The many pleasant hours I spent in Whistler’s studio in Cheyne Walk are dominated in recollection by the striking personality of the artist. In physical no less than in mental equipment, he stood apart from his generation, and the characteristic peculiarities of his appearance, joined to the marked idiosyncrasy of his temperament, must remain unforgettable to all who knew him. It is easy indeed to recall the tones of the sometimes strident voice as he let slip some barbed shaft in ruthless characterisation of one or other of his contemporaries: easier still to summon again, as though he stood before me now, the oddly fashioned figure, lithe and muscular, yet finely delicate in its outline, as he skipped to and fro in front of his canvas, now with brush poised in the air between those long slender fingers, seeming, as he gazed at the model, to challenge the supremacy of nature, now passing swiftly to the easel to lay on that single touch of colour that was to record his victory. It is not so easy, however, to convey in words the intellectual impression left by the agile movement of his mind, as it leaped in sudden transition from the graver utterance of some pregnant thought concerning the immutable laws of his art, to those lighter sallies of wit and humour that found their readiest and most congenial exercise in the half-playful, half-malicious portraiture of men we both knew.

So notable indeed and so notorious became the sayings of Whistler, uttered in such moods of laughing irony, that the more deeply serious side of his nature was apt in his own time to be ignored or even denied. And for this he himself was partly to blame. His own manifest enjoyment in the free play of a ready and relentless wit was apt sometimes to obscure that deeper insight into the essential principles of the art he practised, to which no one on occasion could give a finer or more subtle expression.

No one, surely, perceived more clearly that there is in every art an essential quality born of its material and resting with instinctive security upon its special resources and limitations, without which it can make no lasting claim to recognition. He never forgot that the painter or the poet who ventures to take upon himself added burthens of the spirit which he is unable to subdue to the conditions of the medium in which he works, can find no just defence for the violation of any of the conditions the chosen vehicle imposes, by an appeal to the intellectual or emotional value of the ideas he has sought to express. He looked perhaps with even excessive suspicion upon the interpretation through painting of subjects that suggested any sort of reliance upon the modes appropriate to other arts, with the result that the effects he achieved bear sometimes too strongly the stamp of calculated effort. Science was a word he was very fond of employing with regard to painting, and though it implied a just rebuke to those who were wont to make a merely sentimental appeal, it sometimes fettered his own processes and left upon some of the work he produced rather the sense of a protest against the false ideals of others than of the free and spontaneous enjoyment of the beauty in nature that he intended to convey.

But an artist, after all, is either something better or something worse than his theories, and Whistler was infinitely better. His instinct was sure, and within the limits he assigned to himself he moved with faultless security of taste. If the realm he conquered was not over richly furnished it was at any rate kept jealously free from the intrusion of inappropriate elements. Whatever was admitted there had an indisputable right to its artistic existence, and while he excluded much that other men, differently gifted, might equally have subdued to the conditions he was so careful to obey, such beauty as he found in nature was at least always of a kind that painting alone could fitly render.

To watch Whistler at work in his studio was quickly to forget that he had any theories at all. Nothing certainly could less resemble the assured processes of science than his own tentative and sometimes even timid practice; for although the result, when it received the final stamp of his approval, seemed often slight and was always free from the evidence of labour, labour most surely had not been absent, for the ultimate shape given to his design, though it may have represented in itself only a brief period employed in its execution, had in many cases been preceded by unwearying experiment and by many a misdirected adventure that never reached completion at all.

Whistler’s talk in the studio was not often concerned with the subject of Art, and even when Art was the topic it was nearly always his own. His admiration of the genius he unquestionably possessed was unstinted and sincere, and if he avoided any prolonged discussion of the competing claims of his contemporaries, it was, I think, in the unfeigned belief that they deserved no larger consideration. He had his chosen heroes among the masters of the past, but they were few, and their superior pretensions, in his judgment, were so manifest that it seemed sufficient to him to announce their supremacy without further parley as to the inferior claims of their fellows. The position they occupied in his regard was as little open to argument as the place of incontestable superiority he was wont to assign to himself in his own generation. I remember once, when a friend in his presence rashly ventured to accuse him of a lack of catholicity in taste, Whistler in swift response admitted the justice of the charge and excused himself on the ground that he only liked what was good.

But there were causes, apart from the convinced egotism of his nature, which led him by preference towards other topics of conversation. He has written in his lectures and in his letters both wisely and wittily of the proper mission of painting; so wittily, indeed, that his humour and satire are apt sometimes to obscure the sound and serious thought which, on this subject, coloured even his most playful utterances. For, underlying all he said or wrote, was a conviction he took no pains to conceal—that the principles of Art, together with its aims and ideals, were the proper concern only of artists and could scarcely be debated without impropriety by that larger and profaner circle whose praise and appreciation, however, he was by no means disposed to resent. At times he was even greedy of applause, and provided it was full and emphatic enough, showed no inclination to question its source or authority. There were moments, indeed, when, if it appeared to lack volume or vehemence, he was ready himself to supply what was deficient.

It was partly therefore upon principle that he forbore to discuss at any length subjects with which he deemed the layman had no proper concern; partly also because in intimate conversation his innate and powerful sense of humour so loved to assert itself that he wandered, by preference, into fields where it found unfettered play. And so it happened in the long and intimate talks in the studio, while he was at his work, he loved to speak of things that belonged to the outer world, and to let his wit play vividly, sometimes mischievously and even maliciously, upon the qualities and foibles of his friends. Here he was never reticent, and so relentless were his raillery and his sarcasm that one was sometimes tempted to think that his acquaintances, and even his friends, only existed for the purpose of displaying his powers of attack and annihilation. I remember very well, when he was decorating what afterwards became known as the “Peacock Room” in Mr. Leyland’s house, that I used often to visit him at his work, and sometimes shared with him the picnic meals which a devoted satellite would prepare for him in the empty mansion. He was certainly very proud of the elaborate scheme of blue and gold ornament he had devised, but I believe this unalloyed admiration of his own achievement was scarcely so great or so keen as his delighted anticipation of the owner’s shock of surprise when he should return to discover that the handsome and costly stamped leather, which originally adorned the walls of the apartment, had been completely effaced to make room for the newly fashioned pattern of decoration. He already scented the joy of the battle that impended, and this added a peculiar zest to his labours in the accomplishment of a purely artistic task. As he had hoped so indeed it happened, and in the long controversy and conflict that ensued, he found, I believe, the most perfect and unalloyed satisfaction.

His nature, in short, at every stage of his career was impishly militant, and whereas other men are so constituted as to desire peace at any price, there was with Whistler scarcely any cost he deemed too great to secure a hostile encounter. To baulk him of a controversy was to rob him of his peace of mind, and so deeply implanted in him was the fighting spirit that he was sometimes only half-conscious of the wounds he inflicted. Certain it is that, the lists once entered, he was relentless in attack, and availed himself without scruple of any weapon that came to his hand. And yet even in his most saturnine sallies there was an underlying sense of humour that yielded to the onlooker at least a part of the enjoyment that he himself drew from the encounter; while his after recital of the tortuous ingenuity with which he had whipped a harmless misunderstanding into a grave estrangement was always irresistible in its appeal.

But though pitiless in combat, Whistler was not without a chivalrous side to his nature. He was fond enough, to use his own expression, of “collecting scalps,” but his tomahawk was never employed against members of the gentler sex. His manner towards women was unfailingly courteous and even deferential. In their company he laid aside the weapons of war, exhibiting towards them on all occasions a delicacy of sympathy and perception which they instinctively recognised and appreciated. It set them at their ease. They felt they could listen with interest and amusement to his recital of those fearless and sometimes savage contests with the male, in complete security from any danger of the war being carried into their own country. They were conscious, in his presence, of an enduring truce between the sexes: a truce so artfully established and so chivalrously conceded as to arouse no suspicion that they were being treated with the indulgence due to inferiors. There was, indeed, in his own character and personality something of the charm, something also of the weakness, that is commonly supposed to be exclusively feminine. The alertness of his temperament betrayed an intuitive quickness in identifying himself with the mood of the moment that found in them a ready response; and his natural vanity, though it might sometimes seem overpowering to members of his own sex, was so exercised as to leave no doubt that he still held in reserve a full measure of the admiration which was due to theirs.

Even as a craftsman there was something delicately feminine in Whistler’s modes of work. I have often watched him at his own printing-press when he was preparing a plate of one of his etchings, and it was always fascinating to follow the deft and agile movements of his hands as he inked the surface of the copper and then, with successive touches, graduated the varying force of the impression to be taken. Here, as I used to think, his method seemed more assured, his alliance with the mechanical resources of his art more confident, than when he was struggling with the subtler and more complex problems of colour.

I have already spoken of those physical peculiarities with which he had been liberally endowed by nature. They were such as to make him a marked figure in any company in which he appeared, and, so far from being a source of embarrassment to himself, he regarded them as a substantial asset to be carefully cultivated and artfully obtruded upon public notice. He even went so far as to enforce and emphasise what there was of inherited eccentricity in his personal appearance. The single tuft of white hair which lay embedded in the coiling black locks adorning his brow, he regarded with a special complacency and pride; and I was amused one evening in Cheyne Walk, while I watched him dressing for dinner, to observe the infinite pains he bestowed upon this particular item of his toilet. It was already past the hour when we should both have been seated at our friend’s table, but this fact in no way abbreviated the care with which he cultivated and arranged this unique feature in his appearance.

And yet it would be wrong, perhaps, to ascribe the delay only to vanity, because to be late for dinner was with Whistler almost a religion. Certain it was, however, that he took a childish delight in any little studied departures from the rules of ordinary costume. At one time he ostentatiously abandoned the white neck-tie which was the accepted accompaniment of evening dress; at another, a delicate wand-like cane was deemed to be a necessary ornament to be carried in his walks abroad; and yet again he would announce an approved change in fashion by appearing in a pair of spotless white ducks beneath his long black frock-coat. These calculated eccentricities induced in the minds of the crowd the conviction that Whistler deliberately sought a cheap notoriety, and it must be conceded, even by those who recognised the serious side of his nature, that he exhibited at times a strange blend of the man of genius and the showman. And yet this admission might easily be made to convey a false impression. He was in a sense both the one and the other, but their separate functions were never merged or confused. Till his task as an artist was completed no man was more serious in his purpose or more exacting or fastidious in the demands he made upon himself. There was nothing of the charlatan in that part of him which he dedicated to his work; and it was not until the artist was satisfied that he availed himself of such antics as attracted, and perhaps were designed to attract, the astonished attention of the public.

One charge that was often urged against him by his enemies, arose out of the singular choice of titles for his pictures. But it was not, I think, in any spirit of affectation that he elected to describe some of his works in terms only strictly appropriate to music. His “Harmonies” and his “Nocturnes,” though they seemed at the time to indicate a certain wilful perversity, had in reality a true relation to principles in Art which he was earnestly seeking to establish. It has been rightly held of music that, in its detachment from the things of the intellect and its independence of defined human emotion, it stands as a model to all other modes of expression by its jealous guardianship of those indefinable qualities which are of the essence of Art itself. And in a sense it may be said of Whistler that he discharged a like function in the realm of painting. For all appeal made through other means than those strictly belonging to the chosen medium he had neither sympathy nor pity. It was for the incommunicable element in painting, incommunicable save through the unassisted resources of painting itself, that he was constantly striving, and it was his revolt against all alien pretensions that led him to seek and to adopt the analogy of music wherein the saving efficacy of such elements is never questioned.