“Do you think, prince, that Raphael would not have been the greatest genius among painters if he had been unlucky enough to be born without hands?” Lessing makes the painter Conti say to Prince Gonzaga. A century and a half ago that seemed paradoxical, and was, probably on that account, one of the most quoted maxims of Lessing’s. It has, meanwhile, experienced the fate of many paradoxes, viz., become a commonplace. Nowadays, every dabbler in psychology knows that not arm and hand—i.e., execution—make the painter, but his optical brain centres, i.e., his sensitiveness to impressions of sight, his specific reactions on colour and form. One is a born painter—a painter from organic necessity and natural bent preceding all education—only by special development or susceptibility of this centre.
In painting, however, there are two elements to be kept distinct—drawing and colour. Both these are traceable to the centres of sight, but they correspond to different sensibilities. Optical centres, which perceive with particular keenness and delicacy the distinctions between intensities of light, are the real, organic hypothesis of the talent for drawing; for what we perceive with the eye, without the aid of the senses of touch and muscle, as outline or form, is purely distinction of intensity in light. Optical centres, on the other hand, which are particularly sensitive to the variations of undulations of light, form the basis of the sense of colour and the talent for colouring. As a rule the talents for drawing and colouring appear coupled, even if one or the other preponderates, for highly developed or particularly sensitive optical centres are naturally receptive beyond the average of optical impression of every sort, of differences both of intensity and of undulations of light. This is, however, not always the case, and there are dry, sharp draughtsmen without sense of colour, and some who revel in colour without the ability to grasp the idea of form and render it plastically.
In a brain that is characterised by a special morphological or functional development or sensitiveness of the optical centres, this dominates all functions of the brain, especially memory and association of ideas. The entire thinking faculty has an optical or visual character; it stands in a dependent relation to sight. Memory clings almost exclusively to reminiscent pictures of the sense of sight, and association of ideas connects mainly pictures of this category. Every perception of form calls up in the consciousness representations of form. The fancy is “inwardly completely full of figures,” as Albert Dürer quaintly and with wonderful intuition expresses it in his “Diaries.” The world-picture of this brain, always disposed to intense observation, is neither loud nor excited, but bright, flashing, and radiant like a mosaic work of precious stones and enamel. All the inner connections between the different domains of the brain are sharpened towards the optic centres, and all the activities of the brain, all emotions, all processes on the threshold of consciousness also release central optical excitements.
Whistler’s life-work reveals more than that of any other artist in our times the deep, organic primitiveness of his genius as a painter. We can observe in him, as in a school text, the psychology of the born painter. His signature is at once a fine example of the association of ideas on the part of a visionary. It consists, as everybody knows who has seen Whistler’s works, of a butterfly with evenly outstretched wings. People have insisted on seeing heaven knows what symbol in this, and have consequently sought the wildest and remotest explanations of it. If any one asked the master for an explanation, he laughed, and made a mysterious gesture of refusal. It gave him vast entertainment to see his admirers tormenting themselves with profound attempts at interpreting it. They just had no eyes; they could not see. The butterfly is nothing but the first letter of Whistler’s name—a big W. A Gothic, ornamental W with the two side lines bellied out and a bar in the middle reminds one strikingly of a soaring butterfly with its cylindrical body between its outstretched wings. The definite association of ideas from similarity of form made Whistler, as he painted the W of his signature, think of a butterfly, and he henceforward formed this picture that was fuller in expression, disregarding the original letter, which seemed to him balder and more meaningless. The butterfly came to the front more and more as the W went further and further back, and it is possible that at last Whistler himself forgot the point from which he started.
Whistler was, when he liked, in the front rank as a designer of forms. From the severe, painfully upright school of Gleyre he went forth a master of drawing, as of the outline of corporeality of three dimensions seen stereoscopically. One glance at his wonderfully plastic portraits, especially of his first period, teaches this irrefutably; but, on the whole, as his individuality made itself felt, he neglected form and became more engrossed in colour. In the second half of his life the outlines of subjects hardly any longer interested him at all; he only dwelt on their appearances in colour, on the harmony or discord of their tones. That means that his optical centres were much more sensitive to the differences of undulations than to those of the intensity of light. From this there necessarily resulted a contradiction between him and the average individuals which was not to be got over, since it originated in differences in the constitution of the brain. He who has not Whistler’s special hyper-sensitiveness to colour is simply unable to see things as the latter saw them. He can just as little imagine the impressions that Whistler feels through his sense of sight as perhaps those which are supplied to a hound by his nose. When the blissfully but painfully supersensitive appreciator of colour and the dull seer of outline, i.e., the perceiver of light, sought to explain themselves to each other, inexplicable misunderstandings were bound to arise, which make his celebrated law-suit with Ruskin an excruciatingly comic jest. Ruskin appreciated only draughtsmanship, his mind never went beyond contour. For him a picture was a writing that should express thoughts and feelings in the most concrete form. He demanded that it should be a definite communication, reducible to plain words, as of a narrative, a record of travel, or a treatise on natural science. A picture that differed from an exact representation, just as music differs from articulate speech—a picture that attempted to convey only a general, not a concrete stimulation of the sight-centre sensitive to colour, and the pleasurable feeling accompanying and emphasising it, not only was to him necessarily incomprehensible, but, as he was a dogmatist of strong feelings, seemed to him an impertinence—nay, a profligacy and personal insult. Ruskin’s criticism of a “Nocturne in Black and Gold” was a new version of the fable of the stork and the fox who invited each other in turn to dinner, improved to the point of libel. It was childish of Whistler to bring an action against the angry-minded art-inquisitor who required, as the first duty of a painter, the accuracy of a geologist, botanist, or engineer. He should not have expected justice from judges who saw and felt, not like himself, but like Ruskin. Judge Huddleston was of good faith when, in the immortal trial—which Whistler himself has preserved for posterity in his charming book, “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies”—he exchanged with the artist remarks like these: “Which part of the picture, then, really represents the bridge? Do you mean to say that this is the proper representation of a bridge?” (The question referred to “Battersea Bridge by Moonlight.”) “I had no intention of giving an exact copy of the bridge.” “Do these daubs of colour on it represent human beings?” “They represent what you please.” “Is that thing under there a boat?” “It is a consolation to me that you recognise it. My whole object was only to produce a definite harmony of colours.” He could hear this harmony of colours: Ruskin and Judge Huddleston could not. It was utterly futile to try to make them feel it.
His peculiarity of giving his pictures fine and pretentious names, such as “Black and Gold,” “Blue and Silver,” “Ivory and Gold,” “Purple and Gold” is also generally misunderstood. People read “Silver and Blue,” and saw indistinctly intricate brush-strokes of blue with elevations in dead white, representing, by way of indication, the high seas by night and in a mist. People hurried to the picture labelled “Ivory and Gold,” expecting to gaze at something like an ancient chryselephantine marvel, or a Florentine masterpiece of splendour belonging to the days of the Medici, and what did they find? The lightly executed sketch of a woman in a yellow and white harmony, in which one looked in vain for the costly materials promised by the title. Not Philistines alone have shaken their heads over this, and evil-disposed critics have talked of hoaxing, foppery, and American bluff. They have wronged the artist bitterly. He was absolutely honest; his optical hyper-sensitiveness felt the colour with so heightened an appreciation of tone that he really saw gold, silver, and purple, where a less susceptible sense could only see dull yellow, deadened white, undecided reddish-brown. In all probability, it was long before he realised that others failed to observe, in the appearance of the actual things and his pictures of them, the rare metals and precious stones, the pearls and ivory, which gleamed from them to him. The common phrase, which is a precipitate of the universal thought and feeling, speaks of sun-gold and moon-silver. Sun and moon consequently make such a strong optical impression on even the average man that he thinks of gold and silver with the accompanying higher notes of ideas of splendour and magnificence. In Whistler’s consciousness, however, these ideas began to be felt with gentle excitations, as whitish foam on dark waves in the night, or a woman’s pale complexion in cream-coloured raiment yielded them. These delicate charms affected his sensitiveness just as the force of the sun or moon affects others. In maniacal excitation, of which the acutest form is madness, the brain of the sick person becomes so supersensitive that it reacts on the ordinary impressions of the senses just as on intolerably violent irritations. Moreover, certain poisons, of which hashish is the best known, derange the central nervous system into a condition of supersensitiveness, in which the person poisoned feels himself inundated with floods of light, and sees a blinding brightness everywhere. The sensitiveness to which only illness or poison raises the average brain, was from nature the peculiarity of Whistler’s sight-centres. He was conscious that in certain respects he had more than others, and he felt as superior to them as the Indian hunter does to a pale face of the towns on a game-beast’s track, which the latter does not notice at all, whilst it gives the former a thousand clear indications. As an artist he was amiably modest, as a man amusingly arrogant. He did not flatter himself on his work, but on his finer organisation, i.e., that he was kneaded out of better dough than the majority.
His supersensitiveness is expressed not only in his revel of colour; it is also curiously and graphically revealed in the impressions which he feels of the appearance of women, and which he conveys in his best portraits of women with an intensity no longer restrained within physiological bounds, but positively touching on the morbid. The intensity with which he feels young, high-bred, nervous women has quite an uncanny effect on me. I think of his “Lady Meux,” and other capricious femininities, which were exhibited, in the last fifteen years, in the Paris salons and in London. He plants his model before us in some wonderful position. One stands with its back towards us, but turns its head, as if in a sudden caprice, to us. Another shows us its full face, and looks fascinatingly at us with pinched mouth and impenetrable eyes that think troublous thoughts. These perverted, whimsical beauties wear remarkable and personal toilettes which, except the face and often the hands, reveal not a finger’s breadth of skin, yet, in spite of the interposition of silk and lace, cry out for the fig leaf. They are bundles of sick nerves that, from the crowns of their heads to the tips of their fingers, seem to thrill with Sadic excitement. It is as though they wanted to entice men to wild attempts, and at the same time held their claws ready to tear, with a loud cry of pleasure, the flesh of the daring ones. Everything madly Mænadic, or inexorably Sphinx-like, that Ibsen was incapable of incarnating convincingly in his Hedda Gabler speaks distinctly from Whistler’s female portraits.
They have become typical—typical for copying painters who exaggerate his neurotic women into the pornographic; typical for hysterical women, to whom they suggest poses and psychological states. Félicien Rops perhaps owes him nothing, although often enough his female demons seem Whistler-portraits divested of clothing; he has, from analogous organic hypotheses, independently attained to analogous conceptions of woman; but Zorn’s, Boldini’s, Alexander’s women point to Whistler’s demoniacs. The woman of a given epoch likes to form herself on the ideal which the art and poetry of the time give of the “interesting” woman. Thus Whistler, by means of his female portraits, became an educator of the æsthetically superfine woman of the present day; but Whistler, as an educator of woman, is to me incomparably less sympathetic than Whistler, the delicate appreciator and symphonist of colour.