he stayed at Garlant's and we dined with him there, would be summoned
to dress the salad and make the coffee. It was not long after this
that, by the doctor's advice, he gave up coffee and stopped smoking
too. Few men ever ate less than Whistler, but few were more fastidious
about what they did eat. He made the best of our English cooking while
it lasted, but he was glad when Bowen was replaced by Louise and then
Augustine, who were French and who could make the soups, salads, and
dishes he liked, and who did not hesitate to scold him when he was late
and ruined the dinner.
These meetings must have been pleasant to Whistler as to us; there
were weeks when he came every evening. On his arrival he might be
silent, but after his nap he would begin talking, and his talk was
as good on the last evening with us as on the first. We shall always
regret that we made no notes of what he said, though the charm of
his talk would have eluded a shorthand reporter. Much can never be
forgotten. In "surroundings of antagonism" he wrapped this talk as
well as himself in "a species of misunderstanding" and deliberately
mystified, bewildered, and aggravated the company. But when disguise
was not necessary, and he talked at his ease, he impressed everyone
with his sanity of judgment, breadth of interest, and keenness of
intellect. His reading was extensive, though we never ceased to wonder
when he found time for it, save during sleepless nights. His talk
abounded in quotations, especially from the Bible, that "splendid mine
of invective," he described it. His diversity of knowledge was as
unexpected as his extensive reading, and we felt that he knew things
intuitively, just as by some uncanny faculty he heard everything said
about him. When he chose he held the floor and was then at his best.
"I am not arguing with you, I am telling you," he would say, and he
would lose his temper, which was violent as ever, but he was friendlier
than before when it was over. He liked to hear the last gossip, and
reproached us if we had none for him. More than once he told E. her
discretion amounted positively to indiscretion; he was sure she had
a cupboard full of skeletons, and some day, when she was pulling the
strings of one carefully to put it back in place, the whole lot would
come rattling down about her ears. And so, the shadow of sorrow in the
background, the evenings went by that winter in the little dining-room
which had been Etty's studio where the huge Edinburgh pictures were
painted.
The Eden affair was still dragging on, and Whistler was disgusted to
find English artists as afraid to support him as at the Ruskin trial.
One day in Bond Street he met a Follower, just returned to town,
arm-on-arm with "the Baronet." The Follower at once left a card at
Fitzroy Street. Whistler wrote "Judas Iscariot" on it and sent it back
to him. A few weeks later the New English Art Club hung Sir William
Eden's work, and with it, he said, "their shame, upon their walls."
He complimented them, much to their discomfort, on their appetite for
"toad." To clear the air, which had become sultry in the art clubs and
studios, we invited Professor Fred Brown and Dr. D. S. MacColl to meet
him one evening at dinner, and discuss things. Professor Brown had
another engagement. Dr. MacColl came, and Whistler, who did not mind
how hard a man fought if he fought at all, continued on terms with him.
But the New English Art Club he never forgave.
A show of J.'s lithographs of Granada and the Alhambra was arranged
at the Fine Art Society's during December 1896, and for the catalogue
Whistler wrote an introductory note, and another for a show of Phil
May's drawings in the same gallery. He designed the cover for Mr.
Charles Whibley's _Book of Scoundrels_, and also two covers for novels
by Miss Elizabeth Robins, _Below the Salt_, for which he drew a silver
ship, and _The Open Question_, for which he devised shields; all
three books published by Mr. Heinemann. The design for the _Book of
Scoundrels_ was a gallows, drawn in thin lines, with rope and noose
attached. Henley, to whom it was shown, asked whether the gallows
should not have been drawn with a support. Whistler's comment was:
"Well, you know, that's the usual sort of gallows, but this one will
do. It will hang all of us. Just like Henley's selfishness to want a
strong one!" an allusion to Henley's size.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF MRS. A. J. CASSATT
(_See page 257_)]
[Illustration: THE BEACH
WATER-COLOUR
In the possession of Mrs. Knowles
(_See page 274_)]
[Illustration: SHOP WINDOW AT DIEPPE
WATER-COLOUR
(_See page 352_)]
During the winter Whistler met Sir Seymour Haden for the last time
at a dinner given by the Society of Illustrators (of which both were
Vice-Presidents) to Mr. Alfred Parsons, on his election to the Royal
Academy. It was Whistler's first appearance in public since his wife's
death, and as we had persuaded him to go, never anticipating any such
meeting, we were annoyed to think that we had exposed him to the
unpleasantness of it, or Haden either, for we had had no part in their
quarrels. However, as soon as Whistler saw Haden he woke up and began
to enjoy himself. His laugh carried far. Haden heard it, and may have
seen the three monocles on the dinner-table. He looked toward the
laugh, dropped his spoon in his soup-plate, and left. Later Whistler
was called upon to make a speech and could not get out of it. But it
was an anti-climax. The event of the dinner was over.
At Christmas he went with Mr. and Mrs. T. Fisher Unwin and ourselves to
Bournemouth, where our hotel was an old-fashioned inn, selected from
the guide-book because it was the nearest to the sea. We breakfasted
in our rooms, we met at lunch to order dinner, and the rest of the day
Whistler insisted must be spent getting an appetite for it--wandering
on the cliffs, he with his little paint-box. But the sea was on the
wrong side, the wind blew the wrong way, he could do nothing. Some
days we took long drives. One damp, cold, cheerless afternoon we
stopped at a small inn in Poole. The landlady, watching Whistler sip
his hot whisky and water, was convinced he was somebody, but was
unable to place him. "And who do you suppose I am?" Whistler asked at
last. "I can't exactly say, sir, but I should fancy you was from the
'Alls!" Aubrey Beardsley was then at Boscombe, a further stage in his
brave fight with death, and we went to see him. But the sight of the
suffering of others was too cruel a reminder to Whistler, and he shrank
from going to Beardsley.
Dinner was the event of the day, and it would have proved a disaster
had Whistler not seen humour in being expected to eat it, so little
was it what he thought a dinner should be. On Christmas Day he was
melancholy and stared at the turkey and bread sauce, the sodden
potatoes and soaked greens: "To think of my beautiful room in the Rue
du Bac, and the rest of them there, eating their Christmas dinner,
having up my wonderful old Pouilly from my cellar."
But we had something else to talk about. In the _Saturday Review_ of
that week, December 26, there was an article, signed Walter Sickert,
that was of interest to us all.
[Footnote 11: Whistler never lost his fancy for inventing names for his
friends, and O'K. was the one he found for Mr. Kennedy, rarely calling
him by any other either in conversation or correspondence.]
CHAPTER XL: THE LITHOGRAPH CASE. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN NINETY-SIX AND
EIGHTEEN NINETY-SEVEN.
Mr. Sickert's article was ostensibly inspired by the show of J.'s
lithographs of Granada at the Fine Art Society's, which Whistler had
introduced. Whistler understood it to be an attack upon himself, as
well as upon J., whose lithographs alone it pretended to deal with.
As a rule, Whistler's lithographs were made on lithographic paper and
transferred to the stone. The article argued that to pass off drawings
made on paper as lithographs was as misleading to "the purchaser on the
vital point of commercial value" as to sell photogravures for etchings,
which, when Sir Hubert Herkomer had done so, led to a protest from
J. and Whistler, and also from Mr. Sickert, whose condemnation had
been strong. The article, therefore, was written either ignorantly or
maliciously, for no such distinction in lithography has ever been made.
Transfer-paper is as old as Senefelder, the inventor of lithography,
who looked upon it as the most important part of his invention. The
comment amounted to a charge of dishonesty, and an apology was demanded
by J. The apology was refused by Mr. Frank Harris, editor of the
_Saturday Review_, and consequently Messrs. Lewis and Lewis brought an
action for libel against writer and editor.
The action stood in J.'s name, and Whistler was the principal witness.
In the hope that the matter might be settled by an apology and without
appeal to the law, Mr. Heinemann arranged a meeting between the
editor of the _Saturday Review_ and Whistler, but nothing came of
it. People who knew nothing of lithography got involved in the case,
and our friend Harold Frederic, for one, entangled himself with the
enemy. Others were found to know a great deal whom we never suspected
of knowing anything, and through Whistler we discovered that Mr.
Alfred Gilbert started life as a lithographer, was indignant with
the _Saturday Review_, and only too willing to offer his help to us.
Meetings followed on Sunday evenings in the huge Maida Vale house where
Mr. Gilbert was trying to revive mediæval relations between master and
workman and live the life of a craftsman with pupils and assistants, a
brave experiment which ended in failure.
The case was fixed for April 1897, the most inconvenient time of the
year for the artist who exhibits. Whistler was working on the portrait
of Miss Kinsella, and he had promised three pictures to the _Salon:
Green and Violet_, _Rose and Gold_, and a Nocturne. M. Helleu, who
was in London, catalogued and measured them, reserving space on the
wall. Only a few days were left before sending in and the work would
never be done in time. Whistler was in despair. It was then, too, he
learned that C. E. Holloway, a distinguished artist whom the world
never knew, was ill in his studio near by. Holloway was anything but a
successful man, and Whistler was shocked to find him in bed, lacking
every comfort. He provided doctors, nurses, medicine, and food, and
looked after the dying man's family. He spent afternoons in Holloway's
tiny bedroom. All this took up time and made it difficult to get his
pictures ready for the _Salon_.
He called one morning on his way to the studio to tell us of the death
of Holloway. He was going to the funeral, and suggested a fund to
purchase some of the pictures and give the proceeds to the family. He
was nervous and worried, the _Salon_ clamouring for his work on the one
hand, the trial claiming him on the other. People, he complained, did
not seem to understand the importance of his time. Things were amazing
in the studio, and he was expected to leave them just to go into court.
No, he wouldn't, that was the end of it. The pictures must be finished.
J. said to him: "The case is as much yours as mine, and you must come.
Your reputation is involved. There will be an end to your lithography
if we lose. You must fight."
Whistler liked one the better for the contradiction he was supposed
unable to bear, and he answered: "Well, you know, but really--why, of
course, Joseph, it's all right. I'm coming; of course, we'll fight it
through together. I never meant not to. That's all right."
And to E., who went with him to the "Temple of Pomona" in the Strand,
to order flowers for Holloway, he kept saying: "You know, really,
Joseph mustn't talk like that! Of course, it's all right. Of course, I
never meant not to come. You must tell him it's all right. I never back
out!"
His work stopped. His pictures did not go to Paris. He stood by us.
The case was tried in the King's Bench Division on April 5, before Mr.
Justice Mathew. We were represented by Sir Edward Clarke, Q.C., and
Mr. Eldon Bankes. Whistler arrived early. In the great hall he met the
counsel for the other side, Mr. Bigham, an acquaintance, and, leaning
on his arm, entered the court, "capturing the enemy's counsel on the
way," he said, as he sat down between us and Sir George Lewis. The
counsel are now both judges.
J., in the witness-box, pointed out that he had made lithographs both
on paper and on stone; that there was no difference between them, an
historical fact which he was able to prove; that for the defendants
to deny that a lithograph made on paper was as much a lithograph as
a lithograph made on stone showed that they knew nothing about the
subject, or else were acting out of malice.
Whistler was called next. He said his grievance was the accusation that
he pursued the same evil practice. He was asked by Mr. Bigham if he was
very angry with Mr. Sickert, and he replied he might not be angry with
Mr. Sickert, but he was disgusted that "distinguished people like Mr.
Pennell and myself are attacked by an absolutely unknown authority (Mr.
Sickert), an insignificant and irresponsible person."
"Then," said Mr. Bigham, "Mr. Sickert is an insignificant and
irresponsible person who can do no harm?"
Whistler answered: "Even a fool can do harm, and if any harm is done
to Mr. Pennell it is done to me. This is a question for all artists."
And he added that Mr. Sickert's "pretended compliments and flatteries
were a most impertinent piece of insolence, tainted with a certain
obsequious approach."
Further asked if this was his action, he said: "I am afraid if Mr.
Pennell had not taken these proceedings, I should."
"You are working together then?"
"No, we are on the same side."
"Are you bearing any part of the costs?"
"No, but I am quite willing."
Sir Edward Clarke then interposed and asked if there was any foundation
for that question.
"Only the lightness and delicacy of the counsel's suggestion."
[Illustration: THE THAMES
LITHOTINT. W. 125
(_See page 333_)]
[Illustration: FIRELIGHT. JOSEPH PENNELL. NO. 1
LITHOGRAPH. W. 104
By permission of T. Fisher Unwin, Esq.
(_See page 333_)]
At the end of the cross-examination Whistler adjusted his eye-glass,
put his hat on the rail of the witness-box, slowly pulled off one glove
after the other. He turned to the judge and said:
"And now, my Lord, may I tell you why we are all here?"
"No, Mr. Whistler," said his Lordship; "we are all here because we
cannot help it."
Whistler left the box. What he meant to say no one will ever know. We
asked him later. He shook his head. The moment for saying it had passed.
Sir Sidney Colvin, Keeper of the Print Room of the British Museum;
Mr. Strange, of the Art Library, South Kensington; Mr. Way and Mr.
Goulding, professional lithographic printers; and Mr. Alfred Gilbert
were our witnesses.
Mr. Bigham said that the case was a storm in a teacup blown up by
Whistler, and that the article could do no harm to anybody.
Mr. Sickert protested that he was familiar with all the processes of
lithography; that the plaintiff's lithographs were not lithographs,
but, as a matter of fact, mere transfers. He had submitted the article
to another paper, which refused it before it was accepted by the
_Saturday Review_. He had been under the impression that the plaintiff
would like a newspaper correspondence. He was actuated by a pedantic
purism. Cross-examined by Sir Edward Clarke, he had to admit by
implication that he intended to charge the plaintiff with dishonest
practices, and that he had caught Mr. Pennell, the purist, tripping.
He had to admit that the only lithograph he ever published was made
in the same way, and he had called it, or allowed it to be called, a
lithograph.
Mr. Sickert's witnesses scarcely helped him. Mr. C. H. Shannon's
testimony was more favourable to us than to him. Mr. Rothenstein
testified that all the lithographs he had published were done exactly
as Whistler and J. had done theirs, and as he came out of the box fell
into his hat. Mr. George Moore solemnly proclaimed that he knew nothing
about lithographs, but that he knew Degas. "What's Degas?" roared the
judge, thinking some new process was being sprung on him, and Mr. Moore
vanished. The editor of the _Saturday Review_ acknowledged that he
had published an illustrated supplement full of lithographs done on
transfer-paper and advertised by him as lithographs; that he had not
known what was in Mr. Sickert's article until it appeared.
The judge, in summing up, said that a critic might express a most
disparaging opinion on an artist's work and might refer to him in
the most disagreeable terms, but he must not attribute to the artist
discreditable conduct, unless he could prove that his charge was true.
If the jury thought the criticism merely sharp and exaggerated, they
would find a verdict for the defendant, but if not--that is, if it was
more than this--they should consider to what damages the plaintiff was
entitled. The verdict was for the plaintiff--damages fifty pounds, not
a high estimate of the value of artistic morality on the part of the
British jury, but at least, in so far as it carried costs, higher than
the estimate put upon Whistler's work in the Ruskin trial.
So convinced were the other side of a verdict in their favour that a
rumour reached us of a luncheon ordered beforehand at the Savoy, on
the second day, by the editor of the _Saturday Review_ to celebrate
our defeat. We waited to be sure. Then we carried off Whistler, Mr.
Reginald Poole, who had conducted the case for us, and Mr. Jonathan
Sturges to the Café Royal for our breakfast. Whistler was jubilant, and
nothing pleased him more than the deference of the foreman of the jury,
who waylaid him to shake hands at the close of the trial. And since
then no incautious British artists or critics have dared to tamper with
Senefelder's definition of lithography.
CHAPTER XLI: THE END OF THE EDEN CASE. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN NINETY-SEVEN
TO EIGHTEEN NINETY-NINE.
After our triumph Whistler went to Paris and Boldini painted his
portrait, shown in the International Exhibition of 1900. It was done
in a very few sittings. Mr. Kennedy, who went with Whistler, says that
Boldini worked rapidly, that Whistler got tired of doing what he had
made other people do all his life--pose--and took naps. During one of
these Boldini made a dry-point on a zinc plate. Whistler did not like
it, nor did he like any better Helleu's done at the same time. Of the
painting Whistler said to us, "They say that looks like me, but I hope
I don't look like that!" It is, however, a presentment of him in his
worst mood, and Mr. Kennedy remembers that he was in his worst mood all
the while. It is the Whistler whom the world knew and feared.
When Whistler came back to London, in May or June, he went to Garlant's
Hotel, where Kennedy was staying. Mr. Kennedy's relations with Whistler
commenced by his selling Whistler's prints and pictures in New York,
and then developed into an intimate friendship, which continued until
almost the end of Whistler's life. Kennedy was one of Whistler's
champions in America, devoted and loyal, though the friendship
ended rather abruptly through a regrettable misunderstanding. After
Whistler's death, Kennedy was mainly responsible for the Grolier Club
exhibition and catalogue.
This summer Whistler went to Hampton, where Mr. Heinemann had taken a
cottage. Whistler never liked the country, but, he said, "I suppose now
we'll have to fish for the little gudgeon together from a chair, with
painted corks, like the other Britons."