And as we read them in the familiar writing, we wonder why they never seemed foolish, but quite right, as he chanted them. In the Haden correspondence, published in The Gentle Art, a new version of Peter Piper may be found. He loved to quote the Danbury News man and the Detroit Free Press. He never lost his joy in American humour, and because there is something of the same spirit in Rossetti's limericks he never tired of repeating them, especially the two beginning:
and
Whistler invented Sunday breakfasts. The day was unusual in London and also the hour—twelve instead of nine. "Nothing exactly like them has ever been in the world. They were as much himself as his work," George Boughton wrote. Whistler arranged the table, seeing that everything placed on it was beautiful: the blue and white, the silver, the linen, the Japanese bowl of goldfish or the vase of flowers in the centre. If his resources failed, he borrowed from Lord Redesdale, or, after his brother was married, from Mrs. William Whistler, whose Japanese lacquer was his admiration. He prepared the menu, partly American, partly French, and wholly bewildering to joint-loving Britons. His description of the British breakfasts he was asked to were amazing: "Beef, the people or the rats had been gnawing, beer, and cheese rinds, salad without dressing and tarts without taste. Quite British!" His buckwheat cakes are not forgotten. He would make them himself, if the party were informal, and he never spoke again to one man who ventured to dislike them.
Sometimes eighteen or twenty sat down to breakfast, more often half that number. All were people Whistler wanted to meet, people who talked, people who painted, people who wrote, people who bought, people who were distinguished, people who were royal, people who were friends. From Mr. Cole we have notes of the company and talk at some of the breakfasts:
"June 17 (1877). To breakfast at J.'s. F. Dicey, young Potter, and Huth there. He showed some studies from figures—light and elegant—to be finished.
"June 29 (1879). To Whistler's for breakfast. Much talk about Comédie-Française and Sarah Bernhardt.
"July 8 (1883). Breakfast at W.'s. Lord Houghton, Oscar Wilde, Mrs. Singleton, Mrs. Moncrieff, Mrs. Gerald Potter, Lady Archie Campbell, the Storys, Theodore Watts, and some others. Mrs. Moncrieff sang well afterwards. Lord Houghton asked me about my father's memoirs. Margie [Mrs. Cole] sat by him."
The breakfasts remain "charming" in Mrs. Moncrieff's memory. And "charming" is Lady Colin Campbell's word. Lady Wolseley writes us that she remembers "a flight of fans fastened up on the walls, and also that the table had a large flat blue china bowl, or dish, with goldfish and nasturtiums in it." Mrs. Alan S. Cole recalls a single tall lily springing from the bowl; though invited for twelve, it was wiser, she adds, not to arrive much before two, for to get there earlier was often to hear Whistler splashing in his bath somewhere close to the drawing-room. This was Mr. W. J. Rawlinson's experience once. He had been asked for twelve, and got there a few minutes before as for breakfast in Paris. Several guests had come, others followed, a dozen perhaps; one was Lord Wolseley. For Whistler they waited—and they waited and they waited. At about half-past one they heard a splashing behind the folding-doors. There was a moment of indignation. Then Howell hurried in, beaming on them. "It's all right, it's all right!" he said, "Jimmie won't be long now; he is just having his bath!" Howell talked and they waited, and two struck before Whistler appeared, smiling, gracious, all in white, for it was hot, and they went down to breakfast. As soon as he came in he was so fascinating that the waiting was forgotten. We have heard but of one person who did not like the breakfasts, an artist who went one morning, and his story was that he drove down to Chelsea from St. John's Wood, and found Whistler alone, and they went into the dining-room, and there was an egg on toast for Whistler and another egg on toast for himself, and that was all. Then Whistler wanted to show him pictures, but he was furious, and he said, "No, Whistler, I have paid three shillings and sixpence for a cab to come here, and I have eaten one egg, and I will look at no pictures!"
Sir Rennell Rodd writes us of the breakfasts at 13 Tite Street, "with the inevitable buckwheat cakes, and green corn, and brilliant talk. One I remember particularly, for we happened to be thirteen. There were two Miss C.'s, the younger of whom died within a week of the breakfast; and an elderly gentleman, whose name I forget, who was there, when he heard of it at his club, said, 'God bless my soul!' had a stroke, and died too."
J. was once only at a Chelsea breakfast, in 1884, at Tite Street, when Mr. Menpes was present. But we often breakfasted in Paris at the Rue du Bac, and in London at the Fitzroy Street studio. It made no difference who was there, who sat beside you, Whistler dominated everybody and everything in his own as in every house he visited. Though short and small—a man of diminutive stature the usual description—his was the commanding presence. When he talked everyone listened. At his table he had a delightful way of waiting upon his guests. He would go round with a bottle of Burgundy in its cradle, talking all the while, emphasising every point with a dramatic pause just before or just after filling a glass. We remember one Sunday in Paris in 1893—Mr. and Mrs. Edwin A. Abbey and Dr. D. S. MacColl the other guests—when he told how he hung the pictures at the annual Liverpool exhibition in 1891:
"You know the Academy baby by the dozen had been sent in, and I got them all in my gallery; and in the centre, at one end, I placed the birth of the baby—splendid; and opposite, the baby with the mustard-pot, and opposite that the baby with the puppy; and in the centre, on one side, the baby ill, doctor holding its pulse, mother weeping. On the other by the door, the baby dead, the baby's funeral, baby from the cradle to the grave, baby in heaven, babies of all kinds and shapes all along the line; not crowded, you know, hung with proper respect for the baby. And on varnishing day, in came the artists, each making for his own baby. Amazing! His baby on the line. Nothing could be better! And they all shook my hand, and thanked me, and went to look—at the other men's babies. And then they saw babies in front of them, babies behind them, babies to right of them, babies to left of them. And then, you know, their faces fell; they didn't seem to like it—and—well—ha! ha!—they never asked me to hang the pictures again at Liverpool! What!"
As he told it he was on his feet, pouring out the Burgundy, minutes sometimes to fill a glass. There were minutes between one guest and the next; he seemed never to be in his chair; it was fully two hours before the story and breakfast came to an end together. But though no one else had a chance to talk, no one was bored. It was the same wherever he went if the people were sympathetic. If they were not, he could be as glum as anybody, especially if he was expected to "show off"; or, he could go fast asleep. In sympathetic houses he not only led the talk, he controlled it. There is a legend that he and Mark Twain met for the first time at a dinner, when they simultaneously asked their hostess who that noisy fellow was? For there was noise, there was gaiety, and everybody was carried away by it, even the servants.
Whistler was an artist in his use of words and phrases, making them as much a part of his personality as the white lock and the eye-glass. His sudden "What," his familiar "Well, you know," his eloquent "H'm! h'm!" were placed as carefully as the Butterfly on his card of invitation, the blue and white on his table. No man was ever so eloquent with his hands, he could tell a whole story with his fingers, long, thin, sensitive—"alive to the tips, like the fingers of a mesmerist," Mr. Arthur Symons writes of them. No man ever put so much into words as he into the pause for the laugh, into the laugh itself, the loud, sharp "Ha, ha!" and into the deliberate adjusting of his eye-glass. So much was in his manner that it is almost impossible to give an idea of his talk to those who never heard it. We have listened to him with wonder and delight, and afterwards tried to repeat what he said, to find it fall flat and lifeless without the play of his expressive hands, without the malice or the music of his laugh. This is why the stories of him in print often make people marvel at the reputation they have brought him. Not that the talk was not good; it was. His wit was quick, spontaneous. "Providence is very good to me sometimes," was his answer when we asked him how he found the telling word. He has been compared to Degas, who, it is said, led up the talk to a witticism prepared beforehand; Whistler's wit met like a flash the challenge he could not have anticipated. He loved a good story, made the most of it, treated it with a delicacy, a humour that was irresistible. He could be fantastic, malicious, audacious, serious, everything but dull or gross. He shrank from grossness. No one, not his worst enemies, can recall a story from him with a touch or taint of it. The ugly, the unclean revolted him.
We have heard of Sundays when Whistler sketched the people who were there, hanging the sketches in his drawing-room. One Sunday he made the dry-point of Lord (then Sir Garnet) Wolseley. Lord Wolseley himself has forgotten it: "I fear, beyond the recollection of an agreeable luncheon at his house at Chelsea, I have no reminiscence," he wrote to us. And Lady Wolseley thinks "Lord Wolseley may have gone to him for sittings early, and have breakfasted with him. I have a vague impression." But Howell was summoned that Sunday from Putney to amuse the sitter and prevent his hurrying off, and he put the date in his diary:
"November 24 (1877). Went to Whistler's, met Sir Garnet Wolseley. Whistler etched him; got two first proofs, second one touched, 42s. Met Pellegrini and Godwin."
Whistler went everywhere, and knew everybody, though he did not allow everybody to know him. When somebody said to him, "The Prince of Wales says he knows you," Whistler's answer was, "That's only his side." He lived at a rate that would have killed most men, and at an expense in details that was fabulous. "I never dined alone for years," he said. If no one was coming to him, if no one had invited him, he dined at a club. He was a familiar figure, at different periods, in the Arts, Chelsea, and Hogarth Clubs, the Arundel, the Beaufort Grill Club, or, for supper, at the Beefsteak Club. Many of his letters, for a period, were dated from "The Fielding." He was once put up at the Savile, he told us, but heard no more about it; and at the Savage, but that, he said, "is a club to belong to, never to go to." At the Reform, had he thought of it, he lost all chance of election one night when his laugh woke up the old gentleman whose snores were equally loud in the reading-room. An amusing proof of the number of his clubs is Mr. Alden Weir's story of passing through London and being asked to dine by Whistler, who suggested first one club, then another, and drove him about to half a dozen or more, at each getting out of the cab alone and coming back to say nobody of any account was there, or the dinner was not good, or some other excuse; and, at last, with an apology, driving him home to Chelsea, where a large party waited and an excellent dinner was served, and Mr. Weir was the one guest not in evening dress, for Whistler kept the party waiting still longer while he changed. In the Lindsey Row days Whistler sometimes dined in a cheap French restaurant, "good of its kind," with Albert Moore and Homer Martin, a man he delighted in. Many artists dined there, he said, and would sit and talk until late. "But then, you know, the sort of Englishman who is entirely outside all these things, and likes to think he is 'in it,' began to come too, and that ruined it."
To Pagani's, in Great Portland Street, a tiny place then, he went with Pelligrini and others. He was often at the Café Royal in the eighties with Oscar Wilde; towards the end, Mr. Heinemann, Mr. E. G. Kennedy, and we were apt to be with him, when, if he ordered the dinner, Poulet en casserole was the principal dish, and sweet champagne the wine. Never shall we forget a dinner there, in 1899, to Mr. Freer, who had just bought a picture. We and Mr. Heinemann were the other guests. Much as Whistler wished to be amiable to Mr. Freer, he was tired, and, somehow, the dinner was not right, and there were scenes in our corner behind the screen. Mr. Freer felt it necessary to entertain the party, which he did by talking pictures like a new critic, and Japanese prints like a cultured school-ma'am. Whistler slept loudly and we tried to be attentive, until at length, at some psychological moment in Hiroshige's life or in Mr. Freer's collection, Whistler snored such a tremendous snore that he woke himself up, crying: "Good Heavens! Who is snoring?"
Whistler had the faculty of being late when invited to dinner. One official evening, he arrived an hour after the time. "We are so hungry, Mr. Whistler!" said his host. "What a good sign!" was his answer. At times he felt "like a little devil," and he told us of one of these occasions:
"I arrived. In the middle of the drawing-room table was the new Fortnightly Review, wet from the press; in it an article on Méryon by Wedmore, and there was Wedmore—the distinguished guest. I felt the excitement over the great man, and the great things he had been doing. Wedmore took the hostess in to dinner; I was on her other side, seeing things, bent on making the most of them. And I talked of critics, of Wedmore, as though I did not know who sat opposite. And I was nudged, my foot kicked under the table. But I talked. And whenever the conversation turned on Méryon, or Wedmore's article, or other serious things, I told another story, and I laughed—ha ha!—and they couldn't help it, they all laughed with me, and Wedmore was forgotten, and I was the hero of the evening. And Wedmore has never forgiven me."
Whistler went a great deal to the theatre in the seventies and eighties, and was always at first nights. Occasionally he acted in amateur theatricals. In 1876 he played in Under the Umbrella, at the Albert Hall, and was elated by a paragraph on his performance in the Daily News. He showed himself at private views and at the ceremonies society approves. To see and to be seen was part of the social game, and the world, meeting him everywhere, mistook him for the Butterfly for which he seemed to pose.
For a year after the exhibition in Pall Mall, Whistler did not show any paintings. Artists said his pictures were not serious because not finished. Whistler retorted that theirs "might be finished, but—well—they never had been begun." Such remarks were not favoured by hanging committees. Probably Royal Academicians were honest, though malicious. Lord Redesdale remembered one whose work is forgotten, who used to say that Whistler was losing his eyesight, that he could not see there was no paint on his canvas. Mr. G. A. Holmes told us that a few artists in Chelsea, though they disliked him personally, thought him a man with new ideas who threw new light on art; Henry Moore said to Mr. Holmes that Whistler put more atmosphere into his pictures than any man living. But Academicians, as a rule, were afraid of him and Whistler would tell Mr. Holmes: "Well, you know, they want to treat me like a sheet of note-paper, and crumple me up!"
His prints were hung in exhibitions, many lent by Anderson Rose to the Liverpool Art Club in October 1874, and a few months afterwards to the Hartley Institution at Southampton. Shortly before the Liverpool show opened, Mr. Ralph Thomas issued the first catalogue of Whistler's etchings: A Catalogue of the Etchings and Dry-points of James Abbott MacNeil Whistler, London, Privately Printed by John Russell Smith, of 36 Soho Square. Of the fifty copies printed, only twenty-five were for sale, so that it became at once rare. Mr. Percy Thomas etched Whistler's portrait of himself with his brushes as frontispiece. Mr. Ralph Thomas described the plates, and as he had been with Whistler when many were made and printed, he was far better qualified than any of his successors. It is much to be regretted that Wedmore did not follow Thomas's excellent beginning.
In 1875, Whistler exhibited pictures in the few galleries that would hang him. In October he sent to the Winter Exhibition at the Dudley Gallery a Nocturne in Blue and Gold, No. III., which is impossible to identify, and Nocturne in Black and Gold—The Falling Rocket, which Ruskin presently identified beyond possibility of doubt: the impression of fireworks in the gardens of Cremorne. But at the Dudley it created no sensation. F. G. Stephens, in the Athenæum, was almost alone in its praise. A month later, November 1875, Chelsea Reach—Harmony in Grey, and many studies of figures on brown paper were at the Winter Exhibition of the Society of French Artists, and three Nocturnes in the Spring Exhibition (1876) of the same Society. Thus Whistler managed without the Royal Academy.
PASTEL
PINK AND GREY
OIL
In the possession of Alfred Chapman, Esq.
When Irving appeared as Philip II. in 1874, Whistler was struck with the tall, slim, romantic figure in silvery greys and blacks, and got him to pose. Mr. Bernhard Sickert thinks it extraordinary that Whistler failed to suggest Irving's character. We think it more extraordinary for Mr. Sickert to forget that Whistler was painting Irving made up as Philip II. and not as Henry Irving. Mr. Cole saw the picture on May 5, 1876, and found Whistler "quite madly enthusiastic about his power of painting such full-lengths in two sittings or so." The reproduction in M. Duret's Whistler differs in so many details from the picture to-day, that at first we wondered if two portraits were painted. M. Duret tells us that his reproduction is from a photograph lent him by George Lucas. Probably, M. Duret writes, the photograph was taken while Whistler was painting the picture, which afterwards he must have altered. On comparing the photograph carefully with the picture, we do not believe there were two portraits, but there were many changes. In the photograph the cloak is thrown back over the actor's right shoulder, showing his arm. In the exhibited picture his arm is hidden by the cloak, and his hand, which before seems to have been thrust into his doublet, rests upon the collar of an order. The trunks, apparently, were much altered, especially the right, and the legs are far better drawn, the left foot entirely repainted. Though Whistler was acquiring more certainty in putting in these big portraits at once, he was becoming more exacting, and he made repeated changes. When the Irving was hung at the Grosvenor Gallery, Mrs. Stillman remembers that three different outlines of the figure were visible. The portrait was not a commission. It is said that Irving refused the small price Whistler asked for it, but later, seeing his legs sticking out from under a pile of canvases in a Wardour Street shop, recognised them and bought the picture for ten guineas. Mr. Bram Stoker writes that, at the time of the bankruptcy, Whistler sold it to Irving "for either twenty or forty pounds—I forget which." The facts are that Whistler sold the Irving to Howell, for "ten pounds and a sealskin coat," Howell recorded in his diary, and that from him it passed into the hands of Mr. Graves, the printseller in Pall Mall, who sold it to Irving for one hundred pounds. After Irving's death, it came up for sale at Christie's, and fetched five thousand pounds, becoming the property of Mr. Thomas, of Philadelphia. On the death of Mr. Thomas it was purchased for the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
A portrait of Sir Henry Cole was begun this spring. Mr. Alan S. Cole, in his diary (May 19, 1876), speaks of "a strong commencement upon a nearly life-size portrait of my father. Looking at it reflected in a glass, and how the figure stood within the frame." This was never finished. Whistler's executrix says it was burned.
Lord Redesdale told us of a beautiful full-length of his wife in Chinese blue silk Whistler called fair, his word then for everything he liked. With two or three more sittings and a little work, it would have been finished. But it was a difficult moment, men were in possession at No. 2 Lindsey Row, and he slashed the canvas. The debt was small, thirty pounds or so, and the price agreed upon for the portrait was two hundred guineas. Lord Redesdale would gladly have settled the matter, but Whistler said nothing. A portrait started of Lord Redesdale, in Van Dyck costume, and several Nocturnes were torn off stretchers and slashed. The Fur Jacket, Rosa Corder, Connie Gilchrist with the Skipping Rope—The Gold Girl, Effie Deans, were being painted. The Fur Jacket, Arrangement in Black and Brown his final name for it, is the portrait of Maud, Miss Franklin, who now becomes more important in his life and in his art. It is of great dignity. The dress is put in with a full, sweeping brush in long flowing lines, classic in the fall of the folds; the pale, beautiful face looks out like a flower from the depth of the background. In many portraits Whistler was rebuked for sacrificing the face to the design; here the interest is concentrated on the face, and that is why the shadowy figure has been criticised as a mere ghost, a mere rub-in of colour, on the canvas. That he carried the work as far as he thought it should be carried is certain when it is contrasted with Rosa Corder, also an Arrangement in Black and Brown, in which the jacket, the feathered hat in her hand, the trailing skirt, the face in severe profile, are more solidly modelled. M. Blanche has stated that Whistler, in Cheyne Walk, saw Miss Rosa Corder in her brown dress pass a door painted black, and was struck with the scheme of colour. This may be true, for, as we have shown, chance often suggested the effect or arrangement. Connie Gilchrist—The Gold Girl, a popular dancer at the Gaiety, attracted Whistler by her stage dress, which revealed her slight girlish form in its delicate youthful beauty. He posed her in the studio as he had seen her on the stage, skipping. But the movement which told on the stage by its simplicity its spontaneity, became in the picture artificial. The figure has the elegance of the little pastels, it is placed with the distinction of the Miss Alexander, but the suspended action gives the sense of incompleteness. A long line swept down the back of the figure proves he meant to change it.
The above was written before the painting was bought by George A. Hearn and presented to the Metropolitan Museum of New York. Whistler for years had been endeavouring to get possession of it in order to destroy it. It had been seized at his bankruptcy, and for long was the property of Henry Labouchere. That Whistler was dissatisfied is shown by that long black line from the girl's head to her heels. After it had hung for some time in the Metropolitan Museum the line was removed, and what is left of the picture Whistler wanted to destroy can now be seen on the walls.
Always the pictures he was painting were in his mind. He memorised them as he did the Nocturnes, and over and over, instead of telling what he was painting, he would make, to show those he knew would understand, pen or wash sketches of the work he was engaged on, leaving the sketches, many of which exist, with his friends. There are records of the kind of most of these portraits.
No portraits were shown in 1876, for other work engrossed him. It was the year of The Peacock Room.
We do not know how he got the idea of the peacock as a motive for decoration, or where he obtained his knowledge of it. But the scheme was first proposed to Mr. W. C. Alexander for his house on Campden Hill, and Whistler put down a few notes in pen and ink. The work went no further, and he arranged, instead, a harmony in white for the drawing-room, replaced afterwards by Eastern tapestries. Then Leyland bought his house in Prince's Gate. Leyland's ambition was to live the life of an ancient Venetian merchant in modern London, and he began to remodel the interior and fill it with beautiful things. He bought the gilded staircase from Northumberland House, which was being pulled down. He commissioned Whistler to suggest the colour in the hall, and paint the detail of blossom and leaf on the panels of the dado. "To Leyland's house to see Whistler's colouring of Hall—very delicate cocoa colour and gold—successful," Mr. Cole wrote, March 24. Leyland covered the walls of drawing- and reception-rooms with pictures. He had work by Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Crivelli. He owned Rossetti's Blessed Damosel and Lady Lilith, Millais' Eve of St. Agnes, Ford Madox Brown's Chaucer at King Edward's Court, Windus' Burd Helen, Burne-Jones' Mirror of Venus and Wine of Circe. He bought Legros, Watts, and Albert Moore. Whistler's Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine was his, and he hung it in the dining-room amidst his splendid collection of blue and white china.
Norman Shaw was making the alterations to the house, and another architect, Jeckyll, was suggested by Mr. Murray Marks to decorate the dining-room and arrange the blue and white. Some say that originally Morris and Burne-Jones were to do the dining-room, but that when Whistler stepped in they vanished. Jeckyll put up shelves to hold the china, and Whistler designed the sideboard. The Princesse was placed over the mantel, and space left at the opposite end of the room for another painting by Whistler, who wished the Three Figures, Pink and Grey to face the Princesse. The walls were hung with Norwich leather. The shelves were divided by perpendicular lines endlessly repeated, and the panelled ceiling, with its pendant lamps, was heavy. Whistler maintained that the red border of the rug and the red flowers in the centre of each panel of the leather killed the delicate tones of his picture. Leyland agreed. The red border was cut off the rug, and Whistler gilded, or painted, the flowers on the leather with yellow and gold. The result was horrible; the yellow paint and gilding "swore" at the yellow tone of the leather. Something else must be done, and again Leyland agreed. The something else developed into the scheme of decoration first submitted to Mr. Alexander: The Peacock Room.
He told us one evening, when talking of it: "Well, you know, I just painted as I went on, without design or sketch—it grew as I painted. And towards the end I reached such a point of perfection—putting in every touch with such freedom—that when I came round to the corner where I had started, why, I had to paint part of it over again, or the difference would have been too marked. And the harmony in blue and gold developing, you know, I forgot everything in my joy in it!"
He had planned a journey to Venice, and new series of etchings there and in France and Holland. The journey was postponed. At the end of the season, the Leylands went to Speke Hall. Whistler remained at Prince's Gate. Town emptied, he was still there, spending his days on ladders and scaffolding, or lying in a hammock painting. His two pupils helped him: "We laid on the gold," Mr. Walter Greaves says, and there were times when the three were found with their hair and faces covered with it. Whistler's description of this whirlwind of work was "the show's afire," an expression he used for years when things were going. He was up before six, at Prince's Gate an hour or so after, at noon jumping into a hansom and driving home to lunch, then hurrying back to his work. At night he was fit for nothing but bed, "so full were my eyes of sleep and peacock feathers," he told us. He thought only of the beauty growing in his hands. Autumn came. Lionel Robinson and Sir Thomas Sutherland, with whom he was to have gone to Venice, started without him. He could not drop the work at Prince's Gate.
BLUE AND SILVER
OIL
In the possession of the Executors of Mrs. F. R. Leyland
A record of his progress is in the short notes of Mr. Cole's diary:
"September 11 (1876). Whistler dined. Most entertaining with his brilliant description of his successful decorations at Leyland's.
"September 20. To see Peacock Room. Peacock feather devices—blues and golds—extremely new and original.
"October 26. To see room which is developing. The dado and panels greatly help it. Met Poynter, who spoke highly of Whistler's decoration.
"October 27. Again to see room with Moody. He did not like the varnished surface and blocky manner of laying on the gold.
"October 29. To Peacock Room. Mitford (Lord Redesdale) came.
"November 10. The blue over the brown (leather) background is most admirable in effect, and the ornament in gold on blue fine. W. quite mad with excitement.
"November 20. With Prince Teck to see Whistler and the room. Left P. T. with Jimmy.
"November 29. Golden Peacocks promise to be superb.
"December 4. Peacocks superb.
"December 8. Article in Morning Post on Peacock Room.
"December 9. Whistler in a state over article in Morning Post. Leyland much perturbed as I heard.
"December 15. Whistler now thinking of cutting off the pendant ceiling lamps in Peacock Room.
"December 17. My father and Probyn to see room. Jimmy much disgusted at my father's telling him that, in taking so much pains over his work, and in the minuteness of his etched work, he really was like Mulready, who was equally scrupulous."
Lord Redesdale told us that, returning from Scotland, he went to Prince's Gate. Whistler was on top of a ladder, looking like a little imp—a gnome.
"But what are you doing?"
"I am doing the loveliest thing you ever saw!"
"But what of the beautiful old Spanish leather? And Leyland? Have you consulted him?"
"Why should I? I am doing the most beautiful thing that ever has been done, you know, the most beautiful room!"
Everybody wanted to see it. Whistler held a succession of receptions at Prince's Gate. He was flattered when the Princess Louise and the Marquis of Westminster came, he wrote to his mother at Hastings, for they set the fashion, kept up the talk in London. Boughton said in his Reminiscences: "He often asked me round to The Peacock Room, and I see him still up on high, lying on his back often, working in 'gold on blue' and 'blue on gold' over the whole expanse of the ceiling, and, as far as I could see, he let no hand touch it but his own." Mrs. Stillman, however, remembers the two pupils working while she drank tea with Whistler. Lady Ritchie let us have her impressions of a visit:
"Long, long after the Paris days, Mr. Whistler danced when I would rather have talked. Some one, I cannot remember who, it was probably one of Mr. Cole's family, told me one day when I was walking up Prince's Gate that he was decorating a house by which we were passing, and asked me if I should like to go in. We found ourselves—it was like a dream—in a beautiful Peacock Room, full of lovely lights and tints, and romantic, dazzling effects. James Whistler, in a painter's smock, stood at one end of the room at work. Seeing us, he laid down his brushes, and greeted us warmly, and I talked of old Paris days to him. 'I used to ask you to dance,' he said, 'but you liked talking best.' To which I answered, 'No, indeed, I liked dancing best,' and suddenly I found myself whirling half-way down the room."
Jeckyll came, and his visit was tragic. When he saw what had been done to his work, he hurried home, gilded his floor, and forgot his grief in a mad-house.
Whistler received the critics on February 9, 1877. A leaflet, for distribution, was written, it is said, by Whistler, though the wording does not suggest it, and printed by Thomas Way. It explains that, with the Peacocks as motive, two patterns, derived from the eyes and the breast feathers, were invented and repeated throughout, sometimes one alone, sometimes both in combination; along the dado, blue on gold, over the walls, gold on blue, while the arrangement was completed by the birds, painted in their splendour, in blue on the gold shutters, in gold on the blue space opposite the chimney-place. "Called and found Whistler elated with the praises of the Press of The Peacock Room," is Mr. Cole's note on the 18th of the month. Even then it was not finished. On March 5, Mr. Cole was "late at Prince's Gate with Whistler, consoling him. He trying to finish the peacocks on shutters. With him till 2 A.M., and walked home."
Whistler made no change in the architectural construction of the room. It was far from beautiful, with its perpendicular lines, its heavy ceiling, its hanging lamps, and its spaces so broken up that only on the wall opposite the Princesse and on the shutters could he carry out his design in its full splendour and stateliness, and give gorgeousness of form as well as colour; only there could he paint the peacocks that were his motive, so that it is by artificial light, with the shutters closed, that the room is seen in completeness. He could do no more than adapt in marvellous fashion the eye of the peacock, the throat and breast feathers to the broken surfaces. But in spite of drawbacks, The Peacock Room is the "noble work" he called it to his mother, the one perfect mural decoration of modern times. It was his first chance, and it is a lasting reproach to his contemporaries that there was no one to offer him another until too late.
Whistler, who in his pictures avoided literary themes, resorted to symbolism in his gold peacocks on the wall facing the Princesse. One, standing amid flying feathers and gold, clutches in his claws a pile of coins; the other spreads his wings in angry but triumphant defiance: "the Rich Peacock and the Poor Peacock," Whistler said, symbolising the relations between patron and artist.
Leyland had been away from Prince's Gate for months. He had seen his beautiful leather disappear beneath Whistler's blue and gold. He had heard of receptions and press views to which no invitations had been issued by him or to him, and he was annoyed at having his private house turned into a public gallery. The crisis came when Whistler, thinking himself justified by months of work, asked two thousand guineas for the decoration of the room. Leyland, who had sanctioned only the retouching of the leather, could restrain himself no longer. Like many generous men, he had a strict, if narrow, sense of justice. The original understanding was that Whistler should receive five hundred guineas. This grew to a thousand as the scheme developed. But when, at the end, Whistler demanded two thousand, and there was no contract, Leyland sent Whistler one thousand pounds, not even guineas. To Whistler this was an insult. He felt he had been treated not as an artist, but as a tradesman. He never forgave Leyland, though, at one moment, Leyland was prepared to pay the whole sum if Whistler would leave the house. Whistler refused, preferring to make Leyland a gift of the decoration than not finish the panel of the Peacocks, and he told Mr. Cole:
"You know, there Leyland will sit at dinner, his back to the Princesse, and always before him the apotheosis of l'art et l'argent!"
And this was what happened. Leyland knew that, in return for the loss of his leather and his irritation with Whistler, he had been given something beautiful, and he kept the dining-room as Whistler left it, toning down not a flying feather, not a piece of gold in that triumphant caricature. Until the colour fades from the panel, the world cannot forget the quarrel. Whistler never forgot it, and his resentment against Leyland never lessened. It may be that he was over-sensitive, certainly he put himself in the wrong by his conduct to Leyland. But he could no more help his manner of avenging what he thought an insult, than the meek man can refrain from turning the other cheek to the chastiser. It will ever be to Leyland's credit that he left the work alone.
A few years ago the room was removed from the house in Prince's Gate, bought by Messrs. Brown and Phillips, sold by them to Messrs. Obach, who exhibited it in their Bond Street gallery, and it was then purchased by Mr. Charles L. Freer and taken to Detroit. As he owns the Princesse, The Peacock Room is probably once again just as it was when Whistler finished it.
Many exhibitions had been organised in opposition to the Royal Academy, but on too small a scale to contend against that rich and powerful institution. Sir Coutts Lindsay, the founder of the Grosvenor Gallery, brought to it money, a talent for organisation, and a determination to show the best work in the right way. Nothing could have been more in accord with Whistler's ideas. He dropped in to smoke with Mr. Cole on the evening of March 19, 1876, "in great excitement over Sir Coutts Lindsay's gallery for pictures—very select exhibition, which he carried to an extreme by saying that it might be opened with only one picture worthy of being shown that season." Sir Coutts Lindsay proposed to exhibit no pictures save those he invited, and he might have succeeded had he ignored the Academy, and made the Grosvenor as distinct from it as the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers was under Whistler's presidency. He had the daring to invite Whistler, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, Walter Crane, Watts; but the weakness to include Millais, Alma-Tadema, Poynter, Richmond, Leighton. "To those whose work he wanted, he gave little dinners," Mr. Hallé has told us, and a very strange lot some of them seemed to Sir Coutts probably, to his butler certainly. One evening the butler could endure it no longer, and he came into the drawing-room and whispered: "There's a gent downstairs says 'e 'as come to dinner, wot's forgot 'is necktie and stuck a fevver in his 'air," for at this period Whistler, Mr. Hallé says, never wore a necktie when in evening dress. The white lock bewildered others. Mrs. Leyland remembered his going to her box at the opera once, where the attendant leaned over and said: "Beg your pardon, sir, but there's a white feather in your hair, just on top!"
At first, Burne-Jones and the followers of the Pre-Raphaelites were most in evidence at Sir Coutts Lindsay's exhibitions, and the "greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery" element prevailed. But the Grosvenor, by the time its traditions were taken over by the New Gallery, was little more than an overflow from the Academy.
Shortly before the first exhibition in 1877, Whistler's brother, the doctor, was married to Miss Helen Ionides, a cousin of Aleco and Luke Ionides. The wedding (April 17, 1877) was at St. George's, Hanover Square, and the Greek Church, London Wall. It brought to Whistler a good friend for the troubled years that were to come, and Mrs. Whistler's house in Wimpole Street was for long a home to him.
The first Grosvenor was a loan exhibition, and opened in May 1877. Whistler sent Nocturne in Black and Gold—The Falling Rocket shown at the Dudley; Harmony in Amber and Black, the first title of The Fur Jacket; Arrangement in Brown; Irving as Philip II. of Spain, with the title Arrangement in Black, No. III. From Mrs. Leyland came Nocturne in Blue and Silver; from Mr. W. Graham another Nocturne in Blue and Silver—changed later by Whistler to Blue and Gold, Old Battersea Bridge, now at the Tate Gallery; from the Hon. Mrs. Percy Wyndham, Nocturne in Blue and Gold, at Westminster. The Carlyle was included, but it arrived too late to be catalogued. Boehm lent his bust of Whistler in terra-cotta, done in 1872, considered at the time a good portrait.
Whistler's work was also seen in a frieze, described by Mr. Walter Crane: "Whistler designed the frieze—the phases of the moon on the coved ceiling of the West Gallery which has disappeared since its conversion into the Æolian Hall, with stars on a subdued blue ground, the moon and stars being brought out in silver, the frieze being divided into panels by the supports of the glass roof. The 'phases' were sufficiently separated from each other."
We have heard of this decoration from no one else. Probably it was overshadowed by the crimson silk damask and green velvet hangings, the gilded pilasters and furniture, the monumental chimneypiece, of which complaints were heard from every side. The sumptuousness of the background was disastrous to the pictures. Whistler's suffered less than others, but were not liked the more on that account. Before the private view (April 30, 1877), Sir Coutts Lindsay had expressed his disappointment in the Irving and the Nocturnes. At the private view the crowd gathered in front of Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, Millais, Leighton, Poynter, Richmond. The critics sneered at Whistler, or patronised him. The Athenæum grudged meagre lines to this "whimsical, if capable, artist and his vagaries." The Times smiled with condescension at "Mr. Whistler's compartment, musical with strange Nocturnes," wondered how Irving enjoyed "being reduced to a mere arrangement," and deplored the theory that, in practice, covered "an entire absence of details, even details generally considered so important to a full-length portrait as arms and legs. In fact, Mr. Whistler's full-length arrangements suggest to us a choice between materialised spirits and figures in a London fog."
But no criticism was so insolent as the notice of the Grosvenor which Ruskin delivered from his circulating pulpit, Fors Clavigera (July 2, 1877).
Ruskin, though social subjects engrossed him, was still the art critic powerful to the public, to himself infallible. He had made the Pre-Raphaelites, he set to work to unmake Whistler. Already he was attacked by the mental malady, the "morbid excitement" in Mr. Collingwood's words, that obscured the last years of his life; he had been very ill in the winter of 1877. Nothing else could pardon his malice and insolence. He reserved his chief abuse for Whistler's Falling Rocket at Cremorne, with the sudden burst of fire and shower of gold and detail disappearing in the illimitable darkness of night. That fireworks in a place of entertainment could have in them the elements of beauty was a truth Ruskin could not grasp, and with this wonderful canvas before him, he remained blind to the splendour of the subject and the mastery of the painter: "I have seen and heard much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."
Boughton, in his Reminiscences, tells that Whistler first chanced upon this criticism when they were alone together in the smoking-room of the Arts Club. "It is the most debased style of criticism I have had thrown at me yet," Whistler said. "Sounds rather like libel," Boughton suggested. "Well—that I shall try to find out!" Whistler replied.
Till now, his answer to abuse of his work had been the lash of his wit. But if critics had tried him by their stupidity, never, before Ruskin, had they outraged him by their venom. The insult appeared in a widely read print; he sought redress in the most public fashion possible in England, and sued Ruskin for libel.
The immediate result was that he found it harder to sell his pictures. To buy his Nocturnes was to be ridiculed, Mr. Rawlinson, one of the few who risked it, assures us. Whistler laughed away the new anxiety, and devoted more time to black-and-white. He had hoped to go to Venice, but the preparations for the trial kept him in London. And now Howell made himself as useful to Whistler as he had been to Rossetti:
"Well, you, know, it happened one summer evening, in those old days when there was real summer, I was sitting looking out of the window in Lindsey Row, and there was Howell passing, and Rosa Corder was with him. And I called to them and they came in, and Howell said: 'Why, you have etched many plates, haven't you? You must get them out, you must print them, you must let me see to them—there's gold waiting. And you have a press!' And so I had, in a room upstairs, only it was rusty, it hadn't been used for so long. But Howell wouldn't listen to an objection. He said he would fix up the press, he would pull it. And there was no escape. And the next morning, there we all were, Rosa Corder, too, and Howell was pulling at the wheel, and there were basins of water, and paper being damped, and prints being dried, and then Howell was grinding more ink, and, with the plates under my fingers, I felt all the old love of it come back. In the afternoon Howell would go and see Graves, the printseller, and there were orders flying about, and cheques—it was all amazing, you know! Howell profited, of course. But he was so superb. One evening we had left a pile of eleven prints just pulled, and the next morning only five were there. 'It's very strange,' Howell said, 'we must have a search. No one could have taken them but me, and that, you know, is impossible!'" There is a record of this period in the etching, Lady at a Window, with Rosa Corder, or Maud, by the garret window, looking at a print, the press behind her.
It was a period of what he called his "fiendish slavery to the press." There were new plates. In 1878 St. James's Street was reproduced by lithography in the "Season Number" of Vanity Fair. The Athenæum objected to it because it was "not done as Leech or Hogarth would have done it." The World mistook the reproduction for the original, and so invited from Whistler one of the letters following each other fast: "Atlas has the wisdom of ages, and need not grieve himself with mere matters of art." Adam and Eve—Old Chelsea has a special interest, for it marks the transition from his early manner in the Thames Set to the later handling in the Venetian. A plate was made from the Irving as Philip of Spain, the only portrait Whistler reproduced on copper, and it was not a success. His plates of Jo and Maud were never from pictures, though often studies for pictures he proposed to paint. The dry-point of his Mother has no relation to the portrait. He was bored to death with copying himself, he would say, and, twenty years afterwards, when he undertook a lithograph of his Montesquiou and failed, he said that "it was impossible to produce the same masterpiece twice over," that "the inspiration would not come," that when he was not working at a new thing from Nature he was not applying himself, "it was as difficult as for a hen to lay the same egg twice."
In 1878 he made his first experiments in lithography. His attention had been called to it by Mr. Thomas Way, who did more than any other man to revive the art in England. Lithography, appropriated by commerce, was almost forgotten as a means of artistic expression. In France, it was given over for cheaper and quicker methods of illustration; in England it was overweighted by the ponderous performances of Haghe and Nash, hedged about by trade unions, and reduced to the perfection of commonplace. Lithographers here and there preserved its best traditions and regretted the degradation. Mr. Thomas Way determined to interest artists again in a medium that had yielded such splendid results. He prepared stones for them, explained processes, and would not hear of difficulties. Some artists experimented, but lithography did not pay while the anecdote in paint fetched a fortune. Mr. Way appealed to Whistler, who tried the stone, grasped its possibilities, and was delighted. In his first five lithographs he did things never attempted before and found the medium adapted to him. He made nine this year on the stone, though his later work was mostly done on lithographic paper. He proposed to publish this first series as Art Notes, but there was no demand, and the plan fell through. The Toilet and the Broad Bridge were printed in Piccadilly (1878), edited by Mr. Watts-Dunton, and they had hardly appeared when the magazine came to an end. Neither Whistler nor lithography then meant success for any enterprise.
In 1878, the Catalogue of Blue and White Nankin Porcelain Forming the Collection of Sir Henry Thompson was published. Mr. Murray Marks and Mr. W. C. Alexander own delicate little designs of blue and white by Whistler for Mr. Marks, but never used. They were a good preparation for the drawings which, in collaboration with Sir Henry Thompson, he made to illustrate the Catalogue. Some are in brown, some in blue, reproduced by the Autotype Company. Nineteen of the twenty-six are by Whistler, simple and direct, the modelling in the drawing by the brush as the Japanese would have given it. As a rule there are neither shadows nor attempts at relief. The series is a refutation of the assertion that he could not draw. Whenever he attempted drawing of this sort, or etchings like The Wine Glass, he eclipsed Jacquemart and all his contemporaries. Worried, anxious, the libel case hanging over him, his debts increasing, the general distrust in his work growing, Whistler, nevertheless, gave to the catalogue his usual care. We have seen another set of the drawings, which differ slightly from those reproduced, and with which, evidently, he was not satisfied. The book was edited by Mr. Murray Marks, and issued by Messrs. Ellis and White, of 29 New Bond Street, in May, and Mr. Marks exhibited the drawings and the porcelain, with the book, in his shop, 395 Oxford Street. The show was not a success, the book was a loss, though only two hundred and twenty copies were printed. Now it is almost impossible to get.
Of personal notice, Whistler had more than enough. He was caricatured this year in The Grasshopper at the Gaiety—it was in the days of Edward Terry and Nellie Farren. A large full-length, thought by many more a portrait than a caricature, was painted by Carlo Pellegrini, an Italian artist who lived in England and, under the names of "Singe" and "Ape," contributed to Vanity Fair caricatures which, unlike the characterless, artless scrawls of his more popular amateur successors, were works of art and, therefore, appreciated by Whistler. The painting shows Whistler in evening dress, no necktie, and a gold chain to his monocle; and in a scene parodying the studios and artists of the day, it was pushed in on an easel, some say by Pellegrini, with the announcement, "Here is the inventor of black-and-white!" It was a failure, and no wonder. It was impossible to see the point. The painting now belongs to Mr. John W. Simpson of New York. Whistler was also caricatured in Vanity Fair by "Spy," Leslie Ward, then rapidly rivalling "Ape" in popularity, and to be so caricatured was, in London, to achieve notoriety.
To the second Grosvenor in 1878 he sent, in defiance to Ruskin, another series of Nocturnes, Harmonies, and Arrangements. Among them was the Arrangement in White and Black, No. I., the large, full-length portrait of Miss Maud Franklin, that sometimes figures in catalogues and articles as L'Américaine. We believe it was never shown in England again. It passed in the early eighties into the collection of Dr. Linde, at Lübeck, where it remained until 1904, was then sold through Paris dealers to an American, and remains one of the least known of Whistler's large full-lengths. We saw it in the spring of 1904 at M. Duret's apartment in the Rue Vignon. It is the only portrait, except the Connie Gilchrist and The Yellow Buskin, in which Whistler attempted to give movement to the figure. Miss Franklin wears a white gown in the ugly fashion of the late seventies, and walks forward, one hand on her hip, the other holding up her skirt. But she fails to fulfil Whistler's precept that the figure must keep within the frame. She seems walking out of the depths of the background, breaking through the envelope of atmosphere. The problem was difficult, an unusual one for Whistler, and, interesting as is the result, the portrait hardly ranks with the greatest. When shown in 1878, it did not help to reconcile the critics. The Athenæum said: "Mr. Whistler is in great force. Last year some of his life-size portraits were without feet; here we have a curiously shaped young lady, ostentatiously showing her foot, which is a pretty large one." It was a "vaporous full-length" in the opinion of the Times, babbling nonsense about the Nocturnes and glad to turn from Whistler's "diet of fog to the broad table of substantial landscape spread for us by Cecil G. Lawson." Whistler contributed a drawing of the Arrangement in White and Black to Blackburn's Grosvenor Notes, an illustrated catalogue published for the first time in 1878. For many years Whistler made these little sketches in pen and ink after his pictures for illustrated catalogues, and for papers that illustrated notices of the exhibitions, an aid to the identification of works where the titles fail.