The early proofs of others plates were unsatisfactory. Each proof was a trial, and, as each was pulled, he worked upon the plate, not generally taking out large slabs or putting in new passages to make a new state of it, but strengthening lines or lightening them, giving richness to a shadow or modelling to a little figure. It would be impossible, if the hundred proofs of each of these Venetian plates were not shown together, to say how much he did or what he did to each, but the first proof is quite different from the last and no two are alike. Some of them, from ghosts, became solid facts.
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK. NO. III
OIL
In the Metropolitan Museum, New York
OIL (DESTROYED)
From a photograph lent by Pickford R. Waller, Esq.
In his Venice etchings Whistler also developed what he called the Japanese method of drawing, Bacher calls his secret, and Mr. Menpes the secret of drawing. Whistler always spoke frankly about it to us, from the first time J. saw him etching, and he followed the same method in his lithographs. In etching or lithography it is difficult to make corrections, the surface of the plate or the stone should not be disturbed, it is not easy, by the ordinary manner in which drawing is taught, to put a complicated design on the plate without elaborate spacing, tracing, or a preliminary sketch. Frequently, when the design is half made in the usual fashion, the artist finds that the point of greatest interest, the subject of his picture, will not come on the plate where he wants it. The Japanese always seem to get the design in their colour-prints in the right place, and yet their technique adds to the difficulty of changing or altering a design, especially in their wood blocks. But whether this is because they have the method of drawing Whistler attributed to them, whether he got his idea from their completed prints or evolved it, we do not know. We do know that the idea was his long before he painted the Japanese pictures. You can see the beginning of it in the Isle de la Cité. The system, scientific as all his systems were, is to select the exact spot on the canvas, the lithographic stone, the copper plate, or the piece of paper, where the focus of interest is to be, and to draw this part of the subject first. It might be near the side of a plate, though he insisted that the composition should be placed well within the frame or on the plate, contrary as such treatment is to Japanese methods and his early practice. In the early paintings, sprays of flowers or branches of trees run into the picture to give the impression that it is carried beyond the frame, as the Japanese do. But his theory, perfected before the Venetian period and adhered to as long as he lived, was that everything should be well within the frame or plate mark, as far within as the subject was from him. Having selected the point of interest, he drew that, and drew it completely, and there, on his canvas, plate, or stone, was a picture. It might be a distant view of palaces or shipping beneath a bridge; in London, a shop window; in Paris, a dark doorway; in portraits, the sitter's head. Once he put it down, he drew in the objects next in importance, all the while carrying out the work completely and making one harmonious whole. The result was that the picture was finished—"finished from the beginning"—and there was on the plate, paper, or stone a space which he could fill with less important details or leave as he chose. With his painting it was a different problem. When the subject was arranged, it grew together all over, at the same time. In some of the earlier pictures, Old Battersea Bridge for example, a piece of canvas seems to have been added, though he maintained that the artist should confine himself to the size of the canvas he selected, and not get over his blunders, as many do, by adding to or taking from the canvas. All this requires the greatest care in just what Whistler considered most important, the placing of the subject. Working in this manner, always with the completed picture in his mind, he could return again, add further work if he thought it was needed, knowing he had his subject drawn. It sounds simple, so simple that one day, when he had been explaining it to Mr. E. A. Walton, and the latter said, "But there is no secret!" Whistler's answer was, "Yes, the secret is in doing it." It is just this, "in doing it," that the excellence of his work lies. As a matter of fact the difficulty is restraint in drawing the heart of a subject, while in painting still more restraint is necessary, the restraint imposed by colour and the medium.
Besides etchings and pastels Whistler made water-colours in Venice, but as they were never shown together it is impossible to say how many. There were also a few oils. The most important is Nocturne, Blue and Gold, St. Mark's. Bacher speaks of one from the windows of the Casa Jankovitz, "the Salute and a great deal of sky and water, with the buildings very small," and of a scene at night from a café near the Royal Gardens. Then there is the upright sunset from the Riva referred to by Mr. Pennington, and two others painted from Mr. Ross Turner's terrace, one looking down the Riva to San Biagio, the other up to San Marco, both full of little figures, and with boats and a suggestion of the Lagoon, in the background; studies left hanging in sunlight after he had done one day's work until he came to do the next. Mr. Forbes recalls a Nocturne of the Giudecca, with shipping, on a panel, which Whistler gave to Jobbins, who, as he told us, thought so little of it that he painted a sketch on the back and then sold it to Forbes, who still has it. Canfield was said to have another of S. Giorgio. Doubtless there are more, but we know of none that were exhibited.
At the end of November 1880 Whistler was back in London. "Years of battle," M. Duret calls the period that followed, and Whistler was ready to fight.
He arrived when the Fine Art Society had a show of "Twelve Great Etchers," a press was in the gallery, Goulding was printing, etching was upon the town.
"Well, you know, I was just home; nobody had seen me, and I drove up in a hansom. Nobody expected me. In one hand I held my long cane; with the other I led by a ribbon a beautiful little white Pomeranian dog; it too had turned up suddenly. As I walked in I spoke to no one, but putting up my glass I looked at the prints on the wall. 'Dear me! dear me!' I said, 'still the same old sad work! Dear me!' And Haden was there, talking hard to Brown, and laying down the law, and as he said 'Rembrandt,' I said 'Ha ha!' and he vanished, and then——!"
He was without house or studio, and stopped in Wimpole Street with his brother until he took lodgings in Langham Street and then in Alderney Street. (The record of this is in the etching published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, April 1881.) He set to work printing the plates, for few had been pulled in Venice. The Fine Art Society moved Goulding's press upstairs and friends came to see him, and here Mr. Mortimer Menpes says he first met Whistler, and, dropping Poynter, South Kensington, and his ambition, threw himself at the feet of "the Master" and called himself pupil. It was not an ideal workshop, and the Fine Art Society took two rooms for Whistler in Air Street, Regent Street, on the first floor, with a bow window under the colonnade, now the Piccadilly Hotel: the window from which he etched the plate of the Quadrant.
T. Way and his son came to Air Street to help Whistler print. The press was in the front room, and T. R. Way made a sketch of it in colour, his father damping paper, Whistler inking a plate, the press between them: an interesting document. The work was interrupted by excitement. One day Whistler placed on the heater a bottle of acid tightly stopped up. The stopper blew out, steaming acid fumes filled the room, and they ran for their lives. Another time, they took caustic potash, or something as deadly, to get the dried ink out of the lines of the plates, and they dropped the bottle on the floor, and there was not much left of the carpet. Why anything was left of the floor or of them is a mystery. Then, Mr. Menpes says:
"Whistler drifted into a room in my house, which I had fitted up with printing materials, and it was in this little printing-room of mine that most of the series of Venetian etchings were printed."
The edition of a hundred sets was, however, not completed during Whistler's lifetime. It was only after his death that Goulding finished the work.
The first series of twelve Venetian plates was shown in December 1880 at the Fine Art Society's. The Twelve were selected from the forty plates Whistler brought back. The critics could see nothing in them. They were dismissed as "another crop of Whistler's little jokes." One after another the people's authorities repeated the Attorney-General's decision that Whistler was amusing, and Burne-Jones' regret that he had not fulfilled his early promise, and Whistler collected the criticisms for future use.
Brown, of the Fine Art Society, took to New York a set of the proofs. Whistler spent a Sunday pulling them. But the etchings were no more appreciated in New York than in London. Only eight sets were ordered.
In the meanwhile Whistler was preparing his exhibition of pastels. Mr. Cole notes in his diary:
"January 2 (1881). Jimmy called, as self-reliant and sure as ever, full of confidence in the superlative merit of his pastels, which we are to go and see."
This exhibition also was held at the Fine Art Society's. Whistler designed the frames; he wrote the catalogue, which had the brown paper cover, but not quite the form eventually adopted, and it was printed by Way; he decorated the gallery, an arrangement in gold and brown, which was enjoyed as another of his little jokes by the critics. Godwin was one of the few who admitted the beauty, and his description in the British Architect (February 1881) is on record:
"First, a low skirting of yellow gold, then a high dado of dull yellow-green cloth, then a moulding of green gold, and then a frieze and ceiling of pale reddish brown. The frames are arranged on the line; but here and there one is placed over another. Most of the frames and mounts are of rich yellow gold, but a dozen out of the fifty-three are in green gold, dotted about with a view of decoration, and eminently successful in attaining it."
On the evening of the Press view Mr. Cole says:
"January 28 (1881). Whistler turned up for dinner very full of his private view to-morrow. Later on, we concocted a letter inviting Prince Teck to come to it. His last draft was all right, but he would insist on beginning it 'Prince,' although I assured him 'Sir' was the usual way of addressing him in a letter."
The private view (January 29) was a crush, Bond Street blocked with carriages, the sidewalk crowded; nothing like it was ever known at the Fine Art Society's. Millais, showing forgotten machines in the adjoining room, was one of the first to see the pastels. "Magnificent, fine; very cheeky, but fine!" he bellowed, and afterwards said so to Whistler, who was pleased. The crowd did not know what to say, and, had they known, would have been afraid to say it. For Whistler was there, his laugh louder, shriller than ever. He let no one forget the trial. An admirer asked the price of a pastel: "Sixty guineas! That's enormous!" Whistler heard, though he was not meant to; he heard everything. "Ha ha! Enormous! Why, not at all! I can assure you it took me quite half an hour to do it!"
People laughed at Whistler's work, because they thought they were expected to. Because he was the gayest man they refused to see that he was the most serious artist. When they laughed at his art, it hurt; when they laughed at him, they suffered; and he had his revenge in mystifying them:
"Well, you know, they thought it was an amiability to me for them to be amused. One day, when I was on my way to the Fine Art Society's, while the show was going on, I met Sir and Lady —— face to face, at the door, as they were coming out. Both looked very much bored, but they couldn't escape me. So the old man grasped my hand and chuckled, 'We have just been looking at your things, and have been so much amused!' He had an idea that the drawings on the wall were drolleries of some sort, though he could not understand why, and that it was his duty to be amused. I laughed with him. I always did with people of that kind, and then they said I was not serious."
The critics, too, laughed, but there was venom in their laughter. They liked to take themselves, if they couldn't take Whistler, seriously, and they hated work they could not understand. The pastels were sensational, Whistler was clever with a sort of transatlantic impudence. They objected to the brown paper, to the technique, to the frames, to the decorations, to the subjects; they became unexpectedly concerned for the past glory of Venice. Godwin, again, was an exception "No one who has listened, as the writer of these notes has, to Whistler's descriptions of the open-arcaded, winding staircase that lifts its tall stem far into the blue sky, or of the façades, yet unrestored, that speak of the power of the Venetian architect, can doubt that he who can so remember and describe has failed to admire. It is by reason of the strength of this admiration and appreciation that he holds back in reverence, and exercises this reticence of the pencil, the needle, and the brush."
A number of people showed their belief in the pastels by buying them, and the exhibition was a success financially. The prices ranged from twenty to sixty guineas, the total receipts amounted to eighteen hundred pounds. Bacher quotes a letter written to him just after the show opened signed "Maud Whistler": "The best of it is, all the pastels are selling. Four hundred pounds' worth the first day; now over a thousand pounds' worth are sold."
Before the show closed, at the end of January, Whistler was summoned to Hastings. His mother had been there since her illness of 1876-77, from which she never entirely recovered, though there were intervals between the attacks when her family had no cause for anxiety. But her death was sudden. Those who refused to see in Whistler any other good quality could not deny his devotion to his mother; those to whom he revealed the tenderness under the defiant masque with which he faced the world knew what his love for her meant to him. She had lived with him whenever it was possible. His visits and letters to Hastings had been frequent. He never forgot her birthday. He told her of all his success, all his hopes, and made as light as he could of his debts and disappointments. But in the miserable week before the funeral at Hastings he was full of remorse; he should have been kinder and more considerate, he said; he had not written often enough from Venice. Dr. Whistler was with him part of the time, and the Doctor's wife the rest. In the afternoons they wandered on the windy cliffs above the town, and there was one drear afternoon when he broke down: "It would have been better had I been a parson as she wanted!" Yet he had nothing to reproach himself with. The days in Chelsea were for her as happy as for him, and she whose pride had been in his first childish promise at St. Petersburg lived to see the development of his powers. She is buried at Hastings.
It was fortunate that when he got back to town there were events to distract his thoughts. The Society of Painter-Etchers opened their first exhibition in April at the Hanover Gallery. American artists who were just starting etching and had never shown prints in London were invited. Frank Duveneck sent a series of Venetian proofs. This was the occasion of "the storm in an æsthetic teapot," which, had not Whistler thought it important as "history," would be forgotten. We quote, as he did, from The Cuckoo (April 11, 1881):
"Some etchings, exceedingly like Mr. Whistler's in manner, but signed 'Frank Duveneck,' were sent to the Painter-Etchers' Exhibition from Venice. The Painter-Etchers appear to have suspected for a moment that the works were really Mr. Whistler's, and, not desiring to be the victims of an easy hoax on the part of that gentleman, three of their members—Dr Seymour Haden, Dr. Hamilton, and Legros—went to the Fine Art Society's Gallery in Bond Street, and asked one of the assistants there to show them some of Mr. Whistler's Venetian plates. From this assistant they learned that Mr. Whistler was under an arrangement to exhibit and sell his Venetian etchings only at the Fine Art Society's Gallery."
Whistler heard of this. He called on Mr. Cole, "highly incensed with Haden and Legros conspiring to make out he was breaking his contract with the Fine Art Society," and went at once to the Hanover Gallery, Mr. Menpes with him. The three members fortunately were not there. Then Haden wrote to the Fine Art Society that they had found out about Mr. Duveneck and said they were delighted with his etchings, and expressed regret. But it is incredible that Haden and Legros should have mistaken the work of Duveneck for that of Whistler. The story was published by Whistler in The Piker Papers. With its interest a little dulled by time, the correspondence may be read in The Gentle Art.
Whistler had not forgotten the pictures left with Graves in Pall Mall. By degrees he bought them back. When Mr. Algernon Graves consulted his father about letting Whistler have the pictures upon which the full amount was not paid, after Whistler had repaid a hundred pounds for three, the father said, "Let him take the whole lot, and don't be a fool; the pictures aren't worth twenty-five pounds apiece." The Rosa Corder was sold at Christie's with Howell's effects, Mr. Algernon Graves agreeing that, if it brought more than Howell's debt to the firm, Howell's executors could have the balance. The father maintained the picture wouldn't fetch ten pounds, but it brought more than the amount of their bill, some hundred and thirty pounds. The Irving was sold to Sir Henry for a hundred pounds—at Irving's sale it was bought by Mr. Thomas of Philadelphia for five thousand guineas—and the Miss Franklin went to Messrs. Dowdeswell. Whistler continued to pay his bills regularly as they came due, to Graves' astonishment; there was only one exception, and then Whistler came to ask to have the payment postponed, and this was not settled until long after the pictures were in Whistler's possession. When Whistler paid the final instalment Graves expressed his surprise. But Whistler said: "You have been a very good friend to me; in fact, you have been my banker. You have acted honourably to me in the whole matter. I meant to pay, and I have done so."
These business details and his exhibitions left Whistler no time in 1881 for the Salon, where he had nothing, or for the Grosvenor, to which he sent only Miss Alexander. In the autumn, borrowing the Mother from Graves, he lent it to the Academy in Philadelphia, the arrangements being made by Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt, and this is her account:
OIL
In the possession of H. C. Finch, Esq.
Photograph of the room at Prince's Gate, showing the Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine in place
"In the autumn of 1881 I was asked by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to receive pictures by American artists, and have them forwarded for exhibition, and especially they entreated me to persuade Mr. Whistler to send a picture. He had never been represented in any American exhibition. I obtained a chance when meeting him at a dinner of pressing the subject more vigorously than I could have done by writing, and he promised to send his mother's portrait. It was collected in due course and deposited in my studio, then in the Avenue. Mr. Whistler came immediately after, and as the canvas was breaking away from the stretcher, he directed the packing agents, who were skilful frame-makers, to restrain it, and then left me. As soon as the canvas was made tight, spots of crushed varnish appeared on the surface. The varnish, in fact, broke or crumbled and I feared the canvas might have broken. I flew down the street, overtook him, and brought him back, dreading that he would blame us and even that some injury had been done. To my surprise, he took the misfortune with perfect composure and kindness, and stippled the spots with some solvent varnish that soon restored the even surface. And there was never a word of suggestion that we had done any harm. Of course, I knew the fault was not in anything that had been done, and it was by his own order, but from all I had heard about him I trembled. The greatest difficulty in connection with that exhibition was to persuade him to journey to the American Consulate in St. Helen's Place and make his affidavit for the invoice. It had to be done by himself; and it was not pleasant, as we know, to waste a day, the very middle of the day, in this dull declaration of American citizen sojourning in England. After the cases were ready for shipment there was still delay to get his task accomplished, and I think the Pennsylvania Academy hardly guess how much persuading it took. What a pity they did not secure the beautiful picture for his own country! Now that it hangs in the Luxembourg, they envy it."
The Mother was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1881, and, on the suggestion of Mr. Alden Weir, at the Society of American Artists in New York in 1882, and it could have been bought for a thousand dollars. Although nobody wanted it, it made him known in his own country as a painter. He was elected a member of the Society of American Artists that year.
At this time, owing to the visit of Seymour Haden to the United States, American artists became interested in etching, and societies were formed and exhibitions held all over the country. There was a show in the Boston Museum in 1881. Another, the first of a series, was given by the New York Etching Club in 1882. And the Philadelphia Society of Etchers organised in the same year an International Exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts. Articles in Scribner's on Whistler and Haden and American Etchers added to the interest. Messrs. Cassell and others issued portfolios of prints, and every painter became an etcher. The result was a boom, then a slump, out of which Whistler and Haden almost alone emerged, for the reason that their work was not done to please the public or the publishers. We remember the excitement made by Haden's lectures which prepared America for Whistler, whose prints were in both the New York and Philadelphia Exhibitions. Mr. James L. Claghorn, almost the only Philadelphian who then cared for etchings, had already many Whistlers. Mr. Avery, in New York, had some years before begun his collection and secured for it many of the rarest proofs, and he was followed by Mr. Howard Mansfield, who later on interested Mr. Charles L. Freer. But in America more had been heard of Whistler's eccentricities than his work. It could no longer remain unknown, once his etchings and the portrait of the Mother were seen and The White Girl was lent to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where it hung for some time. And the young men who had been with him in Venice, coming back, spread his fame at home, and when Americans got to know his work they became the keenest to possess it. Even at this time Avery owned the Whistler in the Big Hat, Mr. Whittemore The White Girl, and Mrs. Hutton the Wapping. That an American artist's works should be bought at all by Americans at that date was extraordinary. Tadema, Bouguereau, Meyer von Bremen were the standard, soon, however, to be exchanged for Whistler, the Impressionists, and the Dutch and Barbizon Schools.
On May 26, 1881, Mr. Cole "met Jimmie, who is taking a new studio in Tite Street, where he is going to paint all the fashionables; views of crowds competing for sittings; carriages along the streets."
It was No. 13, close to the White House. Whistler decorated it in yellow: one "felt in it as if standing inside an egg," Howell said. He again picked up blue and white, and old silver; he again gave Sunday breakfasts, and they again became the talk of the town and he the fashion. If the town was determined to talk, Whistler was willing it should. He was never so malicious, never so extravagant, never so joyous. He wrapped himself "in a species of misunderstanding." He filled the papers with letters. London echoed with his laugh. His white lock stood up defiantly above his curls; his cane lengthened; a series of collars sprang from his long overcoat; his hat had a curlier brim, a lower tilt over his eyes; he invented amazing costumes: "in great form, with a new fawn-coloured long-skirted frock-coat, and extraordinary long cane," Mr. Cole found him one summer day in 1882. He was known to pay calls with the long bamboo stick in his hand and pink bows on his shoes. He allowed no break in the gossip. The carriages brought crowds, but not sitters. Few would sit to him before the trial; after it there were fewer. In the seventies it needed courage to be painted by Whistler; now it was to risk notoriety and ridicule. Lady Meux was the first to give him a commission. Two of his three large full-lengths of her are amongst his most distinguished portraits. She was handsome, of a luxuriant type, her full-blown beauty a contrast to the elusive loveliness of Maud in the Fur Jacket, or Mrs. Leyland, or Mrs. Huth. Whistler found appropriate harmonies. One was an Arrangement in White and Black. There is a sumptuousness in the velvet gown and the long cloak he never surpassed, and the firm modelling of the face, neck, and arms gives to the regal figure more solidity than he ever got before. Whistler was pleased with it, spoke of it as his "beautiful Black Lady," and Lady Meux was so well pleased that she posed a second time. In this, the Harmony in Flesh Colour and Pink, afterwards changed to Pink and Grey, she wears a round hat low over her face, and a pink bodice and skirt, and stands against a pink background, and the ugly fashion of the day cannot conceal the beauty. The third portrait, as far as we can find out, was never finished. Mr. Walter Dowdeswell has a pen-and-ink drawing of it. She wears a fur cap, a sable coat, and carries a muff. For this, it is said, after differences, a maid posed and Whistler painted her face over the Lady's. Mr. Harper Pennington says: "The only time I saw Jimmy stumped for a reply was at a sitting of Lady Meux (for the portrait in sables). For some reason Jimmy became nervous, exasperated, and impertinent. Touched by something he had said, her ladyship turned softly towards him and remarked, quite softly, 'See here, Jimmy Whistler! You keep a civil tongue in that head of yours, or I will have in some one to finish those portraits you have made of me!' with the faintest emphasis on 'finish.' Jimmy fairly danced with rage. He came up to Lady Meux, his long brush tightly grasped, and actually quivering in his hand, held tight against his side. He stammered, spluttered, and finally gasped out, 'How dare you? How dare you?' but that, after all, was not an answer, was it? Lady Meux did not sit again. Jimmy never spoke of the incident afterwards, and I was sorry to have witnessed it."
At the time of the London Memorial Exhibition Lady Meux offered the Committee the two portraits in her possession on condition that the third should be returned to her. This the Committee were unable to do, and it was not until her will was published after her death, in January 1911, in which she bequeathed the missing picture and the correspondence relating to it to the National Gallery, that any more was heard about it. Then a statement appeared in a New York paper that the portrait was in the collection of Mr. Freer, and Miss Birnie Philip stated in the Times that Whistler had destroyed the picture which, according to Lady Meux in her will, "was ordered and paid for by her husband, but it had never come into his possession nor could it be found."
Sir Henry Cole posed for a second portrait and Whistler got back from Mr. Way the first, discovered in one of the rolls of canvases he bought at the sale. Mr. Cole saw the second portrait in the studio:
"February 26 (1882). Found his commencement of my father, good but slight, full length, evening clothes, long dark cloak thrown back, red ribbon of Bath."
"April 17 (1882). In spite of his illness, my father to Whistler's, who fretted him by not painting; my father thought that Jimmy had merely touched the light on his shoes, and nothing else, although he stood and sat for over an hour and a half."
This was the last sitting. The next day Sir Henry Cole died suddenly: a distinguished official lost to England, a friend lost to Whistler. Eldon, an artist much with Whistler at the time, was in the studio on the 17th, and recalled afterwards that Sir Henry Cole's last words on leaving were, "Death waits for no man!" Whistler meant to go on with the portrait. On May 2 Mr. Cole went again to Tite Street: "After a long delay, Jimmy showed me his painting of my father, which J. can make into a very good thing."
It is said not to have been finished, but we possess a photograph of it which shows no want of finish. This also, Mr. Cole was informed, Whistler destroyed. Neither was a full-length of Eldon finished: a fine thing, to judge from the photograph we have seen. It also has vanished, though a small half-length, sent to the London Memorial Exhibition, but not hung—it may be a copy—is now in New York. During the next few years other portraits were begun, and of several we have photographs which it is not possible to identify. An Arrangement in Yellow was of Mrs. Langtry. For a new version of his scheme of "blue upon blue" Miss Maud Waller posed. Mrs. Marzetti, her sister, who went with her to the studio, writes:
"The sittings commenced in the early part of 1882. We went two or three times, and then Whistler painted the face out, as it was not to his liking, although most people thought it excellent. In those days Maud was very beautiful. The picture was started on a canvas that already had a figure on it, and it was turned upside down, and the Blue Girl's head painted in between the legs. The dress was made by Mme. Alias, the theatrical costumier, to Whistler's design, and I believe cost a good deal. In the end the picture was finished from another model (I do not know who), and was hung in one of Whistler's exhibitions in Bond Street [Notes, Harmonies, Nocturnes, May 1884, at Dowdeswell's]: it is No. 31 in the catalogue, and called Scherzo in Blue—The Blue Girl. This was the same exhibition in which he hung the picture he gave me, and which in the end I never got (No. 66, Bravura in Brown). I should have treasured it for two reasons: Whistler's painting, and also that it was a portrait of Mr. Ridley. The picture of Maud was to have been at the Grosvenor Gallery, but was not finished. However, it was sent in for the private view, and taken away again the same night or next morning. We used thoroughly to enjoy our visits to the studio—that is to say, I did, because I sat and looked on. I can't say whether Maud enjoyed them as much; probably not, as we used to get down there about eleven o'clock, have lunch, and stay all the afternoon, most of which time she was standing.
"I cannot remember all the callers we used to see there, as there were so many, but some of the more frequent visitors I remember well. There was one man who was always there, all day long, and we just hated him; I don't know why, as he seemed very harmless. He was Whistler's shadow. I don't know who he was, but have an idea that he used to write a bit. I think he was very poor, and that Whistler pretty well kept him. I heard some few years ago that he died in a lunatic asylum. Oscar Wilde was a frequent visitor, also Walter Sickert. Whistler used to say, 'Nice boy, Walter!' he was very fond of him then. Others I remember were two brothers named Story, Frank Miles (who had a studio just opposite Whistler's)—Renée Rodd as Whistler used to call him—Major Templar, Lady Archie Campbell, and Mrs. Hungerford. Whistler was just finishing the portrait of Lady Meux, and I stood for him one day for about five minutes. It was a full-length portrait in black evening dress, with a big white cloak over the shoulders.
"Whistler was a most entertaining companion; he was very fond of telling us Edgar Allan Poe's stories, and also of reciting The Lost Lenore, which he said was his favourite poem. He dined with us several times in Lyall Street; he was always late for dinner, sometimes half an hour, and I think on more than one occasion was sound asleep at the table before the end of the dinner.
"Whistler's usual breakfast, which he often had after we arrived at the studio, was two eggs in a tumbler, beaten up with pepper, salt, and vinegar, bread and coffee....
"Whistler stood yards away from the picture with his brush, and would move it as though he were painting; he would then jump across the room, and put a dab of paint on the canvas; he also used to wet his finger and gently rub portions of his picture. I have often seen him take a sponge with soap and water and wash the Blue Girl's face (on the canvas, I mean)."
Lady Archibald Campbell, also posing for Whistler, said: "He was a great friend of ours. I think I sat to him during a year or so, off and on, for a great many studies in different costumes and poses. His first idea was to paint me in court dress. The dress was black velvet, the train was silver satin with the Argyll arms embroidered in appliqué in their proper colours. He made a sketch of me in the dress. The fatigue of standing with the train was too great, and he abandoned the idea. In all these studies he called my attention to his method of placing his subject well within the frame, explaining that a portrait must be more than a portrait, must be of value decoratively. He never patched up defects, but, if dissatisfied with any portion of his work, covered the canvas afresh with his first impression freshly recorded. The first impression thrown on the canvas he often put away, often destroyed. Among others, he made in oils an impression of me as Orlando, in the forest scene of As You Like It, at Coombe. He considered this successful. A picture he called The Grey Lady was a harmony in silver greys. I remember thinking it a masterpiece of drawing, giving the impression of movement. I was descending a stair, the canvas was of a great height, and the general effect striking. It was almost completed when my absence from town prevented a continuance of the sittings. When I returned he asked to make a study of me in the dress in which I called upon him. This is the picture which he exhibited under the name of The Brodequin Jaune, or The Yellow Buskin. As far as I remember it was painted in a few sittings. When I saw him shortly before his death I asked after The Grey Lady. He laughed and said he had destroyed her."
Mr. Walter Sickert has recorded a number of interesting details about these pictures, though his statements are vague. He says that the canvases had a grey ground "made with black and white mixed with turpentine," and that Whistler used a medium of oil and turpentine, and "covered thinly the whole canvas with his prepared tones, using house-painters' brushes for the surfaces, and drawing lines with round hogshair brushes nearly a yard long.... His object was to cover the whole canvas at one painting—either the first or the hundredth." Lady Archibald asked him if he was going to touch up her portrait at the last sitting. Whistler said, "Not touch it up, give it another beautiful skin." Mr. Sickert also very aptly suggests the reason why some of the portraits were never completed. Whistler did them all over, again and again, till they were "finished—or wrecked, as often happened, from the sitter getting tired, or growing up, or growing old." Almost the only new fact in Mr. Frank Rutter's Whistler is given him by Mr. Sickert, who says he remembers once Whistler standing on a chair with a candle at the end of a sitting from Lady Archibald Campbell, looking at his work, but undecided whether he should take it out or leave it. They started to dinner, and in the street he decided, saying, "You go back. I shall only be nervous and begin to doubt again. Go back and take it all out." This, Mr. Sickert says he did, with a rag and benzoline.
M. Duret suggests that the ridicule of her friends had an effect on Lady Archibald Campbell, or perhaps her beauty made her critical; anyhow, she suggested changes to Whistler, who, though he seldom accepted suggestions from his sitters, did his best to meet her, until it seemed as if, to please her, he must repaint the picture, and he was discouraged. We have heard of a scene outside the studio: Lady Archibald in a hansom on the point of driving away never to return; M. Duret springing on the step and representing the loss to the world of the masterpiece, and arguing so well that she came back, and The Yellow Buskin was saved from the fate of The Grey Lady and The Lady in Court Dress. Some think the portrait that was finished is Whistler's greatest. It has distinction and character. It is another Arrangement in Black in which critics could then discover but dinginess and dirt. One wit described it as a portrait of a lady pursuing the last train through the smoke of the Underground. People have learned to see, or at least to think they should see, beauty, and to-day they hardly dare deny it is a masterpiece. Whistler called it first the Portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell, but afterwards The Yellow Buskin, the title in the Wilstach Collection, Philadelphia, where it now hangs.
Mr. Walter Sickert tells an amusing story of Whistler's way sometimes of meeting the suggestions of sitters:
"I remember an occasion when Whistler, yielding to persuasion, allowed himself to introduce, step by step, certain modifications in the scheme of a portrait that he was painting. As time went on he saw his own conception overlaid with an image that he had never intended. At last he stopped and put his brushes slowly down. Taking off his spectacles, he said, 'Very well, that will do. This is your portrait. We will put it aside and finish it another day.' 'Now, if you please,' he added, dragging out a new grey canvas, 'we will begin mine.'"
M. Duret posed to Whistler at the same time as Lady Archibald Campbell. When she could not come Whistler would telegraph him, and day by day he watched the progress of her portrait while his was growing. Business brought M. Duret to London. He had always been much with artists in Paris, had been intimate with Courbet, was still with Fantin, Manet, and Bracquemond. He recognised the genius of men at whom the world scoffed, and it was he who by an article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (April 1881) made the French realise their mistake of years, and again give Whistler the place so long denied him.
In the possession of Pickford R. Waller, Esq.
One evening in 1883, after a private view, Whistler and Duret were talking over the pictures they had seen, and in discussing the portrait of the President of some society, Whistler declared that red robes of office were not in character with modern heads, and that a man should be painted in the costume of his time, and he asked Duret to pose to him that he might show what could be done with evening dress, the despair of painters. The experiment was not so original as Duret seemed to think. Leyland was painted in this way ten years before, when Whistler proved the truth of Baudelaire's assertion that the great colourist can get colour from a black coat, a white shirt, against a dark background. Sir Henry Cole also posed in evening dress. Whistler did not rely entirely upon so simple a scheme in his portrait of Duret, who has a pink domino over his arm, a red fan in his hand. His portrait is called Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Black.
M. Duret describes Whistler at work. He marked slightly with chalk the place for the figure on the canvas, and began at once to put it in, in colour; at the end of the first sitting the scheme was there. This was the method that delighted Whistler. The difficulty with him was not to begin a portrait, but to finish it. The painting was brought almost to completion, rubbed out, begun again, and repainted ten times. Duret saw that it was a question not only of drawing, but of colour, of tone, and understood Whistler's theory that to bring the whole into harmony and preserve it the whole must be repainted as a whole, if there was any repainting to be done. There are finer portraits, but not many that show so well Whistler's meaning when he said that colour is "the arrangement of colour." The rose of the domino, the fan, and the flesh is so managed that the cold grey of the background seems to be flushed with rose. Duret, when he showed the picture, took a sheet of paper, cut a hole in it, and placed it against the background, to prove that the grey, when surrounded by white, is pure and cold without a touch of rose, and that Whistler got his effect by his knowledge of the relation of colour and his mastery of tone.
The Lady Meux—Black and White went to the Salon of 1882, catalogued as Portrait de M. Harry—Men, to the confusion of commentators. The Harmony in Flesh Colour and Pink was shown at the Grosvenor with Nocturne in Blue and Silver, Scherzo in Blue—The Blue Girl, Nocturne in Black and Gold—Southampton Water, Harmony in Black and Red, Note in Black and Opal—Jersey, Blue and Brown—San Brelade's Bay. The Times was unable to decide whether Whistler was making fun of them or whether something was wrong with his eyes. The Pall Mall regretted that "if the Lady Meux was full of fine and subtle qualities of drawing, the Scherzo in Blue [Miss Waller] was the sketch of a scarecrow in a blue dress without form and void. It is very difficult to believe that Mr. Whistler is not openly laughing at us when he holds up before us such a piece as this. His counterpart in Paris, the eccentric M. Manet, has at least more sincerity than to exhibit his work in such an imperfect condition."
But Whistler now had defenders. An "Art Student" wrote the next day to the Pall Mall to point out that "at the private, and therefore, presumably, the Press, view, The Blue Girl was seen in an unfinished state, having been sent there merely to take up its space on the wall. It was removed immediately, and has been since finished. Had the critic seen it since he would hardly have called it without form and void. The want of artistic sincerity is certainly the last charge that can be brought against a man who has followed his artistic intention with such admirable and unswerving singleness of purpose."
From this time onward Whistler no longer fought his battles alone.
Eighteen eighty-two was the year of The Paddon Papers. Mr. Cole noted in his diary: "September 24. To Jimmy's. He lent me proof of his Paddon and Howell correspondence. Amusing, but too personal for general interest." We agree with Mr. Cole. There were complications of no importance with Howell, in which Paddon, a diamond merchant, figured, and complications over a Chinese cabinet which Mr. Morse bought from Whistler when he moved from No. 2 Lindsey Row. For long Mr. Morse had only the lower part, while Howell kept the top. Whistler, who thought nothing concerning him trivial, published this correspondence in a pamphlet, called The Paddon Papers: The Owl and the Cabinet, interesting now only because it is rare and because it was the end of all relations between himself and Howell.
In the early winter of 1883 Whistler gave the second exhibition of his Venetian etchings at the Fine Art Society's. The prints, fifty-one in number, included several London subjects. He decorated the gallery in white and yellow. The wall was white with yellow hangings, the floor was covered with pale yellow matting and the couches with pale yellow serge. The cane-bottomed chairs were painted yellow. There were yellow flowers in yellow pots, a white and yellow livery for the attendant, and white and yellow Butterflies for his friends. At the private view Whistler wore yellow socks just showing above his shoes, and the assistants wore yellow neckties. He prepared the catalogue; the brown paper cover, form, and size now established. He printed after each number a quotation from the critics of the past, and on the title-page, "Out of their own mouths shall ye judge them." A friend who looked over the proofs for him writes us:
"We came to 'there is merit in them, and I do not wish to understand it.' [A quotation from the article in the Nineteenth Century which Sir Frederick Wedmore must wish could be forgotten.] Jimmy yelled with joy, and thanked the printer for his intelligent misreading of understate. 'I think we will let that stand as it is,' he said. I was amused at the private view to see him discussing the question with Wedmore, who, naturally, did not think it quite fair."
Before the show opened it was, Whistler told us, "Well, you know, a source of constant anxiety to everybody and of fun to me. On the ladder, when I was hanging the prints, I could hear whispers: no one would be able to see the etchings! And then I would laugh, 'Dear me, of course not! that's all right. In an exhibition of etchings the etchings are the last things people come to see!' And then there was the private view, and I had my box of wonderful little Butterflies, and I distributed them only among the select few, so that, naturally, everybody was eager to be decorated. And when the crowd was greatest Royalty appeared, quite unprecedented at a private view, and the crowd was hustled into another room while the Prince and Princess of Wales went round the gallery, looking at everything, the Prince chuckling over the catalogue. 'I say, Mr. Whistler, what is this?' he asked when he came to the Nocturne—Palaces. 'I am afraid you are very malicious, Mr. Whistler,' the Princess said."
Those who received the little Butterflies thought them charming. Mrs. Marzetti writes us:
"I have a few treasures which I guard most jealously; one is the golden Butterfly that he made us wear at the private view of his exhibition in Bond Street, in the original little card box in which he sent them (three I think) to mother, with a message written on the lid, and signed with his Butterfly."
The public laughed. They thought the Butterflies added to the screaming farce, the foppery of the whole thing. The attendant in yellow and white livery was called the poached egg. The catalogue was worse. Poor Wedmore and the others could hardly like to have their blunders and blindness immortalised. Most of them made the best of it by refusing to see in him anything but the jester. His humour was compared to Mark Twain's, and he to Barnum, and the show was "excruciatingly agreeable." Some honestly thought his work rubbish, and found his last little joke dull without being cheap. Their ridicule has become ridiculous. As for Whistler's etchings, the price of the series of Twelve, as of the Twenty-Six issued a year or so later in which many of these prints were published, was fifty guineas; on May 27, 1908, the single print Nocturne—Palaces sold in Paris for one hundred and sixty-eight guineas, and we have been offered two hundred pounds for our Traghetto. The etchings were also shown in decorated rooms in Boston and Philadelphia.
For the exhibitions of 1883 he had no new work, but sent two earlier Nocturnes to the Grosvenor and to the Salon the Mother, and was awarded a third-class medal, the only recompense he ever received at the Salon. In the winter of 1883-84 he worked a great deal out of doors, spending many weeks at St. Ives, Cornwall. He took no interest in landscape; "there were too many trees in the country," he said. But he loved the sea, from the days of The Blue Wave at Biarritz and The Shores of Brittany until one of the last summers when he painted at Domburg, in Holland. The Cornish sketches were sent to his show of Notes, Harmonies, Nocturnes, at Dowdeswell's Gallery in May 1884, the first exhibition in which he included many water-colours. The medium had been difficult to him; now he was its master. He used it to record subjects as characteristic of London as the subject of his pastels were of Venice. There were also studies and sketches in Holland, for he was always running about again. The interest of the catalogue was in the preface, L'Envoie he called it, and was so laughed at not only for the place he gave it, but for the spelling, that he searched the dictionaries, and then declared, we cannot say with what authority, that envoie means some sort of snake. "Ha ha! that's it! Venom!" he said. The Envoie, without his explanation, is interesting, for it consists of the Propositions No. 2, which have become famous: that a picture is finished when all traces of the means that produced it have disappeared; that industry in art is a necessity, not a virtue; that the work of the master reeks not of the sweat of the brow; that the masterpiece should appear as the flower of the painter, perfect in its bud as in its bloom. He decorated the gallery: delicate rose on the walls, white dado, white chairs, and pale azaleas in rose-flushed jars. The Butterfly, tinted in rose, was on the card of invitation. The Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Grey was as little appreciated as the Yellow and White in 1883; to the critics it was a new affectation.
There were signs of appreciation when, in 1884, Whistler sent the Carlyle to the Loan Exhibition of Scottish National Portraits at Edinburgh, where it created an impression. There had been attempts to sell the picture. M. Duret tried to interest an Irish collector, who, however, did not dare to buy it. It was offered to Mr. Scharfe, director of the British National Portrait Gallery, who not only refused to consider the offer, but laughed at the idea that "such work should pass for painting." The first endeavour to secure it for a national collection came from George R. Halkett, who urged its purchase for the Scottish National Gallery in the Scotsman (October 6, 1884). He was supported by Mr. William Hole in a letter published the following day.
Unfortunately, the subscription paper disclaimed approval of Whistler's art and theories on the part of subscribers. Whistler, indignant, telegraphed to Edinburgh: "The price of the Carlyle has advanced to one thousand guineas. Dinna ye hear the bagpipes?" The price he had asked was four hundred, and this ended the negotiations.
Why about this time Whistler should have become involved in a Church Congress in the Lake Country, unless he was coming from or going to Scotland, we never have been able to explain. He told us about it years later, and he seemed no less amazed than we. J. was just about to start for the Lakes, and Whistler was reminded of his excursion there. We give the note made at the time:
"Sunday, September 16 (1900). Whistler dined, and Agnes Repplier—not a successful combination. The dinner dragged until E. J. Sullivan happened to come in, and Whistler woke up, and, all of a sudden, we hardly know how, he was plunged into the midst of the Lake Country and a Church Congress, travelling third class with the clergy and their families, eating jam and strange meals with quantities of tea, and visiting the Rev. Mr. Green in his prison, shut up by his bishop for burning candles, and altogether the hero and important person he would never be on coming out. An amazing story, but what Whistler was doing in the Lakes with the clergy he did not appear to know; the story was enough."
The only result of the expedition was the etching done in Cumberland, and his impression of the unpicturesqueness of the Lakes: the mountains "were all little round hills with little round trees out of a Noah's Ark." What he thought of great mountain forms we do not know for, save on the trip to Valparaiso and going to Italy, he never saw them. Yet the lines of the coast in the Crépuscule show that he could render mountains. But, as he said, the mountains of Cumberland are only little round hills. At the end of his life he saw the mountains of Corsica, Gibraltar, and Tangier, but there is no record.