JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER was a foremost figure in the artistic world, and he always struck me as the most curiously satanic gentleman I ever saw. He cultivated an upward turn of his dark eyebrows, he waved his long, thin hands in a fantastic way, he shook his locks or passed his fingers through them in a manner all his own, and appeared not only a poseur in art, but a poseur in literature, and a poseur among men. This probably added to his interest, for he certainly had a remarkable personality, and a better half-hour could not be spent than in his company.

He was as cruel to his friends as to his enemies, as scathing in his remarks, and yet at times almost maudlin in his sentimentalism. It was quite delightful to hear him discuss his own work. His egotism was—well, it was his own. His sweeping assertions were a revelation.

On my return from America in 1900 he told me that, “although an American himself, he should never visit that country again, as there was not an artistic soul to be found there.” And yet the purchasers of a host of his pictures and etchings were Americans, as were many of his best friends.

One hesitates to tell any Whistler stories, there has been such an extraordinary output. Many are doubtless apocryphal. I recall one or two that I have heard from his own lips, or from the persons (often the victims) chiefly concerned in them.

George Boughton, the painter, had a house on Campden Hill, designed by Mr. Norman Shaw, R.A., and five or six steps lead to the hall, as that eminent architect so often arranges. Whistler had been dining with Boughton one evening, and, as he was leaving, he did not notice the steps and fell down head first. The host was distracted and ran to pick him up.

Whistler sat up on the bottom step.

“What a d——d total abstainer you must have had for an architect, Boughton!” was all he said.

The famous “Peacock Room” at Prince’s Gate was a wonderful scheme of decoration, peacocks’ eyes on a gold ground being its principal motif. About the year 1880 the late Mr. Leyland, a wealthy shipowner and patron of the arts, had taken this grand new mansion, and asked Whistler to decorate a room. Jimmy, poor and out at elbows, as usual, jumped at the idea, but no terms were fixed upon. The work began. It was a prodigious undertaking, and the extraordinary and erratic little man spent two years and a half over his grateful task.

Being at Prince’s Gate all day, and having the run of Leyland’s house, Whistler had a hospitable way of inviting his friends to come and see the room, and then he would ask them to stop to luncheon. This sort of thing, which began occasionally, ended in being an almost daily occurrence, and Jimmy used to hold a little levée every morning, when subsequently three, four, and five people remained to luncheon. This became too much for Mr. Leyland, and his plan for putting an end to the campaign was a somewhat ingenious one.

Jimmy one day entertained four friends; the meal not being announced, he rang the bell for the butler.

“When is lunch?” he asked.

“I have no orders for lunch,” replied the man with a stately air.

“Oh no, of course,” replied Jimmy, not in the least disconcerted. “We’ll go along to such and such an hotel. Stupid of me to forget it!”

But it was enough, and though he pretended not to mind, and with that delightful impudence for which he was famous turned it off, he never forgave the incident, and determined to pay Leyland out. From that day he took his own lunch in a little paper parcel, and sat and devoured it when so inclined. On the next occasion Leyland came in to admire the peacock decorations about the usual luncheon hour.

“You will have some lunch, won’t you?” Whistler said.

Leyland looked surprised.

“Oh, please don’t refuse. It is always excellent, I assure you.”

Leyland looked still more uncomfortable.

Up jumped Jimmy, fetched his bag, and proceeded to untie his parcels, saying:

“It’s all right, old chap, have no anxiety; it is my lunch, not yours, and you are heartily welcome to it.”

When the work was accomplished which had taken so long Leyland wished to pay the bill, and asked the artist what was his figure.

“I have worked a whole year and more,” Whistler said. “I consider my services are worth two thousand pounds a year, therefore the figure is two thousand five hundred pounds, from which you can deduct the few hundreds you have given me on account.”

Leyland was horrified.

“Preposterous!” he said, “perfectly preposterous!”

Jimmy looked at him and drew himself up to his full height, which was not great.

“I beg, Mr. Leyland, that you will accept as a gift the entire work of my life for the last year and a quarter. I can compromise nothing.”

Once again Whistler scored and Leyland paid. His thanks to his patron afterwards took the form of painting a life-size portrait of him as a devil with horns and hoofs.

The sale of the famous portrait of Carlyle gave Whistler one of those opportunities in which he delighted. It was first exhibited in Edinburgh, and the Edinburgh Corporation, wishing to possess this masterful work, telegraphed to know what would be his lowest figure, to which Jimmy replied by wire: “Terms a thousand guineas, to the tune of the bagpipes.”

This was pure cheek, for the picture stood at five hundred guineas in the catalogue, and instead of replying how much less he would take for it, as the canny city fathers desired, he had doubled the sum. Three or four years later he sold that selfsame picture to Glasgow for the sum of a thousand guineas.

When painting his delightful picture of Miss Alexander, Whistler took about seventy sittings—a fearful ordeal. She told Phené Spiers that she thought he often rubbed out a whole day’s work after she had gone.

Near the close of his life Whistler withdrew from London for a period, living permanently in his rooms in the Rue du Bac, in Paris. I had not seen him for seven or eight years when I met him again in May, 1900, at a dinner-party at Mr. Heinemann’s in Norfolk Street, Park Lane. How altered Whistler was—he had changed from a somewhat sprightly middle-aged man to one nearer seventy.

His shaggy hair was grizzly grey, his round, beady, black eyes were as clear and brilliant as ever, overhung by thick black brows. A bright colour was upon his cheek, almost a hectic flush, if one may apply the term to a man of his age, and there was the same vivacity about him as of old. He was just as thin, and, needless to say, had not grown! He was the same witty little person, with the same sharp, sarcastic tongue. The artistic world had come to appreciate his work very differently from of old, and already he was encountering what a rival wit has pithily described as “the last insult—popularity.”

He had practically given up living in England, he said, with that strong American accent which he never lost: Paris he “found so much more inspiring.”

“There is not much wit in France now,” he remarked, “but there is positively none in Britain. There is not much good literature in France either, but there is less in England. People are all too busy trying to fill their pockets with gold to have time to store their brains with knowledge.”

The conversation turned upon his studio. Speaking of students, he said:

“Oh, I like women ever so much better than men. They are finer artists; they are more delicate, more subtle, more sensitive and artistic; indeed, it is the feminine side of a man that makes him an artist at all. Art is refined, or it is not Art. Man is not refined, except when he copies woman.”

“That is all very well,” I answered, “but unfortunately there have been so few great women artists.”

“Have there been many great men artists?” he enquired, with a little twinkle; “because I think not. In fact, there has been just as good work done by women as has ever been done by men in that line, and now that more of them are taking up Art, and are breaking the trammels by which they have been surrounded for generations, I shall be surprised if the world does not produce better women artists than men. It is in them; it is a born instinct. Love of refinement, beauty, poetry, sentiment, and colour belong to woman. Cruelty, perhaps valour, strength, and ruggedness, are on the man’s side.”

Encouragement goes a long way, just as human sympathy is the very backbone of life. Poor Jimmy Whistler got very little of either until his last few years. To the philosophy of youth everything matters, to the maturity of old age nothing matters.

He was brilliant and vain. But then, all men are vain. It is the prerogative of the male from the peacock upwards.

For some years Whistler had a little Neapolitan model, with very dark hair and beautiful black eyes. His wife took great interest in her. After his bereavement Jimmy felt he ought to continue to minister to the welfare of the girl, who by this time had grown into a magnificent specimen of a Neapolitan woman. She married when still very young, and, being tired of sitting as a model, she asked her patron one day to allow her to use his name if she started an atelier. “Might it be called the ‘Whistler Studio,’ and would he himself come and see after it and give instruction once a week?” Whistler approved of the plan and assented.

The woman therefore took a studio in Paris, where the painter was living, and at the end of the month, instead of having a dozen students as she expected, something like a hundred had entered their names, all eager to study under Whistler. On the strength of her success Madame abandoned her simple clothes and appeared gorgeous in black, rustling silk robes, in which she strutted about the studio and played the grande dame. Whistler, as has been said, promised to attend, and more or less he kept his word. The first day of his appearance the great little man marched into the room occupied by the female students, and, picking out one girl, sat down opposite her canvas, intending to correct her work.

“Give me your palette,” he said. “What is this? and this? and this?”

She told him the different colours.

“Hideous!” he replied, “and impossible! Where are so and so, and this and that?”

She had none of them. No one in the room was lucky enough to possess the colours he sought, so Whistler sent out for them and chatted pleasantly until the messenger’s return, having told the maiden in the meantime to clean her palette of all the vivid hues she had displayed upon it. The paints and the clean palette arrived together. Jimmy arranged them according to his taste.

“Now,” he said, “that palette is fit to paint with, and so ends your first lesson. Study it, and paint only with those colours until you see me again.”

Before the day was finished every girl had arranged her palette according to the plan, and the men in the other room likewise followed suit. When the artist paid his next visit to the studio, he found the palette he had himself prepared fixed upon the wall and immortalised with a wreath, while underneath was a label announcing, “This palette has been arranged according to the regulation of James Whistler, the artist.”

Whistler’s marriage was the strangest affair in the world, for he was probably about sixty at the time, and his bride, Mrs. Godwin, a widow, although a pretty woman, was by no means young. Yet the romance and enthusiasm they developed were delightful, and during the ten years or so of his married life Whistler became infinitely more human and contented in every way. They were very happy; indeed, his tender solicitude for his wife’s welfare on every occasion, and his anxiety and concern during her long illness, were a revelation to those who only thought of Whistler as a quarrelsome egoist wrapped entirely in himself. Hidden away, he had a kind heart, although he chose generally to conceal it. His wife’s loss was the tragedy of his existence, and he was never the same man afterwards.

Henry Labouchere wrote: “So my old friend Jemmy Whistler is dead. I first knew him in 1854 at Washington. He had not then developed into a painter, but was a young man who had recently left the West Point Military College, and was considering what next he should do. He was fond of balls, but he had not a dress-coat, so he attended them in a frock-coat, the skirts of which were turned back to simulate an evening-coat.

“I believe that I was responsible for his marriage to the widow of Mr. Godwin, the architect. She was a remarkably pretty woman and very agreeable, and both she and he were thorough Bohemians. I was dining with them and some others one evening at Earl’s Court. They were obviously greatly attracted to each other, and in a vague sort of way they thought of marrying. So I took the matter in hand to bring things to a practical point. ‘Jemmy,’ I said, ‘will you marry Mrs. Godwin?’ ‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘Mrs. Godwin,’ I said, ‘will you marry Jemmy?’ ‘Certainly,’ she replied. ‘When?’ I asked. ‘Oh, some day,’ said Whistler. ‘That won’t do,’ I said; ‘we must have a date.’ So they both agreed that I should choose the day, tell them what church to come to for the ceremony, provide a clergyman, and give the bride away. I fixed an early date, and got the then Chaplain of the House of Commons to perform the ceremony. It took place a few days later.

“After the ceremony was over we adjourned to Whistler’s studio, where he had prepared a banquet. The banquet was on the table, but there were no chairs. So we sat on packing-cases. The happy pair, when I left, had not quite decided whether they would go that evening to Paris or remain in the studio. How unpractical they were was shown when I happened to meet the bride the day before the marriage in the street. ‘Don’t forget to-morrow,’ I said. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘I am just going to buy my trousseau.’ ‘A little late for that, is it not?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she answered, ‘for I am only going to buy a new tooth-brush and a new sponge, as one ought to have new ones when one marries.’ However, there never was a more successful marriage. They adored each other, and lived most happily together; and when she died he was broken-hearted.”

One day I asked Walter Crane, who knew both Watts and Whistler more intimately than I did, whether he could tell me something of these two, so different from one another, and yet each of whom needs a prominent place—the one in the painter’s Valhalla; the other, well, let time decide in what niche and where Jimmy’s little statue shall command worship.

Crane replied:

One of my cherished possessions is the book-plate here shown which Walter Crane designed for me. He is probably the best Ex Libris draughtsman of the day, and he himself thinks this is the best book-plate he ever drew. At his request it was reproduced on wood, and while it has delighted its possessor, it will surely be admired by all for its intrinsic merit.

To explain the riddle of its symbolism.

On the right-hand side is the crest of the Harleys; on the left, the arms of the Tweedies. At the top the Medusa head and three legs represent Sicily. At different corners are implements, trappings, and odds and ends from various countries I have visited. The lamp of learning is burning brightly, the wreaths of fame, the book of knowledge are there, and a little ship is sailing away into the unknown; while below—and surely this is brilliant imagination—lies the world at my feet. This was sent to me with the following letter, written in the neatest and most brush-like of caligraphy:

At a later date, on returning a book, the kind originator of my treasure added some notes in pencil about this particular kind of work; notes quaint and full of pith as the writer’s drawing.

Another note given below enclosed his own book-plate:

As to book-plates, seeing that books are a particularly treasured kind of personal property and cannot yet be considered as communal as umbrellas; and because borrowers of books like long leases, but are generally provided with short memories, the possibly harmless, but certainly most necessary, book-plate has a distinct raison d’être.

Furthermore, they afford an opportunity of embodying in a succinct, symbolic, and decorative form the concentrated essence of the character, performances, career, and descent of the book-owner or lover. Thus book-plates acquire a certain historic interest in course of time, and may from the first possess as well an artistic interest; but this, naturally, depends on their design and treatment.

Next appears a notable figure thrown upon my cinematograph stage by the rapid process of setting free successive memories.

Watts. For a lover of pictures, what recollections that name implies!

How many and varied the styles, how many and varied the subjects, that in turn have found expression and thus sprung into life on the easel of this great painter.

It happened that on June 1st, 1886 (the anniversary of my birthday), a friend took me to the studio of Mr. Watts to see him at work, a note of which incident lies before me in a big, round, girlish hand.

To begin with, the charming house in Melbury Road, Kensington, with its large studio and spacious picture-gallery, seemed exactly the right home for a great artist.

At this time the master was working on what appeared, to my young mind, a ghastly subject—“Vindictive Revenge,” depicting a vulture of human form tearing to pieces a victim, whether man or woman escapes my memory. Horrible, and in no way satisfying to my reason. On another easel was a huge sulphur-coloured canvas showing a dying man sitting in his chair with a majestic woman’s figure standing by his side. Lying on a table near was a sketch (later exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery) of a most quaint and antiquated musical instrument that was used in the larger picture. This instrument resembled a wooden bowl, its aperture covered with a stretched skin, on which the shaggy hair was left, and the strings were passed over a few holes in this skin.

What it was called or whence its origin history does not relate. It had probably been picked up as a curio for its quaint appearance, but Mr. Watts disclaimed being a collector of such, telling me that his house would have been long overfilled had he given rein to this hobby, unique in the way it carries one on and on.

In the gallery in Melbury Road hung all manner of pictures and numerous portraits, amongst which I recognised those of Tennyson, the Prince of Wales, his former wife Ellen Terry, and Violet Lindsay—one of his favourite models—besides many more; but almost seventy were then being exhibited at Manchester, which somewhat denuded the walls.

In personal appearance Watts was a gracious, kindly old gentleman, with white hair and a closely trimmed beard. He wore a tight tweed suit and a scarlet ribbon loosely tied round his neck, besides a black velvet skull-cap, head-gear of so many “old masters.”

Here it seems permissible to quote a message from that great artist, when he was ill, delivered by Alfred Gilbert at an Art Congress.

He urged “the importance of making the aims and principles of art generally understood. The stumbling-block to the English was the practical: all that did not present the idea of immediate advantage seemed to them impractical. Till the love of beauty was once more alive among us there could be little hope for art.... The art that existed only in pictures and statues was like a religion kept only for Sundays.”

Like all other first impressions, this visit to the studio stands out a clear and vivid sketch in my mind. Everyone must have enjoyed meeting Watts, but to those workers who use the pen there is always a kindred interest, an alliance of aim with the brothers of the brush, besides the inspiring pleasure derived from the presence and helpful words of a master of his art.

From 1886 to the year of grace 1910 is a leap indeed: all but a quarter of a century! Likewise, from the awe-inspiring canvases of Watts, the master, to the witty, delightful, crisp illustrations of that past-craftsman of Art, Harry Furniss, is a change of subject well-nigh as great. At the thought of him gravity forsakes one’s visage, gives way to a smiling mien and expectation of wholesome fun, of delicate enjoyment.

What a worker, oh, but what a worker! as the French would phrase it, is the well-known and popular Hy. F.

I think I can lay claim to being a fairly busy person, but I feel ashamed, stunned, when I think of the stupendous amount of work accomplished by Harry Furniss. Anyone who has seen those five hundred illustrations to the eighteen volumes of Dickens must have admired the delicate draughtsmanship, the characterisation, the comedy and tragedy, and, above all, the penmanship of the artist. Five hundred illustrations! Yes, nearly all full-page, most of them containing several figures, and yet—but read in his letter below.

No wonder he was up with the first streaks of dawn for months, no wonder he became ill. Harry Furniss achieved a Herculean piece of work, if ever artist did.

Later in the autumn, accompanying a brief note snatched out of the over-busy worker’s day, is the expressive sentence, scribbled beside a pen-and-ink sketch of Father Time bearing the artist’s easel upon his back, as the patriarch squats and smokes, and H. F. breathlessly paints:

“Still working against Time.”

Doubtless he will go on doing so all his life, five hundred new illustrations for Thackeray later being but an episode, and yet he found time to illustrate many of his letters to friends: I have many I prize.