J. A. M. WHISTLER
YEARS ago James Whistler was a person of high promise: he has since been
an artist often of agreeable and exquisite, though sometimes of
incomplete and apparently wayward, performance. He has the misfortune to
have been greatly known to a large public as the painter of his least
desirable works, these having reached an easy notoriety, while the
others have thus far too much escaped a general fame. Much of Mr.
Whistler’s art has the interest of originality, and some of it the charm
of beauty; and yet the measure of originality has at times been
over-rated, through the innocent error of the budding amateur, who, in
the earlier stage of his enlightenment, confuses the beginning with the
end, accepts the intention for the adequate fulfilment, and exalts an
adroit sketch into the rank of a permanent picture. _Mr. Irving as
Philip of Spain_—three years ago at the Grosvenor—was a murky caricature
of Velasquez; the master’s sketchiness remained, but his decisiveness
was wanting. And in some of the _Nocturnes_ the absence, not only of
definition, but of gradation, would point to the conclusion that they
are but engaging sketches. In them we look in vain for all the delicate
differences of light and hue which the scenes depicted present. Like the
landscape art of Japan, they are harmonious decorations, and a dozen or
so of such engaging sketches placed in the upper panels of a lofty
apartment would afford a justifiable and welcome alternative even to
noble tapestries or Morris wall-papers. But, on the large scale on which
they are painted—a scale in which their well-considered sketchiness is
carefully emphasized—it is in vain that we endeavour to receive them as
cabinet pictures. They suffer curiously when placed against work not of
course of petty and mechanical finish, but of patient achievement. But
they have merits of their own; nor are their merits too common. So short
a way have they proceeded into the complications of colour, that they
avoid the incompatible: they avoid it cleverly; they say little to the
mind, but they are restful to the eye, in their agreeable simplicity and
limited suggestiveness. They are the record of impressions. So far as
they go, they are right; nay, in one sense they are better than right,
for they are charming.
And, moreover, there is evidence enough elsewhere that Mr. Whistler,
confined to colour alone, can produce more various and more intricate
harmonies than those of a _Nocturne_ in silver and blue, than those of a
_scherzo_ in blue, or than those even in that fascinating portrait of
Mrs. Meux, in which it was not so much the face as the figure and the
movement that came to be deftly suggested, if hardly elaborately
expressed. A great apartment in the house of Mr. Leyland, which Mr.
Whistler has decorated, has shown that a long and concentrated effort at
the solution of the problems of colour is not beyond the scope of an
artist who has rarely mastered the subtleties of the intricate human
form. It has shown, moreover, that his solution of such problems can be
strikingly original. As a decorative painter—as a painter of large or
brilliant sketches—Mr. Whistler has had few superiors in any time or
land. His skill is sometimes genius here. Why, in the Grosvenor Gallery,
the very year in which the irrepressible painter proffered the most
unwelcome of his _Nocturnes_, there was a quite delightful picture,
suggested, indeed, by Japanese Art, but itself not less subtle than the
art which prompted it—_A Variation in Flesh-colour and Green_—bare-armed
damsels of the farthest East, lounging in attitudes of agreeable
abandonment in some balcony or court open to the genial sunlight and to
the soft air. The damsels—they were not altogether meritorious. The
draughtsmanship displayed in them was anything but “searching.” But the
picture had a quality of cool refreshment such as the gentle colour and
clean-shining material of Luca della Robbia affords to the beholder of
Tuscan Art, as he comes upon Tuscan Art under Tuscan skies.
The interest of life—the interest of humanity—has confessedly occupied
Mr. Whistler but little; yet in spite of his devotion to the art
qualities of the peacock, it has not been given to him to be quite
indifferent to the race to which he belongs. His portraits, sometimes,
whatever may be his theories, have not been very obviously considered as
arrangements of colour only for colour’s sake. They may even have
profited by the adoption of hues such as suited their themes, and here
Mr. Whistler may have delivered, through his language of colour, a
message which some men would have intrusted to line alone. Anyhow he has
been able to paint with admirable expressiveness a portrait of his
mother, and to have recorded on a doleful canvas the head and figure of
Carlyle, and in both, the simplicity and veracity of effect are things
to be noted. Not indeed that the pictures are without mannerism: the
straight and stiffish disposition of the lines in the first is not so
much a merit as a peculiarity. But a certain dignified quietude and a
certain reticent pathos are apparent in the portrait of the lady, and
the rugged simplicity of Carlyle—a simplicity which his own generation
received with so naive an admiration—is suggested not only with skill of
hand, but with the mental skill that discovers quickly, in presence of a
subject, wherein lies the best opportunity for high success in treating
it.
But I take it to be admitted by those who do not conclude that the art
is necessarily great which has the misfortune to be unacceptable, that
it is not by his paintings so much as by his etchings that Mr.
Whistler’s name may aspire to live. In painting, his success is
infrequent and it is limited—though when it occurs, its very peculiarity
gives us a keen relish for it—in etching, it is neither limited nor
rare, though of course it is not uninterrupted nor unbroken. In
painting, Mr. Whistler is an impressionist—he is an impressionist in
etching, but etching permits the record of the impression only, while
painting demands at all events the occasional capacity to realise with
weeks of labour what a few hours might happily enough suggest.
Moreover—and the circumstance is odd and noteworthy—it is in his
etchings that Mr. Whistler has reached realisation the best, and he has
reached it, in the earlier Thames-side work of twenty years ago, with no
sacrifice whatever of freedom and of frankness in treatment. His best
painting betrays something of that exquisite sensitiveness, that almost
modern sensitiveness, to pleasurable juxtapositions of delicate colour
which we admire in Orchardson, in Linton, and in Albert Moore; it
betrays sometimes, as in a portrait of Miss Alexander, a deftness of
brushwork, in the wave of a feather, in the curve of a hat, that recalls
for a moment even the great names of Velasquez and of Gainsborough; and
of high art qualities it betrays not much besides—though these, which
are very rare, we are properly grateful for. But the etchings—that is
indeed another matter. They must be considered in detail. No criticism
is wasted that concerns itself carefully with them, and that points out
from the many, which are fair, and which are exquisite, and which are
flagrantly offensive.
In some of his prints, Mr. Whistler makes good a claim to live by the
side of the finest masters of the etching needle, and a familiarity with
Rembrandt and with Méryon increases rather than lessens our interest in
the American of to-day. But Mr. Whistler has etched too much for his
reputation, or at least has published too much. No one who can look at
work of Art fairly, demands that it shall be faultless; least of all can
that be demanded of work of which the very virtue lies sometimes in its
spontaneousness; but one has good reason to demand that the faults shall
not outweigh the merits. Now in some of Mr. Whistler’s figure-pieces,
executed with the etching-needle, and offered to the public
indiscreetly, the commonness and vulgarity of the person pourtrayed find
no apology in perfection of pourtrayal—the design is uncouth, the
drawing is intolerable, the light and shade an affair of a moment’s
impressiveness, with no subtlety of truth to hold the interest that is
at first aroused. See, as one instance, the etching numbered 3 in Mr.
Thomas’s published catalogue—notice the size of the hands. And see again
No. 56, in which the figure is one vast black triangle, in which there
is apparently not a single quality which work of Art should have. The
portraits of Becquet, the violoncello player, of one Mann, and of one
Davis, have character, with no mannerism, but with a good simplicity of
treatment. But neither face pourtrayed, nor Art pourtraying it, is of a
kind to command a prolonged enjoyment. On the other hand, in some of the
etchings or dry points, not, it seems, included in the catalogue, and in
the refined and sensitive little etching of _Fanny Leyland_ there is
apparent a distinct feeling for grace of contour—for the undulations of
the figure and its softness of modelling. These are but the briefest
sketches—they have a quality of their own. It is not ungenerous to
suggest that carried further they might have failed. For the true genius
of etching is in them as they are. As they are they have not failed.
Many have been the themes which, in the art of the aquafortist, Mr.
Whistler has essayed. He has essayed landscape; he has drawn a tree in
_Kensington Gardens_, and a tree in the foreground of the _Isle St.
Louis, Paris_; but that tree at least seems of no known form of
vegetable growth—it has the air of an exploding shell. Here and
there—occupied with those juxtapositions of light and shade which
fascinated the masters of Holland—Mr. Whistler has drawn interiors, and
in one of his interiors we note a success second only to the very
highest these Dutchmen attained. This is the interior described as _The
Kitchen_. Only the finest, the most carefully printed impressions
possess the full charm; but when such an impression presents itself to
the eye, the Dutch masters, who have followed most keenly the glow and
the gradation of light on chamber-walls, are seen to be almost rivalled.
The kitchen is a long and narrow room, at the far end of which, away
from the window and the keen light, stand artist and spectator. Farthest
of all from them the light vine leaves are touched in with a grace that
Adrian van Ostade—a master in this matter—would not have excelled. By
the embrasure of the window, just before the great thickness of the
wall, stands a woman, angular, uncomely, of homely build, busied with
“household chares.” In front of her comes the sharp sunlight, striking
the thick wall-side, and lessening as it advances into the shadow and
gloom of the humble room; wavering timidly on the plates of the dresser,
in creeping half gleams which reveal and yet conceal the objects they
fall upon. The meaningless scratch and scrawl of the bare floor in the
foreground is the only fault that at all seriously tells against the
charm of work otherwise beautiful and of keen sensitiveness; and the
case is one in which the merit is so much the greater that the fault may
well be ignored or its presence permitted. Again, _La Vieille aux
Loques_—a weary woman of humblest fortunes and difficult life—shows, I
think, that Mr. Whistler has now and then been inspired by the pathetic
masters of Dutch Art.
We have seen already that two things have much occupied Mr. Whistler—the
arrangement of colours in their due proportions, the arrangement of
light and shade. And the best results of the life-long study which, by
his own account, he has given to the arrangement of colour are seen in
the work that is purely, or the work that is practically, decorative—the
work that escapes the responsibility of a subject. And the best results
of the study of the arrangements of light and shade are seen in a dozen
etchings, most of which—but not _The Kitchen_ and not the _Vieille aux
Loques_—belong to that series in which the artist has recorded for our
curious pleasure the common features of the shores of the Thames. Here
also there is evident his feeling, not exactly for beauty, but at all
events for quaintness of form, for form that has character. It had
occurred to no one else to draw with realistic fidelity the lines of
wharf and warehouse along the banks of the river; to note down the
pleasant oddities of outline presented by roof and window and crane; to
catch the changes of the grey light as it passed over the front of
Wapping. Mr. Whistler’s figure-drawing, generally defective and always
incomplete, has prevented him from seizing every characteristic of the
sailor-figures that people the port. The absence, seemingly, of any
power such as the great marine painters had, of drawing the forms of
water, whether in a broad and wind-swept tidal river or on the high
seas, has narrowed and limited again the means by which Mr. Whistler has
depicted the scenes “below Bridge.” But his treatment of these scenes is
none the less original and interesting. By wise omission, he has managed
often to retain the sense of the flow of water or its comparative
stillness. Its gentle lapping lifts the keels of the now emptied boats
of his _Billingsgate_. It lies lazy under the dark warehouses of his
_Free Trade Wharf_. It frets and flickers and divides in pleasant light
against the woodwork of the bridge in the larger _Putney_.
The limitations of Mr. Whistler’s art are very conspicuous in a more
recent experiment than the original Thames-side series—the series of
_Venice_. So evident, indeed, are they in that set that the set has been
undervalued by many amateurs of taste, who have exacted too much that
Mr. Whistler should give them, not what he was best able to see in
Venice, but what cultivated readers of Art history have been most
accustomed to see there. The Venice series is in the etcher’s later
manner—a style in which ever-increasing reliance is placed on the
faculty of slight and suggestive sketching. Now etching, even when
practised with the greatest possible union of fidelity and freshness, is
hardly the appropriate medium for conveying the charm of delicate
architecture. Of such architecture Méryon himself only now and then
essayed to give the charm, and he essayed it, deliberately, at the cost
of abandoning not a little of the etcher’s freedom—he became, for the
nonce at least, a “great original engraver;” he took his art beyond its
habitual bounds. His triumph justified him. But Mr. Whistler, even in
his earlier manhood, when those of the Thames etchings which are the
fullest of detail were wrought with sureness and precision of hand,
never betrayed either the capacity or the will to reproduce the charm of
delicate architecture. Yet in an art to which colour is denied, the
charm of delicate architecture must be the charm of Venice. It remained,
however, for Mr. Whistler to see whether the place had yet some aspects
which his etching could record—an impression, not a reproduction: that
was all that could be looked for. And Mr. Whistler etched his
impressions with curious uncertainty and curious inequality. He was now
adroit, now wavering. He took from London to Venice his happy fashion of
suggesting lapping water. He looked at Venice as a whole, keenly,
delicately, but never in detail—we had bird’s-eye views of it. It had
been interesting to wonder what would be the vision granted to a
fantastic genius of a fantastic city. Well, little new came of it, in
etching—nothing new that was beautiful. Afterwards, in a series of
pastels, it became clear who it was that had seen Venice. It was Mr.
Whistler the exquisite colourist, not the exquisite etcher.
[Illustration]
Mr. Whistler’s fame as an aquafortist, then, rests chiefly still on his
Thames-side work; and, even there, less on the faint agreeable sketches
done of later years, though these have their charm, like the better of
his painted _Nocturnes_, than on the work of his first maturity. The
_London Bridge_ and the _Free Trade Wharf_ and one or two _Putneys_—one
of them is in this book—may be named, however, among the happiest
examples of the later art that is specially brief in recording an
impression. The spring of the great arch in _London Bridge_, as seen
from below, from the water-side, is rendered, it seems, with a
suggestion of power in great constructive work, such as is little
visible in the tender handling of so many of the prints of the river.
The _Free Trade Wharf_ is a very exquisite study of gradations of tone
and of the receding line of murky buildings that follows the bend of the
stream. It is, in its best printed impressions, a thing of faultless
delicacy. A third river-piece, not lately done, has been rather lately
retouched—the _Billingsgate: Boats at a Mooring_. In the retouch is an
instance of the successful treatment of a second “state” or even a later
“state” of the plate, and such as should be a warning to the collector
who buys “first states” of everything—the _Liber Studiorum_ included—and
“first states” alone, with dull determination. Of course the true
collector knows better: he knows that the impression is almost all, and
the “state” next to nothing, except as indicating what is probable as to
the condition of the plate, and he must gradually and painfully acquire
the eye to judge of the impression.
A few years ago Mr. Whistler retouched his _Billingsgate_ for the
proprietors of the _Portfolio_, and the proof impressions of the state
issued by them reach the highest excellence of which the plate has been
capable. Not sheltering itself under the extreme simplicity and
singleness of aim kept so adroitly in the _Free Trade Wharf_ and in the
_London Bridge_, it falls into faults which these avoid. The ghostliness
of the foreground figures demands an ingenious theory for its
justification, and this theory no one has advanced. But the solidity of
the buildings introduced into this plate—the clock-tower and the houses
upon the quay—are a rare achievement in etching. For once the houses are
not drawn, but built, like the houses and the churches and the bridges
of Méryon. The strength of their realisation lends delicacy to the
thin-masted fishing boats with their yet thinner lines of cordage, and
to the distant bridge in the grey mist of London, and to the faint
clouds of the sky. Perhaps yet more delicate than the _Billingsgate_ is
the _Hungerford Bridge_, so small, yet, in a fine proof, so spacious and
airy. It lacks substance, of course, and solidity—and so does the
impression of landscape in a dream.
Finally, there are the _Thames Police_, the _Tyzack Whiteley_, and the
_Black Lion Wharf_. These, which were executed a score of years since,
are the most varied and complete studies of quaint places now
disappearing—nay, many of them already disappeared—of places with no
beauty that is very old or very graceful, but with interest to the
every-day Londoner and interest, too, to the artist. Here are small
warehouses falling to pieces, or poorly propped even when they were
sketched, and vanished now to make room for a vaster and duller
uniformity of storehouse front. Here are narrow dwelling-houses of our
Georgian days, with here a timber facing and there a quaint bow window,
many-paned—narrow houses of sea-captains, or the riverside tradesfolk,
or of custom-house officials, the upper classes of the Docks and the
East-end. These too have been pressed out of the way by the aggressions
of great commerce, and the varied line that they presented has ceased to
be. Of all these riverside features, _Thames Police_ is an illustration
interesting to-day and valuable to-morrow. And _Black Lion Wharf_ is yet
fuller of happy accident of outline and happy gradation of tone, studied
amongst common things which escape the common eye.
It is a pleasure to possess such faithful and spirited records of a
departing quaintness, and it is an achievement to have made them. It
would be a pity to remove the grace from the achievement by insisting
that, as in _Nocturne_ and _Arrangement_, the art was burdened by a here
unnecessary theory; that the study of the “arrangement of line and form”
was all, and the interest of the association nothing. When Dickens was
tracing the fortunes of Quilp on Tower Hill, and on that dreary night
when the little monster fell from the wharf into the river, he did not
think only of the cadence of his sentences, or his work would never have
lived, or lived only with the lovers of curious patchwork of mere words.
Perhaps, without his knowing it, some slight imaginative interest in the
lives of Londoners prompted Mr. Whistler, or strengthened his hand, as
he recorded the shabbiness that has a history, the slums of the eastern
suburb, and the prosaic service of the Thames. Here, and often
elsewhere, his work, if it has shown some faults to be forgiven, has
shown, in excellence, qualities that fascinate. The Future will forget
his failures, to which in the Present there has somehow been accorded,
through the activity of friendship or the activity of enmity, a
publicity rarely bestowed upon failures at all; but it will remember the
success of work that is peculiar and personal. These best things we have
dwelt upon are not to be denied that length of days which is the portion
of exquisite Art.
------------------------------------------------------------------------