THE WORLD OF JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER

1 07 254

THE WORLD OF

James McNeill Whistler

BY HORACE GREGORY

Amy Lowell: Portrait of the Poet in Her Time. 1958

THE WORLD OF
James McNeil Whistler

by

HORACE G,REGO RY

"It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait."
John Singer Sargent quoting James McNeill Whistler

THOMAS NELSON & SONS
Edinburgh NEW YORK Toronto

Copyright, 1959, by Horace Gregory

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Conventions.
Published in New York by Thomas Nelson & Sons and simultaneously
in Toronto, Canada, by Thomas Nelson & Sons CCanada), Limited.

Library of Congress Catalog Card No,: 59-15544

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED TO

Joanna and Haudl ZiegJer

Note

For encouragement in the writing of the following pages I am
deeply indebted to Henry Allen Moe of the Guggenheim Founda-
tion from which I received a grant; to John and Ruth Stephan, to
Dr. Frank Millett, to Sir John Rothenstein, to William Rubin, to
James Johnson Sweeney.

For the last draft of the book I am grateful for a translation of a
passage in the Goncourt Journals made by Patrick Bolton Gregory,
for the understanding and thoughtfulness of my editor, Gorham
Munson, for the assistance of officials in the following institutions:
The Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Frick Museum
(New York), The New York Public Library, The Library of Con-
gress (Washington, D.C.), The British Museum (London), The
Tate Gallery (London), the University of Glasgow (Scotland).

My thanks also to New Directions for permission to quote on
page 233 lines from Ezra Pound's 'To Whistler, American," from
Personoe, copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound.

H. G.

Authors
Foreword

This book does not pretend to be a definitive biography of James
McNeill Whistler. It is rather an interpretation of his life and art
Some readers may complain that I have not recited all the Whistler
anecdotes of which there are so many, yet it is my belief that very
few have improved with age.

The legend of his showmanship still tends to overshadow Whis-
tler, "the serious artist/' who in his generation made enduring con-
tributions toward an appreciation of Oriental art. His work became
an influence that survives today. In retrospect and in relationship to
contemporary painting, his work, however slight and tenuous it may
seem, can be recognized as more American and more "modern" than
it seemed to be twenty years ago. It is to be hoped that "the serious
artist" in Whistler will gain another hearing.

In respect to Whistler's genius one should not confuse solemnity
with seriousness. He was never solemn. However improvident he
was, however lavish he became in the spending of his energy or
his creditors' money, he could never afford the luxury of being dull.
He was both gallant and courageous, and as someone said, requoting
a remark made by Samuel Johnson, "Where there is no courage, no
other virtue can survive except by accident."

H. G.

Palisades, N. Y.
May 1, 1959

Contents

PROLOGUE 1 5

I 19

II 28

III 39

IV 44

V 57

VI 73

VII 85

VIII 89

IX 99

X 107

XI 121

XII 138

XIII H8

XIV 154

XV 176

XVI 196

XVII 220

EPILOGUE 23 1

INDEX 249

List
of Illustrations

AFTER PAGE 128

Whistler in his Paris Studio

Courtesy of Miss Elizabeth E. Roth, Print 'Room, N.Y. Public
Library

Early Self -Portrait

Courtesy of Miss Elizabeth E, Roth, Print Room, N.Y. Public
Library

Fantin-Latour's Portrait

Courtesy of Miss Elizabeth E. Roth, Print Room, N.Y. Public
Library

Whistler's Half-Sister

Courtesy of Miss Elizabeth E. Roth, Print Room, N.Y. Public
Library

Miss Leyland

Courtesy of Miss Elizabeth E. Roth, Print Room, N.Y. Public
Library

Before the Mirror

Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Tate Gallery,
London

Whistler in the 1870's

Courtesy of Miss Elizabeth E. Roth, Print Room, N.Y. Public
Library

12 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Punch on the Ruskin Trial

Courtesy of Miss Elizabeth E. Roth, Print Room, N.Y. Public
Library

Miss Cicely Alexander

Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery,
London

Beatrix Godwin Whistler

Courtesy of Miss Elizabeth E. Roth, Print Room, N.Y. Public
Library

Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac
From the Frick Collection

Rosa Corder

From the Frick Collection

An Etching by Ernest Haskell

Courtesy of Miss Elizabeth E. Roth, Print Room, N.Y. P^M^c
Library

THE WORLD OF

James McNeill Whistler

Prolo

ue

o,

N the last Monday of November, 1878, a dark-eyed, slender,
middle-aged American made his presence felt in the dimly Ht
chamber of the Exchequer Court, Westminster Hall, London. The
American was James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and he announced
from the witness box that he, the plaintiff, in the libel suit of
Whistler vs Ruskin, had been born in Russia in the city of St. Peters-
burg, a statement which was literally untrue. He went on to say that
he had spent ten or twelve years in St. Petersburg and that his father
had been a major in the United States Army. The latter statements
had a greater measure of factual truth and they supported the im-
pression that he so artfully created in the minds of London jurors
who had been called upon to decide difficult questions of morality
and art in a crowded courtroom.

The famous trial which was commented on at length in the Lon-
don newspapers had also caught the attention of another American
who had taken up residence in London. He was Henry James, and
through a friendly arrangement with William Godkin in New York
he had agreed to write a series of unsigned articles for Godkin's new
weekly, The "Nation, James was in his middle thirties, an age at
which the gifted writer, if he happens to be writing criticism, is
inclined to take a top-lofty and acid view of the scene before his eyes.
He was nine years younger than the American in the witness-box;
his greater distinction and his fame were yet to come. He had written
three impressive novels and a memorable long short story, "Daisy
Miller"; his celebrity was as yet unformed; he was as critical of other
Americans in Europe as he was of Europeans who preyed upon
American innocence and idealism.

The occasion of Whistler bringing suit against John Ruskin foi

16 THE WORLD OF

saying in print that the artist had flung a pot of paint in the public's
face was appropriate for a neat measure of James's acidity. His own
appearance either in Bond Street or Piccadilly was not remarkable;
he was bearded, square-shouldered and correctly, decorously dressed.
His manner was brisk, yet stolid, and one that stood in contrast to
Whistler's dark cloak, short, light step and glittering monocle. In his
own way James was no less aggressive, but the distinction he sought
was of a different order. His manner was in keeping with the intent
stare from his blue eyes and the self-conscious pauses in his speech.
It had been his choice to write anonymously his London notes on
arts and letters for Godkin's New York periodical.

James regarded with a dubious air the publicity that his fellow
American had welcomed. His etchings, James thought, were good,
but his productions (by which he meant Whistler's paintings) were
very eccentric and imperfect. By praising Whistler's etchings, James
ventured what was then a safe opinion, and he let fall the larger
portion of his acid on the progress of the two-day trial, in which a
Titian was mistaken for one of Whistler's canvases, on the judge,
the attorney general, the witnesses, the jurors: "If it had taken place
in some Western American town," he wrote, "it would have been
called provincial and barbarous; it would have been cited as an inci-
dent of low civilization."

Whistler had entered, midway in his career, a precarious and even
dangerous notoriety. He had set himself apart from the English
painters who may have rented ill-kept and dusty studios in London
but also maintained luxurious homes in the suburbs and the country.
They were of a world, despite romantic irregularities and shreds of
gossip, that Victorian England regarded with an affection that was
not unmixed with moral solicitude. To the half-amused and slightly
skeptical British public that cared nothing about art but read the
daily papers, Whistler's small figure, his dark skin, his brilliant dark
eyes gave the general impression that he was an Italian, the living
archetype of the Italian villain in Victorian fiction. It was from this
majority public that the jury was drawn, and the obvious question
before the court and jury was: How could such a foreigner be taken
seriously?

In a court chamber so dark that no painting could be shown
intelligently to any juror, Whistler did well to stress an exotic foreign

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 17

origin. Since Ruskin's charge against him concerned the validity of
his art Whistler chose St. Petersburg, where he first went to art
school, as his place of birth. In this particular courtroom the literal
fact that he was born July 10, 1834, in Lowell, Massachusetts, was
irrelevant to the origins of his painting. His life as a painter was on
trial in court. He was neither the coxcomb nor the cockney that
Ruskin had called him. If the origins of his art were urban, they
were urban in the continental European sense, well removed from
the immediate associations that were either British or American; they
were of St. Petersburg, Paris and Japan. The eccentricities of
Whistler's appearance in court were not those of the London bo-
hemian; he was neither ill-washed nor shaggy. The whiteness of his
freshly laundered linen, the nearly military cut of his blue-serge
jacket resembled the uniform of one who was captain of a yacht. He
had already made the point that his father had been a major in the
Army, which implied that Whistler, the artist, would not speak
solely in terms of artistic nonsense; his dress implied the standard, if
not the weight, of military precision behind it.

As for being an American, Whistler also disassociated himself from
the kind of American who had so recently caught up and held the
enthusiasm of London society. That kind of American was Joaquin
Miller, the poet, the Bard of the Sierras, who delighted his London
hostesses by wearing ten-gallon hats, high-heeled boots, pistols and
flowing hair. On his visit to London Miller looked as though he had
stepped out of a genre painting of the Wild West as Holman Hunt,
one of John Ruskin's highly favored Pre-Raphaelites, would have
imagined it to be. Miller was what the British public, even in literate
circles, anticipated of American looks and manners; he was entertain-
ing in a way that Whistler was not. He could be readily patronized
and easily forgotten.

From the darkened chambers of the Exchequer Court Whistler's
inspiration came when the Attorney General referred directly to the
painting that had been the object of Ruskin's critical remarks:

"And that was the labor for which you asked 200 guineas?" said
the Attorney General.

"No, it was for the knowledge gained through a lifetime/'

As Whisder spoke, the courtroom felt, rather than understood, the
shocking vitality of truth behind the histrionic manner of the dark

18 THE WORLD OF

little man in the witness box. Something quite unamusing was being
said and in it was an appeal to human feeling and experience, some-
thing beyond the troublesome, abstract question, "What is art?" It
was then that the sharp, military accents of his speech held their
authority; yet even then, at the moment when his sincerity was felt
by the jurors and the court, Whistler's candor was of the kind that
fosters legend. The jurors then believed that the heritage of fighting
was in his blood, which was something they could understand. The
truth of what the little man had said carried authority to those who
were certain of almost nothing else that had been told them in the
progress of the trial.

Whistler, who had instinctively recalled at a crucial moment that
his origins in respect to art had begun in St. Petersburg, might well
have said, if his hearers could have understood him, that he had been
cradled in The Hermitage and that he had learned to walk upright
by strolling through the mauve and green corridors of the Catherine
Palace. Nor did it lack significance that the Arrangement in Gray
and Black, the well-known portrait of his mother, had been exhibited
at the trial. It was she as well as his father who had aided his "knowl-
edge gained through a lifetime" by guiding him through the gardens
of Tsarskoe Selo, and she who had pointed out to him the beauties
of the Chinese Room of the Catherine Palace, the branches of cherry
blossoms on its walls and delicate sprays of Oriental ferns and
grasses. Was it that knowledge that many years later gave Whistler
in Paris the inspiration to find examples for his art in Japanese
prints? This was a question that could not be raised in the Exchequer
Court. Yet the mention of St. Petersburg, the most Oriental of all
North European cities, held an echo of magic that could not be
denied. Something very like an appeal to British "sporting instinct"
had been aroused. The son of an officer in the United States Army
had proved that he did not fall into the usual classification of a
coxcomb or a cockney. So far then a fragment of truth in an obscure
situation had come to light and a fragmentary token of victory, one
farthing, was given to Whistler by order of the court. This was, to
say the least, a singular and minimum token of victory over the most
persuasive of Victorian moral critics, John Ruskin.

I

ACTS concerning the origins of Whistler's paternal ancestors
are obscure. In that highly unreliable but entertaining work, Aubrey's
Brief Lives, a Dr. Daniel Whistler (1619-84), Fellow of the Royal
College of Physicians, London, was the indirect cause of a fellow
mathematician's death. He entertained a certain Dr. Pell so lavishly
with food and drink that the results, according to Aubrey, were "the
cause of shortening his daies." Whistler made no claims to being
descended from Dr. Whistler or from the many English Whistlers
who can be traced back to the Norman conquest, but insisted that
his grandfather, John Whistler, had been born in Ireland. It is prob-
ably true that he was, and his story, as it was retold by his son and
grandson, falls into the romantic pattern of their lives. It was what
they wished to believe.

John Whistler ran away from his home in Ireland to England in
1775 or 1776 and enlisted in the British Army. He had happened to
join a regiment that was under the command of a Sir Kensington
Whistler. That gentleman was, perhaps, a relative, and it was said
that he could not tolerate the disgrace of having a foot soldier who
bore his name in his own regiment. He therefore transferred John
to another regiment, and the young man was sent overseas to be
one of those who reinforced General Burgoyne's troops in America.
John Whistler's new regiment, after landing in Canada, arrived at
Saratoga in time to surrender with Burgoyne.

What John Whistler did as a prisoner of the Americans is not
known, but the great probability is that, in being shifted with other
prisoners from camp to camp and in being sometimes on parole, he
had a chance to make brief tours of Long Island, Pennsylvania, and
New Jersey. He was probably underfed and underclothed in winter.

20 THE WORLD OF

In all likelihood his visit to the New World lasted until Cornwallis
surrendered at Yorktown in October of 1781. He went back to Eng-
land in an exchange of prisoners, and with a show of initiative
worthy of his grandson, he eloped with Anna, daughter of a Sir
Edward Bishop, and then returned to America.

It is clear that John Whistler regarded soldiering as his profession,
for after making his home in Hagerstown, Maryland, he enlisted in
the United States Army; he assisted in the building of Forts Wayne
and Dearborn. And at Fort Wayne in 1800 his son, George Wash-
ington Whistler, the father of the artist, was born. John Whistler
served in the War of 1812 and received the brevet rank of Major;
he lived in Kentucky for a few years, and when he retired from the
Army in 1815, he moved to Bellefontaine, Missouri, where he died
in 1817. Seventy years later, James McNeill Whistler spoke of being
both Irish and a Southerner at heart. He also said that he had a pre-
natal interest in Chicago (since the city was built on the site of Fort
Dearborn). This claim always amused Whistler's guests in London.

John Whistler's nomadic life was a precedent for the adventurous
path of his son George's career in military engineering. From New-
port, Kentucky, at the age of fourteen George Whistler was ap-
pointed to the recently revived Military Academy at West Point.
The Academy had been reorganized by Congress in 1813, for the
need to do so had become imperative. A report read to Congress
revealed that cadets ranging in ages from ten to thirty-four had been
admitted; some became officers in four months while others enjoyed
the status of being cadets for a period of six years; some were maimed,
others were married and some were totally unfit to carry arms.
Despite this unhappy report of West Point's cadets, a tradition of
training in engineering had taken root in an environment described
as one of "idleness, dissipation and irreligion." The institution could
be salvaged and it was. Colonel Joseph G. Swift was appointed
superintendent; he had been West Point's first graduate and had an
excellent reputation as an engineer. When George Whistler came
from Kentucky to West Point, it housed a promising school of engi-
neering and a general reformation in discipline had begun.

Although discipline had been reinforced at West Point, the
atmosphere of the Academy on the Hudson more closely resembled
a boy's preparatory school than a college. A pretty girl, Mary Swift,

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 2!

niece of Colonel Swift and daughter of Dr. Foster Swift, the Aca-
demy's surgeon, was the belle of the campus. Cadets were appointed
from the South and they combined the liveliness of Scotch-Irish
ancestry with the sentimental graces of colonial plantation society.
Into this circle where he felt very much at home stepped George
Whistler. He had good looks and social gifts of his own; he could
draw and paint; his attentions delighted Mary Swift; and he had
earned the nickname of "Pipes" because he played popular airs upon
a flute* The scene was set for romantic attachments and lasting
friendships. One day in punishment for a mild infringement of mili-
tary discipline George Whistler was made to face the parade grounds
of West Point's campus astride a cannon as though it were a rocking
horse. As he saw Mary Swift approaching, he whipped out his
pocket handkerchief, and earnestly, as though he had just assumed
a special duty, he began to polish the gun. Only a well-poised and
attractive boy could have carried off this bit of pantomime success-
fully, and from his seat on a cannon George Whistler became the
sentimental hero of West Point. His quick wits endeared him to his
superior officers and instructors; he had proved himself fit to stand
beside the superintendent's niece, the belle of West Point. His gifts
of inventiveness, of making the best of an embarrassing situation,
were of greater importance than being head of his class (which he
was not) in mathematics.

George Whistler was an able if unconventional student of engi-
neering and he could be trusted to face what seemed impossible
to others with a boyish grin and manly hardihood. Colonel Swift
approved of him; he married the Colonel's niece, and was given an in-
structorship at West Point which he did not hold long because he pre-
ferred a more active test of his abilities in the United States Army.
Under orders from the Army he was sent out at the head of a com-
pany to fix the boundary line between the United States and
Canada. He accomplished his assignment at fifty degrees below zero
in a wilderness of rivers, lakes and swamps. This was the kind of
work that he enjoyed, and it also showed the kind of ability that
Colonel Swift respected.

After he had set the affairs of West Point in order, Colonel Swift
was at liberty to act as consulting engineer for privately owned in-
dustries. In this profession he was joined by another West Point

22 THE WORLD OF

graduate, William Gibbs McNeill of North Carolina. McNeill,
Swift and George Whistler became close friends; their professional
interests were the same; the women in their families moved in the
same circles and McNeilTs sister, Anna Mathilda, had become a
intimate friend of George Whistler's young wife, Mary. Among
Army engineers who were encouraged by the Army to enter railroad
engineering (since lack of wars released them from military duty),
the best-known were of Scotch-Irish ancestry and from the South.
The Scotch-Irish engineers in the United States kept in touch with
parallel developments in their profession in Scotland and the north
of England, and with West Point as a center for training in civil
as well as military engineering, they knew one another and furthered
each other's careers. A meeting of United States Army engineers,
released for the advancement of civil engineering in their adopted
country, was like a gathering of the clans.

In 1833, when he resigned from the Army, George Whistler held
the rank of Major and had behind him a professional record in rail-
road engineering. He had been employed by several railroads,
including the Baltimore and Ohio; he was well known by locomo-
tive manufacturers, including the Winans of Baltimore. In 1828 he
had been sent to London to consult with British railroad engineers.
Major Whistler was a young man who was listened to and admired,
but it was dear that he had no Yankee shrewdness in engineering
as a business; he enjoyed solving technical problems, problems of
management and of cutting roads through difficult terrain, yet he
could not make his employers feel that his interests and theirs were
one. His appointments were of short duration, which suited his
lighthearted, restless temperament. For some few years Baltimore,
Maryland, was his headquarters; a half century later, his son, the
artist, led some of his friends into thinking that Baltimore was his
birthplace (and these were the moments when James McNeill
Whistler felt patriotic about the South).

At home Major Whistler had the air of being a charming guest
rather than the head of a family. His pretty little wife had given
him three children; George, Deborah, and Joseph, and McNeill's
sister, Anna Mathilda, hovered in the background as though she
were the children's aunt, always willing to nurse them back to health
when they fell ill. Whenever the Major spent a few days at home,

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 23

the occasion was like a holiday: guests were called in, the Major
played his flute, his wife played hostess and the songs were usually
light and sentimental airs of Scotch or Irish origin.

In the South the musical evening at home was in high fashion and
the Whistler-Swift-McNeill household followed it, Thomas Moore,
the Irish poet, had been a welcome guest in London drawing rooms
where he sang as prettily as a tamed bird his Irish melodies. He
made a visit to the United States and wealthy families in Charleston,
Baltimore and Richmond had him repeat his London successes in
their drawing rooms; everyone was pleased, including the flattered
and temporarily enriched poet. A musical evening at the Whistlers,
following in spirit the performances of Thomas Moore, created an
atmosphere of gaily inspired innocence and charm. It was Major
Whistler's concession to the joys of Southern domesticity and it also
showed the side of his character that resembled the kind of "artistic"
temperament and sensibility made famous by his son. At the age of
thirteen he had taken a precocious boy's delight in painting a small
portrait of his mother which was in tribute to her (who had fifteen
children) and for his own children to admire. The shadows that
crossed the Whistler threshold were slight enough, yet they were
there: one was the Major's lack of cleverness in handling money,
which his growing celebrity half-concealed; the other was his rest-
lessness, which was the concern of his good friends, Colonel Swift
and William Gibbs McNeill.

The death of his young wife in 1827 brought none but superficial
changes in his household. Anna Mathilda McNeill had nursed Mary
Whistler through her last illness and in taking charge of the children
had stepped into a position of matronly authority.

Within a short time she married Major Whistler and the marriage
meant that the musical evenings were resumed.

The year after the Major's retirement from the Army, in 1834,
he had received the appointment of engineer of locks and canals at
Lowell, Massachusetts, where his first son by Anna Whistler was
born. That son was named James Abbott Whistler. His first and
middle names came from his father's sister, who had married James
Abbott of Detroit. The family remained at Lowell for six years, and
during that period the Major's friends feared that the panic of 1837
would cause a downward curve in his career; the times were hard

24 THE WORLD OF

and the Major's optimism was wearing thin. His latest venture,
which was a position with the Western Railroad of Massachusetts,
seemed to lack promise. He stayed briefly in Springfield and then
moved his family into a pleasant little house in Stonington, Con-
necticut. It was at Stonington, with the advice of Colonel Swift and
William Gibbs McNeill, that the Major listened to an invitation
from the Tsar of Russia.

Tsar Nicholas I of Russia thought of himself as a benevolent,
progressive ruler of all the Russias, and he wished to build a railroad
between St. Petersburg and Moscow which would be proof to Europe
that neither he nor the Empire he ruled had dropped behind the
times. In St. Petersburg news of his intentions spread throughout
court circles. They reached the ears of the Envoy-Extraordinary from
the United States, Colonel Charles Stewart Todd of Kentucky, a
man of easy address, who, when he looked at himself in the glass,
fancied he resembled Louis Phillipe of France and he enjoyed the
view. After he had returned from Europe, one of the best of his
after-dinner speeches included an account of how when he had
stepped out of a cab in Paris he had been mistaken for the bland,
bewildered monarch. When Colonel Todd, who had a politician's
memory, heard of the Tsar's wish to build the St. Petersburg-Moscow
railroad, he remembered his friend, Major John Whistler, and re-
called that his son, George, had been appointed to West Point from
Kentucky. He also remembered that George Whistler had risen to
the rank of major and that he had become a promising railroad engi-
neer. Colonel Todd was among those happy souls who are never
backward in lightly giving gratuitous advice; he recommended Major
George Whistlers services to the Tsar's advisers. The knowledge
that Major Whistler received his training at West Point and in the
United States Army increased his prestige to members of the Tsar's
commission on the building of railroads. Most of the Tsar's advisers
had minds of military cut; his commission on railroads and the Tsar
saw themselves as heirs of the Prussian Frederick the Great, Peter
the Great, the builder of St. Petersburg, and Nicholas's father, Tsar
Paul; their ideas of progress were in terms of military eclat.

In 1841 Colonel Melnikov and Colonel Kraft, both members of

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 25

the Tsar's railroad commission, were dispatched to the United States.
On their visit to Baltimore, where the Winans' locomotive industries
were doing well, again they heard of Major Whistler, and they inter-
viewed him at his home in Stonington. They also saw Joseph Swift
who had been promoted to the rank of General, and Brodisco, the
Russian Minister to Washington. Both Swift and Brodisco negotiated
the terms of their offer to Major Whistler which included a salary
of twelve thousand dollars a year. Before closing negotiations, Gen-
eral Swift was assured that the salary would provide decent living
quarters in St. Petersburg and that the post itself as director of the
building of the Tsar's railroad would increase Major Whistler's
prestige in the United States. With the understanding that his
family left behind in Stonington was to follow him a year later,
Major Whistler arrived in St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1842.

Through his father's career with its touch of genius, with its
changes of place, with its gallantries and its romantic sentiment, the
seeds of James Abbott McNeill Whistler's romantic temperament
had taken root. In his own right Major Whistler was an "original,"
and an "original" in his profession. But what of the McNeill side of
the family history? At sixteen Whistler added McNeill to the Abbott
in his name; it brought attention to the Scotch side of his ancestry,
for the McNeills descended from the McNeills of Skye, and were
proud of that heritage. Another and obvious reason was the acknowl-
edged influence of his mother upon his life. James's dark-complexion,
foreign air came from his McNeill grandmother, whose boyish,
unfeminine good looks overshadowed the charms of her daughters;
she looked strange and James looked like her. James's mother, in
the presence of her mother, her sisters, her husband, her husband's
first wife, Mary Swift, and her son James, always considered
herself sternly, virtuously plain. Among the Whistlers, the Swifts,
the McNeills, Anna Mathilda sought out the corners of a room
and sat with a sewing basket in her lap or at a writing table.
Like her mother, she too was small and dark. Quietly she stepped
into her Episcopal church duties and into sick rooms of friends and
relatives. Her father had been a successful physician, and she felt it
her duty to be a consoling and efficient nurse. Her Episcopal faith

26 THE WORLD OF

had a dark Calvinistic, almost contradictory strain within it, and a
few of her friends spoke of her as "one of the saints upon earth."
If she had had executive ability and a drive to power, she might well
have been close in spirit to her contemporary, Florence Nightingale.
She had that mysterious something that the nineteenth century
called "strength of character/' yet she was too feminine to assert it
openly; she had always been too shy, too much reserved. Beneath
the surface of her external calm, her air of resignation, she was as
romantic as any Southern lady of her day; in her retreats to the
corner of a room, she carried with her the novels of Sir Walter Scott
and James Fenimore Cooper. She brought up Mary Swift's children
and her own on readings of the Bible, yet she did not resist the
temptation to enjoy Prescott's Conquest of Peru, which was the kind
of reading that appealed to her love of faraway, exotic places, that
gave her something in common with her adventurous husband and
she was as impractical as he in money matters. She worshipped
Major Whistler with the fervor of Rebecca's nursing of Ivanhoe, and
her marriage to him, as if by a miracle, had given her the position
of Rowena.

Anna Mathilda had never competed openly with the first Mrs.
Whistler. Mary Swift had gone to dances and the theatre while
Anna Mathilda read tracts recommended by her pastor, and went
to bed early. If she stayed up late reading the novels of Sir Walter
Scott it was in the sick room of a friend or at a sick child's bedside
in the nursery. Her devotion to the sick was not always without
reward to the inward-looking romantic side of her character.

Her first son, James, was the object of her maternal care. From
the day of his birth, he was readily subject to bronchial infections
and remained so all his life, and yet he was also the center of what-
ever lightheartedness her stern, somewhat melancholy temperament
possessed. He was so much a McNeill in looks and so much like the
Major in gaiety of spirit that she could not resist his intentions to
have his own way. Whatever James lacked in discipline, that lack
was compensated for in George, her stepson, and in her younger
son, William. The presence of James's cheerfulness was her relief
from great as well as minor anxieties. Nursing was her pride, yet
the Whistler family suffered several deaths: first Mary Swift's son,
Joseph, then three sons of her own, all dead in infancy and child-

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 27

hood as though the angry God of Calvinism had pierced the veils of
her calm Episcopal belief. Her household duties were never a
pleasure to her and she felt dependent upon the advice and care of
her servant, Mary. James, whom the Major agreed was beautiful
enough "to make Sir Joshua Reynolds come out of his grave to
paint him asleep," was one to whom she could turn for admiration
and amusement.

James was quick and active, yet anything but robust; the child
liked to draw and frequent colds kept him indoors with paper and
pencil. The Major never forgot his early wish to be an artist and that
at West Point he stood at the head of his class in drawing. The
Major and his wife could not be called fatuous parents. He was too
Byronic in his domestic attitudes, too close to believing "Love in a
man's life is a thing apart, 'tis a woman's whole existence," and
Anna Mathilda was much too reserved to indulge in overt displays
of maternal affection, yet both were more than amused by the child's
facility in sketching, and it is probable that their approval of it had
more encouragement of James's bent toward being an artist than
they realized. The Major and his wife felt with reason that they
were "cultivated" people; not many a railroad engineer, however
brilliant he may have been, would see his infant son as a portrait by
Sir Joshua Reynolds, and then have his wife accept the remark as
part of easy, almost casual, domestic conversation. She thought of it
as a pretty compliment and wrote it down in her journal.

Before leaving for St. Petersburg, Anna Mathilda had promised
her mother to keep a journal of her experiences in Russia; the
journal would take the place of writing long letters home. In writing
it she would have her mother's image before her; and if she felt
strange in a distant country that image would reassure her that all
was well. But she also felt the importance of the Major's commis-
sion, and in the writing of her journal, her style took on some of
stiffness, some of the proprieties of Rowena's speeches in Ivanhoe; it
is not improbable that she thought of posterity's as well as her
mother's eye. After all, her journey to Russia could hope to be a
footnote to history.

n

LAJOR Whistler left no account of what he saw in St. Peters-
burg when he arrived there in the autumn of 1842. He and his wife
had read the memoirs of de Custine and were prepared to visit a
new world. What he saw was the most remarkable city in Northern
Europe, the Russian "window" to Europe, built by Peter the Great
on the marshes that flanked both sides of the river Neva and was a
man-made city, not unlike Venice far to the south in Italy. It had
been built to glorify Peter's ambitions to be a European as well as
Asiatic Tsar, and the image that he carried in his mind was the
French Sun King's creation at Versailles. That image never left the
minds of his descendants, including Elizabeth, Catherine, Alexander
I down to Nicholas I, but it had gone through, even in Peter's day,
an extraordinary mutation: in the smaller buildings there were the
intimacies of Dutch interiors and German decorations, in the larger
buildings the scope and magnitude of French and Italian design. In
the hundred years between Peter's day and Nicholas I, Venetian
architects had given St. Petersburg the air of being a larger, more
austere, snow-swept, sea-lashed Venice on the Baltic; the Neva was
its Grand Canal; its squares were enlarged versions of San Marco.
The Great Cascade of Peterhof, piled high with neo-classical statuary
and water, flowing over heights of hewn and carved stone, outshone
the fountains at Versailles. Major Whistler rented apartments on
the Neva which were at short walking distance from white and
stone-paved Theatre Street, which had been recently laid out by
Rossi, a street of Romanesque arches and neoclassical fagades; it was
the haunt of French, German, British and American embassies.
On his arrival he was ushered into the presence of the Tsar.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 29

Nicholas was tall, sallow, handsome and inclined to fat, De Custine
remarked that he wore corsets to preserve a youthful figure under
a smartly cut military uniform. The Tsar was affable; as Grand Duke
he had visited London and on his visit flattered himself that he knew
more than most crowned heads of Europe about the arts and
sciences; he could make himself understood in English and, since
French had been the language of the Russian court for a hundred
years, spoke French with ease. The Major's usual optimism re-
sponded quickly to the Tsar's air of official cordiality. The Major,
as well as other American visitors to St. Petersburg, liked the Tsar.
They liked his habit of walking the streets of St. Petersburg wear-
ing a broad-brimmed black felt hat and a dark cloak loosely thrown
across his shoulders; he had the external appearance of being demo-
cratic, and he seemed to be direct and efficient. He was said to like
cleanliness and to forbid the smoking of cigars and pipes on the
streets of the city and this was the side of his character that he
showed to Major Whistler. He briskly unrolled a map and drew a
straight line between St Petersburg and Moscow; the line repre-
sented the railroad. Cost in roubles or in time, effort, skill or human
life of a route through difficult terrain was of no importance. Major
Whistler was instructed to do the nearly impossible; it was what he
had come to do and he took his orders.

Major Whistler's apartments overlooking the Neva were large
furnished rooms, and since they were awaiting the arrival of his
family, extremely large and empty. He hired a German footman, and
also took under his protection an unfortunate Russian woman and
her small son, whom, in the absence of his own children, he in-
formally adopted. As in America he was infrequently at home. His
assignments from the Tsar were on the roads between Moscow and
St. Petersburg rather than sitting at a writing desk in his apartment.
He was far too industriously employed to make many new friends
in St. Petersburg.

The Major's plans for the Tsar's railroad went ahead so well that
the Tsar's advisers could find no fault with him, and if the Major
objected to the hardships endured by mujiks who were forced to cut
their way through four hundred miles of swamp and forest in the
dead of winter, there is no record of his complaints. The Major's duty
as he saw it was to serve the Tsar gallantly and well, and in respect

30 THE WORLD OF

to this task he had the spirit of an ingenious and courageous soldier
of fortune.

His wife's journal is the only reliable document we have of the
five and a half years the Whistlers spent in residence in St. Peters-
burg. But this does not mean that it told everything. If Anna
Mathilda thought of herself as the recording angel of the Whistler
family, and the care with which she wrote is proof that she did,
candor was not among her virtues; her virtues were of wifely loyalty
and family pride. The journey to St. Petersburg from Stonington,
Connecticut, was faithfully recorded. One sees the party of seven
make their way across the Atlantic. They were George, her stepson,
who accompanied her to the shores of the Baltic before returning to
his job with the Winans in Baltimore; Mary, her maid; and Anna
Mathilda's four charges: her stepdaughter, Deborah, her sons, James,
William, and an infant, Charles. The brightest moment of the trip
and one that had meaning in the future career of James was the
stop-over at Preston, on the west coast of England, on a visit to his
McNeill relations.

Dr. McNeill, Anna Mathilda's father, had two daughters by his
first wife who had died before he left Scotland and they had settled
in Preston. Anna Mathilda's two half-sisters, Eliza and Alicia, were
as lively and voluble as she was quiet and the features of Aunt
Alicia, looking like William Makepeace Thackeray's sketches of
himself, rotund and neckless with steel-rimmed spectacles, were the
subject of one of James's earliest drawings. But far more important
than finding an early and cheerful model in his Aunt Alicia was the
fact that the McNeill relations at Preston talked about art and had
friends among members of the Royal Academy. From them Anna
Mathilda added to her own and her husband's interests in painting,
and from then onward whatever James overheard in conversations
about art and painters was the kind of talk that American children
of his age and in 1842 had no opportunity to hear at all. His Aunt
Eliza had married Mr. Winstanly; they were close friends of the
Rigbys; and the beautiful Rigby girls, as well as the young John
Ruskin, were sitters to the first of the great English portrait photog-
raphers, Octavius Hill. One of the Rigby girls became the wife of
Eastlake, who was later known as the President of the Royal Aca-
demy, and if Anna Mathilda had not met Lady Eastlake, her half

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 31

sisters induced her to read her book, A Residence on the Shores of
the Baltic. From them Anna Mathilda was made aware of the latest
names in British art; and she had learned them well.

On the trip northward and eastward her infant son, Charles,
mysteriously and suddenly died in her arms. She then remembered
how Mary Swift's son had died of typhoid and her own son Kirk
had died of scarlet fever, and now came the death of infant Charles.
The death darkened her arrival in St. Petersburg and made her
fearful of meeting her husband. Her long-looked-for arrival would
bring with it her own grief and bad news. Now more than ever and
for the many years following, she turned to James whose health
needed her care and whose charm could turn her thoughts away
from what she felt were "morbid and unChristian" fears of death.

In the pages of her journal (which were written in sidelong
glimpses from her writing desk) the personality of James began to
stir to life; and the two lively members of the family in the apart-
ment overlooking the Neva were Deborah and James. On musical
evenings Deborah played a harp while James sat sketching in a
corner. James was a favorite of his elder half sister and remained so
throughout their lives; she had decided early that he was a genius
and fifty years later, when she was Lady Haden and against the wish
of her husband, she still insisted that he was.

Fears of the glittering snow-ice-sea-swept city of St. Petersburg
began to enter the Whistler household. The Whistlers distrusted
Russian food and particularly Russian milk; therefore they bought
their own cow and stabled it in the courtyard nearby. Anna
Mathilda's maid, Mary, instructed the Russian cook in the arts of
making American griddle cakes which became a staple of James's
diet wherever he lived and for many years of his life. To him the
serving of griddle cakes was like waving the Stars and Stripes and
singing "Yankee Doodle/' Anna Whistler could not understand Rus-
sian servants; their passionate effusions, their reluctance to take
baths, their tears of gratitude whenever she showed casual kind-
nesses embarrassed her. She disapproved of drink and they were
often very drunk. The woman and small boy, who had received the
Major's bounty before she had arrived in St. Petersburg, bewildered
her. As she attempted to give them their weekly allowance, the
woman sank to the floor and kissed the hem of her skirt and her

32 THE WORLD OF

fingertips. This performance distressed Anna Mathilda so profoundly
that she instructed Mary to be the woman's weekly paymaster.

But the most bewildering experience of all was an incident of
Christmas week. The Major and the two boys, James and William,
had bought Anna Mathilda a portable writing cabinet. James and
William were delighted by the choice, and the presentation of the
gift was the center of excitement on Christmas day. The day after
Christmas the escritoire and the Major's flute disappeared. The ser-
vants were questioned; the German footman dismissed; the theft
reported to the Tsar's police. The mystery was never solved. It was
the kind of incident that modified the Major's optimism concerning
Russian virtues, that enclosed Anna Mathilda more securely than
ever within doors and off the streets of St. Petersburg; and her fears
led to her further reliance upon her eldest son, James, to make light
of all her "morbid" fancies.

From the windows of the apartment, the Winter Palace shone
like a wedding cake designed by an Italian pastry cook and at night
fireworks on the Neva blazed, burst into multicolored light, vanished,
then blazed again. James, confined to his room by one of his numer-
ous "sore throats," often stayed up half the night to watch them.
The views from his window were the earliest of his "nocturnes":
the deep sky lit by falling rockets, the blaze of fire against snow and
a cold dark sky. Unconsciously "the work of a life time" had begun,
work that was not to be realized until many years later when the
fireworks at Cremone Gardens in Chelsea on the Thames restored
the image of falling rockets out of darkness to his memory. This was
not "work" in the usual sense but pleasure and delight, associated
with the forbidden joy of being awake after his mother's instruc-
tions to go to sleep; it was a private, secret pleasure, almost like an
indulgence in one of the seven deadly sins. It was the kind of
pleasure that James held to at the height of his career. This recollec-
tion of a scene from his early childhood was one of the secrets of his
"originality."

Whether she admitted it or not, Anna Mathilda had great need of
James's ability to charm and to disobey her. When he was not watch-
ing fireworks late at night, she heard him laughing to himself at
midnight over droll passages he had discovered in Cooper's romance,
The Spy.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 33

The Major, obsessed as he was by the task of building the four
hundred miles of railroad between St. Petersburg and Moscow, spent
fewer days at home than ever, and Anna Mathilda did not like the
light-spirited Americans who visited her in St. Petersburg. Although
James and Deborah enjoyed the brief visits paid by Colonel Todd
and Mrs. Brodisco, the American wife of the Russian minister to
the United States, Anna Mathilda did not. She thought Mrs.
Brodisco, though handsome enough, went to too many balls, theatres,
operas, and read too many yellow-covered French novels, and in
matters of religious thinking, she thought Colonel Todd, if not
downright wicked, was frivolous, which he undoubtedly was. She
received only the Episcopal pastor, Edward Law, with confidence.
She also received John Motley, who was later to write The Rise
and Fall of the Dutch Republic, and his friend, young Mr. Maxwell,
both of whom were Colonel Todd's assistants and from them she
learned that the Colonel gave them a smaller salary than they ex-
pected. Their stay in St. Petersburg was short; they returned to the
United States, John Motley to complete his historical studies and
Mr. Maxwell to write a book on his European travels which included
an enthusiastic account of how democratic the Tsar's reign was, an
opinion that was not shared by de Custine or any other writer of
his day.

Anna Mathilda had half approved of Mr. Maxwell because he
was in dubious health and had allowed her to nurse him. Deborah,
who feared him as a possible suitor, was glad to see him go. What-
ever cheerfulness the Whistler apartment held depended upon the
initiative of James; unlike William, he talked his way out of reciting
moral verses in French to his father at the breakfast table, and pro-
duced a drawing to admire and some of them were amusing. He
had the gift of making himself the center of his family's brief release
from daily anxieties. In St. Petersburg the Whistler family circle
had become increasingly withdrawn.

Fortunately and with the excuse of furthering their education, the
Major and his wife trooped their children through St. Petersburg
museums and public buildings. The collections on the walls of the
Imperial Galleries, The Hermitage and the Hermitage Pavilion were
gazed at in the spirit of well-conducted family-guide-book-tours. One
cannot say that James, quick as he was to see and to overhear, saw

34 THE WORLD OF

and understood everything that was pointed out and said. Yet what
he saw at the Imperial Galleries was enough to carry impressions of
a courtly, polished world within his memory.

Although the Imperial Galleries could not be compared with the
collections at the Louvre, the Prado and the murals of the Sistine
Chapel, their large selection of paintings did not lack sophistication.
The lesser Flemish painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries were represented Whistler never lost his admiration for
Dutch painting and so were the French eighteenth-century court
painters, which was a consistent expression of taste in St. Petersburg.
The Russian court which had taken its language and its models from
the French chose that aspect of French court painting that most
clearly "told a story" because it was easiest to understand. The result
was that it had acquired Fragonard's The Clandestine Kiss, the
picture of a lover, shadowed by a door, kissing a lady dressed in
virginal white and modest gray. Her coloring with its glint of reddish
gold hair is not unlike the most well-known studies of Whistler's
white-girl symphonies.

The Russian Imperial court also expressed its taste in displaying
on the walls of its galleries the domestic eroticism of Greuze, pic-
tures of voluptuous young girls and children in torn dresses. Their
own painters, particularly Firsov, Levitski and Borovikovski, reflected
the lessons learned from Hogarth, Chardin and Velasquez. In later
years when Whistler was at war with Victorian schools of genre
painting, it could be said that he had seen better examples of their
art at The Hermitage and at the Hermitage Pavilion. It is not too
much to say that he was bored by genre painting. As a spectator, he
had had his fill of it in childhood.

During one of James's illnesses Deborah had borrowed from a
friend a folio volume of Hogarth's engravings for his amusement.
Not many parents today would think that Hogarth's prints of The
Rake's Progress and Marriage a la Mode were suitable entertainment
for a sick child; the nineteenth-century family of Anglo-Saxon
heritage thought otherwise. For fifty years children's annuals pub-
lished in England and America gave their readers moral instruction
by reproductions of Gin Lane and the famous dinner at which the
Rake treated his friends all of whom were, women as well as men,
distinctly the worse for wear and heavy drinking. It is not known

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 35

whether or not the morals of the children were improved, but they
did enjoy the pictures, particularly those that hinted broadly of evils
and crimes they could not quite understand. "If I had not been ill,"
James confided to his mother, "perhaps no one would have thought
of showing them to me/' and he remained loyal to a nostalgic admira-
tion for Hogarth throughout his life. In his liking for Hogarth James
shared the taste of many a Victorian child.

The crowded street scenes in Hogarth's engravings, the sight of
rags and squalor and picking of pockets, the violence of movement,
were not unlike the pageant of St. Petersburg on a fete day or the
occasion of an imperial birthday, but there were several important
differences: the colors of the East against ice and snow; the broader
streets, the greater crowds; the Tsar's Gardes a Cheval in jackets of
blue and silver, tunics of black and gold, hussars in gold and red
and green all caught James's eye. For ten years afterwards James's
sketch books and even his etchings at West Point and in the Coast
Survey offices at Washington had fanciful Russian hussars waving
swords and sabers in their margins.

During the five years that the Whistlers lived in and near St.
Petersburg four of the summers were spent in a villa within walking
distance of Tsarkoe Selo, the estate where the Catherine Palace had
become to the Whistlers the most instructive of museums. The
Whistlers had made a discerning and characteristic choice, one that
was worthy of inspiring the kind of artist that James McNeill
Whistler became in the best moments of his career. The Palace had
been designed by the son of Rastrelli, the Venetian architect who
had been brought to Russia by Peter the Great. The Venetian, with
worldly art and subtlety, cast a bronze bust of Peter that made him
resemble, if not in feature, the kingly bearing of Louis XIV of
France. His son was no less gifted, and under orders from Peter's
daughter, the Empress Elizabeth, he erected a summer palace. At her
commission, the Rastrellis, father and son, brought to St. Petersburg
the reflected glories of Palladio. Rastrelli, the son, was the greatest
of Imperial Russia's architects; under his hand the high baroque of
Venice moved northward to the shores of the Baltic, glittered in a
new, and because of Rastrelli's genius, an appropriate setting of ice
and snow. The Summer Palace, like the roofs of cathedrals in
Venice, was peopled at the summit by gilded statues and its outer

36 THE WORLD OF

walls were of pale blue and the grounds of Tsarskoe Selo, laid out
in avenues of clipped hedges, had scattered through them in a sym-
metrical order eighty pleasure houses and pavilions. Yet no mention
of this outward splendor is in Anna Mathilda's journal; an even
more important and interior view of the Palace held her imagination.

What she wrote about, what she had discovered for herself and
for James was the Chinese Room of the Palace, that part of Rastrelli's
baroque and neo-Venetian edifice that had been remodeled by
Charles Cameron for Catherine the Great. Not much is known of
Cameron, and whether or not Anna Mathilda knew he was Scotch
is not recorded in her journal. It is supposed that Cameron studied
under the brothers Adam, the famous interior and furniture designers
in London, because traces of their teachings are to be found in his
designs. It is certain that he admired the work of Vanbrugh who
designed Blenheim, the Churchill estate. Catherine had heard of
him because he had written a clever, if pedantic, book on Roman
antiquities. She found out that he was living in Italy and she ordered
him to be brought to St. Petersburg with the same imperial will and
the same results with which Nicholas received Major Whistler in
Russiaand he came. It was assumed that for a short time Cameron,
since he was young and handsome, was among her favorites. She
discovered in Cameron a genius equal to that of Rastrelli's. He
became her pet architect; he designed rooms for her in the Palace
of remarkable beauty at extraordinary expense. When she grew
weary of the pleasure and luxury he provided for her taste, she com-
plained that his extravagance would bring her treasury into bank-
ruptcy. She dismissed him and little was heard of him from that
day to this.

Among his masterpieces in the Palace was the Chinese Room.
It was of a China that Cameron did not know but had imagined,
and in his day he was not alone in imaginary views of China. The
courts of Europe in the eighteenth century found much to emulate
in Chinese courtly attitudes, social behavior and dress: the waxed
pigtail in head dress had arrived from China and so had the fixed
and courtly smile. At the French court Boucher painted scenes of an
imagined China and in London Sir Joshua Reynolds made a study
of Chinese manners and dress in one of his portraits of a Chinese
boy. Appreciation of things Chinese was a mark of civilized and
fashionable behavior. Anna Mathilda and the Major were probably

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 37

not blind to this gesture of fashion in the recent past, but if they
were, their tastes were instinctively allied to Cameron's love for
exotic recreations and his restraints: his flat pastel colors covered by
sheets of glass upon the walls, his neo-classic sills and doors, his
thresholds, and door and window frames, his sparing use of pictorial
design on walls, the single sprays of apple blossom and ferns and
grasses. Delicate tints of color were reflected from walls and columns
on polished glass, and light flowed through tall doors and windows,
the reflection of sun on snow or the green-tinted light from the trees
and grasses of a summer's day.

Coolness and light flowed through the Chinese Room, a pale and
somewhat abstract light which had become a polished reflection of
indoor, urban beauty. This was in contrast to passionate, barbaric
Russia, to serfs and peasants whose sheepskin garments stank,
whose miseries of flesh in running sores and lice embarrassed visiting
Americans, and whose drunkenness was combined with tears and
prayers and pleas to God, to demigods like the Tsar, his noblemen,
his soldiers. In the Chinese Room Anna Mathilda found a serenity
that gave her and her sons protection from the Russia they did not
care to know. It gave them a sense of living above and beyond the
world. Was their feeling "aristocratic"? As far as Anna Mathilda's
emotional restraint and her sense of being a plain woman permitted
aristocratic day-dreaming, it was. Her aristocratic feeling was one of
plain living and high devotion to the Episcopal Church, and it was
also mixed with pride of being the wife of an American engineer
who had European recognition.

The effect of the Chinese Room on James was not confided in
later years to his friends. Memory of it was probably subconscious
or diffused into general memories of St. Petersburg, yet it does
explain the peculiar, and what might otherwise have been called
instinctive, attraction Oriental art had for him. The attraction was a
matter of feeling that was far stronger than intellectual conviction;
it was as serious and as deeply ingrained in his response to it as any
influence upon his life and work. James, as well as the Whistler he
grew into, was never heavily serious nor naively candid, and, in a
literal sense, seldom truthful He held to certain of his deeply per-
sonal secrets; his seriousness wore the masks of levity or half fan-
tastic, melodramatic action.

What Whistler did confess was an early proficiency in speaking

38 THE WORLD OF

French. It was his second language and it was picked up rather than
earnestly studied by James and William. The Major had found a
tutor for the two boys who was an indolent, so Anna Mathilda
thought, young German. In a scattered fashion he taught French
as well as other grammar-school subjects. After his dismissal, another
tutor made a short stay, but the most that James learned from them
was a method of learning French by ear and of deftly repeating it
aloud, much to the envy of his mother, who, though she could read
French, was much too shy to trust herself and her American accent
to the ears of her visitors. James also picked up a word or two of
Russian.

It was James who became his mother's guide through the streets
of St. Petersburg. It was he who asked directions in French from
the Tsar's officers to point the way, he who, with his few words of
Russian, ordered sleigh and carriage drivers and gave alms to beg-
gars. On one cold day Anna Mathilda was shocked to know that
a footman had frozen to death while waiting for his master to return
to his sleigh; his death intensified her fear of St. Petersburg and
what she considered its immorality. Winter or summer, to her the
Russians seemed in need of a higher and more serious view of life.
When she heard gossip of the Tsarina's illness, she concluded flatly
that she went to too many balls and stayed up too late at night.

At the Whistler summer house near Tsarskoe Selo on a hot
Sunday Anna Mathilda saw a group of young hussars dismounted
and idling in a field on the road to Peterhof. She sent James and
his brother out to distribute tracts among them; the tracts were to
remind them that it was the Lord's Day and not a time to lounge
and play. James delighted in the errand for reasons other than his
mother may have suspected. He tossed tracts at the hussars and
shouted at them in French, and the hussars, shouting back at him,
cheerfully knocked each other over and rolled on the grass as they
dived for the tracts. It was a game and relieved the boredom of a hot
dull Sunday. James, laughing, led his mother to a window to watch
the show. James's action was of a piece with his later attitudes
toward social and religious reform, yet he probably agreed with his
mother that the hussars were too far gone in irreverence and
drink for her to offer them hopes of conversion to the Episcopal
Church.

nt

T

i HE arrival of Sir William Allen in St. Petersburg was an im-
portant event in the Whistler family circle. Sir William was a
member of the Scottish Royal Academy of painters and had come to
St. Petersburg at the Tsar's order to paint a large canvas of Peter
the Great teaching mujiks how to build ships at St. Petersburg. The
Tsar's choice was logical enough: this was not the first time Sir
William had journeyed to the cold northeast of Europe. In his youth
Sir William left Edinburgh for London and found a patron in Sir
Alexander Crighton, a physician in the British Royal household,
who had faith in the boy's ability to paint. On a trip to Russia Sir
Alexander took young Allen with him, and on their return to London
Allen painted pathetic scenes of Polish peasants, who were among
the displaced persons of that day, starving in Russian snow. On his
visit to London a few years later Nicholas was impressed by Allen's
pictures of scenes which the Tsar knew well, and even as Grand
Duke the Tsar was an accomplished hypocrite. It was rumored that
his outward liberality to Pushkin disguised a liaison with Pushkin's
wife, and it was said that though the lady had another lover in the
person of Georges d'Anthes (who killed the jealous poet in a duel),
d'Anthes was acting as the Tsar's proxy. Allen's expression of sym-
pathy for the fate of Poles on Russian soil touched the Tsar and
gave him a chance to express his Pan-Slavic sentiments. Therefore
Sir William Allen was his man; he was a vigorous genre painter, one
of whose famous works was a scene of Scotch cottagers playing at
Blindman's Buff. Surely he was the man to make Peter's building of
ships an adventurous incident. And Sir William talked in the same
fashion that he painted; on his visit to the Whistlers he fascinated
James with his story of his heroic canvas of men and ships.

40 THE WORLD OF

After James had been sent to bed, Anna Mathilda showed James's
drawings to Sir William. The great man was cautious, yet he recom-
mended that the bright boy who had listened so closely to his story
be sent to the Imperial Art Academy. James was eleven years old and
restless; Sir William had rescued him from idleness.

The Whistlers promptly sent him to the Academy, where he was
taught to draw from plaster casts. James was the youngest student in
the room where classes were held; he was a privileged character, and
very happy. More than all else there was no doubt in James's mind
that he and his family were superior. He was anything but shy and
was untroubled by the usual trials of early adolescence.

James was not the only restless member of the Whistler family,
now deeply clouded by the loss of Anna Mathilda's "Russian baby,"
at eighteen months, the latest visitation of the will of Anna Mathilda's
Calvinist God. Deborah, her stepdaughter, suffered headaches and
obvious results of boredom. At eighteen she was a little too old to
regard her father as the ideal escort at balls and dinner parties which
she attended with the Major on his infrequent excursions into society.
Without his permission, she joined St. Petersburg crowds on fete
days, and on the occasion of a royal wedding to which she had not
been invited, she stayed out late at night watching the festivities that
took place in front of the Winter Palace. The Major felt humiliated
by her lack of an invitation, by her eagerness to attend the festival
without it, and by the fact that she felt no sense of her wrongdoing.
He decided that St. Petersburg was bad for her, and that she, her
stepmother and James and William should take a long vacation from
St. Petersburg. His decision drew James and Deborah closer to-
gether. They responded to the promise of an English holiday with
the same delight they shared with Colonel Todd when he had taught
James to toast the Tsar's health in champagne and in French.

The truth was that the Major's own enthusiasms for his work in
Russia had declined. He had begun to feel the first, uneasy twinges
of middle age, the strain of overwork under the Tsar's orders, the
peculiarities of St. Petersburg climate, the extreme cold of its winters
and the sudden burst of warmth in late May which transformed the
countryside into something that resembled a semi-tropical forest. (The
heat at least was semi-tropical.) The lack of sanitation both at Tsarskoe
Selo and St. Petersburg gave rise to cholera epidemics which were

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 41

also semi-tropical in their intensity; it would be best to make sure
that his family were safe with friends in England.

Deborah received an invitation to visit friends in Switzerland
while Anna Mathilda with James and William joined their Preston
relatives for a summers vacation on the Isle of Wight. Deborah's
Swiss journey was momentous; it was in Switzerland that she met
the nephew of Kirk Boots, one of the Major's best friends.
The young man was a London physician, Dr. Francis Seymour
Haden, and before much time had elapsed, she fell in love with
him. Nor were American romances in Switzerland rare; in that
day Switzerland had become a favorite resort of the young and
romantic American traveler; Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women
there, and Deborah, like many a fashionable American girl, shared
the prospects of meeting the "right" young man there as well as a view
of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc. It did not take her long to find him.
He was clean-shaven, tall, and brisk in manner and he was also
interested in the arts. In his own right he was a promising etcher.
To marry him would be to keep an association with the arts that
Deborah had known in the Whistler household; it might well have
occurred to her that her future husband would understand and
perhaps appreciate James.

The Major was not overjoyed at the news of Deborah's engage-
ment and the rapid approach of her marriage to Haden. He came to
England so reluctantly to meet Haden that he almost caused the
couple to postpone the wedding, which, because of his late arrival,
was delayed two days. To his wife he complained of feeling middle-
aged and ill at ease. On meeting Haden, he did not like him. Did he
foresee that Haden within the next thirty years would be a domestic
tyrant? Or was the Major himself growing into the kind of Victorian
father of whom the head of the Barretts of Wimpole Street in
London was archetypical? Deborah was docile, yet held firmly
enough to her own wishes on this occasion not to fall into the
fatherly trap that held Elizabeth Barrett, the poet, an invalid until at
the age of forty she eloped with Robert Browning. We shall never
have the final answer to these two questions; we know only that the
Major's stay in England was extremely brief, that he seemed dis-
tracted rather than pleased, and that he commissioned Sir William
Boxall of the Royal Academy to paint a portrait of James. If the

42 THE WORLD OF

portrait of the smiling boy is to be trusted as an expression of James's
feeling, James enjoyed the sitting and Boxall's attention. In later
years, judging from the portraits, whether painted by himself or
others, Whistler always enjoyed his own presence in a picture.

The Major returned to St. Petersburg and to his duties. The
Tsar had just presented him with the Order of St. Anna, which by
coincidence was both his mother's and his wife's name and there-
fore appropriate. Deborah went with her husband to London and
settled peacefully in an impressive house in Sloane Street, and
James with his mother and William continued their stay with Anna
Mathilda's relatives at Preston.

Anna Mathilda in her journal was not unaware of important
events in Europe during that year of 1848; she knew well enough
that it was a historic year. She read newspapers and began to jot
down her opinions concerning world affairs. The fall of the Bour-
bons in France was not reassuring, nor was news of Chartists massed
at Whitehall a cheerful sign of the times. She copied (in French)
the Tsar's proclamation of his own security as well as his ukase
asking for reaffirmation of the people's faith in him as head of
church and state. As an American and in theory she held to a Puri-
tan's dislike of kings, emperors and tsars. In practice, and because
of her husband's dependence upon Nicholas's good will, she was
strongly in favor of all things being settled without threats and
fears. "May God so overrule in the councils of Europe that a better
state of society be ordered!" she exclaimed. News from St. Peters-
burg continued to be bad; the cholera epidemic was unabated; she
knew that her husband was neither as robust nor as optimistic as he
had been in America. Then came news of his illness; he had had
an attack of cholera and continued to be weak, listless and unlike
himself. Late in 1848 she sent James to live with Deborah and her
husband in London. She returned to St. Petersburg and on April 7,
1849, the Major was dead.

The Tsar offered to install Anna Mathilda's sons as pages in his
court. She refused this courtesy but accepted the use of his private
barge to carry her down the Neva to Kronstadt, and from Kron-
stadt she returned to England. James saw nothing of her last gloomy
days in St. Petersburg. It was as natural for her to shield him from
the worst of her dark impressions, so that he would remember only the

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 43

glittering fagades of the Winter Palace, the fireworks at night, the
joy of being admitted as the youngest member of a drawing class at
the Imperial Academy. For a few years, George, his elder half-
brother, living in Baltimore, was to become the protector and gen-
eral adviser of the Whistler fortunes, but it was James who stood
at the center of the family. It was he who took the place, if not the
responsibility, of being head of the family, left vacant by the
Major's death.

IV

a June day in 1849 the dark-eyed, smiling boy of William

Boxall's portrait of James Whistler stood before the picture at the
Royal Academy and approved what he saw. The image on canvas
looked like a child of exceptionally good fortune; it seemed to be the
mirrored reflection of red cheeks, a deeply cut, white Eton collar,
dark-brown curls above the forehead, and with these the general
air of a vivacious fourteen-year-old who was well cared for, well-
dressed and at ease in his surroundings. The boy was accompanied
by his mother and his younger brother, William. All three were
pleased at seeing that James's portrait which had been commissioned
by his father had been selected for a place on the Academy's walls.
James's approval of the Boxall portrait meant something to his re-
cently widowed mother. At the Hermitage in St. Petersburg she
had been impressed by James's ridicule of Peter the Great's attempts
at painting birds; James had laughed aloud at the Tsar's pretensions
as a painter, and in her journal she noted the incident as a promise
of James becoming an art critic.

The Boxall portrait was among the legacies that Major Whistler
had left his family, and its place in the Royal Academy show of 1849
was proof that Whistler taste in art was above the ordinary. Nor
did Major Whistler leave his family dollarless. Shortly after his
death his pensions and investments brought his heirs an income of
fifteen thousand dollars a year. His widow and eldest son, George,
feared that it might dwindle, which it did, and they were conscious
of the need to live sparingly so as to carry the future expenses of
educating James and William. Anna Mathilda could not continue
the style of living that the family had enjoyed in St. Petersburg as

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 45

well as on visits to Preston and her stepdaughter's new home in Lon-
don. She therefore decided to return to the house that Major Whis-
tler had bought in Stonington, Connecticut, before the family had
moved to Russia.

The visit to the Royal Academy in London is the only cheerful
entry in the narrative of the Whistler family return to the United
States. It was the last memorable view that James had of his boy-
hood visits to London. In 1849 the Academy was housed next door
to the National Gallery, and across the street from it stood St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields, the church of so many famous weddings. St.
Martin's was the most intimate, the most delicately wrought of
London's early eighteenth-century churches, and the proximity of a
gallery and a church was a circumstance that fell within Anna
Mathilda's sense of a rare and fortunate fitness of things on earth.
This last and favorable impression of London held premonitions of
James's future; he was never to be attached to any city in the United
States as he was to London, and his attachment was deeper than any
expression of his like or dislike of London and the English.

The return to Stonington was an anticlimax for James's mother,
for William and for himself. The small New England town and
house meant a severe readjustment for all three, and pleasant as the
environment was, it could not match the excitements of St. Peters-
burg and Londonand most unsatisfactory of all, the town had no
school that suited Anna Mathilda's plans for the boys' education.
The right school, she felt, was at Pomfret. It was Christ Church
Hall, and its principal was the Rev. Dr. Roswell Park who had been
a West Point engineer until he heard the call to enter the church.
He was not, of course, another Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and his school
was scarcely more than a grammar school for girls as well as boys,
but like his famous contemporary, he believed in upright Christian
discipline and practiced it with conspicuous dignity.

Anna Mathilda installed herself and two sons within a few rooms
of a farmhouse at Pomfret. The move meant the loss of her privacy
and it also meant the keeping of two boys to barnyard chores which
James neither welcomed nor could be forced to perform with decent
regularity. When he was not restless, he was bored and listless, nor
did he find in Dr. Park a model of behavior. Many years later a
schoolmate, then an elderly woman, confessed that she thought

46 THE WORLD OF

Whistler attractive with his brown curls and easy manner and she
remembered him as being so slender that he seemed tall. The fact
was that at fifteen James was at once too old in the excitements of
living in large cities, too readily bored with rural scenes and enter-
tainments, too childish in his lack of classroom discipline to be con-
tent at Christ Church Hall. He did not do well in studies in which
his brother William calmly and stolidly excelled. The worthy Dr.
Park lost patience with him and, by attempting to cane him, lost
his own temper and dignity. The caning had been preceded by the
master chasing the student round and round the classroom. Mani-
festly the school at Pomfret had not been made for James, and it is
probable that Dr. Park advised James's mother of this and tactfully
suggested that West Point was the place to send him. As far as
James's education, health and behavior were concerned, the move to
Pomfret as well as to Stonington was a failure; James's "sore throats"
returned; he became unlike himself, and when he lacked an audi-
ence, he grew listless. He was like a small actor on an empty stage
facing an empty house.

Anna Mathilda and George, who was still prospering steadily at
Winans' locomotive plant in Baltimore, agreed that West Point
would provide the best solution for James's difficulties. From all
accounts of him, George, like James's younger brother William, was
a model of virtue, but like so many models of his kind, the vague
aura of his goodness outshone his personality. He was helpful,
correct, industrious. He promised to do what he could to obtain
James a cadetship at West Point, and with something of his father's
conscientiousness and boldness, he had an interview with Daniel
Webster, the New England lawyer, orator and political lion, on the
subject of James's appointment to the military academy. Webster
had heard of Major Whistler and passed on James's name to Presi-
dent Fillmore's list of recommendations of young men to West Point.
Since Fillmore appointed James as cadet-at-large, and not as a
strictly military appointment, it is likely that George told Webster
of his younger brother's interest in art and of his ability to draw.
Major Whistler had been an unconventional studentand a famous
engineer. West Point could afford to discount whatever doubts there
were concerning his son.

Since Major Whistler's day at the academy, West Point had

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 47

again changed for the better. Colonel Swift had been replaced by
"The Father of West Point/' Superintendent Thayer, whom the War
Department had prepared for his office by sending him to Europe,
and in particular, to L'Ecole Polytechnique. Thayer reinforced what
had been a French "tradition" at West Point and with it even
greater stress was placed upon the study of engineering. In West
Point's drawing classes boys became familiar with French skills in
making maps and architectural designs. At West Point a romantic
affection for all things French began to prosper and in this atmos-
phere James Whistler acquired an equally romantic inspiration to
see Paris, to share the life of its unmilitary bohemian artists.

Nor did the academy on the Hudson lack a setting that was at-
tractive. Built as it was on the site of Fort Putnam, the old fort gave
it the air of being an estate of a Scotch laird in Highland country,
the fort a graystone Gothic pile, the Hudson River an enlarged
moat that reflected walls and terraces in its waters. In 1851 West
Point still had the general atmosphere of an idyllic school for boys
and Presidential appointment of cadets had made it an exclusive
one. Southern plantation families sent their sons to the Academy, and
from this quarter the spirit of a southern aristocracy made itself
visible: Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were of that origin, and
during James's stay at West Point, Lee became Superintendent.
From Thayer s time onward West Point had gained more poise in
enforcing rules of academic as well as military discipline, and with
its air of social ease and polish, it had become a young gentleman's
school of military engineering.

In the same fashion that Major Whistler was at home in his
cadetship at West Point, James Whistler accepted West Point's
hospitality; that is, he went to the Academy as though he were a
welcome guest. He stretched to the limit West Point's tolerance of
students who attended its art classes; he was anything but soldierly
in his bearing; he tripped rather than strode or marched, and
though generally neat in his appearance, he broke the rules of being
tightly buttoned up in his uniform. His easy social manner, which
was charming enough to please his instructors in art, was not the
kind that passed inspection on the parade ground. He was regarded
as the exception to West Point's sternest rules with the hope that
his brightness would outshine his errors and that his talents in

48 THE WORLD OF

drawing would justify, if not condone, his unathletic and un-
soldierly behavior.

Alden Weir, who afterwards became one of the best of his gen-
eration's American painters, was Whistler's art instructor at West
Point and he enjoyed rather than discouraged the presence of an
unconventional cadet in his classroom. It was obvious that young
Whistler had more facility in his drawings than his fellow students.
If Whistler left behind him nothing remarkable in his classroom,
his intelligent responses to Alden Weir's teachings made the in-
structor feel that his pupil's prospects could not be less than brilliant.

At West Point Whistler's near-sightedness began to play its part
in shaping his career. On the parade ground his actions too often
seemed irrelevant, and with his inability to see things sharply at a
distance, it was not unnatural that he feared and distrusted horses.
He could not guide a horse, and when in saddle he was all too
readily unmounted. For him the parade ground was far too public
for scenes of inept horsemanship, and throughout his life his vanity
was too easily cut and pierced and bled too freely to tolerate even
minor scenes of public criticism. Whenever and wherever he failed
to show himself superior to those around him, it was as though he
bled internally. His injury was the source of his verbal wit, and in
later years its signal came with the flashing of his monocle in which
his handicap of short-sightedness had become a gesture of defiance
and the fixing of the monocle in his eye a weapon of attack. On
the parade ground if a horse refused to treat Whistler's person with
respect, it quickly followed that Whistler had no use for horses.

One day at drill and at a superior officer's cry of "Halt" Whistler
sailed over his horse's head. His commander remarked drily, "Mr.
Whistler, I am happy to see you for once at the head of your class."
Unhurt the boy leaped upright: "But I got there gracefully," he
insisted as though he had won an argument. Yet the reply did not
equal his father's gesture of polishing the mouth of a cannon. Later
Whistler told his friends that the horse was not an amusing animal;
how could any man keep a horse for the sake of entertainment?

Through the prestige of his father's professional honors in engi-
neering, Whistler was permitted to extend his stay at West Point

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 49

for three years. In all his classes, excepting those in art, he was
doing badly, and scarcely better than at the school in Pomfret.
Whistler knew that he was neither a mathematician nor a soldier,
yet he did not dislike West Point. He had made a friend of Alden
Weir; he and Weir collaborated in making a series of water colors
showing views of West Point, and in the teacher-student relation-
ship Weir gave credit to Whistler's inspiration for the sketches.

Whistler may well have tried the patience of his other instructors.
They believed him to be bright but indolent, and certainly neg-
lectful of military propriety and discipline, but to balance these
demerits was the charm of his strange good looks, his social poise,
his wit and these latter qualities gave him ease among his class-
mates. It was felt, and he probably shared West Point's belief,
that he could have been a clever engineer if he chose to be one. In
actuality that choice was wishful thinking. Whistler was frankly
bored by any precise study of the sciences; he needed another kind of
stage for his activities; he cared nothing at all for history or econom-
ics, chemistry or physics. What he liked at West Point was its exclu-
siveness and, when off dress parade, its formal and yet graceful
social manner. He had picked up the West Point manner with the
same ease that he had learned French in St. Petersburg.

Anyone could have foreseen that Whistler at the end of two years
at West Point would not be an ideal cadet. His neglect of required
studies would soon involve a moral problem for his instructors and for
the Superintendent at West Point, General Robert E, Lee. The
General was humorless, deeply religious, an able administrator, a
great general and a moralist. At West Point he was not the man to
make allowances for a bright cadet's failure in chemistry and mili-
tary history because that particular student talked well and had
uncommon wit; he would consider the cadet's lack of industry an
occasion for prayer; and if both religious and moral persuasion failed,
immediate, if gentlemanly, dismissal was the next and final action.
The issue was an honest one, and it involved Lee's professional as
well as personal integrity.

Whistler's instructor in history reflected Lee's impress of moral and
military seriousness at West Point. In class he asked Whistler for
the date of the battle of Buena Vista, for during the early 1850's the
Mexican War was still hot in the minds of instructors at West Point.

50 THE WORLD OF

In the conduct of the war General Winfield Scott, "Old Fuss and
Feathers," had paid the cadets recruited from West Point an over-
whelming compliment; he said it was they who had won the war in
quick march time. The Mexican War was West Point's undisputed
victory; each battle was sacred and Whistler could not remember
either the date or the existence of Buena Vista. The instructor made
his last appeal, checked his temper and tried to be informal:

'What is this?" he said. "You don't know Buena Vista? Suppose
you went out to dinner, and the company began to talk about the
Mexican War, and you, a West Point man, were asked the date of
the battle, what would you do?"

Whistler's reply was in the best form of his later manner: "I
would leave the room at once; I refuse to associate myself with people
who could talk of such things at dinner." The reply was a West
Point heresy and could be accepted only from those whose grades
in history were not less than excellent.

Whistler had learned at West Point a certain skill in distracting
his examiners, and if he did not succeed in charming them into
giving him passing grades, his wit earned him notoriety among his
classmates and instructors. At the very least he could not be dis-
missed for mediocre conduct. His academic grades in all subjects
except art were so ridiculously low, his facility in art so outstanding
that both extremes of bad and good were in daily evidence. He had
earned a kind of fame; his fellow cadets told stories of his flirting
in French with the French maid at a boarding house and being
discovered by her mistress, which meant that he lost his privilege
of eating meals other than those served in the mess halls. They
remembered his short stature, his dark, unruly hair which gave
him the name of "Curls." His near-sightedness did not improve
his skill at marksmanship and accounted for his lack of smartness in
horseback riding, particularly in the more complicated maneuvers on
the parade ground. It was like him not to complain of his physical
defects, but to ignore them gallantly, trusting to his wit to save an
awkward situation and to shield his vanity to say when his com-
mander gave him a horse named Quaker, "He's no Friend!"

As Whistler's classmates retold these stories, some of them took on
a resemblance to the episodes in Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Story of
a Bad Boy. In retrospect Whistler became West Point's "bad boy"

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 51

who had astonished his easily impressed classmates. They who were
at ease in saddle or on parade remembered his quick pen and pencil
sketches of characters out of the novels of Dickens, Victor Hugo and
Dumas; they saw him as the rare artist at West Point. In the class-
room his irregular conduct had made him a schoolboy's hero, gay,
irreverent, and "different." And as for Whistler, he did not resent
the sight of spruce, gray uniforms worn by his classmates, and when
he felt like it, he could make himself look as neatly turned out as
any of his fellows.

Thirty years later Whistler told to friends in London the cause of
his dismissal from West Point. His examiner in chemistry had
questioned him on the properties of silicon, and Whistler quickly
replied that silicon was a gas. "That will do, Mr. Whistler," said the
examiner, and Whistler always closed the story with: "Had silicon
been a gas, I would have been a major-general." The last remark
brought assurance of applause which was what he needed for
the healing of an early injury to his pride.

To Whistler at eighteen the dismissal from West Point was
a serious reality and one that demanded a confession of failure to
his family. He went to the office of the Superintendent, General Lee,
and pleaded reconsideration of his failure in chemistry. The Gen-
eral was courteous and grave. "I can only regret," said he, "that
one capable of doing well should so have neglected himself and
must suffer the penalty." Lee, the moralist, spoke; the language was
awkward, 1 formal, unyielding, and yet Whistler never lost his respect
for Lee. For the first and last time in his life, he consciously respected
moral authority. Something deeper than Whistler's vanity was pierced
and deflated. It had been among his dreams that circumstances being
otherwise he would have made a smardy tailored, dashing and cour-
ageous officer perhaps, at least, a "major-general." Henceforward he
saw himself as an artist who was not without the sharp, brilliant
eclat of an idealized military hero.

Whistler's return to Pomfret was not a happy one, and the Con-
necticut summer was green, empty and dull. His mother's view of
his dismissal from West Point did not differ greatly from Gen-
eral Lee's expression of courteous regret. Family pride had been
injured, and his mother disliked Whistler's lack of a visible future
as much as he disliked the cloudy atmosphere of unspoken reproof

52 THE WORLD OF

through the rooms of the Pomfret farmhouse. Instead of becoming at
the very least "an officer and a gentleman/' he faced the prospect of
joining his virtuous half-brother, George, at Winans' locomotive
works in Baltimore and that was a decidedly unhappy outlook. Nor
could a fortunate substitute for Whistler's stay at West Point take
place on a few acres of Connecticut farm land. Cows, sheep and
chickens were not his audience, and the stony New England coun-
tryside offered few attractions for him. They dulled his wits.

Part of the unhappiness of going to Baltimore and the unromantic
locomotive works was that the city was not St. Petersburg, nor
London, nor Paris. In Whistler's eyes the city was eminently un-
exciting. However, he did go to Baltimore and landed on his
brother's doorstep. After a brief vacation George had re-entered
Winans' firm as a partner and superintendent and had married a
daughter of its founder. He was embarrassed at the thought of
placing a romantic, flighty younger brother under him at a desk in
the drafting room. He had already found a place for William, but
William could always be relied upon to do what he was told James
could not. Whistler was as uneasy as George, for the occasion was
not one of celebration, and he made it fairly clear that he did not
want a life of servitude to Winans Locomotive Works. He was less
of a Prodigal Son in the Whistler family than a black sheep and he
acted accordingly: he strolled into the Winans' drafting rooms and
scrawled fanciful drawings of Cavaliers who were locked up in
dungeon cells on neatly stretched and prepared drafting paper. The
Cavaliers expressed Whistler's image of himself, but they also
meant that Winans' draftsmen saw ruined pencils at their desks and
drawing boards on which new sheets of paper had to be laid.

Whistler solved the problem of his idleness by leaving for Wash-
ington, and Washington was less depressing than Baltimore. Al-
though the nation's capital in 1854 had the air of a sleepy Southern
town, although it was humid, swirling in dust whenever the sun
shone and deep in mud whenever it rained, Pierre Charles L'Enf ant's
design of the city gave it the mirrored reflection of neo-classical order-
liness and charm. The courtesies of Washington were Southern
courtesies which were associated with much that Whistler remem-
bered of his childhood and had been reinforced by General Lee's
influence at West Point. It was a city in which family names,

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 53

including Whistler's, were not easily forgotten, and Whistler re-
ceived admittance to the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis's office.
Whistler told him of hopes for reinstatement at West Point; he
talked about St. Petersburg and of his father; and he hinted to
Davis that a failure in chemistry was no more than a gentleman's
error. Secretary Davis was as formal and grave as General Lee, yet as
he bowed Whistler out of the room, he gave him permission to call
a second time.

After seeing the Secretary of the Navy and pleading with him
unsuccessfully to be transferred from West Point to Annapolis,
Whistler returned to Jefferson Davis's office. Davis remembered that
Whistler had spoken of doing well in Mr. Weir's art classes at West
Point and he also remembered that a Captain Benham who had
known Major Whistler was in charge of the drawing division of the
United States Coast Survey. Davis said that return to West Point
was an impossibility, but if Whistler cared to see Captain Benham
there was probably a job waiting for him at a dollar and a half a
day.

When Whistler saw Benham, Benham found that his old friend's
son was amusing to talk to and he invented a job for him. Whistler
was appointed to the United States Coast Survey offices on Novem-
ber 7, 1854. What he had learned during his visit to Washington
was how to emulate his father's initiative and charm and how not
to be wholly dependent on the advice and good wishes of his half-
brother, George.

At West Point Whistler had been known for boyish skill in cook-
ery, and when he settled into lodgings in Washington on Thirteenth
Street, he continued what afterwards became his famous gift in
serving impromptu meals out of a chafing dish. The reasons for his
pleasure in being an amateur chef are not obscure. At home his
mother had left the trials of cooking to her servants, and on occa-
sions when she could not afford or failed to hire an able cook, even
the simple meals served in the Whistler household suffered a de-
cline. At West Point and in Washington Whistler preferred his
own inventions in the art of making omelettes and griddle cakes to
the meals served in mess halls and boarding housesand in Wash-
ington the cost of dining out at fashionable restaurants was prohibi-
tive. A spirit-lamp, a frying pan, a French coffee-maker were his

54 THE WORLD OF

kitchen tools, and when he invited guests to his rooms in Thirteenth
Street, he gave the coffee-maker and the frying pan the properties
of Aladdin's lamp. It was a way of proving his self-sufficiency, and,
incidentally, of showing he was versed in the art of being an original
and European host. The cigarette which closed the meal was the
last touch of his sleight of hand; the meal was then entirely Whis-
tlerian: two eggs, flour and yeast, a pitcher of syrup, a cup of coffee
had created the illusion of a work of art.

His meals were also consistent with his bohemian ideals of how
to live in Paris. The French coffee-maker was the symbol of his
intentions, and since he read and spoke French fluently, the novels
of Dumas and Hugo continued to charm his imagination. Reading
them, he spirited himself away from Washington and out of the
routine of office hours in the Coast Survey drafting rooms. With
his ability to talk French, to dance, and with the connections that
his family had in Washington, he quickly became a social asset at
balls and evening parties in Washington. He soon discovered that
his office hours interfered with the increasing number of his invita-
tions to dine out. In January, 1855, he spent six and one half days
in his office; the rest of the month had slipped away. His memories
of London and of St. Petersburg made way for easy acquaintance
with members of foreign embassy offices in Washington, and at the
British Legation he met Labouchere, who afterwards became the
famous "Labby" and one of Whistler's best friends in London. At
this moment Labouchere was an attache of the British Legation and
was one of Whistler's first instructors in the exchange of verbal wit.
In Thirteenth Street Whistler was both host and chef at dinner to
the Russian Charg d' Affaires.

It was not difficult for Whistler to convince himself that he was
well on his way toward being a man of the world. This was a pleas-
ant dream and under its influence, its enchantments, its desires, the
Whistler who twenty years later became a celebrity in London's
Chelsea began to emerge from the chrysalis of a shabby genteel
lodging-house in Washington. In Coast Survey offices Whistler's
progress was less spectacular, yet it merited attention from Captain
Benham. Within a short two months he had picked up the essentials
of etching and engraving; his topographical maps showed a brilliant
facility and an unprofessional tendency to etch irrelevant portrait

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 55

heads and topographical details on his plates. Captain Benham in-
formed him that less art and more accurate drawing was required;
that he could not go on forever spoiling plates that had been
bought with the taxpayers' money. He reminded Whistler that the
office was not an art school, but a branch of the government serv-
ices.

Captain Benham had grown fond of Whistler and he attempted
to warn him that his attendance at the office was dilatory and a shade
too erratic for future employment. He sent another young draftsman
to Whistler's rooms at half-past eight in the morning. Whistler
opened the door and explained that he was not dressed and then
cordially offered his visitor a chair. He poured a cup of coffee from
his French coffee-maker and served it to his visitor. Whistler dressed
slowly, carefully; he talked easily, lightly; he convinced his visitor
that time was of no importance, and together they arrived at the office
at half-past ten. Captain Benham did not repeat his experiment in
warning Whistler,

It was in Washington that Whistler began to attract notice by
his dress. He walked the streets in a Scotch bonnet and a plaid
shawl tossed over one shoulder. Whistler wore Highland dress with
particular reference to his mother's family, the McNeills, as well as
his own liking for the novels of Sir Walter Scott. His gesture of
belated Jacobinism was shared by many Southern families in Wash-
ington and it had in it a fashionable balance between levity and a
romantic tribute to Southern family origins. It insured his welcome
at evening parties at which the first impression Whistler made was
of being French, and at the second, Scottish, and from then onward
conversation was easy and never too serious. With a copy of Henry
Murger's Vie de Boheme in his pocket Whistler enjoyed his dis-
guise both as a Highlander and a Jacobean Cavalier, and this was
the kind of social pleasantry that could be understood in Wash-
ington.

By February, 1855, Whistler's name on the payroll of the drawing
division of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey had be-
come a cause of embarrassment to Captain Benham. Benham appre-
ciated Whistler's presence in the office and he believed that Major
Whistler's son had a touch of genius but he was almost never in
the Survey's offices, and he could not be paid for services in absentia.

56 THE WORLD OF

Whistler spared the Captain further embarrassment by a friendly
and abrupt resignation. He had made up his mind to study art, to
go to Paris. Henry Murger's Vie de Boheme had converted him to
a religion of Paris for art's sake, and he was ready to start, however
limited his means might be, upon his pilgrimage.

V

T

JL HOSE who walk into the rooms where nineteenth-century
French paintings are shown at the Metropolitan Museum in New
York are likely to find two or three of their fellow visitors gazing
at a large rectangular canvas signed "Courbet." The subject of the
picture seldom fails to catch the attention of the curious: it is of an
extremely naked, golden-tinted girl lying on her back, her black hair
flowing in the direction of the lower left corner of the frame.
Perched on her left hand is a brightly feathered parrot who seems
to be sensible of the girl's charm. She is undoubtedly the mistress of
the situation, an unGreek, nineteenth-century Leda who tempted
a parrot and not a swan.

Aside from his own pictures shown in several museums and col-
lections in New York, Courbet's woman with a parrot is the most
vivid souvenir of James McNeill Whistler's student days in Paris
and though Whistler in his painting was never given to the kind of
vividness that Courbet's canvas so obviously displays, yet the bar-
baric Leda has a distinct resemblance to one of the first of Whistler's
models, his Eloise, his "Fumette," with whom he lived during the
four years of his stay in Paris. Whistler shared models with Courbet
and Eloise was a free lance in her profession.

Whistler had come to Paris in the summer of 1855 and had
enrolled at the Studio Gleyre. George Whistler had agreed to send
him an allowance of three hundred and fifty dollars a year in quar-
terly installments and he had urged his younger half brother to make
the best use of his money and time by becoming a student at the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts. But Whistler at twenty-one was not disposed
to follow an elder brother's warnings and advice. An incident of his
leaving the United States Coast Survey offices in Washington had
already shown his present temperament, his resolution. As he left

58 THE WORLD OF

the office he picked up his draughtsman's magnifying glass and on
its surface etched the features of a small devil. A few days later
Captain Benham found the glass on Whistler's desk and pocketed
it as a memento of his departing draughtsman. Two years later in
Paris Benham showed the glass to Whistler who held it up between
them and said, "I recognize both of us perfectly."

In leaving Captain Benham's office Whistler was free to arrive
at his own decisions, to study art and to be a devil in his own right.
At home even the strongly willed convictions of his mother could not
resist him. When he announced his intentions to go to Paris, his
mother temporized by remaining silent; George bought boat passage
for him, and he was on his way. And once in Paris Whistler decided
that the disciplines of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts were not for him.
Little green chairs and tables on sidewalks in front of the cafes
were too inviting; the days were bland and warm and Whistler
needed air. He had come to learn Paris as well as painting, and the
small devil etched on Benham's magnifying glass glittered and
danced in the back of his mind.

Because Gleyre was a well-liked teacher of foreign students of
painting who came to Paris, Whistler chose his studio for preliminary
instruction. Although Gleyre was among the disciples of David and
Ingres who were the idols of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he held to
certain unacademic principles that were his own, and from him
Whistler acquired the rule that black was the foundation of tonal
values in color. Gleyre's rules were few but impressive and they
inspired young Englishmen who became his pupils to vigorous indus-
try. Whistler was not inspired to strenuous effort; his choice of
Gleyre's Studio was a sign of his freedom rather than a return to
school, and at Gleyre's he discovered companions for the hours after
Gleyre's classes were dismissed. There he found a group of young
men, some of whom became well-known in their own right and sev-
eral became famous as characters in fiction many years later when
George Du Maurier wrote his novel, Trilby. They were Edward
John Poynter, Alecco lonides, Thomas Armstrong, Valentine Cam-
eron Prinsep, Thomas Reynolds Lamont, and George Du Maurier
himself.

The group formed a British colony in Paris and the atmosphere
it created was one of healthy school boys on a diligent holiday:

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 59

they worked hard, played hard, but seldom stayed up too late at
night. They lived as though they had stepped out of the pages of
Thackeray's The Newcomes, and Du Maurier's Trilby had for its
lay figure Whistlers mistress, "Fumette." Whenever the group gave
drinking parties Whistler and his "Fumette" were invited. Whistler
strummed a guitar and sang Southern plantation songs; "Fumette's"
small feet and flights of temperament were boyishly admired by her
hostsand Whistler encouraged her to recite whole pages of de
Musset's verses that she had learned by heart. Whistler, small, dark,
agile, had the air of being a foreign guest in the company. Actually,
square-chinned, aggressive young Du Maurier was almost a "for-
eigner"; he was the son of a French father and of Ellen Clarke,
daughter of Mary Anne Clarke who was once mistress of the Duke
of York and the "heroine" of a great cause celebre during the Re-
gency. Du Maurier's family heritage was by no means conven-
tional, and the temperaments within it were more erratic than the
wildest irregularities of the McNeills or the Whistlers. George Du
Maurier suffered an affliction that would cause an artist of less
enduring fibre to lose himself in drink or morphine. He had lost
the sight of one eye and was threatened with total blindness, yet he
seemed the most correctly British of the group and to outward ap-
pearances always looked as though he had just stepped out of a cold
bath. It was Whistler who seemed ominously French and notably
frail. Whistler also seemed Italian, or rather he resembled the lay
figure of the Italian villain of Victorian fiction, and though in Trilby
Du Maurier frankly intended a portrait of him in "the idle appren-
tice," Jos Selby, there was more than a little of Whistler in the
master villain of the book, Svengali.

Whistler found other friends than those who studied at Gleyre's,
and of greater importance to his early career as a maker of etchings,
he found sources of inspiration that were other than those of Gleyre's
English colony. Most of the younger generation of art students at
Gleyre's admired Guillaume Sulpice Chevalier whose pen name was
"Gavani," the illustrator of Hoffmann's Tales, whose doctrine was
"I do a thing only because of its difficulty" and followed this by
saying that his life consisted of work and women. In his dress he was
conspicuous for his clean linen and smartly upturned military
moustaches, and in these details one can see the beginnings of a

60 THE WORLD OF

style, an "artistic" manner that later Whistler made his own. In his
drawings "Gavani" was master of a thin, graceful, nervous line that
Whistler admired.

Another source of inspiration to Whistler was in the etchings of
the pathetic madman, Charles Meryon, who had been befriended by
Baudelaire's art criticism. Meryon sought out the poet who had
praised his etchings, but the interview only served to frighten
Baudelaire. Meryon had written to Baudelaire saying that he did
not believe in the existence of Edgar Allan Poe, that the poet's name
had been the invention of a syndicate of spies who had written "The
Murders in the Rue Morgue" to expose his (Meryon's) private
life. Meryon was soon placed in a madhouse, but his published
volume of etchings, Vues de Paris, had a moment of great celebrity,
and traces of what that book taught Whistler are seen throughout
the first fifteen years of Whistler's career in the art in which he too
became a master.

Whistler's emulations of "Gavani" and Meryon were distinctly
impersonal. "Gavani" was of a circle that was jealously guarded
by Edmund and Jules Goncourt, who later were to permit Seymour
Haden, Whistler's brother-in-law, to receive praise, but were careful
to exclude all consideration of Whistler's gifts. Compared to his
English contemporaries at Gleyre's who drew sketches of him in the
shape of a question mark, Whistler was too outrageously French, and
compared to his French contemporaries, he was all too enthusias-
tically American.

As Du Maurier unconsciously prepared himself for the writing of
Trilby, transforming Whistler's "Fumette" into a heroine with a
very Greek profile, Whistler etched a portrait of himself. The por-
trait was done a la Rembrandt with lighter touches of what he had
learned from "Gavani" and Meryon; and most of all it was a portrait
of a half -smiling young American of the mid-eighteen-fifties who
was visibly enjoying Paris; there was a touch of "style" in the broad-
brimmed straw hat set upon dark curls, and the small moustache
and short imperial completed a fashionable picture of the artist at
his ease.

The Du Maurier circle at Gleyre's was less than half of Whistler's

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 61

life in Paris. Part of his Paris was the imaginary world of Henry
Murger's Vie de Boheme, and he had the verve, lightheartedness,
and American innocence to adapt the book to the cut of his own
personality and behavior. Throughout his life he did little reading,
but he had a grammarian's eye, ear and memory for whatever he
selected to read or overhear; within these limitations he was seldom
in error, and as a Bohemian in the Paris that he hoped to make his
own, Whistler converted Vie de Boheme into his particular Manual
of Arms.

By the time Whistler came to Paris, Murger's sketches of Bohemia
with their urban gypsies, their poets and painters, their Mimis and
Musettes, had been produced upon the stage and applauded by
Louis Napoleon, and they also served a turn as plot and characters
for Puccini's opera, La Boheme. The confessions of his early
poverty had made Murger surprisingly well-to-do and outwardly
respectable.

In middle age and with ironic ease Murger assumed his place in
the cafes of Montparnasse as the hero of the Latin Quarter; he was
genuinely modest and he was never to forget that he had once been
and still was a disappointed poet: his gifts had been too facile to earn
the kind of fame that he desired. He moved and dressed with the
elegance he had once envied in other men, and was ill-prepared to
have Whistler introduce himself in a cafe as an ardent admirer
from America. And later when Whistler attempted to introduce him
to a friend, another American, Murger shied away.

Murger had grown too conservative to accept an enthusiastic
Bohemian from the United States, Whistler' s white duck suit which
had been cut and tailored in Baltimore did not conform to the rules
of the starving art students who roamed the streets of Montparnasse,
and the strange costume merely embarrassed the author of Vie de
Boheme.

Meanwhile there had been nothing in Vie de Boh&me to offend
the sensibilities of one who in his childhood and tinder instructions
from his mother memorized whole chapters from the Bible; the love
scenes in the book were indicated briefly by the blowing out of
candles in garret rooms, and in that sense infidelities between lovers
also remained inviolate: their bedroom scenes were not the subject
of prolonged discussions. If Vie de Boh&me preached anything at all,

62 THE WORLD OF

it was of the success of youthful levity against a too solemn regard
of the arts, against transient failure, against poverty and middleclass
attitudes toward money. All this was tonic to Whistler's spirit: his
mistress Eloise became "Fumette" in direct imitation of Vie de
Bahama's Musette, and not (as she was to become in Du Maurier's
memory) a Trilby. A personal morality derived from his reading of
Vie de Eoheme remained with Whistler for the rest of his life, and
it was not amazing that to British Victorian critics, it seemed less
than any moral sense at all.

Sooner than even he anticipated Whistler grew bored at the pros-
pect of continued regular attendance at Gleyre's Studio. The Louvre
with its large congregation of visiting celebrities and art students
was a greater attraction to him than the routine of a studio where
a student labored a stipulated number of hours a day. At each suc-
cessive stage in his career Whistler gravitated toward the centers of
social activity, centers of gossip, centers of urban excitement and
distraction. He chose to sleep till noon, stroll to the Louvre, instruct
himself in the practice of copying old masters and after hours argue
theories concerning art in a cafe with two newly discovered friends,
Fantin-Latour and Alphonse Legros, who like himself haunted the
chambers of the Louvre.

At the Louvre, and at what seemed to him then an impassable
distance, Whistler saw the tall-hatted, lavender-gloved figure of
Delacroix who bowed at him; and there he also exchanged a few
words with the inspired teacher of art, Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who
toured the Louvre with eager students in his wake, including Fantin
and Legros. Whistler's friendship with these two young men was a
way of getting an education at second-hand. Next to becoming a
pupil of Lecoq, being a listener to his disciples was best, and instruc-
tion from Legros and Fantin flowed as easily as table wine.

In a cafe near Montparnasse Whistler arranged the meetings of
a Society of Three. Of the three, Legros was the most impressive
figure; his manner was precise and grave; h& was slender and pre-
maturely middle-aged with touches of gray at his temples and in his
carefully trimmed beard. His high forehead, hooked nose, and
severe eyes dominated the table. He was an accomplished etcher and

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 63

one of Lecoq's favorite students; his personality was of one who was
born to teach, who loved teaching with all the religious gravity of
his Burgundian peasant origins, and Legros had more to say than
anyone Whistler had heard talk at Gleyre's. With a wine glass for
his lectern Legros recited the teachings of Lecoq, of how the master
insisted upon accurate drawings, of how each object, whether from
life or nature mart or a painting by Holbein was to be faithfully
reproduced, and how after this had been accomplished, the reproduc-
tions of the same subjects, recalled in memory, were done in class
or on an easel placed against the blank wall of a studio. Lecoq
conducted his last series of classes in the open air, in woods along
the Seine, while models strolled through sunlight and shade. While
the models rested, students were required to reconstruct from mem-
ory what they had lately seen, the walking figures, the glancing of
light between the leaves.

Legros told how Lecoq, through the exercise of discipline, liber-
ated the painter from too slavish a dependence upon models in the
studio, and how he uncovered the hidden resources of memory.
This was an example drawn from Legros' teaching that Whistler
followed for many years, and under his friend's tutelage, he formed
the habit of gazing at, then turning his back on, objects to sketch
them or describe to a companion. As he walked with a friend through
the city at night, Whistler gaily commented on scenes just passed, on
light pouring from cafe doors and windows, on "nocturnes'* of
river, street, doorways and sky, or he wheeled about with his eyes
closed asking others what they saw. He made a game of the practice
and continued it ten years later in London where he confused his
listeners who sometimes thought him drunk or mad, and if he de-
scribed a scene correctly, he clapped his hands, shouted his trium-
phant "Ha, ha" and hummed a song.

From Legros, Whistler learned of Baudelaire and the beginnings
of Symbolist poetry, and in this instruction Legros was joined by
Fantin-Latour who also knew Verlaine and Rimbaud who spent
their evenings within the vine-covered entrance of Closerie des
Lilas, a garden-like cafe in the precincts of Montparnasse. Fantin in
temperament and appearance stood for everything that Legros was
not. Legros was the pure provincial from Burgundy; Fantin was half-
Slav, bleakly depressed and high-spirited by turns; he was short,

64 THE WORLD OF

thickly set and hypersensitive. Like Legros, Fantin was bitterly poor,
and there is a winter sketch of him by Whistler: Fantin, propped
up in bed, wrapped in an overcoat and muffler, a battered top hat on
his head, his numbed fingers at work upon a drawing.

At the Louvre Fantin earned early but dubious notoriety for his
five admirably studied copies of Veronese's The Marriage Feast at
Cana y of which Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother-in-law bought one.
To Fantin even his hack work became an act of devotion; he
loved the painters of the Italian schools and Veronese in particular.
Glimpses of Italian light and air entered his flower studies which
in his middle-age brought him a living. Each study was illumi-
nated by strokes of Italian color which almost freed him from the
static brilliance of the Dutch school of flower painting. He wor-
shipped at a distance the glitter, the violence, the poise of Dela-
croix, and, easily influenced as he was, he also came under the spell
of Courbet. His various influences were seriously, sensitively ac-
quired, and each was at work, one against the other, in his painting.
The presence of dignity and high-mindedness made itself felt
in all his work; his goddesses floating on clouds had indefinable
charms, yet his sensitivity was of a sort that forces the beholder to
admit that the artist had failed to make up his mind about anything
his very independence from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was of the
same quality. He was doomed to be a fine rather than a decisive
painter; his work and his character were of one piece. When Whis-
tler met him, he was a passionately serious young man, one whose
ambitions were likely to result in the bitterest of disillusionments.

What Fantin shared with Whistler was a youthful idealism that
overcame the discomforts of extreme poverty, of the near agony of
working and living through the coldest nights and early mornings
of winter months in drafty and unheated rooms. He sturdily faced
whatever turns of fortune the Latin Quarter had to offer, and his
hero-worship moved as though drawn by a field of magnetic force
in the direction of Courbet.

While Whistler earned the title of being an ''idle apprentice" at
Gleyre's, the conversations with Fantin and Legros intensified his
knowledge of contemporary French art. From Fantin he heard of
the importance of Courbet and of the writings of Baudelaire, and it is
more than likely that his appreciation of Charles Meryon's Vues de

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 65

Paris had been reenforced by Fantin's passionate respect for the
opinions of Baudelaire's art criticism. At the very least, Fantin's
enthusiasms ran a decade ahead of Whistler's admirations for Henry
Murger and the poetry of de Musset. From Legros, Lecoq's truculent
interpreter, Whistler was guided into a sphere of influence that was
even now shared by Degas, Monet and Manet who were Lecoq's
pupils and who valued his critical advice. Legros, however highly he
regarded Delacroix and Ingres, was too severe in his tastes to welcome
the polished eclecticism of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Like many who
are radical in temperament, Legros' opinions were sharp, clear and
narrow, and against them Whistler balanced Fantin's adoration of
Courbet. And as Whistler's attendance at Gleyre's studio waned, he
was drawn into the orbit where the paintings of Courbet were sun
and moon, Venus and Mars, to the eyes of a younger generation of
French artists.

When Whistler arrived in Paris the figure of Gustave Courbet
represented everything desired by young and unknown artists of the
Latin Quarter; he had received all the rewards of sudden notoriety,
if not established fame. He defied the standards of the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts by saying as if he addressed a cheering crowd, "Ugliness
is beauty." The journalists of the day, including Proudhon, the
anarchist critic, who stepped into the circle of Courbet's friends,
read moral lessons into his paintings of fleshly young women reclin-
ing in the shade of thick foliage and of heavy nudes parading with
arms uplifted in oracular gestures. Courbet's subjects were decidedly
unclassical; his women, unlike the nudes of the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts, could not be mistaken for goddesses. They looked as though
they welcomed the fatigue that follows a long walk in the open air
as well as the pleasures of the table and the bed.

It was easy for Proudhon to read into one of Courbet's fleshly
bathers the following lesson for his readers: she is ''that fleshy and
substantial Bourgeoisie, deformed by grease and rich living; in
whom flabby weight stifles all ideals, predestined to die of weakness
of the will, if not of melting fat. There she is, such as her stupidity,
her selfishness, her cooking have made her." It was not surprising
that Zola, the novelist, joined Proudhon in praise of Courbet, and

66 THE WORLD OF

the painter was elevated to leadership, with Daumier behind him,
of a Naturalist movement in art and letters.

One suspects Courbet himself read little of Proudhon's message
in his painting of The Bathers; he enjoyed the painting of robust
nudes, and telling as far as his hand and eye could guide him, the
truth about them. His protest was against the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
He was against all the so-called "ideas" of the Second Empire and
its pretensions to ideal beauty; he resented the yearning of the newly
rich buyers of pictures for neo-Greek refinements. Years later Whis-
tler echoed his feeling by saying that Rome and Athens were filled
with ruins. What concerned Courbet was his rediscovery of truth
in Rembrandt and Titian the kind of truth that Rembrandt painted
in his picture of a more than half nude woman lifting her shift high
as she wades through the waters of a brook. In writing his mani-
festo of 1855, Courbet said, "At no time have labels given a correct
idea of things . . . Unhampered by any systematized approach or
preconceptions, I have studied the art of the ancients and the mod-
erns ... I simply wanted to extract from the entire body of tradi-
tion the rational and independent concepts appropriate to my own
personality."

"Schools have no right to existence," said Courbet, "there should
be only painters."

This was a statement that many a young painter at the Louvre,
including Whistler, hoped was true. Whistler walked to Courbet's
studio and was received by a Courbet who at thirty-six looked like
a young giant newly risen from the earth. He was bull-necked and
deep-chested and his face was framed by masses of coarse black
hair; he had full lips, large, capable hands, and his absent-minded
gaze was of one who had just awakened from a sensual dream. He
was the son of a well-to-do farmer at Ornans, a little town, near the
French border of Switzerland. Throughout the day and half the
night, Courbet worked enormously, drank enormously, and at irregu-
lar intervals ate enormous meals. He did not contemplate his can-
vases; he painted, and his work had the hardiness of work done by
a peasant at harvest time. Courbet vaguely and generously accepted
Whistler as another admirer, and to Fantin and Legros, Whistler
announced Courbet as a "great man."

Unlike the masters of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Courbet had

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 67

firmly rejected "ideal beauty" and the neo-classical serenity through
which historical figures moved. His scenes, which were an example
to Whistler, were of contemporary life. His The Funeral at Ornans,
a picture which in its foreshortened perspective showed the inhab-
itants of a rural community standing before an open grave, was re-
ceived by younger artists as proof of Courbet's sincerity and depth
of feeling. When Mary Cassatt, the American painter, first saw it, she
burst into tears. It was unlike Whistler to weep on such occasions,
and he did not, but he was impressed impressed by what Courbet
had to teach him.

Scarcely less influential was Courbet's painting, The Studio,
which showed Courbet in a room filled with friends, including
Baudelaire and George Sand. What offended the tastes of Courbet's
critics was the sight of the thinly draped model standing at the
painter's left shoulder and, as if to make the scene even more
embarrassing, there was the figure of a small boy gazing at both
painter and model with admiration but the picture established
Courbet's reputation among young men of his day, for they under-
stood that his conception of "truth," realistic as it may have been,
had the strength of an inner vision of reality. Over and over again
he insisted, "Beauty is truth."

While his fellow artists continued to admire The Studio and The
Funeral at Ornans, public curiosity was attracted and repelled by
The Bathers. The picture showed the back view of a heavily weighted
nude stepping through a trickle of water, and with one arm raised
in a portly gesture greeting another robust lady caught in the act of
slowly undressing herself.

When Napoleon III saw the picture, he responded in a way that
would have delighted the ghost of the Marquis de Sade; he struck
at the backside of the portly nude with his riding crop, and his
companion, the Empress Eugenie, whose favorite painting was Rosa
Bonheur's Horse Fair with its Percheron horses, innocently in-
quired as her husband struck at Courbet's nude, "Is she a Percheron
too?"

Whistler had inherited his family's skill in finding homes. In
Paris his choices served to add a flying buttress to his morale; his
rooms, however cheap, always had a "view." If they faced a court-
yard, a tree flourished in a garden. If they looked down upon a

68 THE WORLD OF

street, the greenery of the Luxembourg was within the range of
vision, or the green grove of the Cimeti&re de Montparnasse swayed
like a wave beneath church spires. What if a small, brick-floored
room contained no more than a cot, a straw-bottomed chair, a basin
and a pitcher? Whistler accepted his version of a Vie de Boheme
with the same air of cheerfulness that as a child had made him the
center of his family circle. When his washstand was held in pawn,
he remarked that he'd just eaten his washstand and offered his
guest the straw-bottomed chair.

There were days when he was unable to buy paints or canvas.
One afternoon at the Louvre, and with an innocent, yet righteous
eye, he borrowed paint, brush and canvases of an absent student.
Another day, in the guise of showing others how to paint, he
acquired through swift touches of his thumb and palette-knife
enough paint from neighboring palettes to complete an unfinished
picture. The Whistler smile, laugh and innocent eye sustained a
gesture that could be mistaken for a combination of enthusiasm and
absent-mindedness, and every detail of the gesture carried with it
the authority of a peculiarly guileless charm. He talked Lalouette,
the proprietor of a restaurant, into giving him meals and Burgundy
on credit. Lalouette's was a place where Whistler entertained his
friends, where the wine was good and the prices low. In return,
Whistler made an awkward, yet half-affectionate etching of Lalou-
ette's five year-old daughter; Whister was embraced by the entire
family of Lalouettes and his credit was extended to the sum of three
thousand francs. It was characteristic of Whistler to see to it that the
sum was eventually paid.

Three less gifted artists than Fantin and Legros Douret, the
sculptor, Henry Oulevey and Ernest Delannoy, the painters were
companions of Whistler's late hours and holidays. When he grew
bored with "Fumette's" recitations of Alfred de Musset's verses or her
storms of temper if she grew bored she was known as La Tigresse
among other painters Whistler turned up at Oulevey *s rooms.
One day, "Fumette" relieved her feelings by tearing up a number of
Whistler's drawings. He wept and spent the night with Oulevey in
drink. On the occasion of another quarrel Whistler met Oulevey
with Lambert, an acquaintance of the night, and all three decided
on a late supper and more to drink. All they lacked was the money

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 69

to pay for a night of conversation on the maladjustments of destiny
to man. It was already past the midnight hour, and Whistler had
an inspiration; the three marched up to the door of a flat where
Lucas, George Whistler's friend, who paid Whistler his allowance
from home, lived and slept. Lucas, waked from his sleep, was scarcely
in a mood to listen to Whistler's story of how his rent was due tomor-
row; Lucas would not advance the next quarter's allowance. The
door was closed.

The three stepped into a restaurant with something less than a
vague notion of how their bill was going to be paid. Whisder was
violent with the idea of challenging Lucas to a duel and the anger
which resembled that of a spoiled child was the obverse side of
Whistler's air of boyish levity. Truly his mother had indulged him
with the indulgence not unmixed with the awe that a plain woman
has when she looks upon the bright and gay child of her union
with an attractive husband. In his bland moments Whistler re-
flected the image of his mother's "Jemmy" who could do no wrong.
To this was opposed another image, cast in a slightly different
form, of the small devil he had etched upon a magnifying glass.
He insisted shrilly that a duel with Lucas would settle the bill in a
gentlemanly manner, and then suddenly fell asleep. Slowly with
the orders of food and drink before them and by turns, the three
woke up and fell asleep again. In gray morning light Oulevey
wakened Whistler, then slept again. As sunlight struck his face, he
wakened to find Whisder at his side with four hundred francs in
hand and settling the bill. He had slipped away from the restaurant
into the street and fell in step with another American, who was
willing to lend him money on the condition that Whistler go with
him to his studio and look at his pictures for half an hour. Whisder
accepted the terms and tie money was in his hands. As the three
began walking home through the heat of late morning, they felt the
not unnatural desire for further drinking. They turned in at the
Caf6 de France, and there in its cool and darkened interior, sat
Lucas sipping his cup of morning chocolate. All thoughts of a duel
had been forgotten; Whisder was rich again.

To what he called his "no shirt friends/' his French acquaint-
ances, Whistler remained, like so many Americans, a mystery. In
their eyes he was decidedly Puritanical in matters of personal clean-

70 THE WORLD OF

liness; he ate less to keep his shabby clothes in repair; money which
might have been spent for food went to the laundress. He bought
a small iron to keep his shirt and collar in press; yet on a hot day
he pawned his jacket to buy cool drinks and walked through Mont-
parnasse in a newly washed white shirt. "When he had money/'
Oulevey confided to a friend, "he flung it away. He had the heart
of a woman, the will of a man."

For two years he endured and enjoyed the uncertain temper of his
model and mistress, his "Fumette." It is also possible that he did not
quite believe in the reality of her existence. She was the subject of
an etching, yet she did nothing to create for him the illusion of
permanence in his daily life; she shared his bed, his studio, his hours
of late rising as well as the first meal of the day, but she did not
enter the scenes of his midnight conversations with Fantin and
Legros. Whenever he searched for new, temporary and cheaper
quarters, she was absent; as Whistler established credit with a new
landlord by renting a piano and moving it (to prove that he had
any furniture at all) into his rooms, "Fumette" was not in sight.

It was then that Whistler and Delannoy with sketching pads,
pen and ink, etching plates and their usual lack of money, decided
to leave Paris behind them to simmer in the heat and to take a trip
north to Strasburg. At the last moment Whistler raised two hundred
and fifty francs which carried them through to their destination,
but on their way back to Cologne their money had been spent with
the finality of a legacy that had been acquired and vanished in a
dream the night before. Whistler persuaded Herr Schmitz, his land-
lord, to accept the plates he had etched en route as a loan against
his bill, and said that they represented the work of a great artist.
Delannoy and Whistler took to the road. The episode was one of
the first of many in which Whistler forced his landlord to become his
banker; it was difficult for Whistler at any time to believe that he
was poor, and he had the gift of making others share his optimism.

The American consul at Aix loaned Whistler fifty francs which
was more than enough to pay Herr Schmitz's bill and to have the
plates sent on to Aix. On their march south from Cologne to Aix,
Whistler and Delannoy found that their trip was scarcely a holiday;
their straw hats and light summer clothes had undergone violent
transformations caused by wind, sun, rain and sleeping in barns and

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 71

haystacks along the road. Their bread, wane and cheese had been
paid for at the high price of giving away sketches and pen-and-ink
drawings wherever they stopped to rest. Their gain was Whistler's
French set of etchings published in 1858. They were happy to be back
in Montparnasse again, and Whistler, livelier than ever, was at the
Cafe Moliere where waiters were calling for coffee pour le petit
Whistler, le petit Americain.

The publication of the French set of etchings marked the end of
Whistler's student days in Paris. His apprenticeship of hack work
at the Louvre copying paintings for well-to-do Americans who were
willing to buy something from the hand of the son of Major Whis-
tler was over. At the Louvre Whistler and Fantin had met one of
the earliest of Courbet's friends, Francois Bonvin, who kept himself
and his flickering talents alive by holding a small post in the govern-
ment service. To younger painters Bonvin offered space in his studio
and helpful criticism; Whistler and Fantin joined a small group
under Bonvin's shelter, and they painted directly from the model
under instruction from the inexhaustible Courbet. It is not surpris-
ing that Courbet, overworked as he was by his sustained display of
muscular energy on large canvases and overwrought by wine, could
scarcely remember this early meeting with Whistler, and when he
did, mistook him for one of several young Englishmen he knew. It
was not until later that he recognized Whistler as one apart from
the little group that painted at Bonvin's.

Although Whistler had done a few portraits in oils, including a
self-portrait, all in clumsy imitation of Courbet, the beginning of
his career in painting came with his completion in Paris of At the
Piano. The teachings of Lecoq through the agency of Legros in-
spired Whistler to draw his setting for the picture from memory.
The figures in it are his half-sister and her daughter and the
scene, painted in the foreshortened perspective of The Funeral at
Orans, is the interior of his half-sister's music room in London.

Though At the Piano showed its indebtedness to Courbet, Whis-
tler never agreed with Courbet's dictum, "Style is humbug"; At the
Piano has that almost indefinable quality called "style," which had
been sharpened by Whistler's emulation of "Garvani" in his drawings
and what he discovered in Collet's severely disciplined line in etch-
ing. What Whistler contributed to these influences was something

72 THE WORLD OF

that was quite his own a memory of the walls of the Chinese Room
in the Catherine Palace with their flat pale tones and their austerity
in decorative detail; this was the something "new," the touch of
"style" that gave At the Piano its distinction and its charm. With
Courbet's approval, he sent At the Piano to the Academy Exposition
in London several years later but for the moment, and with Cour-
bet's praise of the picture still echoing at the back of his mind, he
felt it almost an honor to have At the Piano rejected by the Salon
in Paris.

At the Piano announced Whistler's coming of age; the year was
1859; he was twenty-five; and he had heard from the Hadens that
pictures were being bought in London by the newly well-to-do. In
London it was not inevitable that the young artist was doomed to
marry Poverty and share her burdens into a dubious middle age.
He was invited to make a temporary home at the Hadens' house in
Sloane Street and to leave Vie de Boh&me behind him; he had learned
much of what he wished to learn from Courbet at Bonvin's. Not
the least remarkable of the French painter's extraordinary powers
was the mark he left upon painters who stood at extreme distances
away from Whistler; in his own country, the painter "was Cezanne,
and westward, across the Atlantic, Thomas Eakins; the uncommon
heritage of Courbet was the only meeting of these three young
artists on common ground.

vi

O,

r N a September day in 1859 Whistler entered the doorway
of his half-sister Deborah's house in upper Chelsea, near Knights-
bridge in London. The Sloane Street house was material proof that
Deborah had married well; it was a four-storied, cream-brick house;
it was deep, narrow and tall, and less Victorian in its modest ap-
pearance than of the high-ceilinged period of the Regency. The
place had an air of conservative restraint; it was a house that would
inspire confidence in the professional abilities of the young sur-
geon, Dr. Seymour Haden, who was Deborah's husband.

As he was welcomed by Deborah and her husband, Dr. Haden,
Whistler returned to a world that had been familiar to his childhood
where floors were covered with Turkey carpets, where a gas-lit
music room was an appropriate feature of a home, where meals
were served at regular hours by well-mannered servants. In Sloane
Street Deborah held to the practice of domestic cleanliness and
austere comfort; she had the poise of a woman who is always dis-
creetly fashionable in dress and manner. In At the Piano something
of her poise was reflected in her dress and in the crisp, white frock
of her young daughter. She was happy to see the brother whom she
had always thought of as the genius of her family, but within his
household, it was also clear that Dr. Haden was master: he was tall,
his manner was professionally correct and decisive; his smoothly
shaven features were less cordial than firmly set, and if he betrayed
any signs of possessing an "artistic" temperament which his own
gifts as an etcher may have permitted, these were shown in sudden
and dogmatic fits of rage. His attitude toward his half-brother-in-
law was one of generous patronage; he had no thought of dividing
the authority of the household with him.

74 THE WORLD OF

In coming to London Whistler had exchanged the sunlight of
Paris which flowed through broken shutters of a garret in Mont-
parnasse for the silver-tinted mist that gleamed in gray light through
heavily draped windows in Sloane Street. There is no doubt that he
found the contrast refreshing, for upper Chelsea with its fashionable
shops extending in the direction of Knightsbridge had a glimpse of
the carriage trade streaming westward from St. James and Picca-
dilly. In 1859 Victorian London had begun to glitter. The Hadens
had spoken the truth when they had written of many pictures being
bought that were painted by younger men. The Hadens had seen
well-to-do London move westward toward Kensington Palace, the
childhood home of Queen Victoria. Regency houses were being
remodeled and refurnished, and new mansions were being built
westward beyond Hyde Park and south of Kensington Palace Gar-
dens. The established painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
their wives, their mistresses passed one another in Kensington Road
on shopping tours, and in that newly fashionable neighborhood,
John Millais, the painter of Ruskin's portrait, lived in Gothic gray-
stone turreted splendor between solid walls built on the foundations
of Millais* increasingly prosperous career.

Friendly as the Hadens were to their young guest and half-
brother, it was also understood that their house was not his studio,
and during the day he set out to rediscover London. In making
some of his early etchings of French street scenes and doorways in
Paris, he chose for one of his models a sharp-tongued old woman, a
flower seller, who often obliged him by lending the color of her spare
figure to complete the view of the Paris that existed below stairs,
below the level of its cafes, its Bohemia, its fashionable life. In
this direction he followed the examples given him by Charles
Meryon and Courbet and he continued the same path in London
which led him to the East End, to Wapping, to the docks along
the river. He found an inn where sailors boarded and set up his
easel in one of its rooms.

Whistler gave dinners at the inn to which he invited Du Maurier,
lonides, and a patron, Serjeant Thomas, who was also a patron of
Holman Hunt, the Pre-Raphaelite, and who had helped Millais
before that 'painter rose to eminence in Kensington. Thomas had a
print shop in Old Bond Street, at reasonable walking distance from

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 75

Sloane Street but most important of all, the Old Bond Street shop
in one of its rooms on an upper floor contained a press for Whistler's
etchings. When his afternoon's work at Wapping was done, and
after dinner, at an hour close to midnight, Whistler mounted the
stairs to Thomas's press and proofed his etchings until early dawn
next day. These hours chosen for his work had been set in Paris and
continued for the greater part of his life. The dinners at the inn
were of mixed company; skippers of barges met with Whistler* s West
End guests; Whistler drank toasts to his landlord, and to his host's
discomfort, blew kisses to his wife. Whistler drank rather more than
in Paris and discovered a taste for Port. As he worked correcting
etchings in Old Bond Street he sipped a glass of Port, saying, "Excel-
lent, excellent" at each stroke he made upon the plate.

Whistler had learned to etch as rapidly as other artists sketched
on paper. At a glance his monocle caught the cold light between the
rigging of ships and eliminated the confusion of too many objects
seen within a frame. He selected his scenes with unerring firmness
and felicity, everything caught within the picture as though seen
for the first time and the last. In these etchings the lines of docks
and warehouses framed the sight of ships with their sails furled
and cargoes emptied, and at a later date, they were to establish
Whistler's reputation.

Whistler strolled, plate in hand, talking to sea-captains, deck-
hands, stevedores, and in London it was at though he had at last
begun to complete the work he had done in the United States
Coastal Survey in Washington. Captain Benham's promising young
etcher had fulfilled a debt due to early friends who were confident
of his talents.

Seymour Haden's hospitality which had extended to Whistler's
friends was also beginning to bear fruit, but this was of less hope-
ful character than Whistler's etchings. It was far more like the
threat of an approaching storm, more like the threat of dirty weather
on a dark night at sea. No two men were more profoundly unlike in
temperament than Whistler and his generous host: Haden was
leonine in speech and manner* In anger he was given to fits of
roaring and it was said that even his sideburns bristled in contrast,
Whistler's manner was adroitly feline, and he displayed the self-
sufficient boldness and agility of a cat.

76 THE WORLD OF

Legros, Fantin and Delannoy had joined Whistler as guests under
Haden's roof. Delannoy feared the sensation of having Haden's
hutler shadowing his movements; he distrusted the plumbing in
Haden's bathroom with its miraculous shower-bath which he called
the importation of Niagara to Europe. Delannoy was the unregen-
erate, untutored, unteachable Bohemian, frightened by London and
Whistler's relatives. His stay was short; he returned to Paris, and
within a few years of wandering starvation, disappeared. It was said
he ended his days in a lunatic asylum.

Fantin and Legros, both less shy than Delannoy, were no less
disturbed by Haden's presence in his own house and were no less
disturbing. Whistler had informed Haden that Legros was in such
hopeless, desperate need that it would take God or someone of
supernatural powers to relieve him, and Haden, warmed by an
impulse to be God, did what he could he bought one of Legros'
paintings of a church interior, and still under the influence of helpful
intentions he also bought one of Fantin's copies of The Marriage
Feast at Cana. He insisted, however, that there was something
wrong with Legros' perspective and promptly took the painting
upstairs to his own studio at the top of the house where he re-
touched it to his own satisfaction and the displeasure of the artist,
who, by the way, had shown no signs of gratitude for Haden's
patronage.

When Legros saw the results of Haden's work on his own
canvas, his repressed antagonism to his host broke out in fury. "Run
off with the picture," suggested Whistler, for he at all times and
on later and more famous occasions, held to the artist's right to
protect his work from the demands of the buyer. Whistler and
Legros bundled the canvas out of the house, hailed a cab and
wheeled it off to Whistler's studio on the waterfront. A few hours
later and with considerable heat Haden followed them to discover
that Legros had quickly restored his own perspective to the picture.
In bad grace Haden accepted the undoing of his correction silently;
host and guest had reached a stalemate in the desire to educate one
another, and both had drifted far beyond the exercise of tact.

Meanwhile Haden fed his guests so well that they felt the shadow
of his patronage in the dining room: at lunch sherry preceded fine
cuts of roast beef; at five-course dinners, champagne was served.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 77

As the guests listened to Deborah Haden at the piano in the music
room, they felt their own talents superior to those of their host and
hostess and grew uneasy at the thought of sharing respectability and
comfort. In the eyes of the artists, the Hadens were rich and did not
deserve to meet true artists on common ground.

Poor Haden! And in this situation he was a difficult man to pity.
Himself an artist, he had hoped to find friends among his brother-
" in-law's friends, yet he was one who was accustomed to having his
orders obeyed. In his etching room at the top of the house he
smouldered with the heat of injured pride: he had expected those
who received his bounty to appreciate his art which had already
received favorable notice from the Goncourts and which was more
praise than Whistler had earned from that quarter. He pitied art-
ists who were less fortunate than he; no doubt he thought them
fools, only to find himself snubbed by them at his own dinner
table.

Haden's attitude toward Whistler was anything but serene, and
from Whistler's experience, unreliable. When Whistler took his
journey from Paris to Strasbourg and back again and was in need
of immediate funds, Haden had refused to send him money. On
Whistler's arrival in London Haden received him as a father might
welcome a favorite son. He helped Whistler edit The French Set
of etchings and permitted the address, 62 Sloane Street, to appear
on its title page. Haden showed a proprietary interest in the set; he
etched a charming tide page for it which showed Whistler sur-
rounded by French children and seated with a drawing pad set like
an easel on his knee. Moreover Haden had taken pains with the
etching; he had etched two plates and chose the second and seemed
eager to please his volatile brother-in-law.

Something like an armed truce existed between the two, the
well-to-do surgeon who etched on holidays and the indigent young
artist who was yet to become professional, yet both held to the
ideals of the gifted amateur and both were ambitious. Obviously
it was a friendship that could not last forever; it demanded a
quality of tolerance for opposing wills that neither possessed.

For the time being Haden was pleased to admire Whistler's At the
Plano\ he hung the picture on a wall of his drawing room and
showed it to visitors. In speaking of it he took the critical preroga-

78 THE WORLD OF

tive of a friendly relative; he stressed what he considered its flaws
and expressed his regrets that the picture was of a kind that could
not be shown at the Academy.

In 1860 when Whistler submitted the picture to the Academy
and it was accepted, Haden's pride in his brother-in-law's brilliance
was mixed. The picture had been accepted in defiance of his opinion,
and At the Piano became one of the minor sensations of the Acad-
emy show. Though Whistler's etchings had more praise written of
them than the painting, At the Piano had its few and distinguished
admirers. George Du Maurier, Whistler's fellow student at Gleyre's,
who was now seeking employment in London, was impressed. He
wrote to his mother of Whistler's success:

I have seen his etchings which are the finest I ever saw.
The other day at a party where there were swells of all
sorts he was introduced to Millais, who said: What! Mr.
Whistler! I am very happy to know I never flatter, but I
will say that your picture is the finest piece of colour that
has been on the walls of the Royal Academy for years . . .'
And Sir Charles Eastlake took the Duchess of Sutherland
up t6 it and said There Ma'am, that's the finest piece of
painting in the Royal Academy.'

Du Maurier's letter showed the flash of excitement, which was
not without a small blue flame of envy, that At the Piano had
aroused and there were others who stopped to look at the picture.
Among them was the rapidly aging Thackeray, who as he gazed at
little Annie Haden's white frock did not conceal his pleasure at
seeing a child transfixed and yet at ease listening to her mother
playing unheard music at a square piano. The worldly novelist,
the cynical sentimentalist, was charmed. Two years later Thackeray
expressed a wish to meet Whistler, but the wish was not strong
enough for him to keep the appointment made by Val Prinsep and
Du Maurier. His memory of At the Piano had dimmed and his
enthusiasm for its charm had waned.

William Michael Rossetti, whose activity as a critical journalist
was the mainstay of support for the aesthetic aims of the Pre-Raphael-
ite Brotherhood as well as the material needs of the Rossetti family,
did not like the picture. He wrote that it was an eccentric, uncouth,

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 79

smudgy, phantom-like portrait of a lady at a piano a statement
which, more than all else, echoed Pre-Raphaelite opinions against
their French contemporaries, and it was clear that Whistler had
newly arrived from Paris. In his first showing at an annual exhibi-
tion Whistler had done better than any of his friends; even Rossetti's
attack created interest in his picture, and Haden was forced to
admit that his brother-in-law's gifts were not mediocre; at the very
least they were worthy of vigorous criticism.

In speaking of these early months and years in London, Whistler
remarked that at first all doors were open to him, but on second
encounter, the doors were mysteriously closed again. Millais' cor-
diality was extremely short-lived and soon it was clear that Whis-
tler had failed to sustain the friendships of the Du Maurier circle.
He was soon glad to sell At the Piano for thirty pounds to a Mr.
Phillips.

The truth was that mere notice for a month or a season could
not establish a young artist in what was virtually a closed market
where reputations, guided by the invisible will of the Royal Academy,
commanded high prices. The wealthy artists of the day were Royal
Academicians who were slow to admit (then as always) a young
artist of probably irreverent attitudes to their company. Whistler's
manner was irreverent; he did not speak the language of Frith and
Millais, who in 1860 received sums in the neighborhood of five
thousand pounds for a picture; they were rich men. Whistler was
fortunate to find in John Phillips, who was also a member of the
Academy, a sympathetic buyer of At the Piano. Phillips had just
returned to London after a journey through Spain and he shared
Whistler's admiration for Velasquez.

It is probable that Frith and Millais overheard rumors of what
Whistler thought of them, for one day he asked a new model the
names of artists for whom she posed and when she said, "Frith,
Watts and Tadema," he exploded with "Golly, what a crew!" The
girl archly replied with cockney shrewdness, "Why, they said some-
thing like that when I said I posed for you/* Such knowledge of
what Whistler thought of his elder contemporaries would not be
welcome to them in any society in which gossip floated among the

80 THE WORLD OF

artists; in London society of the 1860*5, irreverence of Whistler's
kind was a social error that was not likely to be forgiven.

The aggressive and yet humble young George Du Maurier, who
did not presume to paint the threat of blindness precluded the
hope of any career above that of being an illustrator on the staff of
popular magazines began to make his way in circles where praise
of Whistler was taboo.

There was never any love lost between Whistler and Frith.
William Powell Frith represented all that one thinks of today when
one speaks of Victorian art, the art that made its greatest appeal to
the Queen herself, that contained within it the most literal and
popular reflection of prosperous middleclass English life. Frith was
literally a product of his time; he was the son of a Yorkshire butler,
who as a boy had come down to London, had earned scholarships
at art schools, and as he gained recognition, looked upon painting
less as an art than a means, if one were business-like about it, of
acquiring a comfortable fortune. He was honestly, half-humorously
materialistic. His first patron, James Bell, was a well-to-do druggist,
who bought pictures that he could understand and what he under-
stood were scenes of urban life, pictures of little-boy street sweepers,
barefooted, ragged, begging pennies from richly dressed, respect-
able, bright-eyed young ladies. Frith was a Victorian Hogarth, who
had none of Hogarth's candor or moral indignation; Frith painted his
subjects as though they existed in the best of all possible worlds,
and his optimism was rewarded by receiving in one instance, from
the Queen an average of 3,000 guineas each for his pictures.
Beyond that figure, he earned a healthy income from lithographs and
engravings of his pictures, which included of course his famous
Derby Day and Ramsgate Sands. In sentiment, piety and charm
his rambling, crowded canvases never failed to give their admirers
their money's worth; the more children, dogs, ladies, squires, mid-
century fops, carriages and footmen appeared in a single canvas, the
more "human interest" stories were told. One could spend a day
or a week looking at the various details of a Frith picture without
exhausting its cheerful, story-telling incidents; to look at one of
them was a pleasure not far removed from reading a three-volume
novel taken from the shelves of a lending library.

There was no "artistic nonsense" about Frith; his figures were

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 81

painted with careful respect for the minutiae of costume, clean rags
on virtuous-looking small boys and girls of the lower orders, bright
silks and starched linens below the rosy or languid faces of well-to-do
ladies and gentlemen; his respect for realistic detail, which repre-
sented not only unusual powers of literal observation, but many
hours of hard work, directly influenced the painting of the more
prosperous Pre-Raphaelites including Millais and Holman Hunt.
That kind of work was anathema to Whistler; he hated it.

The newspaper critics of the day liked Frith; he was of their
kind, and, if anything, his pictures represented larger "slices of life"
than could be written down in their articles for The Times or
Punch. With the exception of Ruskin's Modern Painters the first
volume of which was published in 1843, criticism of painting was no
more than part of a journalistic routine. The critics enjoyed the
vivid scene at an opening of an Academy show, held in one of the
rooms of the National Gallery, where literary and social celebrities
gathered. They enjoyed the chance to talk to one another, to be seen
and to be met; pictures, crowded on the four walls of the room from
floor to ceiling, were of secondary interest, and Frith's pictures were
of a piece with the crowded walls and the crowded room.

In these assemblies Whistler walked, or rather tripped lightly
through the crowd and stopped before a Frith, He screwed his
monocle into his right eye and looked intently at the canvas then
suddenly came his expletive: "Amazing! This picture tells a story!
See, the little girl has a pussy cat, the other little girl has a dog
and that little girl has broken a toy; there are real tears rolling down
her cheeks. Amazing." He straightened up, dropped the glass from
his eye and tripped away. A few people laughed, but the genial
atmosphere of gossip and praise among the critics was broken, and the
incident was cause for another reason why English artists did not
care to meet Whistler a second time if they could help it.

Whistler went down into Chelsea looking for rooms and a studio;
he had spent two seasons in London moving restlessly from Wapping
to Old Bond Street to Newman Street where his old friend Fantin
had found a cheap flat but furnished it so brightly that it was there
that Whistler painted The Music Room. Fantin's taste had trans-
formed a dark interior with heavy hangings into a harmony of green
and rose with the aid of white enameled woodwork and cheap chintz

82 THE WORLD OF

curtains, the kind of furnishings usually reserved for summer houses
and suburban cottages. Whistler (unlike the British Bohemian artists
of the day, who lived in smoky squalor whenever they took rooms in
the city) sought rooms that gave the illusion, even in London, of
light and air. He walked along the Thames at Cheyne Walk, and
from number 16, down the steps and through the high iron gate of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's house, came Charles Algernon Swinburne.
Swinburne (to whom he had been introduced in Paris) was no less
remarkable to look at, no less foreign to English eyes than Whistler:
he was slightly shorter than Whistler, had a slender, girlish, swan-
like neck, and nervous, yet childishly small feet and hands, flaming
red hair, red moustache and imperial and green eyes. Like Whistler,
he recalled to conventional minds an apparition of the Devil, some-
thing that had tripped lightly on the fringes of a half-forgotten night-
mare.

Whistler reintroduced himself; the two men strolled and talked.
Swinburne had a particular attraction for Americans who came to
London. He was gentlemanly in manner and talked in an unworldly
fashion; he was quick in gesture since he was an aristocrat, he dis-
pensed with the more conscious formalities of his Victorian contem-
porariesand he was almost always a little bit drunk. Even an Ameri-
can as distant from Whistler as Henry Adams was impressed by
Swinburne. To Adams Swinburne fitted into a picture of what a poet
should be, but in England so seldom is; his voluable courtesies, his
graciousness to strangers, his paradoxical air of childlike innocence
and evil caught the imagination of those who were bored or annoyed
by the conventions of Victorian social behavior. Swinburne, acting
on impulse, as he so frequently did, immediately introduced Whistler
to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

At this moment Rossetti was beginning to suffer the early stages of
melancholia which followed upon the death of his wife, Elizabeth
Siddall Rossetti; he was haunted by rumors of her suicide, and he
had the vague feeling that whether she committed suicide or not, he
was responsible for her death. He had begun to have hallucinations
of her presence in the chattering of swallows and starlings and in the
noise of doves. The habit of taking laudanum and doses of chloral
at night brought fewer hours of sleep than half-awakened dreams,
He invited friends to share his handsome, disorderly household in

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 83

Cheyne Walk and among them was Swinburne. The experiment
of having George Meredith join their company had already failed.
It was the manifestation of Rossetti's sudden fits of good health that
horrified him. After a few scenes at breakfast, Meredith left. Ros-
setti had grated on Meredith's sensibilities, but Rossetti also had sen-
sibilities that were not soothed by Swinburne's presence. Because of
a nervous affliction that made his skin excessively tender, Swinburne,
after drinking a half bottle of wine, would shed his clothes, slide
down the bannister, and wander from room to room of number 16
Cheyne Walk stark naked.

To Rossetti, Whistler was a new face and an American one, and
Dante Gabriel joined his brother William Michael in admiration
of the American poet, Walt Whitman, and so did Swinburne. One
suspects that Rossetti thought of Americans in much the same light
as he viewed his pet wombat and his peacocks that he kept with the
rest of his exotic menagerie in his back garden. Among his diver-
sions, Rossetti was an inveterate collector, and to his collection,
though he never cared too much for his art, he added Whistler.
He liked Whistler's cheerfulness and he shared Whistler's eye when-
ever it glanced in the direction of a good-looking young woman.

Tenuous as Rossetti's friendship seemed, it was of greater endur-
ance and of greater value to Whistler than any of the new friend-
ships he made during his early years in London. It was true that
Rossetti did not invite Whistler to meet Ruskin or any of his elder
friends of the Pre-Raphaelite circle (many of whom now wearied
him anyway); Rossetti with the instincts of one who knew how to
manage his affairs extremely well never allowed unlikely groups
among his friends to mix. He reserved Whistler for the exchange of
masculine jokes and gossip that could not be shared by the some-
what emasculated hangers-on of the neo Pre-Raphaelites. When he
grew annoyed at Swinburne's excesses in drink and nudity, which
were harmless enough, yet were embarrassing in the presence of his
buxom mistress, Fanny Cornford, he turned to Whistler with relief.

It was fortunate for Whistler to discover all within ten min-
utes' brisk walk from Cheyne Walk and five minutes from Carlyle's
house in Cheyne Row the very rooms and studio he sought in
Lindsay Row. Here there was plenty of air and light; the narrow
house faced the Thames and it was also fronted by a deep nar-

84 THE WORLD OF

row attractive grass and garden plot. The brick-front garden wall
created a respectable illusion of privacy, and the view from the rooms
where later Whistler painted in the second storey looked out across
the river to the south bank; the view embraced a panorama of river
barges, low skylines of factories across the river, and Battersea.

He was no less fortunate in finding a model, a red-haired Irish girl,
Joanna Heffeman, daughter of a witty, shiftless, whisky-drinking sea
captain. The girl resembled one of Titian's bathing Venuses; she had
rich lips, full breasts and a classical torso; she carried herself with
an air of unconscious physical dignity. She had come from the streets
of Chelsea as untutored as Rossettfs Elizabeth Siddall, but she had
none of the languid, almost passive will to death of Rossetti's half-
tragic Beata Beatrix, nor the dreamy sensual propensity toward error
which brought romantic doom to the wife of William Morris. Jo was
not a Pre-Raphaelite type. She had a critical intelligence and the
desire to be well read and at ease in Whistler's company; she was
by no means the ordinary model and casual mistress. She managed
household affairs with more knowledge of how to make shillings and
pence provide a meal than Whistler. Care of her improvident
father had taught her how to make five shillings do the work of a
pound. In meeting Whistler she had found a way out of back alleys
where she had lived and was free of the social stigmata to which
lower-middle-class Londoners consigned the Irish.

VII

JLxURINC

the winter of 1861-62 Whistler took Jo with him for
a short stay in Paris; this was one of the rare occasions that his visit
to the city was not within the charmed circle of Montparnasse. He
found a studio not too far south of Montmartre in Boulevard des
BatignoUes near the house where in later years St6phane Mallarme
held his celebrated evenings at which he gave advice to younger poets.
It was evident that Whistler had small wish to renew his earlier
career in Paris, that the only connection he sustained was with
Courbet. He introduced Jo to Courbet and Courbet responded by
painting a curiously Pre-Raphaelite-like portrait of her as La Belle
Irlandaise. Was Courbet in painting this picture vaguely carrying in
the back of his mind the story of Tristan and Isolde, the legend that
gave romantic character to the coasts of Cornwall, Brittany and Ire-
land? It is probable that unconsciously he was, that like many
painters he responded to unformed sensibilities that were "floating
in the air." Consciously the portrait was as contemporaneous as any
of Courbet's canvases and one could view it as reflecting the feminine
sensuality of a handsome girl overcome by the sight of herself in a
hand mirror. Yet there is no greater proof of the contrast between
Whistler and Courbet than what can be seen in La Belle Irlandaise
and Whistler's The White Girl: Symphony in White No. 1. The
same girl is there; it is Jo in a white dress standing on a white
bearskin rug before a heavy, opaque white curtain; the sunlight
of the studio in Boulevard des Batignolles is also there, radiating
from draped wall and floor. Aside from the tour de force of painting
white against white with almost abstract skill and passion, the pic-
ture was the first of Whistler's wholly remarkable psychological por-
traits. After the abstract qualities of the picture are discerned and

86 THE WORLD OF

accepted, the personality of the model floods the canvas. The fair-
skinned red-haired girl was anything but passive; her stillness in
paint on canvas was the stillness of intense, arrested motion. Where
Courbet saw the dreamy sensualist, Whistler perceived the restless,
inquiring young woman, whose manner in the portrait of her dis-
orderly hair and searching eyes was one of tempestuous elegance,
not coarseness. Perhaps the compliment that Whistler paid her in
painting her in a style that anticipated the work of the early Im-
pressionists, was not entirely conscious; the portrait was one of his
happiest inspirations.

During this period of Whistler's life, much can be made of Cour-
bet's influence on his painting Courbet's hand can be seen in Whis-
tler's brush stroke, in his drawing of the figure, in the feeling of
warmth with which he conveyed the objects within a picture to those
who saw it. These were the obvious contributions made by Whis-
tler's brief friendship with Courbet; yet the essentials of what
Whistler said in painting were his own; for better or worse, his
painting was never mindless; however far he was removed from
genre painting and the making of book illustration, the half-literary,
psychological nature of his portraits created a gulf between him and
the painters of various French schools. His painting was marked by
intelligence and ingenuity, and by a touch of elegance in his sub-
jects and treatment of them that became his signature and at times
his weakness.

His stay of fifteen months in France was in some respects the most
fortunate period of his life; his relationship with Jo steadied his in-
tentions and yet carried with it few domestic responsibilities. During
the fall and winter Paris itself had never been lovelier; Napoleon III
had begun to open up its boulevards; it had become "the city of light"
that was to charm the entire world beyond the nineteenth century
itself. Suddenly Whistler fell ill; it was suspected by those looking
at The White Girl in his room where Jo served him meals that he
had been poisoned by the white lead in the picture. This was pos-
sible but highly improbable; Whistler always ate fitfully and with
indifference to punctuality at meals. He lived on what is vaguely
called "nervous energy." At work he frequently forgot to eat and held
gaily to his theory and practice of timelessness by neither heeding
clocks nor carrying a watch. The result was a return of his childhood

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 87

"sore throat," the slight, yet chronic illness that followed a session
of protracted hours before a canvas in his studio.

A Dr. Chapman recommended a change of air, a trip across the
Pyrenees, and bathing in salt water. At Guethary his attempt to fol-
low doctor's orders nearly drowned him; he was an agile swimmer,
but weakened by his recent illness, he was erratic; the sea was high
and waves drew him beyond safe distance of the beach. The more he
swam, the farther out he drifted into sea. Finally his calling out
for help was heard on shore, and Jo, assisted by a burly brakeman
from a train, effected a rescue, and he was hauled to shore.

The incident cast a shadow across his plans to visit the Prado, to
see as he had long wished to see Velasquez' painting in all its va-
riety; he got as far as Fuenterrabia where he said the children looked
like little Turks and all the natives put together looked like char-
acters dancing on the stage of the Opera Comique. He wrote to
Fantin, urging him to join his travels southwestward to Madrid; but
the fine edge of Whistler's Spanish curiosity suddenly dulled; Fantin
could not come and Whistler returned to Paris and, a short time
later, put up for a brief stay at the Hadens' in London.

Whistler's White Girl, being as she was, slightly in advance of
her time, did not please the judges of the Academy she was sent on
to hang, surrounded by Frith and Maclise and Augustus Egg Egg
the most extraordinary of the genre painters in the newly opened
Berners Street Gallery under the title of The Woman in White. In
the age of storytelling pictures, it was to be expected that the Bemers
Street Gallery saw in Whistler's portrait of Jo a likeness to Wilkie
Collins* popular novel and gave it the same title. Its inappropriate-
ness to Collins' The Woman in White confused the critic of The
Athenaeum and moved him to say that Jo's face was the face of The
Woman in White. The entire picture had no resemblance to Collins'
story and his heroine, to which Whistler replied that he had not read
the book, nor was he responsible for the picture's title. Yet he merely
translated the title to La Dame en Elanc when he showed it at the
Salon des Refuses in Paris a few months later, and to his friends he
said The White Girl had achieved her place in the world through a
succes d'execration.

Whistler's ambiguity in naming his pictures was consistent with
the evolution of his theories about painting: his pictures were not

88 THE WORLD OF

to tell a story; if the picture happened to be a portrait the name
of the sitter was subordinate to the arrangement of the entire picture
and what the artist perceived. Whistler at this moment had effected
in theory, at least, a break with the steadfast naturalism of Courbet
and he took a hint from the title given to The White Girl by Paul
Mantz, the French critic, who reviewed the show at the Salon des
Refuses, who called her, as though he were paying a compliment
to a lady, a "Symphonic du Blanc/' With deeper seriousness than
such a compliment might be taken to imply, paintings were begin-
ning to be compared to music; that comparison was of a kind that
floated through shop-talk in cafes and gossip in studios; fifteen years
later Walter Pater was to give it a rationale in his essay on Giorgione,
to say as brilliantly and as plainly as he could "All art constantly
aspires toward the condition of music" a conclusion that Pater
probably arrived at through his readings in contemporary French
literature.

For Whistler the idea embodied a release from a literal interpreta-
tion of what he saw and reinforced his belief in the teachings of
Lecoq. The idea paid its respects to the uses of memory and en-
dowed painting with the instantaneous effects of hearing a piece of
music for the first time.

vm

Whistler settled into Lindsay Row, his friendship with
Rossetti brought with it fateful consequences: it opened the way to
a commercially valuable acquaintance with Murray Marks and a
jocular, erratic friendship with Charles Augustus Howell. His rela-
tionship to Marks was one that in the minds of those who overheard
gossip about painting without understanding its meaning confused
Whistler's name with those of the Pre-Raphaelites. And Whistlers
association with the disreputable Howell kept him on the nether side
of polite society for some few years to come.

In the figure of Charles Augustus Howell, a fair-skinned, dark-
haired young man with a black moustache and long eyelashes who
claimed to be, but with the vaguest of proof, related to noble Por-
tuguese families, the Rossetti household in Cheyne Walk touched
the fringes of London's underworld. Howell lived with his wife
and mistresses all women of extraordinarily good looks, surrounded
by a half-dozen children no one knew who their mothers were, yet
it was agreed that Howell was the father in a large, pretentious
house in Fulham Road.

Howell's house was situated in a neighborhood which lay be-
tween semi-fashionable Kensington and Bohemian Chelsea; the ad-
dress gave Howell the necessary pretense of ultra-respectability. Ful-
ham was a likely place for ambitious young men of growing families
to make their start toward getting on in the world; it was only much
later in the period between two World Wars that the run-down mid-
Victorian respectability of Fulham began to acquire a sinister air.
Howell used Fulham and his house as a base for his thoroughly
peculiar business and professional activities.

He was something of a painter and an able teacher of the graphic

90 THE WORLD OF

arts. But his skill was directed toward the art of making forgeries
of "old masters" and disposing of them to unscrupulous art dealers.
Among his mistresses, who were handsome girls possessed by a yearn-
ing for the arts, he formed a small artists' workshop whose specialty
was in making forgeries of which he was director and teacher. The
most gifted and the handsomest of his girls was the slender, brown-
haired Rosa Corder whom he taught to make a good living through
her accurate copies of the obscene drawings of Fuseli each set sold
to the buyer as the "originals," as though they had been filched from
the archives of the British Museum. Howell had the advantage of
being far better looking with his Greek profile, slender waist and
broad shoulders than a young man in his chosen profession had a
right to be.

Howell had excellent taste in clothes he always dressed smartly.
He shared a love of horses with Rosa Corder and wore well-tailored
riding habits. His taste in objets d'art and a nearly faultless eye in
selecting beautiful women made him a hero in the Rossetti house-
hold. Rossetti, tortured by memories of his dead wife and housed
with a florid blonde mistress, Fanny Hughes, afterwards known as
Mrs. Cornford, who had grown enormously overweight, turned with
relief to the young women Howell brought to Cheyne Walk. How-
ell's claims to possessing large fortunes and noble pedigrees were set
down as lies by the worldly Rossetti.

Rossetti knew a few facts about Howell who had been intro-
duced to the circle at Cheyne Walk by Ruskin. Howell had been
born in Lisbon, son of an English drawing teacher, and, so it was
said, of a completely unknown Portuguese girl; at the age of 17 in
1857 at Oporto he was arrested and convicted by his victims of
dubious practice in playing cards for money and he was deported to
England and placed under the care of a rural uncle who lived at
Darlington. HowelTs talents and interests were anything but pas-
toral; his father's profession which was his only inheritance gave him
a touch of authority in speaking of the arts, and when he escaped
from the dull prospects of Darlington, he attached himself to no-
toriously artistic men of letters. Ruskin who could never resist a ro-
mantic story, since he himself had written the utterly charming
fantasy, "The King of the Golden River," for the child who after-
wards became his unhappy wife, trusted details of his financial affairs

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 9!

to the handsome, attentive, low-voiced Howell who spoke of living
in Morocco as sheik of a tribe. What Rossetti probably did not know
was that Ruskin tested his young wife's faithfulness by leaving her
alone in the company of Howell in the hope that he would seduce
her. Ruskin, much to his discomfort, soon discovered that Howell
was not the man in whom to confide either financial or domestic mal-
adjustments; Howell's light manner of treating moral transgressions
and capping them with startling anecdotes of his own duplicity
began to frighten Ruskin who then saw himself as a ripened victim
of blackmail. But Effie Ruskin, his wife, had been quicker than he;
her distrust of Howell sprang from her intuitive distrust of Ruskin's
behavior, and to her Howell's glittering attractions to both men and
women was proof enough that there was something wrong.

Ruskin hated to distract his mind with thoughts of money; even
in his fits of benevolence which were not infrequent, he preferred to
make Howell his intermediary and gave Howell a salary of three hun-
dred pounds a year. It was widely rumored that Ruskin paid the rent
for how long it is not certain of Howell's large household in
Fulham. One day Howell came to Ruskin and told him of an artist
who stood in need of a thousand pounds, and Ruskin wrote out a
check in the artist's name and handed it to Howell for immediate
delivery. It was the last that Ruskin heard of the check, but a few
months later he dropped into the artist's studio and saw his friend
pacing the floor in fury.

'What is wrong?" asked Ruskin.

"Why, that man, Howell, that thief, that liar, has been getting
money in my name, saying I sent him to borrow it, and then put-
ting the money in his own pocket."

Ruskin saw the image of Howell forging a thousand pound
check, but he dropped his head and said nothing. The painter saw
that Ruskin felt and knew more than he would tell.

"Has he ever borrowed from you?" the painter asked.

"Perhaps I'm not sure I forget." Ruskin looked ashamed, em-
barrassed. The truth was that he could not make up his mind as
to how far Howell would go in telling stories of his mismarriage to
Effie Gray, whether Howell had guessed at his real condition, his
auto-eroticism, that he had never slept with Effie, that he had told
her when she undressed before him all women's bodies were un-

92 THE WORLD OF

speakably ugly. Had Effie confided in Howell? And then immediately
feared and disliked him? Ruskin was sure of none of this. He did
not dare bring complaint against Howell for forgery and theft.
Howell, upon entering any household had the fatal charms and gifts
of intimacy; he inspired through his handsome, mock-candid address
confidences of those who were less sensitive, less worldly than he.
For the present Ruskin took the safe course of action; he did not
press Howell, but recommended his secretarial services to Swin-
burne and Rossetti. Ruskin guessed that at 16 Cheyne Walk Howell
would be occupied with domestic scandals greater than his own.

And in the Rossetti household, as a nearly daily visitor, Howell
prospered: it was he who directed, engineered the midnight digging
up of Elizabeth SiddalTs body in the churchyard and from its coffin
rescued the manuscript of "The House of Life" which Rossetti in his
grief had buried with it. The adventure was as romantic as any of
the tales that Howell invented to give himself an impressive oral
autobiography which included on proper occasions of dinner parties
a claim that he descended from Boabdil el Chico and therefore wore
a broad red ribbon across a white shirt front. While William Morris
emphatically swore that Howell had stolen the ribbon from an inno-
cent compatriot, Rossetti laughed and referred to Howell as "the
cheeky.*

Howell became the subject of one of Rossetti s limericks; limericks,
by the way, that sounded very gay and sharp as Rossetti recited them
to his friends, but lacked felicity when recited by others or set
down in print. It took a supper of bread and cheese and considerable
wine to make Rossetti's limericks as witty as they were supposed
to be:

There's a Portuguese person named Howell,
Who lays on his lies with a trowel:

Should he give over lying,

Twill be when he's dying,
For living is lying with Howell.

Yet the limerick defended Rossetti from the charge of being de-
ceived by Howell; with a touch of melancholy Italian cynicism,
Rossetti made Howell useful at moments when he wished to enlarge
his collection of objets d'art or when he unexpectedly, which was

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 93

often enough, ran out of cash. Inspired by Whistler's buying of
Japanese prints and blue china in Paris and his enthusiasm for them,
Rossetti began to collect Oriental art and craftmanship and in these
purchases, Howell was his agent. But if Howell could buy things
with a discerning eye, he could also sell stray drawings, etchings,
sketches, scraps of painted canvas and within a few hours at amaz-
ingly high prices. One great secret of HowelFs success was his art of
forgery, either by the skill of his own hand or those of the pretty and
clever young girls who shared his affections and his house in Ful-
ham. By a change of signature and a little aging and weathering
treatment a Whistler or a Rossetti sketch became a sketch by Rem-
brandt or Leonardo da Vinci; these would appear in shops that were
frequently fences for stolen goods. Howell's workshop also turned
out faked Rossetti's, carefully reproduced, even to the interwoven
D G R set in a square in the right-hand corner of a drawing. It is
likely that Rossetti winked at rumors of his discarded sketches being
signed Leonardo or Michael Angelo this was a joke that carried with
it more than a hint of flattery but when he saw one of his own
drawings faultlessly copied and for sale in a dealer's window at a
price that was higher than he usually got, he was speechless with
rage.

The wide range of HowelTs connections which extended from
Ruskin's house on Denmark Hill to the back doors of unscrupulous
shop dealers in Bloomsbury fascinated Whistler. The figure of
Howell had the same attraction to him that creatures of Henry Mur-
ger's Vie de Boheme had for him during his early days in Paris.
Howell had a quick intelligence; he knew good things when he saw
them; he could spot fine examples of China "Blue" Chinese porce-
lain of the 17th and 18th centuries almost as quickly as Whistler
could; and in buying them up from dealers, he could act with more
celerity and get them cheaper than Whistler could "Criminally
speaking," said Whistler, "the Portugee was an artist."

Whistler loved a quick eye and a quick brain; he had an amoral
love for all tricks of sleight of hand and the light-fingered ease with
which Howell stole drawings and etchings from him and from Ros-
setti inspired his admiration rather than his anger. Like many Ameri-
cans before and since his time Whistler had an ill-concealed love
of the underworld, a love of the singular breaker of laws, which was

94 THE WORLD OF

the obverse side of his own Puritanism, his austerities in food and
drink. Howell became a vicarious outlet for Whistler's delight in
evil; Whistler could not, would not stoop to HowelFs habitual dis-
honesties, his inabilities at all times to tell the truth, but he could
make Howell a personal representative of his own allegiance to
the devil he had etched on glass, which he promptly did.

And as for the respectabilities of Victorian London, its artists,
art-dealers and art patrons, Howell to Whistler represented levity in
the face of false seriousness; Howell was a gay and obvious scoun-
drel, while other petty business men of the arts, some of whom had
no more scruples than Howell, assumed a shabby air of innocence as
they sold their stolen goods across the counter. Howell was more
than a salesman; he was a showman with some of the same talents
and instincts that D'Oyley Carte possessed and showed to the world
in his productions of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. It was in a
D'Oyley Carte-Gilbertian spirit that Howell upon being brought into
court on the charge of having swindled a collector out of forty pieces
of blue China pottery appeared at the trial with forty four-wheeled
cabs waiting outside, each with an example of Chinese "Blue" stowed
in its interior; Howell through his histrionics amazed judge and
juryand won the case; and the incident with its attendant publicity
increased the vogue for blue China among collectors. This kind of
publicity gave Whistler prominence as the originator of a taste for
Oriental objets d'art; if his reputation was not enhanced in conserv-
ative quarters, he had caught the eye of those who were interested
in "the latest thing" and Howell's spectacular adventures in collect-
ing Chinese "Blue" contributed its share in making Whistler a fash-
ionable subject of conversation at dinner tables.

Meanwhile Whistler's relationships with his family were begin-
ning to undergo internal changesthe outward sign of which was
an open quarrel with Dr. Haden. Rumor credited the cause to the
presence of Jo a logical conclusion, for Jo could not be accepted at
the house in Sloane Street; naturally enough Haden could not com-
promise his professional respectability by entertaining his half-
brother-in-law's mistress. The Sloane Street house was the scene of a
quarrel that resulted in the two men shouting at each other.

London knew, perhaps too well, Whistler's associations with the
poverty-haunted Greaves brothers and the notoriously unscrupulous

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 95

Howell; charges of cheapness, of bad drawing, of using tricks rather
than art to produce his effects, were strongly hinted; Punch wrote:

"Well, sir, I'm master Jimmy Whistler, I am, and I can
do this sort o' thing with a shilling box o' paints from the
Lowther Arcade, a few sheets of blotting paper, and some
brown paper covers off the family jam pots. I could do
bigger work with improved materials, you bet!"

Whether the attack was written by Punch's editor or not, or for
that matter by any journalist, the voice behind it was of British con-
servative (and moral) opinion; it spoke for those who supported the
Royal Academy; it spoke for those who admired Frith; it spoke for
those who regarded Holman Hunt as a virtuous if sometimes mis-
guided Pre-Raphaelite for the obvious reason that his paintings with
their painful recording of realistic detail had visible evidence of
hard work in the making of them. However long Whistler posed his
models, however often he rubbed out the picture he had painted
and then reconstructed it again it never looked as though months
of effort had gone into it. This general appearance of Whistler's can-
vases was to count against him a few years later. Neither the portrait
of his mother, nor the Carlyle, nor the Miss Alexander harmony in
gray and green had been in circulation long enough to reach a criti-
cal public outside of those who walked in and out of the house in
Lindsey Row. Another Miss Alexander, the elder Miss Alexander
had been begun, the figure of a girl in a gray dress with a gray wall
behind her and a vase filled with buttercups at her right side. Whis-
tler never considered the picture finished; it lacked the movement of
the Harmony in Gray and Green; but it had elegance and charm;
. placed as it is today at the Tate Gallery in London, near the white girl
with a fan, it has the virtue of contrast with the other picture. It
seems less "unfinished" than an example of Whistler at his second
best; it is pleasant and cool, and the figure seems remote, as though
she were standing undecided as to whether to move forward or
backward, or to dissolve where she is standing in gray mist.

The mid-eighteen-seventies were the most productive years of
Whistler's life; not all his portraits took the time to complete that
his portraits of his mother, Carlyle and Miss Alexander demanded
he had also developed a certain facility in the painting of his noc-

96 THE WORLD OF

tumes. He seemed to be able to work endlessly from day to day; he
smoked little and drank less.

Scarcely a day would pass that did not witness bill collectors enter
the gate at Lindsey Row and frequently go up the stairs to his studio
on the second floor. When idle visitors stepped in to see him, he sent
some out on errands to buyon credit further supplies, either paint
or brushes, or canned peaches; some would be sent out with money
to pay bills. Whistler viewed his creditors as an unnecessary distrac-
tion from the day's work, but he welcomed readily enough distrac-
tions of another kind; he would pay a hurdy-gurdy man by the hour
to grind out music in his back garden; this was Whistler's tribute
to the spirit of levity, to lightness of tone in a heavy, fog-ridden
atmosphere.

Murray Marks's understanding of artists was an insight that was
close to genius; he understood the points of honor they recognized,
and his position as an adviser to galleries, museums and wealthy
buyers of painting and objets d'art not only made him a valuable
man to know, but the position also insured him against acts of faith-
lessness; it would have been extremely thoughtless on the part of an
artist to abuse Murray Marks's gestures of benevolence the loss of
his friendship would have invited disaster. He was in a position to
advance money to artists which he frequently did and was also as-
sured that among the artists' creditors, he was the first to be repaid
in full.

Only the pathetic Simeon Solomon betrayed Marks's faith in him
and remained at the time of his death in debt to him. Despite the
fact that he danced naked with Swinburne, screaming and laughing
with him through the rooms of Rossetti's house, much to the disgust
of Rossetti and his buxom mistress, Solomon's excesses did not result ,
in a short life. Solomon came of an Italian-Jewish family that had
made a small fortune by importing Leghorn hats to fashionable shops
in London; Solomon was fair-haired, and to Walter Pater he looked
as a young Greek god should look. Solomon painted a little and drew
a little; for a short time his drawings fetched high prices, and
he wrote what Swinburne thought were charmingly obscene letters.
In 1905 he died of chronic alcoholism in St. Giles' workhouse in
an environment whose terror recalls the darker pages of Oliver
Twist.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 97

Among Marks's artists, Solomon was an extreme exception to the
rule, and Marks viewed the young man's lack of plain dealing with
fatherly concern and more grief than anger. Marks's friendship
with Whistler was of the usual order; the two men could and did
exchange lasting favors which were of great mutual benefit. Whistler
in meeting Marks spoke of Madame Desoye's little oriental shop in
Paris where he, Manet, Fantin, Baudelaire and the De Goncourts
had found fine Japanese prints and bits of Chinese porcelain; Marks
was not slow to take the hint; he entered the business of importing
rare oriental objets d'art as well as Japanese prints to London and
fostered Rossetti's and Whistler's mania for collecting them. He was
always careful to give Whistler credit for creating a vogue for
oriental art, which was consistent with his character and of advan-
tage in proving to his clients that he was aware of the latest fashions
in art and it was through Marks that Whistler a decade later met
Frederick Leyland, the most extraordinary of his patrons.

Between Marks, Rossetti and Whistler, the turns of being in
fashion were reciprocal; in the public mind, however, the figure of
Whistler had become confused with those of the Pre-Raphaelites.
All became part of an "Aesthetic Movement" and distinctions be-
tween them were blurred and remained so for another fifteen years.
Aside from their actual paintings and theories about them, the
friendship between Whistler and Rossetti, though never deep, was
warm and honest. Whistler had been troubled by the placing of his
signature on his canvases and etchings; Rossetti who had wit, felic-
ity and facility in sketching designs from initial letters of a name
presented Whistler the wittiest of his small creations a "W" in the
form of a butterfly. Their private joke became a public one; Rossetti's
gift was both a compliment to and a challenge of Whistler's ingenu-
ity. Whistler accepted the gift, improved upon it, made it come to
life as his signature and added it to the legend of his personality.
It is almost impossible to overestimate the value of Whistler's in-
debtedness to Marks and Rossetti.

IX

T

i HIS phase of Whistler's life, with his quarters in Lindsey Row,
one in which his friendships with Rossetti, Fantin and Legros were
maintained on an even keel and which included many short trips
to Paris, were years in which he established his London reputa-
tion; they were also the most productive years of his life. These were
the years from 1862 to 1879 the year of the Ruskin trial. Incidents
crowded upon one another. In Lindsey Row the studio like so many
of the others that were to follow it was a large room with pale
yellow walls reflecting light, with a Japanese fan or two tacked on
the walls for decoration. But for a screen and a draped seat for the
model, Whistler's palette set upon slender legs and looking like a
tea table tray, his easel and canvas, the room was empty which
was in startling contrast to the Parisian and London studios of that
day. Wherever Whistler worked, the quarters were as neat and
bare as a commanding officer's tent behind the field of battle and
seemed as temporary. In houses where he lived, some of the rooms
were incompletely furnished and decorated, as though he had not
quite moved in. He seemed always to be, as they said in the language
of his day, "on the wing." In Lindsey Row, when he was not actu-
ally at work on an etching or a canvas, he was on the river, up to all
hours of the night in a rowboat with Walter Greaves, or sitting up
in a crowded dining-room with Rossetti, Swinburne, Howell, and
their friends and mistresses. At the center of the dining table in Ros-
setti^ house a wombat or a dormouse would fall asleep to the sound
of Swinburne's voice reading lines from Whitman's Leaves of Grass;
in the back garden the peacocks would shrill (Whistler's peacock
themes were undoubtedly inspired by Rossetti's peacocks) and the
pet bull chained to a stake would stamp the ground and moan.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 99

When Rossetti in his deepest fits of melancholia believed himself
persecuted by Lewis Carroll and felt that he was an object of ridi-
cule in The Hunting of the Snark, his instincts did not lead him
far astray. If the Bellman of the poem was only faintly reminiscent
of Rossetti's leadership in the Aesthetic Movement, in Alice in
Wonderland the mad tea party did resemble dinners at Rossetti's
Tudor House in Cheyne Walk.

In print Swinburne took the center of the scene by writing of art
for art's sake, by disassociating morality from works of art. He also
wrote a poem celebrating Jo's portrait as the white girl with a fan
whose title was "Before the Mirror" and whose lines were inscribed
on the frame that Whistler designed for the picture. Since Whistler
did little reading at any time during his adult life, the dinner-table
conversations kept him rather more than well-informed on what was
being thought and talked about among the critics of the day. He
had a front-row seat at an intimate drama that thirty years later
was to culminate in the overthrow of moral instruction in the appre-
ciation of painting and literature. He was near the source of a move-
ment whose logical apotheosis was the figure of Oscar Wilde.

Everything considered, the public association of his name with
Swinburne's was a gift of good fortune to Whistler, and it was rein-
forced by an association in Paris and through the agency of Fantin-
Latour with Baudelaire. Whistler's admiration for Baudelaire was
as ill-defined as his actual friendship with Swinburne, but the ad-
miration of the French and English poets for one another was
genuine enough, and in the public mind Whistler held a position
somewhere near the center of the circle that their mutual admira-
tion formed. It was there for everyone to see in Fantin's large can-
vas, Homage a Delacroix, with Whistler standing at the center of a
group in which Fantin sat at his left and Baudelaire at his extreme
right. None of Whistler's contemporaries painted his portrait in a
more engaging manner than did Fantin in Homage a Delacroix; the
Whistler of this assemblage is unmistakably a dandy, standing erect
in a black frock coat and leaning lightly on the gloves folded over
the head of his stick but the face with lively eyes and nearly smiling
lips has a curiously innocent expression and is boyish.

The picture was spectacular in its fashionable appeal, and though
it may be regarded as less a work of art than a literary document,

100 THE WORLD OF

even today it has lost none of its air of being in high fashion, and it
retains much of the charm of Fantin's almost feminine personality.

The incidents of Fantin's Homage a Delacroix and Swinburne's
poem, "Before the Mirror," gave Whistler the kind of notoriety that
enhanced his fashionable reputation. To a few patrons he became
more than an American phenomenon in London and Paris. His
name trailed in the wake of the startling, unorthodox reputations of
Baudelaire and Swinburne, and for the next twenty years his repu-
tation was associated with all that was new (and to some critics,
dangerously new) in art and literature.

Meanwhile Whistler at Lindsey Row had found rooms there
for his mother who had come to London, and though extremely
modest, they were delightful rooms. Mrs. Whistler, aside from her
desire to be near her stepdaughter and James, had felt the privations
of the Civil War in Pomfret, Connecticut, all the more so because
her younger son, Dr. William, was a surgeon in the Confederate
Army and the Whistler family had identified itself with the South-
ern cause. The simplicity of the rooms in Lindsey Row the studio
was on the second floor overlooking the back garden pleased Mrs.
Whistler: the dining room with its blue china plates set on shelves
against an archway sunk one foot into the wall, the table cloth of
printed cotton, all seeming to reflect light in pastel colors. The liv-
ing-room with its Chinese screens, the mantelpiece where Jo stood
as the little White Girl with the fan, also reflected scenes much to
Mrs. Whistler's taste formed in the modest austere places where she
lived in the United States. The Victorian fashion of crowded rooms
was absent here; in that sense, she felt at home. The presence of Jo,
however, created embarrassment, and whenever Mrs. Whistler hired
a maid to do the housework if the girl was at all presentable she
would find her strolling serenely naked into Whistler's studio on the
second floor. A certain air of tension developed in the small house-
hold. She had always been indulgent to Whistler's whims, yet her
sense of propriety became precariously unsettled; this was not home
according to her standards of conduct.

With this situation very much alive at Lindsey Row it is easy to
understand why Whistler's studio retained its air of impermanence,
why Whistler's journeys across the Channel to Paris were of greater
frequency, why his friendships with the Greaves family of two

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 101

brothers and a sister approached intimacy. The three were children
of a Chelsea boatbuilder; the father had rowed Turner the painter
across the Thames on many holidays, and probably through Turner,
the son Walter Greaves became interested in art. For young Walter
Greaves having Whistler as a neighbor in Lindsey was an omen of
good fortune for his devotion to painting. Young Greaves was the
Henri Rousseau of Chelsea; he was unworldly he had an innocent,
childlike eye and purity of spirit and he chose Whistler as his
model in general appearance and dress. Only his shyness prevented
him from imitating Whistler's behavior. In exchange for rowing
Whistler up and down the Thames, for being his errand boy, his
carrier of etching plates and canvases, as well as his midnight con-
fidant Greaves took instructions in painting from his master. Greaves
strolled about Chelsea as one who was half-cracked; he was seen
as a thin figure with a black frock coat loosely draped around him
and with a battered tophat awkwardly set upon his head. He
haunted bookstores near the British Museum and in exchange for
second-hand books, he offered pencil sketches: scenes of Chelsea,
walks along the Thames, and little portrait drawings of Whistler.

Greaves with his timid pretensions to a shabby gentility passed
like a shadow through and in and out of Chelsea. He loved Cremorne
Gardens, its open-air amusement parks, its paper lanterns, band
music and fireworks, and he guided Whistler through them; he loved
Battersea, the river and gray-blue fog above it; he joined Whistler
in the making of nocturnes, and Whistler, laughing, spoke to others
of him as "my pupil." His pupil took his master to his house and
had his sister sit to him. Greaves came to know Whistler better than
Whistler knew him for the pupil painted portraits of the master,
posing him always in flamboyant, yet naive attitudes and when he
painted him in his studio, the perspectives seemed deliberately dis-
torted, as though the room held at least five walls and all its objects
were viewed, including the strident Whistler, from an angle just
around the corner. Whistler probably sensed but never admitted that
his all too humble pupil had a touch of genius in his own right.

The slow painting of Christine Spartali's portrait, which was said
to require over seventy sittings, and which was begun in the year
1864, was continued through a period of concealed emotional con-
flict in the Whistler household. In a letter written to Thomas Arm-

102 THE WORLD OF

strong (who knew Whistler during his student days in Paris),
George Du Maurier gossiped of violent scenes between Whistler and
his brother-in-law, Haden, and behind these quarrels the dimly out-
lined forms of Whistler's mother and Jo, the housekeeper model, may
be discerned:

February 1864

. , . Jimmy and Haden a couteaux tires; quarrel about
Joe [sic], in which Haden seems to have behaved with
even unusual inconsistency and violence; for he turned
Jimmy out of doors vi et armis, literally, without his hat;
Jimmy came in again, got his hat and went and said good-
bye to his mother and sister . . . it's a deuced unfortunate
thing and there is little chance of ever a raccommodement.
The best part of it is that Haden has dined there [obviously
at Lindsey Row], painted there, treating Joe like an equal;
traveled with them and so forth, and now that Joe is turned
into lodgings to make place for Jim's mother, and Jim is liv-
ing in respectability, Haden turns round on him and won't
let Mrs. H. go to see her mother at a house which had once
been polluted by Joe's presence. Droll, eh?

There is more than a touch of smartly turned vulgarity in Du
Maurier's manner, yet it echoes accurately enough one British at-
titude toward Whistler in the 1860's. Du Maurier went on to say:

As for Jim I am told he stands in mortal fear of Joe, and
that he is utterly miserable; I met him lately and he cer-
tainly wasn't very nice to me, and seemed to have grown
spiteful and cynical et pas amusant du tout. I fancy
Joe is an awful tie.

Take warning by this, O ye who rail at the domestic
hearth the 'domus and the teasing and pleasing wife.'

The Greeks [the lonides of course] are a providence to
Jimmy and Legros, in buying their pictures.

The situation at Lindsey Row was slowly mounting toward a
domestic crisis. The fact that it did not explode into a sordid, semi-
public display of recriminations reflects credit on Jo, Whistler, and
Whistler's mother. An atmosphere of austere dignity prevailed. In

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 103

September of 1865 Whistler and his brother took their mother to
Coblentz to visit an oculist; her sight was failing, and she needed
treatment. On the way home Whistler spent a month with Courbet
and Jo at Trouville and began a series of sea-pieces. In November
he returned to Lindsey Row for two months, then disappeared for
ten months, sailing as far, so he told friends afterwards, as Val-
paraiso. Rumours were that he had sailed the Atlantic to New York
and did not find the city to his liking; he told several stories, all of
which had a dream-like atmosphere, and no conviction. The facts
are these: he had left London for a ten-month period; on his re-
turn he displayed several paintings that reflected change of scene,
including the beautiful canvas, The Pacific, now in the Frick Col-
lection in New York, and Valparaiso Bay. One is inclined to believe
that he actually sailed as far south as Valparaiso; what happened on
his trip remains open for speculation. The lonides and their friends
had advanced him enough money for a holiday.

In the light of Du Maurier's letter of February 1864, a motive
is supplied for Whistler's need to leave Lindsey Row and its domestic
tensions. Another motive, hinted at in a story of his journey to Chile,
is associated with the American Civil War. Whistler said he joined
a group of restless exiled American Southerners sailing to South
America from London. This action, unproved and romantic as it
sounds, has a touch of probability in it; his brother, Dr. William, had
served as a surgeon in the Confederate Army, and their mother had
crossed lines to visit him in Richmond, Virginia, which was a cour-
ageous journey. American exiles (including Henry James) carried
with them a sense of guilt for non-participation in the Civil War.
It is probable that Whistler shared that sense of guilt as well as the
restlessness inspired by it. At this point it is better not to speculate
too freely but to say that two clear motives joined in a rapidly formed
impulse for Whistler to leave London, to leave London mysteriously
for reasons far too private for him to discuss openly. The domestic
motive seems the more important. In his relationships with men
Whistler was sometimes bitter, harsh, sadistic: his treatment of
Wilde, Mortimer Menpes, Logan Pearsall Smith and others supply
more than ample evidence of cruel conduct. In his relationships
with women another aspect of his character came forward. In a
highly romantic fashion, he was chivalrous, and often admirably

104 THE WORLD OF

silent and would avoid even a semi-public scene. In speaking of a
vague, dream-like sequence in his South American voyage he men-
tioned a group of girls calling himself and those with him "Cowards."
In other words, his trip was an action of evasion. Was he avoiding
scenes between his mother and Jo? That probability seems certain.
He owed loyalty to both. A ten-month trip away from Lindsey
Row dulled the edges of conflict between them, and time softened
his move to keep Jo as an "absent" mistress and to place his mother
in ascendancy at Lindsey Row.

Whistler's restlessness in Lindsey Row produced strange results
and not the least of them was one mentioned above: the semi-Japa-
nese, semi-Rossetti-ish La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine, a tour
de force, a portrait of the beautiful Christine Spartali, daughter of
the Greek Consul-General and friend of lonides: the Greek girl in
a Japanese kimono standing among Oriental screens. The portrait
was something not seen before or since in London. Later the picture
was to have fatal consequences in the Peacock Room of Leyland's
house in Prince's Gate. The Greek Consul-General's wife found the
picture inappropriate for her daughter. On days she stood for it, the
sittings were extraordinarily long; and after them Whistler's mother
served the Spartalis American lunches on low tables and stools very
nearly in Oriental style. The combination of sliced raw tomatoes,
lettuce, roast pheasant, canned apricots and cream, Japanese screens,
endless hours of posing, Mrs. Whistler's piety (Jo was at this time
conspicuously out of sight) made Christine Spartali ill. She and her
family began to hate the picture and when it was finished, they re-
fused to buy it. It was not the last time that Whistler ran into diffi-
culties of this kind with those who commissioned him to paint a
portrait.

Whistler said that his white forelock made its first appearance
on his South American journey. His accounts of the trip in his sev-
eral versions were made acceptable for light conversation over a cup
of tea or a few sips of sherry. His only proof of valor was in the
paintings that had grown out of his ten-month tour; he had re-
established the manner of his nocturnes and the sight of the Pacific
gave refreshed authority to what he had learned from the Japanese.

The white forelock, absent from Fantin's affectionate portrait in
Homage a Delacroix, had made its arrival; his brother, Dr. William,

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 105

also settled in London to pursue a completely respectable, poverty-
haunted medical career in the shadow of his brother's fame. The
good doctor with his benign air, no longer a heroic soldier in the lost
cause of the South, assumed the character of a painfully undistin-
guished man. He was trustworthy and slightly rotund. In money
matters the two brothers offered to help one another, yet neither
could bring himself to accept money from the other. Instead, they
exchanged courtesies which revealed the hidden pride and sensi-
bilities of both. In the Sixties Dr. William's imperial and moustache,
his loosely fitting clothes were those of the conventional Southern
colonel.

Soon after his return from the American holiday, Whistler moved
a few doors east on Lindsey Row; the Greaves brothers helped with
the moving, helped to paint the walls in pastel tones of yellow and
blue; the studio walls on the second floor were painted Confederate
gray with black moldings, foot boards, window and door frames,
and the floor itself. A half century later the influences of Whistler
and Huysmans and Whistler preceded Huysmans by nearly a gen-
eration-caused floors to be painted black in Greenwich Village in
New York. The silver gray of Whistler's studio walls came from the
Oriental screens he knew so well, and though it is nearly certain
that he had never read the writings of Ku K'ai-chih, the Chinese
sage of the fourth century in translation, it was not unlikely that
he had overheard echoes of them in conversations with Murray
Marks and Rossetti. It is more than coincidence that Whistler fol-
lowed hints derived from Ku K'ai-chih's remark: 'To portray a pretty
young girl is like carving a portrait in silver. You may elaborate the
young lady's clothes, but one must trust to a touch here and a stroke
there to bring out her beauty as it really is."

Whistler knew (again from conversations overheard in London
and Paris of the late Sixties) that the training of memory was as im-
portant to the Chinese and Japanese artist as it was to the students
of Lecoq de Boisbaudran. Fantin and Legros would be among the
first to inform him. In Paris in 1868 the brothers de Goncourt laid
claims to being the first to introduce a taste for Oriental art through
their novel, En 18 . . ., but it can be said that Whistler was the
first to give it a sea change and to transport it across the Channel,
and he was certainly the first to apply its precepts directly into paint-

106 THE WORLD OF

ing the first to regard portrait painting as an art that trusted primarily
"to a touch here, and a stroke there to bring out . . . beauty as it
really is." His struggles in painting the portrait of Miss Spartali were
an exercise in that aesthetic. And "carving in silver" entered into his
Nocturnes, his views of the Pacific, and later his portraits of the two
Miss Alexanders. It can be safely said that his applications of blacks
upon blacks, of grays upon grays, of relating blues to silver helped
to create the atmosphere described by Huysmans in A Rebours in
1884 and in the writings of Villiers de Lisle-Adam. These were
among Whistler's gifts to the generation that followed him.

X

L

the trip to South America had done nothing else, it established
Whistler in relationship to the world; Whistler came to Lindsey Row
to settle a few of the more important of his decisions. Henceforth,
London was to he his permanent home; he was to be a figure, how-
ever foreign, in British art; he was to continue his work in a separate
line from that of contemporary French painters, and at a considera-
ble distance from Monet, Manet, Cezanne, Degas, Renoir. From this
time onward he was distinctly islanded. Although he still saw Cour-
bet on short visits to France, his acceptance of the Oriental principles
of design foreshadowed an early break with Courbet. All that he
retained of Courbet's influence in the placing of the full-length
figure the portrait on the canvas was the quality of arrested motion.
And his treatment of the portrait was more psychological than real-
istic. In his household his mother's ascendancy had become complete,
which also meant that Whistler alone had charge of household
credit and expenses, and this meant that the great majority of bills
were unpaid.

Mrs. Whistler thought in terms of austerely moral conduct rather
than of money matters. As for herself, she dressed with Puritan
simplicity and disliked Americans in London who lived in and for
"society." Her single indulgence was in giving in to whatever she
considered Whistler's more harmless whims. If he chose to en-
tertain a great number of people for Sunday-morning breakfasts
Cwhich he did), she thought it right for him to use this means for
advancing his professional career. She had little if any concern for
the warnings implicit in unpaid bills, and if she had her doubts
about them, family pride was sufficient motive to hide them. Pride

108 THE WORLD OF

in her son's ability to solve all problems kept her silent and her
reward was in being chosen as his model for a seated portrait.

As Miss Spartali learned, sitting for Whistler was an honor in
which patience and endurance were not rewarded during the interval
of trial. Whistler hid clocks and refused to carry a watch. As he
painted, he could not and did not wish to measure time. The title
of his mothers portrait was Arrangement in Grey and Black: Por-
trait of the Painter's Mother. The title described the wall against
which the subject sat in profile. The resignation of the figure, the
nearly Quaker-like simplicity of the white lace headdress, the plain
features of the face were painted with the restraint that was as
much a part of the sitter's personality as was Whistler's art in pre-
senting her; so far the study had its psychological interest and valid-
ity. Whether the patience and air of endurance which also con-
tribute to the expression on the sitter's face was the result of her
trial in sitting for the portrait one shall never know. But her son
had purged the picture of much of its merely personal relevance by
making those who saw it conscious of its art, by creating a balance
between personal interest in the subject and the studied arrange-
ment of forms and tonal shades of gray and black with appropriate
touches of white, near white, and flesh tones.

The restraint that Whistler employed in the painting of a "per-
sonal" subject was the obverse side of a character that was becoming
anything but impersonal in its relationship to the world. He was
becoming a public figure whose delight was to exhibit personality
as well as the individual purpose of his art to public view.

At this moment in the late Sixties through Rossetti and Murray
Marks, the Whistlers, mother and son, met Frederick Leyland, the
Liverpool shipowner and Leyland, used to doing things in a large
way, invited them to his seaside estate at Speke Hall outside of Liver-
pool and ordered portraits of himself, his wife and all four children.
The setting provided a Henry Jamesian holiday for the Whistlers,
an approach to moving in society. The tall, vigorous, and bearded
Leyland, through his gestures of patronage to Whistler, approached
the manner of another Lorenzo de Medici. At first, Whistler found
the situation ideal for painting, as well he might, and yet a peculiar
sense of self-consciousness possessed him. Despite the confidence
he had acquired in going his own way, he could not transform him-

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 109

self into a professional painter of portraits; in the lighter, smaller
graphic medium of etchings and lithographs, he was professional
enough, but once the commission for a portrait was placed before
him, he became the "pure artist" hopeful of perfection. It was said
he wept over his drawing of Frederick Leyland's legs in the portrait
he did of him. Childish fears attacked him as well as hopes of an
impossible perfection. Leyland could spare little time for posing. The
same hope haunted Whistler's painting of Mrs. Leyland; the draw-
ing of her hands obsessed him, yet he succeeded here in putting
upon canvas the essential something he sought: the negligent ele-
gance of her manner, the movement of her figure beneath the deli-
cate traceries and drape of her tea gown. To this day, the unfinished
drawing of her hands still shows the marks of his indecision, his
strange lapses into an unwilled lack of professional skill.

It was evident that the.Leylands did not put Whistler at his ease;
as he tried to paint their children, they ran away from him. Out-
wardly the Leylands were and continued to be the most patient of
patrons; they accepted without undue pressure his delays in complet-
ing portraits; they gave in to his whims, but there is no evidence that
they actually listened to anything he had to say or if they did, it
was not more than half overheard. They were kindly, indulgent, and
more than a little absent-minded. Mrs. Leyland with her attractive
head of reddish blonde hair took a special pleasure in posing for and
talking for hours on end with Dante Gabriel Rossetti at his house
in Cheyne Walk. His exotic menagerie, his musical voice, his large
eyes gave her a sense of being richly entertained, and visiting his
house gave her the illusion of something imperative to do; the friend-
ship with Whistler was never of that quality. Of course, Whistler
knew it, and the knowledge was enough to supply a motive for his
uneasiness.

The visits to Speke Hall were preludes to one of the most extraor-
dinary of Whistler's adventures with a patron, and the adventure
involved the friendships of Rossetti and Murray Marks. Rossetti
who was fond of Whistler's La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine,
which even as it is seen today is livelier, if less pure, than most of his
larger canvases, urged the Leylands to buy the picture. Rossetti, to
say the least, was a generous friend and a persuasive salesman;
everything that he did well, he did with ease, which, of course, was

HO THE WORLD OF

one of the secrets of his charm. The Leylands bought the picture,
and with Murray Marks' encouragement, Leyland bought a house in
Princes Gate at Knightsbridge. The passion for building, or rather
rebuilding, had seized Leyland, and he could afford to rebuild on the
scale of the Medicis. The house was to shelter the spoils of his patron-
age. No advice was to be overlooked, and advice was forthcoming
from Murray Marks whose business was on these occasions to take
things in charge. As a good omen, Leyland learned that Northum-
berland House was being dismantled and coming down. He bought
its huge gilded staircase and installed it at Princes Gate. And to
prepare the eye for the gilded wonder he had captured, he com-
missioned Whistler to design the approach to it, a front hall, walls
of cocoa brown, dappled with gold. Rossetti's Blessed Damosel and
Lady Lilith were placed in the drawing rooms; paintings by Burne-
Jones, Millais, Ford Madox Brown, Filippo Lippi and Botticelli,
Legros and Watts crowded the walls. The Pre-Raphaelites had scored
a victory at Princes Gate. Leyland's touch of gold was the magic
that for the moment had placed contemporary art with the "Immor-
tals" and Leyland was not averse to knowledge of his very stylish
patronage spreading in conversation among artistic circles in Ken-
sington and Chelsea. As an arrival among the newly rich in London,
Leyland, the shipowner, was like a pirate come from Liverpool to
take London by storm.

The time of his arrival was the spring of 1876 and a kind of
March madness added fuel to the majesty of his plans; the softly
spoken Burne-Jones and the robust William Morris were consulted;
two architects, Shaw and Jaeckyll, were to act as foremen to the
remaking of the house in Princes Gate. Whistler had already taken
charge of the hall, and rooms were parcelled out to different artists,
each working in his own inimitable way from room to room. A room
was found for Whistler's Princesse, the dining room that also housed
Leyland's fashionable collection of blue and white china. A place was
found for the Princesse over the fireplace; the other three walls of
the room were lined with slender shelves supported by dark brown
spokes, simulating (at some distance) bamboo poles; these were to
display the blue and white china. The walls had for their covering
yellow Spanish leather (imported from Spain and of sixteenth-
century origin) with red flowers painted on it. Marks had told

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER I ! !

Jaeckyll to design the room, and since Leyland was prepared to spend
a fortune on it, Jaeckyll was also prepared to be as lavish as his
imagination allowed him to be.

But neither Marks nor Jaeckyll was fully aware of Whistler's
peculiar relationship to the Leylands; they were unaware that
Whistler had designed a few of Mrs. LeylancTs dresses for her, that
he had proposed marriage to her younger sister, that to offset the
attractions Rossetti had for her, he escorted Mrs. Leyland to the
theatre and went on tours with her to the dressmakers and milliners.
Mrs. Leyland was apparently enjoying herself she afterwards con-
fessed that she liked Whistler because she liked cats and she
probably thought of Rossetti as her tame lion. In spite of being the
mother of four children, she seemed amazingly young, pretty and
very slender; her blue eyes held a look of innocence and her hair
when the sun struck it had a hint of fire in its coils.

In this situation there was little chance of art for art's sake pre-
vailing in the design of Frederick Leyland's dining room. There
was every chance that Whistler would not approve of JaeckylTs at-
tempts to please the lavish purse and eye of Leyland. In painting
the portraits of the Leylands he had met with partial failure and
injured pride; Mrs. Leyland's sister held his proposal at greater than
arm's length and then slipped away. Whistler did not approve of
the dining room at all; he did not approve of Jaeckyll, he did not
approve of his Spanish leather, nor the rug with its red design upon
the floor, nor the red Spanish flowers all these would ruin his
Princesse. He informed Leyland of his disapproval; he begged per-
mission to stay at Speke Hall through the summer and to delay the
opening of his town house until the dining room was fit to meet the
critical eyes of his guests.

Whistler thought of Rossetti's garden and its peacocks, and he was
certain that Mrs. Leyland also remembered them. Even before this
occasion, the idea of peacocks as a motif in decoration had come to
mind. Why not the blue-green of peacocks' tails to counterbalance
the reds in the room? Leyland agreed that Whistler should
have a hand in remaking the room. Whistler wrote a cheerful,
extremely boyish letter to his mother announcing his victory; he
was to prove to her that he was the best of all interior decorators.
The youthfulness of the letter showed how earnestly he valued her

112 THE WORLD OF

opinion; it was as if he were reassuring her that his difficulties in
his relationship with the Leylands would be solved by the creation
of a Peacock Room.

Perhaps no one of the company who gave well-paid advice to
Leyland was less fitted to redesign any room of his intended palace
in Princes Gate than Whistler. The charm of Whistler s house in
Lindsey Row depended upon its austerities. The little money spent
upon the rooms gave them their qualities of light, air and pastel
simplicity. The lack of money called upon the resources of Whistler's
ingenuity and wit. The only person within Leyland's reach who
might have conveyed an impression of richness and a cluttered
harmony out of the chaos of his dining-room was Rossetti. As it was,
the only virtues of the fantastic decor had a distorted origin in ideas
derived from Rossetti himself which may have convinced Mrs.
Leyland that Whistler had found the occasion to parade the pea-
cocks.

Whistler had plans for going to Venice that summer. He dis-
missed them. The city was empty; he moved from Lindsey Row,
an hour's brisk walk, into Princes Gate. With him came the help-
ful, shabbily genteel Greaves brothers, his assistants, his pupils in
arms, humorless, docile, active. They marched into the dining room
and set up ladders and scaffolding; their position at Princes Gate
was a serious matter to them. They came to a world beyond
Bloomsbury and Chelsea, the world of fashion where pocket money
was always to be found where it should be: in one's pocket, and
not to be sought for painfully through small loans from booksellers
or with a ticket received from the pawnbroker.

As for Whistler he assumed military command of a garrison
the Peacock Room in the same spirit that animated his grand-
father's command at Fort Dearborn. His soldiers were the Greaves
and Frederick Leyland's caretaker, and with this spirit he combined
the air of Michael Angelo painting the Creation on the inner roof
of the Sistine Chapel. Actually, however hard he worked, it was
a parody of labor, quite unlike the concentration of his painting in
Lindsey Row. He invited friends to watch his labors, and one
remarked that on the high scaffolding he looked like an imp stepping
footsure upon a tightrope. He gracefully tripped down the ladders
to serve tea. Faced with that hopelessly ill-proportioned rectangular

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 113

room with its yellowed leather walls, painted flowers and shelves
which were in fact perverse versions of the Victorian whatnot,
Whistler's problem was difficult enough. He attempted the danger-
ous expedient of trial and error; he gilded the red flowers, and the
yellow leather merely looked dead; he then began to paint the
leather peacock blue. The color did not take well; yet it was out
of character for Whistler to give up a bad situation easily a stroke
here, a stroke there might save the room. He began to treat the
walls and ceiling and floor of the room as though all six sides of the
room were a canvas, decorated with peacocks and his Princesse. He
almost deceived his own eyes; he became less and less professional
and more amateurish. His air of optimism which had so often
brought further indulgences from his mother was transformed into
slightly hysterical levity and true inspiration was at further distance
than ever. He could be neither Baroque nor Victorian Quarto Cento;
that was beyond his skill. He had misjudged himself almost as
completely as Leyland had misread his character and abilities;
Whistler was forced to bluff, to carry off the performance as an act
of showmanship to save whatever remained of his defeated vanity
and pride.

He had cards printed announcing his temporary residence at
Princes Gate and the progress of the Peacock Room; these were
distributed at Liberty's department store as invitations to the public
to visit him at Princes Gate. Leyland was not as shocked by
Whistler's effrontery in making another man's house his garrison
as he might have been. Since Leyland was in his own way a pirate
and a successful one, he understood Whistler's tendencies in the
same direction, nor was he overtly critical of Whistler's sudden ar-
rogancethat too was something he could understand. He enjoyed
the role of the generous, tolerant patron. He loved the transparent
flattery of artists and if artists gave his reconstruction of a large
house in Princes Gate publicity, he could well afford to enjoy that
too; at the very least, it showed the world how much money he was
willing to spend.

If the presence of Leyland's wealth and the Peacock Room did
not corrupt Whistler's aesthetic integrity, it showed its limitations.
It displayed the contrasts of Whistler's aesthetic to Victorian art.
In a professional sense his Peacock Room could not be taken sen-

114 THE WORLD OF

ously; in a moral sense Whistler was at fault in not being able to
confess his failure. To make the room a work of art, it would have
to have been redone completely, its leather and shelves ripped down
it would have to have been a room in Lindsey Row. In spite of
Leyland's tolerance the situation was riding to a quarrel. Jaeckyll
stepped in to look at what was once his dining-room; legend has it
that he went home and quite out of his mind gilded the floor of his
room. Some said he painted the floor black, but whatever colors he
poured across his floor he was discovered truly to be raving mad. He
was taken at once to an insane asylum where shortly afterwards he
died.

Poor Jaeckyll. The loss of his sanity did no more than add a foot-
note to the legend of the Peacock Room, and if the incident of his
going mad has any meaning beyond the pathetic scene itself, it
shows the kind of unstable creatures that Leyland's wealth at-
tracted and Leyland's inability to judge the men he hired to rebuild
his house. Leyland's generous lack of discrimination was earning
very nearly what it deserved.

During that summer Whistler initiated the unusual practice
(for him) of rising at six, of snatching a breakfast and waking the
Greaves brothers. An hour and a half later they were at Princes
Gate, daubed with gold paint, gold on their faces, literally in their
eyes, in their hair. A symbolic farce of golden and blue peacocks
was in the making. Each day the drama began at eight, ran till four
with its interlude for tea, then on until it grew too dark to see
anything at all. On some days Whistler hired a cab, and like the
devil concealed in a coach, rode for a hurried lunch in Lindsey Row
from and to Princes Gate. Prospect of Leyland's gold brought with
it the excitement and flurry of brief luxuries among them, the
hansom cab.

At tea time Whistler invited his women guests to dance with
him across the floor of the Peacock Room. Freshly applied with
gold and greenish blue paint, the room had its attraction for im-
pressionable young ladies, who, of course, had seen nothing like
it before. Whistler referred to the work at Princes Gate as "the
show's afire" and if anyone accidentally dropped into London during
that dull summer, Whistler's "show" was the show to see. Visitors
saw him on his back, high on scaffolding, delicately stroking with

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 115

a brush the pendant lamps hung from the ceiling. At one time
he threatened to cut them all off, to shave the ceiling dean of
pendants that looked not unlike inverted mountains of the moon,
but he changed his mind and went on painting. The Marquis of
Westminster dropped in and so did Victoria's artistic daughter,
the sculptress, Princess Louise; it was she who did a seated portrait
of her mother in stone, which even now gazes east with youthful
authority across Kensington Gardens toward Knightsbridge. They
marveled at Whistler's labors, which pleased him so much that he
wrote to his mother about his royal visitors.

Scarcely less welcome than the Princess Louise at Princes Gate
was Lord Redesdale.* Redesdale was in the diplomatic services; he
had been to Russia, Japan and the United States, and these various
places vastly entertained him. He had a fondness for Tsars and a
liking for Americans, almost a weakness for learning more about their
curious habits, and he developed, like a taste for olives, particular
admiration for Brigham Young and Whistler. He had finely modeled
features and was always smartly dressed, his top hat worn at a
sharply tilted angle over his right eye. In London he loved to dis-
concert people by asking direct and leading questions; his rapport
with Whistler which began in the early Seventies was instantaneous
and lasting.

When he saw Whistler perched on a ladder in the Peacock
Room, he asked him flatly, 'What are you doing?"

"The loveliest thing you ever saw," said Whistler.

Redesdale was both charmed and curious.

"But what of the beautiful leather and Leyland? Have you con-
sulted him?"

"Why should I? I am doing the most beautiful thing that ever
has been done, you know, the most beautiful room."

Young Redesdale, noting the confusion in the room, was im-
pressed; he believed, as he wrote later, that Whistler was as confi-
dent of the value of his work as Thucydides was of his history.

Through late summer and fall the quarrel with Leyland still
hung fire. Leyland continued to be patient, and yielded to Whistler's
demands that he stay on at Princes Gate for another three months.

* Lord Redesdale was the grandfather of Nancy Mitford. The bright and
chatty character of her prose is a direct heritage from his.

116 THE WORLD OF

Leyland had agreed to give Whistler five hundred guineas for re-
touching the room, and then he agreed on the figure of one thou-
sand. Meanwhile, Whistler still found himself unable to leave worse
enough alone at Princes Gate. The hope of perfection still glim-
mered before him; he received praise from the newspapers for
creating a sensation, and he then demanded two thousand guineas.
Another spring had arrived, the spring of 1877 and Leyland
seemed ill-disposed toward the new demand. It was then that
Whistler painted the cartoon of the two peacocks, the rich peacock
and poor at war on the wall of Leyland's dining room. This was
the closest approach that Whistler ever made to vulgarity, and
even here his ill-temper vented itself in almost abstract design. It
was intended as an insult and Leyland faced it. At last Leyland's
temper broke and he wrote a cheque to Whistler for two thousand
pounds; the exchange of insults was complete the change from
guineas to pounds put Whistler on a footing with the commercial
classes, tradesmen and lower craftsmen, who dealt in and were paid
in pounds, not guineas.

The gossip following the break with Leyland had serious con-
sequences for Whistler. One story was that Mrs. Leyland had
walked into the house unnoted by Whistler as he stood entertaining
guests in the Peacock Room and she overheard him say of Leyland,
"Well, you know, what can you expect from a parvenu?" Mrs.
Leyland then ordered him out of the house. Another story ran that
Leyland had spoken to Rossetti about Whistler's demand for two
thousand guineas and Rossetti replied that Whistler's work in the
Peacock Room was scarcely worth a thousand. Both stories had a
grain of truth within them. The first contained Whistler's attitude
toward Leyland, who, after all, had shown a kind of sportsmanship
in allowing him to follow through his conception of design in the
Peacock Room. Leyland also had the courage to permit the fighting
peacocks to remain where he could face them as he sat at dinner.
The second showed Rossetti's public view of the case; after all, he
had sold Whistler's Princesse to the Leylands and he had no wish to
lose the friendship of a rich patron.

The harm done to Whistler's reputation ran below the surface
of immediate events at Princes Gate. Whistler had become a public
character. In that respect he was no longer the artist to be appreci-

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 117

ated by the few, but a notorious figure whose services commanded
a high price. He was established in London, and talk of what he did
and said was dinner-table conversation. These were the immediate
results of his quarrel with Leyland. Beneath the quarrel which
had been hinted at by Rossettf s remarks to Leyland, was the rumor
that Whistler overcharged his patrons and transformed them into
victims, that his showmanship at Princes Gate proved how un-
serious his painting was, that he was "unprofessional" to the last
degree. This was harmful, and only half-true; like most charges of
its kind, the half-truth within it caused the greater damage.

It was at this time that Henry living's career on the London
stage reached its first great wave of popularity. Whistler's association
with E. W. Godwin, the brilliant and controversial architect, and
through Godwin with Ellen Terry, Godwin's mistress, brought Irving
within hailing distance of Whistler's circle.* Irving had the gift of

* The relationship between Edward William Godwin (1833-1886), George
Frederick Watts (1817-1904), and Ellen Terry (1848-1928) provides an
interesting chapter in Victoriana. Of the three, Godwin the architect was the
most higrHy girted. His unconventional, romantic temperament was not un-
like that ot die American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959). Like
Wright's his published statements aroused controversy. Like Whistler, he re-
garded his art as a "calling," a vocation not a profession, or a trade. His
influence inspired his son by Ellen Terry, Gordon Craig.

Watts was a precocious "genius" among British painters; his origins were
of the lower middle-class. At an early age his facility in drawing, his effemi-
nate good looks, his "ethereal" manner readily attracted art critics and pa-
tronesses. At 28 (1843) he won a prize in competition for designing a huge
mural to be placed (which it was not) in the newly built Houses of Parlia-
ment. The prize made him famous, and also enabled him to study in Italy
for four years. Watts's imagination was that of a didactic illustrator of "ideas."
As he said to Ruskin, "My instincts cause me to strive after things that are
hardly within the province of art, things rather felt than seen." In Italy he
met Lord and Lady Holland, who after his return to England became his
generous protectors; in their household he was called "Signer" and shielded
from the hardships of earning a living. In the United States the best-known
of his illustrated ideas was a painting called "Hope" which showed a female
figure blindfolded, head bent to a string instrument and seated on top of a
globe representing the world. The figure was that of a freshly bathed Eng-
lish girl lightly draped in blue-green voile. In colored reproductions, neatly
mounted and glazed, it hung in many suburban homes. Warts's paintings
became models for "moral" cartoons illustrating ideas on the editorial pages
of pre-World War I Hearst newspapers. There is little doubt that his soft

118 THE WORLD OF

turning stray words and phrases to his own advantage. In the Lon-
don of that hour Rossetti's peacocks were well known. Whistler had
tried to convince Cicely Alexander's father that what his house
needed more than all else was a Peacock Room. Talk of peacocks was
in the air, and the image of them was as fashionable as the sight of
a Japanese kimono or a display of blue and white china. In Irving's
Hamlet (surely a Hamlet that would not be tolerated today) Ophe-
lia in the "dumb-show" scene, the play within a play, carried a fan
of peacock feathers, which gave Irving the chance to shout "Peacock"
at her and the fan a moment which brought roars of delight from
the audience, and gave Irving many curtain calls at the end of the
play.

The effects that Irving sought for and placed behind the foot-
lights of the Victorian stage were nothing if not an exploitation
of a personality, his own. Seeing Irving act became an object lesson
to Whistler. Aside from being a painter he was rapidly learning
something of which he had had glimpses in the early public suc-

pastel colors and "compositions" also influenced the popular American com-
mercial artist Maxwell Parrish (1870-1938).

Ellen Terry's relationship to Watts was no less curious than that of Erne
Gray's to her first husband John Ruskin. Ellen and her elder sister Kate
Terry, both handsome "child actresses" on the London stage sat as models
for Watts's picture, The Sisters. Innocently enough, Ellen, who was under
16, was lured into marriage with Watts (1861) who was then 48. The
marriage was never consummated. Aside from her services aj a docile and
graceful model, Watts and his friends found Ellen Terry restless and trouble-
some. The painter and the girl agreed to annul the marriage. During their
brief marriage and for many years before and after it, Watts lived in Little
Holland House, nursed, guarded and cared for by Mrs. Princep, who served
as sub-patroness of Watts with Lady Holland's approval. Godwin on his
visits to the Princeps, attracted girlish and beautiful Ellen Terry-Watts, who
after she was sent home to her mother, cheerfully eloped with Godwin to
a country cottage at Gustard Wood and lived with him as his mistress. Pro-
longed stays in the country did not suit Ellen Terry's temperament; she was
an actress, fond of the stage and urban life. She was rescued from domestic-
ity a second time, by the intervention of Charles Reade, novelist and play-
wright, who convinced her that it was better for her to be a leading lady in
one of his plays than to waste her talents as a bored housewife in a cottage.
In tribute to Ellen Terry's personality and histrionic gifts Victorian domestic
morality accepted her irregularities without disapproval and she became Dame
Ellen Terry. Further details of her and Godwin's careers may be read in
The Story of My Life by Ellen Terry and in Dudley HarBron's life of God-
win, The Conscious Stone.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 119

cesses of Courbet in Paris. In contrast to the fact that his canvases
were painted in low tones, the colors of his personality became florid
and high. He liked Irving, and more than that, admired him in
much the same fashion that he liked Rossetti and tolerated Howell.
The art that he admired in all three was one concerned with the
projection of personality, whether it brought cheers from crowds
at the Lyceum Theatre, or circulated around the dining room of
Rossetti's house in Cheyne Walk, or in the case of Howell, held
spellbound unscrupulous art dealers, who for the moment, were
caught off guard.

In his paintings of Carlyle and of Pablo Sarasate, the violinist,
Whistler had learned the advantage, however abstract his titles for
portraits were, of selecting celebrated men that the public wel-
comed, even on the walls of his studio. With the same persistence
he had shown in Paris in seeking out Henry Murger and Courbet,
he sought out Irving. Irving whose long hours of work equalled
those of Whistler's at Princes Gate was not at home to artists, par-
ticularly Chelsea artists whose reputations were not established in
conservative circles. Whistler had made several attempts to see him
and each failed. He was forced to write a letter:

"It is hopeless calling for I never find you I have tried before
now. Meanwhile do look in some afternoon directly at the 'Society
of British Artists/ Suffolk Street and see my picture of Sarasate
and let that show you what I meant your portrait to be and then
arrange with me for a day or two at my new studio."

Irving had been playing the part of Philip II in Queen Mary,
Tennyson's first play. The run of the play was short, scarcely more
than a month, but it had attracted an intellectual as well as a
fashionable audience and Whistler, through his love of Velasquez-
found his chance to do a portrait of Irving as Philip II.

Irving came to Lindsey Row, and though the season of the
year was spring, Whistler's studio was filled with drafts and
very cold; bill collectors interrupted the sittings, yet Whistler worked
and the actor stood for him as though discomforts and lack of
money were furthest from their thoughts. Both acted well; Whistler
cheerful and confident, Irving friendly, but making his point clear
that he had little time to pose, and Whistler finished the picture,
an arrangement in black and silver, with incredible speed. He re-

120 THE WORLD OF

fused to allow Irving to buy it, nor was he prepared to give it to
him. Meanwhile the picture became part of Whistler's growing
collection of distinguished portraits. Bill collectors and cheerful
disregard of health, money and unpaid bills were warnings that
Irving read meanings into that Whistler ignored. Far from cutting
down expenses and moving to cheaper quarters, he was plotting
with Godwin to build a house in Tite Street.

XI

. HE threat of disaster that cast a cloud over Whistler's affairs
after the collapse of his intentions to improve the Peacock Room
was withheld. For a short moment it seemed that his quarrel with
Leyland would he turned to his advantage. Sir Coutts Lindsay
became the new patron of the arts; he had greater wisdom than
Leyland and less eagerness to involve Jiimself in erratic friendships
of artists. From the Duke of Westminster he leased a plot of land
near Grosvenor Square and built the Grosvenor Gallery upon it
and for the first showing held there he invited the more exotic, un-
conventional painters to contribute; he invited Burne-Jones, Rossetti,
Whistler, and a few others. Rossetti declined to show, which marks
the beginning of Rossetti's coolness toward Whistler and stressed
the point that their association was social rather than professional.
The difference of their attitudes toward art in general and painting
in particular had always been clear, and by this time Whistler's
remark that Rossetti should frame his sonnets and paint his poems
had probably reached his ears. Whistler loaned the Gallery his noc-
turnes, and Burne-Jones his water colors, six panels of his Angels
of Creation, his Beguiling of Merlin and The Mirror of Venus. On
the occasion of opening the show a new Mrs. Godwin, daughter of a
painter and an artist in her own small right, appeared along with
other young women all with their hair dressed in the fashion of
Burne-Jones's ladies. Even on state occasions such as this they af-
fected the Pre-Raphaelite costume of no corsets, flat heeled slippers,
and long skirts which revealed the natural lines of the figure. If the
paintings themselves failed to shock the smartly gowned and more
conventional faction of fashionable society, the costumes of those
who were most enthusiastic over the paintings did.

122 THE WORLD OF

A new Mrs. Godwin was evidence that the Ellen Terry-Godwin
household was broken up beyond repair. Even in London Godwin
could not be kept at home; his children missed their charming
father, and Ellen Terry used the resources of her art to answer their
questions as to why he was away. She put on a widow's gown
and a long crepe veil, put their children (the young Gordon Craig
among them) in a carriage, drove them to a cemetery and pointed
out a new-made grave. She wept aloud:

"O my poor children, there lies your dear, dear father. You will
never see him again/'

The children wept with her and the entire cast of this small play,
worn out with an hour's weeping, drove home and went to bed.
Very late that night Godwin returned, but Ellen Terry was still in
full command of her part:

"You are dead," she told him, "and dead you remain. Those
children would think me a fool or a liar if they saw you resurrected
at the breakfast table, and it is as well for their happiness as for
mine that I keep their respect. If they knew you better they would
despise you, and now you will be a romantic memory. Get out,
stay out."

From that time onward, so this story of Ellen Terry's liberation
from Godwin went, Godwin not only sought the company of
women elsewhere but gave in cheerfully to Ellen Terry's preference
for the company of Henry Irving. Soon an officially married Mrs.
Godwin took her place, a very young, plump, pretty little girl,
whose hands and feet were small and finely molded and who ac-
cepted Godwin's erratic behavior with easy and reassuring smiles.
Whistler gave her lessons in painting. The presence of Beatrix
Godwin strengthened rather than diminished the friendship between
the two men.

Godwin with his usual felicity set about to design what was soon
to be called the White House in Tite Street, Chelsea, not too far
from Lindsey Row. In the making of the White House Godwin
and Whistler effected a collaboration that was unique.

In passing through several phases of the Gothic revival and in
his consideration of Oriental art, Godwin's mutations carried him
to reconsiderations of Greek design. He dismissed the monotonous
regularities and balances of the Queen Anne house as lifeless in-

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 123

interpretations of classicism. "Queen Anne led to Harley Street,"
said Godwin, yet he saw the need of simplifying Gothic excesses,
and the path he took led him unwillingly into the road once
traveled by Adam; at this point Whistler and he joined hands.
The memory of the Chinese Room in the Catherine Palace outside
of St. Petersburg came to life again in Whistler's mind and with
it the work of Catherine's Scottish architect, Charles Cameron,
who had fused the teachings of Adam with conceptions of Eastern
art and Cameron's conception had inspired Whistler's drawing room
in Lindsey Row, which was almost empty; a large sofa, two or
three chairs, a Chippendale table and thin straw matting on the
floor, all placed in slight unbalance about the room, served as an
example to Godwin's eye. In designing the compact little White
House, Godwin showed the touch of genius that had its deepest
affinity with Whistler's genius. Even today the White House whose
exterior of white brick is now an "arrangement" in black and white,
the white bricks of its street floor painted black to the foot of the
second floor windows, has retained its quality of being a work of
art. The admirable proportions of the interior of its street floor are
as they once were; the windows of the rectangular dining room
still look out to the garden Whistler and Godwin had in mind, and
light, though the day may be cold and cloudy, still fills the dining-
room. No tenant, however unsympathetic to its designers, has been
able to destroy their intention and identities. It is even today a
memorial to the combined genius of Whistler and Godwin.

When the house was finished, its top floor held a studio; its
second floor, rooms for a vaguely possible school of painting. The
house was attacked by critics for the varied sizes of doors and win-
dows facing the street. "Tite Street was not Baker Street," Whistler
replied; there was to be no sign of commercial dullness and flat
imitation of Queen Anne houses fronting the visitors when they
walked into the White House. As for the placing of doors and
windows, Godwin had undoubtedly seen sketches of that side of
the Doges Palace which faced San Marco Square in Venice, and
had achieved a harmony in counterbalancing with Adam-like re-
straint in ornament of unequally sized rectangular forms.

Pastel colors reflecting light dominated the interiors of the White
House and to the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878 Whistler sent

124 THE WORLD OF

a design of a room, Harmony in Yellow and Gold, a precise rendi-
tion of what he had failed to accomplish in Leyland's dining-room.
His drawing was guided by the austerities of Adamwhich was
proved by his entirely successful suggestions to Mr. and Mrs. D'Oyly
Carte when they restored the rooms of their house in Adelphi Ter-
race and retained Adam ceilings and mantelpieces. Whistler's gift
to London interiors was a rebirth of sunlight in hitherto cluttered
and crowded rooms where the sun seldom entered and from which
the gray light of fog and rain had been excluded by heavy drapes
of deep browns and greens with their colors endlessly repeated on
walls and within the upholstery of sofas and chairs. In London's
climate of damp and cold it is easy to understand why the display
of Victorian wealth and domestic comfort took on the aspect of
overstuffed weight and sunless "cozyness". Deep reds and browns
stressed the illusion of warmth; a fire in the gate, a hot teapot with
its padded tea caddy these reassured the guests of rapidly rising
lower-middleclass families that comfort, though dark as the interior
of a bear's cave, welcomed them and made them "feel at home" in
a glow of maternal Victorian protection and warmth. The crowded,
jewel-like colors of early Pre-Raphaelite painting stressed the same
cave-like qualities. In contrast to them Whistler's nocturnes with
their slate-blue, green-blue tones and surfaces were cold. Empty
spaces in Whistlerian rooms looked cold and abstract and in his
paintings (since he actually use liberal quantities of turpentine) the
surfaces were thin; even black tones looked thinly applied. A
Whistler room had the appearance of brightness, of utility (al-
though he had no use for anything "useful"), of being contrived at
minimum expense. This last quality was a shock to the demands
of Victorian wealth, was a threat to Victorian ideals of comfort
and domestic security.

The withheld storm threatening Whistler's future was gathering
force, and the signs of coming financial disaster were already
glanced at by Henry Irving as he stood manfully indifferent to cold
in Whistler's studio as Philip II. Irving J s Philip was a calm, sneer-
ing, graceful Tennysonian villain, romantic enough to charm the
readers of David Copperfield who remembered Steerforth (as Irving

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 125

did), and prophetic enough (since in the play he predicted the rise
of Elizabeth to Queen of England) to please the historically minded
members of the audience*

Irving's romantic temperament was never unmixed with shrewd-
ness; he saw and noted things that others overlooked; he never forgot
how narrowly, when he was merely John Brodribb from Somerset,
he had escaped from eternal poverty and eternal junior clerkship in
the counting room of Thacker, Spink & Co., East India Merchants
in Newgate Street, far from the fashionable West End. He could
read the meaning of Whistler's bill collectors and the lack of fuel in
Whistler's studio without much further speculation.

The meaning became clear when Whistler attempted to move
from Lindsey Row to Tite Street. Whistler's lawyer, Anderson Rose
(who had also become one of his patrons), did what he could to
stave off creditors, and another man of business, a money lender to
whom Whistler appealed, a Mr. Blott, reluctantly took the portrait
of Carlyle as hostage as well as promises of other pictures to be
painted as security for a loan of one hundred and fifty pounds.
Whistler's portrait of his mother was in pawn to a Strand print-
seller, and Charles Augustus Howell was called in to raise smaller
sums of money for the possession of art objects in the White House.
If the White House was not built on sand, it certainly resembled a
house of cards whose faces were scrawled with promissory notes of
pounds, shillings and pence and at the moment, orders for Whis-
tler's work were in a falling market. His mother had been ill and
was sent to the country, out to Hastings for recovery. Whistler him-
self was threatened with ill health; in the past five years during
which he had worked beyond the resources of his fragile body, his
brain and even the earlier promises of his talent were sustained by
something which could be called "nervous energy." What had been
wilfullness in youth had now transformed itself to will, and his will
contained an odd mixture of egotisms of "character" and all-too-easily
ruffled vanity. His doctrine of daily living which was that of levity,
of eating and drinking and smoking sparingly (such as his auto-
graph and butterfly signified), also had in practice something very
like Carlyle's doctrine of work. Whistler could not relax; his forays
into society were conducted with deliberately poised gallantries and
insults. He was often gay, but his gaiety was urban, complex, and at

126 THE WORLD OF

this turn of his life, shrill rather than boyish. His strength of char-
acter, or "will/' saved him from what today would be a nervous
breakdown. As he moved into the White House his affairs had taken
a serious turn; he was ocean-deep in small and large debts.

The failure of his relationship with the Leylands, both husband
and wife, and the notoriety that Whistler had enjoyed at Princes
Gate left him peculiarly naked to his adverse critics. The Grosvenor
Gallery opening of 1875 had been the event of the season in London.
Everyone who was anyone in London from the Prince of Wales to
the merest of newspaper critics had attended it. Out-of-town critics
appeared. Two critics came down from Oxford. One was young,
eager, generous, unknown; he was Oscar Wilde who had dropped
down from Magdalen College to write a report on the show for the
Dublin University Magazine. The other was John Ruskin himself
who held the Slade Professorship at Oxford, the most romantic and
eloquent of Oxford's lecturers. He had drifted into madness, but he
retained his genius for talking and writing. During his moments of lu-
cidity, his writing had greater force, deeper insight, and sharper clarity
than ever before. That he had become a victim of autoeroticism
and a violent one, that his particular judgments were more often
unsound than not, were facts unknown to the general public. The
undergraduates at Oxford delighted in the sight of the tall fantastic
figure who shouted sermons disguised as lectures at them; he did not
speak, he exhorted; they could feel the heat of his moral agony long
after they had forgotten the words that phrased it. At Oxford a stu-
dent could run from Pater to Ruskin, from Pusey to Jowett, the Mas-
ter of Balliol, without loss of excitement at each forensic turn. There
was more dramatic art in full play at Oxford than on the stage of
the Lyceum where Henry Irving held the center of the stage.

Oscar Wilde stepped into the Grosvenor Gallery fresh from the
rooms of Magdalen and the lectures of Walter Pater and John
Ruskin. Before coming to Oxford, he had been groomed at Trinity
College Dublin by John Pentland Mahaffy, Professor of Ancient
History, whose submerged gifts of irony, wit, and social fantasy
found their release in teaching the brilliant boy who became his
favored pupil. As he instructed Wilde, Mahaffy became the beau
ideal of the gentleman manque; he could cast a fly or shoot a bird

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 127

or keep a dinner-table conversation in the air by vaulting references
to Greek art, literature, history. All that the embittered Anglo-Irish
Mahaffy lacked was enthusiasm for the fantastic game he had taught
himself to play the very quality that his young pupil possessed in
abundance. The younger Wilde could affect boredom; he could simu-
late its outward appearance with a fair degree of accuracy, he could
do everything but feel it. Like many another Anglo-Irishman, par-
ticularly one who had been awarded a "demyship" at Magdalen Col-
lege Oxford, worth ninety-five pounds a year, his sense of social
inferiority was deep enough to unseat whatever tendencies to bore-
dom he had acquired. He could never quite master the cold arts of
prolonged ennui. He had walked too closely to the edges of a social
abyss to indulge in anything but the most transparent of insinceri-
ties; whenever he was most insincere, the ardour of his wit betrayed
him, and with unguarded enthusiasm, he promptly sat at the feet of
Godwin and Whistler.

Pater was Wilde's god of the hour, and for diversion, and with a
youthful lack of discrimination, he embraced the Pre-Raphaelites,
Whistler and Godwin with equal warmth.

As the new Mrs. Godwin heralded in her dress and in the way
she bound her hair, Burne-Jones had captured the attention of
Ruskin at the Grosvenor Show. Ruskin was not to be diverted from
the cause of the Pre-Raphaelites, yet in his attack on Whistler, he
must be given credit for seeing at a glance how widely Whistler's
Nocturnes deviated from the Pre-Raphaelite standards as they had
been painfully, painstakingly recorded in the paintings of Holman
Hunt. Each picture of Holman Hunt contained enough literal detail
to tell a story twice as long as Derby Day by Frith. To make certain
of the correctness of his Biblical canvases, Hunt traveled to Palestine;
his painting was honest, industriously produced, and as soon as its
story had been conveyed to the eye, remarkably dull. Yet aU of it
contained virtues of a moral order that Ruskin could and did ad-
mire; Hunt was absent from the Grosvenor Show, but the spirit of
his painting through the medium of Burne-Jones prevailed and
Ruskin was prepared to praise it.

Of all the Pre-Raphaelites Ruskin committed himself to praise,
Holman Hunt was an outstanding example of aesthetic and moral

128 THE WORLD OF

virtue. The literal details of his pictures were proof to those who
saw them of his laborious craftsmanship, were evidence of the many
hours, weeks, months he spent in painting them. No camera portrait
or landscape was half as literal in detail as his completed canvases. In
writing of his painting, he stressed the importance of his "ideas,"
the faithfulness of the sermons that he preached. To a few critics
as well as the majority of the gallery-visitors Hunt's The Awakened
Conscience, painted in the mid-eighteen-fifties, was a sermon by a
master. The picture showed the interior of a heavily furnished music-
room with an upright piano at the right, and at the room's center
a young woman rising from the lap of a richly dressed, bearded,
leering Victorian gentleman. She had obviously resisted temptation
to disrobe completely, and though her hair had come undone and
one of her gloves had fallen to the carpeted floor, the rapt expression
on her face showed spiritual renunciation of fleshly desires. She
was not to be had that night. She was mistress of herself. The essen-
tial, stripteasing vulgarity of the picture, since both figures were
draped, was unfelt by Hunt; he felt he had preached a warning to
young women in the company of rich young men. His professed
intentions were high-minded, even "socially-minded." Thomas Car-
lyle, Hunt was happy to note, admired the way he painted the
moonlight shining through a garden window behind the figures of
his man and woman, yet the philosophic Carlyle had failed to ap-
preciate, Hunt thought, the reflected light of green foliage on the
furnishings of the room.

Ruskin came to the show in the guise of a reporter for his monthly
periodical, Fors Clavigera. This extraordinary paper written by,
edited by and published by John Ruskin from January First 1871
to December 1884 was in the form of letters to the Workmen and
Laborers of Great Britain and was read (as such papers often are)
by club men and intellectuals not by workers. In his old age Bernard
Shaw wrote of Fors Clavigera (which translated means Fate carry-
ing a Key, or a Club the ambiguity was probably deliberate):
"Ruskin in particular left all professed socialists even Karl Marx,
miles behind in force of invective. Lenin's criticisms of modern so-
ciety seem like the platitudes of a rural Dean in comparison."

Ruskin's letters to Workmen and Laborers were in actuality no-
tations on everything that drifted through his increasingly disordered

.2
-o

3

CO

1

Very Early Self-Portrait of Whistler

Fantin-Latour's Portrait of Whistler

Whistler's Half-sister Deborah
(Mrs. Francis Seymour Haden)

Miss Leyland

TATE GALLERY

Jo in Before the Minor

Whistler in the 1 870*5
By Mortimer Menpes

PU^CH, OR THE LOXBON CHARIVARI.

Punch on the Ruskin Trial

NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

Miss Cicely Alexander:
Harmony in Grey and Green

Beatrix Godwin Whistler

THE FRICK COLLECTION

Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac
By James McXeill Whistler

Rosa Corder
By James McNeill Whistler

THE FRICK COLLECTION

James McNeill Whistler

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 129

mind: discussions of politics and art, morality and work as well as
fragments of autobiography. In these papers his opinions were set
forth impulsively, directly, with all the effect created in writing a
letter to a friend. He saw Utopia as through an Olympian mist that
shrouded his suburban estate at Denmark Hill, and through that
dimmed vista anonymous clouds of friends, the workmen of Great
Britain. He called himself, aptly enough, "the Don Quixote of Den-
mark Hill." His occasional flashes of lucidity were proof that genius
perceived the nature of his mental disorder. It is little wonder that
Marcel Proust, three generations later, so deeply admired him, for
FOTS Clavigera, and Ruskin's autobiography, Praeterita, can be re-
read as early models for Remembrance of Things Past.

When Ruskin walked into the Grosvenor Gallery his emotional
life had passed through a crisis in the failure of his attempt to marry
Rose La Touche who was scarcely more than a child. His marriage
with Effie Gray had ended in annulment since the marriage was
never consummated: the deaths, first of his father, then his mother,
left Ruskin in an empty universe, all too easily stirred to anger or to
despair. His writings had been pirated in America which did little
to improve his temper, nor did he view Americans in general with a
kindly eye; and because of his recent experience in respect to his
publications in the United States he had just cause for distrust of
everything that had American origin.

The Grosvenor Gallery was like a room in a Venetian palace. Its
pictures were hung against walls of faded red brocade and between
them stood fine examples of antique furnishings. Among them
Whistler's Nocturnes were an anachronism projected into the future.
Only the portraits of Irving and Carlyle seemed to fall into place at
all, and the critic of the London Times dismissed the entire lot,
including the portraits, by complaining of "an entire absence of de-
tails, even details generally considered so important to a full length
portrait as arms and legs." Whistler's work, he went on, "suggests to
us a choice between materialised spirits and figures in a London
fog."

Ruskin was both less suave and less naive than the Times critic.
He had never liked anything he had seen from Whistler's hand;
Swinburne had tried to introduce him to Whistler and he had re-
fused to see him; he associated Whistler with the less respectable

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 129

mind: discussions of politics and art, morality and worlc as well as
fragments of autobiography. In these papers his opinions were set
forth impulsively, directly, with all the effect created in writing a
letter to a friend. He saw r Utopia as through an Olympian mist that
shrouded his suburban estate at Denmark Hill, and through that
dimmed vista anonymous clouds of friends, the workmen of Great
Britain. He called himself, aptly enough, "the Don Quixote of Den-
mark Hill." His occasional flashes of lucidity were proof that genius
perceived the nature of his mental disorder. It is little wonder that
Marcel Proust, three generations later, so deeply admired him, for
Fors Clavigera, and Ruskin's autobiography, Praeterita, can be re-
read as early models for Remembrance of Things Past.

When Ruskin walked into the Grosvenor Gallery his emotional
life had passed through a crisis in the failure of his attempt to marry
Rose La Touche who was scarcely more than a child. His marriage
with Erne Gray had ended in annulment since the marriage was
never consummated: the deaths, first of his father, then his mother,
left Ruskin in an empty universe, all too easily stirred to anger or to
despair. His writings had been pirated in America which did little
to improve his temper, nor did he view Americans in general with a
kindly eye; and because of his recent experience in respect to his
publications in the United States he had just cause for distrust of
everything that had American origin.

The Grosvenor Gallery was like a room in a Venetian palace. Its
pictures were hung against walls of faded red brocade and between
them stood fine examples of antique furnishings. Among them
Whistler's Nocturnes were an anachronism projected into the future.
Only the portraits of Irving and Garlyle seemed to fall into place at
all, and the critic of the London Times dismissed the entire lot,
including the portraits, by complaining of "an entire absence of de-
tails, even details generally considered so important to a full length
portrait as arms and legs." Whistler's work, he went on, "suggests to
us a choice between materialised spirits and figures in a London
fog."

Ruskin was both less suave and less naive than the Times critic.
He had never liked anything he had seen from Whistler's hand;
Swinburne had tried to introduce him to Whistler and he had re-
fused to see him; he associated Whistler with the less respectable

j 30 THE WORLD OF

members of the Rossetti circle, including Howell * whom he had in-
troduced to Swinburne. Ruskin's irrational fits of snobbery were also
active in refusing to see merit in Whistler's work; Ruskin's earlier
defense of the Pre-Raphaelites had the air of being a concession

* During the years 1864-66 Howell had served as Ruskin's secretary, and it
was rumoured that Ruskin, then in difficulties with his young wife, Erne,
had tried to get her to commit adultery, and had bribed Howell to seduce
her. He failed; she was both beautiful and intelligent.

She had no fancy for Howell and was in love with the thoroughly mas-
culine Millais, who' married her after her marriage to Ruskin was annulled.
Her instincts and her will were stronger than the combined wills of the auto-
erotic Ruskin and the adventurous Howell.

In 1954 Helen Rossetti Angeli, daughter of William Michael Rossetti, pub-
lished an honestly intentioned effort, Pre-RapJiaelite Twilight: The Story of
Charles Augustus Howell, to whitewash the character of Howell, and to
clarify obscurely understood rumours emanating from gossip which sur-
rounded the Rossetti circle. Although it is impossible to refashion Howell
into a latter-day Pre-Raphaelite saint, he was not as vicious as Victorian gos-
sips thought he was. He was the youngest son in a large Anglo-Portuguese
family; his mother held claims to being of royal Portuguese heritage. Howell
was forced to fend for himself in London, and with a lew social connections,
made the best of a Bohemian-celebrity-worshipping temperament. He was
handsome and was easily accepted by and attracted to women. With his wife
and several other good-looking women he lived in the house that Ruskin had
given him in Fulham Road. The house was also filled with children of whom
it was said: "All were sure who their father was, but no one was certain
as to who made claim to being their mothers."

It is certain that Rosa Corder was HowelTs mistress, and nearly certain that,
for a short time, she was also Whistler's. Mrs. Angeli proves that the dis-
graceful story attending HowelTs death that he was found in a gutter, his
throat cut, and with a coin thrust between his teeth is false. He died of
pneumonia, aged 50 years, in the Home Hospital, 16 Fitzroy Square, St.
Pancras, April 25, 1890, an unsuccessful adventurer in the renting of sea-
coast real estate (summer cottages) and nearly forgotten by those who knew
him when he was young. He was a romantic, not-too-scrupulous dealer in
works of art, and much too unbusiness-like to be a true rival of Murray Marks.
He was not much more dishonest than the majority of antique dealers today.
In his early friendships he had a fatal gift of intimacy, and since he was a
Bohemian by temperament, he had no use at all for respectable, mediocre,
middleclass company. He ran to the best company he could find or the low-
est, and thereby relieved himself of boredom. This last was a trait that he
shared with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Whistler, who forgave him for his
habit of telling \vild lies because his lies were half-poetic, fantastic, brilliant.
When young, his personality was that of a skilled actor; he was a gentleman-
artist manque, quick to serve his friends or to make love to a pretty girl. The
best marks in Ms favor may be found in the loyalty he inspired in his mis-
tresses (who knew him better than his male acquaintances), and these in-
cluded Rosa Corder, who was not promiscuous, but quite the contrary.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 131

downward in the social scale. He was a champion of the drawings
made by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife, "Lizzie" Siddal, weak, feeble
drawings that showed scarcely more than a sensibility that yearned
toward "art." Yet Ruskin knew that her origins were proletarian, and
she herself had been a milliner's assistant (which was in those days
a euphuism for "whore," a euphuism not earned by poor "Lizzie's"
conduct); she was literally employed in a milliner's shop. Ruskin
was then able to patronize her without restraint. Like many well-to-
do Communists of the twentieth century whose impulse is to pa-
tronise the poor, to rule them by doctrinal force disguised as uni-
versal benevolence, so Ruskin embraced Socialism. He openly
patronised the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The Pre-Raphaelites had
nothing in common with his favorite painter, Turner except, and
this by vaguest association, they, too, were romantic painters.

Ruskin's instincts told him that he could never patronise Whistler
or his work and by 1875 he had transformed his patronage of the
Pre-Raphaelites into something that resembled his crusade for Social-
ism. At Oxford he had dismissed Whistler's painting as absolute
"rubbish." At the Grosvenor Gallery show he had found an oppor-
tunity, spurred by his madness, to reiterate his opinion of it.

He looked at the Nocturne in Black and Gold the falling rocket,
a blaze of color at night in Cremorne Gardens. Or was that blaze of
color the memory of what in childhood Whistler saw on the Neva
from a window in St. Petersburg? One will never know; in all prob-
ability the Nocturne in Black and Gold represented the fusion of
things remembered and the place was neither Cremorne Gardens
nor night on the Neva, but the essential explosion of fireworks at
night held with authority within Whistler's memory. These are
speculations that Ruskin did not know of, and had he known, would
have cared little for them. The painter who controlled Ruskin's
imaginative life was Turner; for Turner's paintings Ruskin's intu-
itions were unfailingly alive; placed before one of Turner's seascapes
he could see everything that was there and much that was not.
Turner filled completely the place reserved by Ruskin for contra-
dictions of his theories, for his flights of speculation beyond the
rational limits of taste and aesthetic dogma.

The sight of Nocttirne in Black and Gold infuriated Ruskin; he
had just cause to think of Americans as charlatans and here was

!32 THE WORLD OF

proof of it; he had expected to see "absolute rubhish" and here it
was. If he saw the Carlyle portrait he saw it with his mind made up
that that too was not a painting. In respect to Whistler's painting
a glance would suffice, would tell him all he needed to know, and
he* knew enough to know of Howell's household in Fulham Road,
and had probably heard through Rossetti more than enough of
Whistler's friendship with Howell and Rosa Corder. If he had over-
heard gossip arising out of Chelsea (and it is difficult to think that
he had not), Whistler's pictures represented an immorality-he
sought out the price asked by Whistler for the Noctiirne, and saw
that^t was two hundred and fifty guineas-an enormous price to ask
for a piece of what he thought was no more than a scrawling of
paint across the canvas. There was no work in it at alL

Ruskin felt it his duty to tell the workmen of Great Britain the
enormity of the crime that he had witnessed; his imaginary friends,
the laborers, should hear of it; Sir Courts Lindsay the banker should
know in what contempt Ruskin and his friends held his choice of
Whistler as an artist.

In Fors Clcnrigera of July 2, 1877, Ruskin voiced his charges
against Whistler which were:

For Mr. Whistler's own sake, no less than for the pro-
tection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to
have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-edu-
cated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect
of -wilful imposture. 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.

A few weeks later George Boughton whom Whistler had met in
Paris in the Fifties saw him at The Arts Club, told him he wished
to talk quietly with hirn in a corner, and showed him Fors Clavigera
of July 2. Whistler said: "It is the most debased style of criticism I
have had thrown at me yet." Boughton, like so many friends of artists
in similar situations, half enjoyed the prospect of a fight and re-
plied, "Sounds rather like a libel."

'Well-that I shall try to find out!" said Whistler; yet he did not
act. On the surface his financial disorder did not seem hopeless. His

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 133

brother had married a cousin of his wealthy friend, Luke lonides.
Whistler did not see that Ruskin's attack would cause further dis-
trust of his abilities among those who had witnessed the failure of
his attempts to make the Peacock Room a work of art. The Grosvenor
Gallery had been such a fashionable affair that gallery had been
opened to rival the Royal Academy and as far as a glittering attend-
ance to an opening show went, the rivalry was established.

Up to this time Whistler's quarrels with the critics were for the
most part an exchange of words without benefit of print, but in 1867
he did reply to P. G. Hamerton's notice of his Symphony in White
No. Ill in the Saturday Review. It was the best of all his earlier
remarks on critical irrelevance, and it proved that the butterfly signa-
ture contained the sting of a scorpion. In that reply he advanced
his skill in quoting the critic to the critic's greatest possible disad-
vantage, and with a military flourish created a field of battle in which
no quarter was asked or given:

How pleasing that such profound prattle should inevitably
find its place in print! "Not precisely a symphony in
white ... for there is a yellowish dress . . . brown hair,
etc. . . . another with reddish hair . . . and of course
there is the flesh color of the complexions."

Bon Dieu! did this wise person expect w 7 hite hair and
chalked faces? And does he then, in his astounding con-
sequence, believe that a symphony in F contains no other
note, but shall be a continued repetition of F, F, F? . . .
Fool!

The letter was an exact rendition of Whistler's speaking voice
and the way his mind worked. Readers of the letter had a direct view
of the little black-haired man with a white forelock, and they
caught the reflected beam of the eyeglass screwed into his right
eye. The letter also disheartened all thought of pity for either artist
or critic. To sentimental readers of his reply, Whistler fought a
shade too well; his appeal was to abstract justice and to the brain
if any sympathy was required it was for the critic who had made a
foolish mistake, not for the artist. The artist, so many thought, was
one who had creative powers, not brains or wit; the real artist \vas
more like Watts, a creature in delicate health and protected by the

134 THE WORLD OF

ladies of Little Holland House, or like Millais, who was robustly
kind to even*one 7 or like Rossetti, a queer person who kept strange
animals as pets. The Whistler legend that Whistler had begun to
create for himself ran counter to middleclass a prosperous, comfort-
loving middleclass morality. That public would enjoy finding the
artist himself in error; then, perhaps, they could pity him and at the
same time assert the superiority of their own ability to make mis-
takes, to forgive themselves, to forgive the world, and yet be suc-
cessful.

Whistler did not foresee that Ruskin's attack would affect even the
two Miss Alexanders, that their friends would ridicule even the
Harmony in Grey and Green and make Miss Cicely who resented
his not restoring the face of her doll, who hated to think of the
hours wasted in his studio when she might better have been out
of doors, ashamed of the picture that showed her standing impa-
tiently behind his back. In the present emergency, like the scorpion
encircled by fire (a fire represented by restive creditors), Whistler
was trapped. He was without pocket-money; he hired cabs to drive
about London, and at the end of a drive wound up at the doors of
friends asking for cab fare, plus the loan of a shilling. However much
experience he had gained during his student days in Paris of Vie
de Boheme, there was a keener edge to his lack of money in 1878.
He now dressed far better and more expensively. He made much of
having his hair dressed well and instructed each barber who served
him in the particular art of arranging his hair, scolding and cheering
the man alternately. His model Jo had left him, and in her place he
had installed Maud, a smaller English version of Jo who had Jo's
coloring, the same flash of reddish hair, but was less violent in
temper, had fewer brains and was of less help in saving household
money. Godwin, the most intimate of his recent friends, had dis-
solved partnership with Norman Shaw, one of Leyland's architects
of the remodeled house in Princes Gate, and was too deeply en-
meshed in debts and legal troubles of his own to offer help. Godwin
was also in ill health, Beatrix Godwin, his new wife, complained
that her husband, despite his continual round of gallantries, had
chills at night and nearly suffocated her with blankets when they
went to bed.
The charges against Whistler in Fors Clavigera meant that his

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 135

money-granting patrons had become increasingly elusive. They ap-
peared regularly enough at his Sunday breakfasts in the new White
House to accept his sendee of pancakes with maple syrup, to see him
refuse to sit at one place at the table, but instead to cam 7 a chair
with him and talk to each guest, laughing as he did so. If bill
collectors stepped in, he pressed them into action as waiters. Under
the spell of Whistler 's commands, they removed plates and returned
with tea and coffee cups; this was all very gay, but the guests did not
buy the pictures in his studio. If they had, many of his debts would
have been cleared in six months* time; they preferred to listen to
his talk, his invectives against critics, against Leyland. They ac-
cepted Whistler as they accepted a performance by Henry Irving.
The scene was one of high and impolite comedy.

Whistler traveled out to Hughenden the day was fine, it was
Septemberto see Lord Beaconsfield, Disraeli. Surely, he thought,
they would have something in common, and Disraeli's portrait could
be painted. He walked into the park of the estate; the elderly states-
man was leaning on the arm of a companion; Whistler introduced
himself; the old man was distantly polite in the manner of elder
statesmen. Yes, he recognized Whistler, or pretended that he did,
and then slowly walked away on the arm of his companion, talking
blandly of other things. Whistler had been smoothly cut; there was
nothing for him to do but to go back to Chelsea. A few months
later Disraeli's portrait was painted by Millais.

Far-fetched attempts of this kind to check his falling market did
not bring expected results, which in a great emergency is all-too-
usual. Whistler was not to be saved by intervention of the demigods
of state. A little help came by way of Howell; Howell had intro-
duced Whistler to a Pall Mall engraver, Henry Graves; Graves
agreed to make mezzotints of the Carlyle, and the venture brought
Whistler eighty pounds; this was very well, but it was not enough.
Nor was HowelPs payment of a hundred guineas to Whistler for
Rosa Corder enough; nor were the continued friendships of the
lonides enough, nor the friendship of Lady Colin Campbell enough.
The well of disorder, which had become a whirlpool of Whistler's
debts with the White House at their center, was too deep. There
was nothing to do but to open counterattack upon Ruskin in court-
to sue Ruskin for libel and a thousand pounds damages.

, 36 THE WORLD OF

Anderson Rose, Whistler's solicitor, agreed to act; he believed
that Whistler had a case and Ruskin no case at all. He saw Ruskin's
lawyers, they agreed with him and attempted to dissuade their client
from taking the stand in court against Whistler. Ruskin was ill;
more than that, one of his deeper cycles of mental illness had arrived;
he could not appear in court-that was understood; but he would
not allow the case to be settled out of court. Ruskin had heard that
Whistler had called one of Turners paintings of the sun, "a red
wafer"; that was an indignity he would not allow. He convinced
himself that it was he who was persecuted, that he needed the sup-
port of all his friends, everyone and in particular, Burne-Jones,
Whistler's successful rival for attention at Grosvenor Gallery. He
felt he could prove in court what he had written about Whistler,
that the man was an amateur in art and shopkeeping. It was useless
for Ruskin's lawyers to argue with him at all; reluctantly they re-
ported failure of settlement out of court to Anderson Rose. Ruskin
was far more eager to quarrel in court than Whistler; Whistler
knew that the verdict might well turn against him; he was not a
popular artist and Ruskin was an influential critic, the only critic of
art in England whose word carried weight, enough weight to de-
stroy him, as it seemed to be doing now.

The coming trial demanded the most of Whistler's histrionic gifts,
gifts that had been tested in private theatricals during his early days
in London, gifts that had reached a dubious eminence in the Pea-
cock Room at Princes Gate. He could not depend on his friends
among fellow artists. Among popular artists he knew Charles Keene
well, the cartoonist for Punch, but Keene did not wish to commit
himself, and Punch, of course, was against all forms of the "new"
in art, even the Pre-Raphaelites were a shade too "new" for them
as George du Maurier's drawings showed. Whistler could not hope
for help from that quarter. Keene saw the case as any journalist
would see it as a 'lark." George du Maurier would see it in the
same light; beneath the surface of their neutrality lay the half-
envious jealousy of the cartoonist for the studio painter. This has
always existed and always will. The only witness that Whistler
could depend upon was himself.

Whistler's general situation was so bad, so completely unstable,
that the suit for libel against Ruskin was in actuality Whistler's

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 137

trial for life. If he lost, the dark present would forecast an increas-
ingly darker future. He would lose face in London which had be-
come his choice of place for the working out of his destiny. He en-
joyed fighting, but here the stage was large enough to inspire stage
fright; a misstep on his part could lead only to further disaster.

xn

H,

_E was assured of publicity. That he knew, and when the case
opened on a dark day, November 26, 1878, in the Exchequer Divi-
sion at Westminster, in a gloomy, ill-lit courtroom, the press was
there, even Henry James, the young American novelist, on an as-
signment from the New York weekly, Tlie Nation. Across the
street from the building, Whistler had hired a room which held
a collection of his paintings for the purpose of showing them
to the jury. The courtroom was not the place to exhibit paint-
ings of any kind; even a well-trained judge of art would have been
discouraged by lack of light and the natural confusions which arise
in a legal discussion of art.

Baron Huddleson who sat on the bench had chosen a special
jury. Representing the case for Whistler were Mr. Serjeant Parry
and Mr. Petherham; a Mr. Bowen represented the defendant, Rus-
kin. Mr. Parry spoke respectfully of Ruskin's high reputation as a
critic of art in England and America and quoted the passage from
Fors Clavigera that had caused offense. He also had a few words of
modest praise for his client, speaking strangely enough of Whistler's
reputation in the United States, which was not as great then as it
was later. He mentioned his work as a painter, but stressed his activi-
ties as an etcher, and stressed most of all Whistler's industry, "an
unwearied worker in his profession/' he called him. Mr. Parry's open-
ing was better than it seemed. It was truthful, sober, and a little
bit dull; we know now that he was clearing the stage for his client
who was dressed in a double-breasted suit of navy-blue serge.

Whistler was the first witness. After he had asserted that he was
born in St. Petersburg of a military family, his effort was to prove
his education in art, a delicate point. Ruskin's charge of "ill-edu-

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER J39

cated" had struck home. Whistler said to the court: "I studied in
Paris with Du Maurier, Poynter, Armstrong." He knew their names
would be familiar names in court, and the statement was disarm-
ingly truthful. He spoke of a gold medal he had received at The
Hague; he named the eight pictures hung at the Grosvenor Gallery
and was careful to name certain people who had bought them
the Hon. Mrs. Percy Windham, wife of a Tory statesman, and Mrs.
Leyland. He mentioned his portrait of Thomas Carlyle; he men-
tioned that his price for Nocturnes was two hundred guineas, that
he had received as much from the Hon. Percy Windham; that most
of his pictures were sold before they had appeared on the walls of
the Grosvenor Caller} 7 . Whistler had picked up where Parry had
left off; he was sparring for time; his opening was nearly as dull as
Parry's; he had scarcely caught the attention of the court; he was sur-
prisingly modest.

A few of his pictures were shown to the court, the portraits of
Irving and Carlyle The Falling Rocket was presented to the court
upside down. There was a moment of confusion, yet those who had
come to the court for excitement were in danger of disappointment.
Uneasiness filled the room as well as first signs of boredom. The
reporters looked bored; how could one judge art in a courtroom;
someone would have to talk with more enlightenment. The attorney-
general began to cross-examine Whistler who had remarked that
The Falling Rocket was a night-piece that represented the fireworks
at Cremorne.

"Not a view of Cremorne?" asked the attorney.

"If it were called a view of Cremorne, it would certainly bring
about nothing but disappointment on the part of the beholders"
with these words Whistler drew a laugh; he was beginning to feel
his way into his part. 'It is an artistic arrangement," he went on.
"It was marked two hundred guineas."

The attorney-general then took the plain man's attitude, some-
thing that the jury could understand: "Is not that what we, who are
not artists, would call a stiffish price?"

"I think it very likely that that may be so."

"But artists always give good value for their money, don't they?"

'1 am glad to hear that so well-established." A single laugh was
heard; Whistler was talking over the heads of his audience. He was

140 THE WORLD OF

still cautious, and his use of irony was of a character not likely to
be clear to those who heard him. '1 do not know Mr. Ruskin, or that
he holds the view that a picture should only be exhibited when it is
finished, when nothing can be done to improve it, but that is the
correct view; the arrangement in black and gold was a finished pic-
ture, I did not intend to do anything more to it."

"Now, Mr. Whistler. Can you tell me how 7 long it took you to
knock off that nocturne?*' The attorney-general's contempt was ob-
vious; he had slightly overstepped the line of formality.

Whistler leaned forward in the witness box: "I beg your pardon?"

This was a real exchange. The attorney-general retreated half a
step:

"Oh! I am afraid that I am using a term that applies rather to my
own work. I should have said, 'How long did you take to paint that
picture?* "

The plain man's attitude was being slowly turned to Whistler's
advantage, not the attorney-general's. The exchange of ironies began
to show that Whistler was not ill-educated and not quite a cockney.

Whistler resorted to further politeness.

"Oh, no! permit me, I am too greatly flattered to think that you
apply to work of mine any term that you are in the habit of using
with reference to your own. Let us say then how long did I take to
loiock off,' I think that is it to knock off that nocturne; well, as
well as I remember, about a day."

Unknowingly the attorney-general had opened a breach for Whis-
tler; the conversation was still over the heads of the listeners. It was
a play of words, rather than true action, but an opportunity was in
the air.

"Only a day?" said the attorney-general.

'Well, I won't be quite positive; I may still have put a few more
touches to it the next day if the painting were not dry. I had better
say then that I was two days at work on it."

"Oh, two days!" The attorney-general had probably heard of the
time spent by Millais and Hunt on their pictures. It seemed safe
to drive his point home. "The labor of two days, then, is that for
which you ask two hundred guineas!"

For the past five minutes Whistler had had time to think. A breach
had opened wide the attorney-general had sprung his own trap;

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 141

the conversation was no longer intellectual; it had to do with time,
human effort, and money not with art. It had to do with work that
prepared a man for excellence in any profession.

"No; I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime."

There was applause. To Henry James the case looked like a farce,
but whatever remained of it was under Whistler's control; the public
character that he had been building up in his own name had ma-
tured. At the center of his being was an artist, but his creation in
the courtroom was one that used arts other than those of paint, brush,
and the etcher's tools. The creation was as histrionic as one of Rus-
kin's ironic angry dances, his gown flapping, before undergraduates
at Oxford. It was also literary; it was appropriate to the situation in
which Whistler's antagonist was a writer of the first order. Ruskin
was undeniably mad, but he had genius and the gifts of a great
romantic poet. For him, a mistake in judgment could not be fatal;
the trial could do little harm to him; yet the trial was to change the
course of Whistler's life.

After the applause, the attorney-general changed the subject:
"You have been told that your pictures exhibit some eccentric-
ities?"

"Yes; often."

'Tou send them to the galleries to incite the admiration of the
public?"

"That would be such a vast absurdity on my part that I don't
think I could."

'Tou know that many critics entirely disagree with your views as
to these pictures?"

'It would be beyond me to agree with the critics."

'*You don't approve of criticism then?"

The attorney-general had opened the way for another point to be
made. The point was intellectual, and would probably be lost, but
by this time Whistler had the concentrated attention of the court-
room:

<{ \ should not disapprove in any way of the technical criticism by
a man whose whole life is passed in the practice of the science which
he criticizes; but for the opinion of a man whose life is not so passed
I would have as little regard as you would, if he expressed an
opinion on law." The statement had nothing to do with Ruskin;

[42 THE WORLD OF

Ruskin was something of an artist himself; his drawings, largely
architectural, had distinction. Whistler's point was to rule out the
aesthetic opinions held in the courtroom, and later to establish the
artist as the highest possible authority on art. The stroke was a bold
one, and later in the trial, it was to lead to general confusion on the
part of the jury.

He was then asked why he called Mr. Irving an arrangement in
black, and Baron Huddleston, who was not without wit, broke in
with: "It is the picture, and not Mr. Irving, that is the arrangement";
and he also said, so as to keep balance between Ruskin and Whis-
tler, that a critic must be competent to form an opinion and bold
enough to express that opinion in strong terms.

The court adjourned to permit the jury to visit the Probate Court
where Whistler's pictures (which had been stored across the street
in the Westminster Palace Hotel) were put on view. After that inter-
val the duel between the attorney-general and the plaintiff-witness
was resumed. . . .

"You mean, Mr. Whistler, that the initiated in technical matters
might have no difficulty in understanding your work. But do you
think now that you could make me see the beauty of that picture,
The Falling Rocket?"

Whisder then sho\ved how much he had learned from watching
Henry Irving; he paused, he gazed at the attorney-general's face
as if to measure it it was a long look; his eye glass shone. Then
he turned to the picture held up for inspection of the court. An-
other long grave look, then back to the attorney-general's face; the
court was silent, it waited; then there was an explosive, "No! Do
you know I fear it would be as hopeless as for a musician to pour
his notes into the ear of deaf man/'

The court roared; it had expected entertainment, and it was now
getting it. The proceedings were turning into mock melodrama.
Whistler's each word, each gesture, was well calculated for maxi-
mum effect; he could now well afford to step down and allow Albert
Moore, a minor artist, but one whose friendship he could trust,
speak in his favor, but William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel's
brother and art critic, was the next witness.

It was a surprise to see W. M. Rossetti take the stand in Whis-
tler's favor. This particular Rossetti was the least gifted member of

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 143

the family which had three poets, Christina and Dante Gabriel and
their romantic father; but it was William Michael who supported
the family in their darkest days by his critical journalism, by a
vast variety of deadly hack work; he had an earnest, sober mind and
great honesty. Burne-Jones circulated a story about him which ran
as follows. One day William Morris tried to interest Dante Gabriel
in Sigurd the Volsung and in Fafnar, figures out of Norse mythology
which were of particular moment to Morris; Dante Gabriel grew im-
patient and protested: "I don't care for that stuff; it's too unnatu-
ral. How 7 can one take a real interest in a man who has a dragon for
a brother?" Morris gravely thought the matter over, then, staring
straight at Dante Gabriel for a full minute, shouted back, Td much
rather have a dragon for a brother than a bloody fool."

There was nothing in common between Whistler and William
Michael; yet William Michael knew that at this trial Burne-Jones
was Ruskin's man. William Michael did not like Burne-Jones, nor
did he like the artist's big, dark, pretentious house in Kensington,
nor his air of flattery to the great, nor the kind of stories he told
when their backs were turned. Burne-Jones delighted in telling how
crazy old Ruskin mistook a half-dozen of his water colors for oils.
That was one reason for William Michael's sympathy for Whistler;
another was the fact that Whistler's levity cheered the moments of
Dante Gabriel's deepest melancholy; and another was an abstract
love of justice that existed in the back of William Michael's honest
mind. He could not praise Whistler highly, but he could and did
insist that The Falling Rocket was worth two hundred guineas; he
was glad to do something to counter-balance whatever Burne-Jones
w r ould have to say in defense of Ruskin's obvious mistake.

In Ruskin's absence at court, Burne-Jones stood for him. He was
the British ideal of how an artist should look, a little shaggy around
the head, bearded, gray-blue-eyed, and with a relaxed and easy man-
ner. He attacked unfinished pictures and he believed all of Whis-
tler's Nocturnes to be unfinished, not works of art. It was clear that
he agreed with Ruskin that his own work was superior to Whistler's,
but despite his ease of manner, his talk was a dull recital of how
artists failed to paint night pieces. The shadow of boredom fell across
the courtroom.

Nor did the boredom lift when the elderly Frith appeared to say

144 THE WORLD OF

his few words against Whistler, nor did it lift when Tom Taylor,
critic of the London Times read aloud his review of the Grosvenor
Show in which he had attacked Whistlers Nocturnes.

A Titian portrait was presented to the jury, and the jury protest-
ing that it was tired of looking at Mr. Whistler's pictures refused
to look. The jury was worn out. Yet the jury's mistake of a Titian for
a Whistler brought a last flourish of excitement to those who reported
the trial, and the incident was in keeping with the air of fantasy the
trial created.

Baron Huddleston summed up the case by standing at the center
between Ruskin and Whistler. "There are certain words by Mr. Rus-
kin about which I should think no one would entertain a doubt:
those words amount to a libel." He then brought up the question of
substantial damages or of "contemptuous damages to the extent of a
farthing/' and the weary jury took the hint. The jury had had
enough talk of art; it could understand that a man of middle age had
painted a picture that contained the knowledge of a lifetime, and its
rough sense of justice found Ruskin guilty of libel with damages to
the extent of a farthing to Whistler as a gesture of contempt.

The costs of the trial were to be equally shared by Ruskin and
Whistler. Ruskin's friends raised Ruskin's share, but Whistler was
forced into bankruptcy. He was put to the effort of turning the trial
into a moral victory for himself, of telling the story of it over and
over again, of acting out the parts of the attorney-general, the judge,
and Burne-Jones, and, of course, of writing pamphlets on the trial,
and of reading Ruskin and annotating him. At last, twelve years
later, he gathered all his papers together and published them under
the title of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Twelve years later,
he met Miss Harriet Monroe, an eager young woman from Chicago
who was then visiting London, and for her he re-enacted Burne-
Jones's being cross-examined by Ruskin's attorney with the question,
"Do you see any art quality in that Nocturne?" For a split second,
Burne-Jones lost his poise and stuttered, 'Tes" in contradiction to
what he had said before, then saying, "I must speak the truth you
know/' He then showed Miss Monroe a watch chain on his vest
and the famous farthing he had won at the Ruskin trial, dangling
from it, but no one ever saw Whistler consulting a watch.
Talk of the trial diverted Whistler from the melodrama of bank-

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 145

ruptcy in Tite Street Many paintings were slashed, cut into rib-
bons to prevent their falling into the hands of creditors. Others van-
ished as if by sleight of hand (which was an art possessed by Howell)
into HowelFs house on Fulham Road. In Chelsea a young man
walked up to Whistler, introduced himself, and said, "Oh, Mr.
Whistler, Fm so sorry about the White House and your losses."
Whistler replied, "Don't pity me think of those poor devils, my
creditors," turned on his heel and walked away.

The White House was immediately leased by Harry Quilter.
Quilter was a stocky, brash little man, a free-lance journalist free
lance because of his aggressively short temper which cut short his
jobs on various newspapers. Like many Victorians, his hobby was
drawing and he turned out an occasional painting. Quilter followed
Tom Taylor (who originally was a drama critic) as art critic on the
London Times. He had his eye on the White House. Quilter had
very nearly all the qualities that Ruskin assigned to Whistler in
Fors Clavigera; he swaggered, bluffed and shouted his way into and
out of newspaper offices; he had a large fund of journalistic informa-
tion and the power to recite it with unqualified assurance.

Meanwhile Whistler's grocer turned up with a bill for tomatoes
and fruit, which had been running for years at Lindsey Row a bill
amounting to six hundred pounds. In Tite Street Whistler offered
him two Nocturnes and his Valparaiso, but the grocer, who had
read of the Ruskin trial feared to take them. He wanted money.
Whistler replied, "I think the best thing is not to refer to the past-
Til let it go, and in the future well have a weekly account wiser,
you know."

As guests entered the White House for Whistler's Sunday-morn-
ing breakfast in the spring of 1879, furniture was being numbered
for sale at auction by bailiffs who served breakfast, and as Whistler
motioned the guests to their seats, he said, looking the men over with
marked approval, "They are wonderful fellows. You wall see how ex-
cellently they wait on table, and tomorrow, you know, if you want,
you can see them sell the chairs you sit on. Amazing!"

The bailiffs were in attendance and possession: one evening
Whistler's guests for dinner saw seven bailiffs drinking beer in the
garden, beer that had been treated with something stronger in it,
so as to keep the men quiet while Whistler's small party was in

146 THE WORLD OF

progress. It began to rain, to thunder, to hail, but the men in the
garden had fallen asleep.

"Look," said Whistler, "at the seven sleepers of Ephesus: stick
pins in them, shout in their ears see you can't wake them look
at them, it's amazing."

Auction bills, bills of sale, covered the front of the house and one
night a storm tore the bills into shreds and tatters. Whistler woke
up the bailiffs who were sleeping inside, told them to tidy things up,
paste up fresh bilk so the house would be neatly up for sale the fol-
lowing morning. His mother was still ill at Hastings; he was in the
house alone with the bailiffs, drawing up plans for further econo-
mies. His liabilities were four thousand six hundred and forty-one
pounds, nine shillings and three pence; his assets were one thousand
nine hundred and twenty-four pounds and four pence; he was far
under the weather.

He could not work in his studio, yet restlessly he sketched three
paintings in caricatures of which the central figure was Leyland,
a lobster with a shirt frill: 'Whom the gods wish to make ridiculous,
they furnish with frill," said Whistler. This was called The Loves of
the Lobsters An Arrangement in Rats; another showed Noah's Ark
on a hill with frilled creatures dancing around it; another was The
Gold Scab Eruption in Frilthy Lucre with a creature wearing frills,
seated on the White House and playing the piano with scales of gold
in sovereigns dropping from it. Whistler in anger was not unlike
Poe; in his fury his imagination turned to the grotesque; his gifts
of irony and of paradox were purely literary. He lost those gifts
whenever he attempted to translate them into the arts of caricature
in drawing or in painting.

In the bankruptcy court, Whistler, dressed in a long black frock
coat, stormed against the rich. The poise, the authority he had won
and sustained in the Ruskin trial, were gone. His voice shrilled and
the court had to silence him.

The examiners appointed for the sale of Whistler's effects Ley-
land, Howell and Thomas Way; of the three, Way, the engraver and
print publisher, was the most sympathetic. In a thoroughly cool,
level-headed manner he continued to help Whistler. He knew Whis-
tler's gifts as an etcher and trusted them.
Irving visited the rapidly emptying house in Tite Street and from

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 147

a mass of half -destroyed canvases rescued his portrait for thirty
pounds. He had recognized his legs beneath the rubbish. Augustus
Hare walked in with a large party to see Whistler among his ruins.
He glanced at the caricatures, but was more deeply shocked to see
the little man, his white forelock waving in the air, skipping in fury
around the room. The exhibition was not a pretty one. Whistler sent
a small show to the Grosvenor Gallery; it received direct and conclu-
sive critical attack. Whistler was spoken of as an artist who once
had high promise; it was admitted that he was an etcher; at the mo-
ment it seemed that if Whistler had won a moral victory, the
aesthetic laurels went to Ruskin; attempts to raise a subscription for
Whistler failed.

By September 1879 there was nothing for Whistler to do but to
leave London. He had heard that Ruskin's share of the trial's cost,
three hundred fifty-two pounds, twelve shillings, six pence, had been
paid. He learned that the little paper L'Art which hoped to raise
funds for him, had collected almost nothing at all, that Harry
Quilter had actually bought the White House with the purpose of
remodeling it for two thousand seven hundred pounds. He held his
last reception, a very small one, and among the guests was Godwin.
They placed a ladder at the door and Whistler climbed it to write
on Portland Stone above it: "Except the Lord build the house, they
labor in vain that build it. E.W. Godwin F.S.A. built this one."
Whistler's early readings in the Bible had served him well, but
never better than in this farewell to Tite Street. The next day he
left for Venice.

xni

OR the past three years Whistler had made provisional plans
to go to Venice each summer and now the opportunity arrived in the
form of urgent necessity. He could try to live cheaply in Venice;
the change of scene would certainly force economies upon him that
were difficult to learn in London. He had received a small advance
and a commission from the Arts Society to do twelve Venetian etch-
ings. The Arts Society had a young man as its new manager; he was
willing to take risks. Though Whistler's Nocturnes were now selling
at auction for twelve pounds ten shillings, perhaps the falling market
would not materially affect the prices of his etchings. Venice was
familiar to the well-to-do Englishman on holiday; the vogue for buy-
ing etchings had begun its ascendency. Prospects for the combination
of Whistler, the buyer of etchings, and Venice were not too bad; the
investment had the possibility of profit.

Whistler came to Venice at one of the two seasons of the year
the other was spring when the sunfilled city was at its best. The
streets, squares, Baroque gardens and facades shone with light from
both sky and waters of the canals. Though the city showed its great-
est beauty, Whistler's spirit was at its worst. He did not care for
historical remains or ruins; the southern Renaissance and Baroque
spirit had no charms for him with the single exception of Velasquez'
paintings. The deep red brocades on the walls of the Ca' Rezzonico,
now transformed by the sun into a red unknown to any other place
on earth, was not to his liking. He took rooms in that beautifully pro-
portioned late Renaissance Palazzo which looks out over the Grand
Canal and attempted to paint the sunset from a window. He swore
at the sun's brightness and at its glow as it disappeared from an eve-
ning sky. Nor did the darkness of the courtyard please him; likewise

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 149

the clumsy weighted remains of late Renaissance carvings in imita-
tion of late Roman decor did not please him. The courtyard, filled
with these remains, depressed and annoyed him.

He escaped to Florian's in San Marco square, the cafe frequented
by Americans from Whistler's day to Hemingway 's, and then re-
membered that he lacked the money to live there in the style he
best enjoyed. Florian's with its orchestras playing into the small
hours of the morning is close enough to the American dream of
Venice to hold its charm. From its tables to the right there is a view
of the gold-tinted archways of San Marco itself with gilded horses
riding above them, and across the way are the clock and bell tower.

Whistler's discomfort at Ca' Rezzonico sent him to other quarters,
quarters on the edges of Venice's slums, and there Maud Franklin
joined him. He would have none of the interiors of Palladio's churches.
He avoided the Venice that Ruskin had known so vividly and de-
scribed so memorably in The Stones of Venice. He disliked Italian
food, which he said was nothing but fowl, and brought bits of
chicken fat home to his room to fry into something he hoped would
resemble bacon. The chill of a Venetian winter was setting in and
he moved into the worst possible place in Venice, Riva degli Schi-
avoni, bleakly exposed to winds and hail.

His reverses of fortune in London had temporarily dulled his in-
stincts. His medium was changing; he painted less and tossed off a
number of pastels. He haunted the English Club and the American
consulate. To him Venice was a foreign city: he tried experiments
(probably suggested by Tiepolo) of filling his sketches with impres-
sions of light and air. In these his fine taste and sensibility remained
as it always was, but they were, somehow, less effective. They lacked
authority. At first his commissioned etchings came slowly. He could
and did catch details of movement in the courtyards and in the
golden tops of towers and spires, but the spirit of Venice was ill-fitted
to his temperament; he could not find peace within the churches.
He could not, like Henry James two years later, grope his way to an
understanding of Venice through its people.

The truth was that he was painfully homesick for London, for the
half-lights of London fog and rain, for the elegantly dressed press of
crowds on an autumn evening in Mayfair. He had been spoiled by
notoriety; he had grown used to ordering servants about, his valet,

150 THE WORLD OF

his maid, his models, the Greaves brothers. A hired gondolier was
poor substitute for the small retinue that followed his steps in Chel-
sea. His spirits were not broken but slightly twisted askew; every-
where he went in Venice, whether to cafes or clubs, he advanced his
habit of borrowing small change from British tourists. Love for the
English and their late Victorian glitter led him into their company;
hatred of them forced him to indulge in the petty revenges of bor-
rowing change that he did not intend to pay back. Stories of him
that traveled back to London were not flattering and reached the ears
of the Arts Society. The Arts Society began to worry about the com-
mission of twelve Venetian etchings.

His adjustment was slow. After rain, with water still dripping from
vines creeping over walls of high banked gardens, he began to mod-
ify his dislike of Venice; slowly he began to discover Tintoretto,
Titian, Veronese, Canaletto, Guardi, but he could find no way to
apply them to his own work. At Christmas mass at San Marco he
decided that the ceiling of the Peacock Room was better than its
dome; he said frankly enough: "Venice is an impossible place to sit
down and sketch, there is always something far better still just
around the corner."

He reassured his mother in his letters that he was actually work-
ing hard, that he rose early in the morning and worked till nightfall.
Because he disliked sketching with an Italian crowd around him
or in a gondola, he sat or stood restlessly at a window and sketched
the views from it. He sought out small canals, doorways darkened
by overhanging shadows, and beggars to look at. It was what he had
done at Wapping in London, and he thought he had found a way
to look at Venice; but shipping was the essential quality of the Lon-
don he first saw, and Venice was both a city of churches and of
tourists. He had to find a new style of etching to catch even a fleeting
impression of what he saw.

The Arts Society in London need not have worried; Whistler's new
style of etching was something that would please the public. The
etchings were quick, glancing, subtle tourist-eye views of places that
had been overlooked. Even the crudest buyer of etchings could dis-
cern the presence of style and an expert sense of design. Of the more
familiar scenes in Venice the buyer could easily find a print or a
photograph, but the Whistler etching was unique. Whistler may

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 151

have been conscious of a commercial lightness, of doing precisely
what would sell, as he sketched his plates for his Venetian etchings.
Perhaps not, but if his instincts failed him in seeking out quarters
to live well in Venice, they were very much alive in guiding his
hand toward pleasing the eyes of British and American tourists.

In his costume, he dropped the frock coat and looked more
like the artist on holiday. His curls and the white forelock were set
against a very broadbrimmed brown hat, tilted far back on his head.
He wore a dark jacket and light trousers and a very low collar with a
long thin black tie loosely knotted in a bow. At night and usually
at Florian's his white duck suits reflected lights from gas jets and
candles, and as he stepped from its shadows to cross San Marco
Square his figure reflected the soft light of the moon. He found a
room in the Casa Jankovitz to which he brought a mixed company
of Americans, Russians, Poles, and Dutch. The company was by no
means of the brilliance of what he had known in London, and
among them was a Russian, whose name is now forgotten, who
claimed to do better pastels than Whistler.

One night Whistler hired a barge and a band to play 'Tankee
Doodle" on it; the barge was flooded with lights that showed several
of his pictures and it sailed the length of the Grand Canal until it
met Whistler's gondola near the Riva where Whistler laughed aloud
from the darkness. When he saw one of Ruskin's friends high on
a scaffolding at San Marco sketching a detail, he pinned a sign on
which was written "I am totally blind" to his coat tail. Stories of
these adventures, however true or false they were, diverted tourists
passing through Venice and revived the legends of Whistler's stu-
dent life in Paris. Among them appeared the story of a quarrel with
an Italian landlady who lived on a floor below him. One hot day
Whistler noticed that she had set her goldfish bowl out on her
window sill; it was said that he let down a fishing line, caught the
fish, fried them and returned them to the bowl, so that the woman
would think that her fish had been killed by the rays of the sun.
There is little possibility that the story has literal truth in it; it is a
schoolboy's story but it does add to the general atmosphere of
Whistler's discontent in Venice; it adds to the air of forced levity
that he did not feel, to the loss of poise that his ego had suffered,
to his hatred of the position in which he found himself.

J52 THE WORLD OF

Even less fortunate was the story of his accidental meeting with
Harry Quilter who had so recently bought the White House. Both
men had selected within a narrow canal the same doorway to sketch
and their gondolas collided. Whistler shouted "Hi, hi, you've taken
my doorway" and Quilter insisted that he had been working there
a week; Whistler still claimed his priority, that he had had an iron
grating put up to improve the design; at last Quilter offered Whis-
tler the use of his gondola to sketch in and Whistler's gondola
backed out of the canal. As Whistler sketched, he talked to Quilter
as though he did not know it was he, and told him about 'Arry
Quilter of The Times, what a stupid critic he was, and gave him a
particularly unflattering account of all of 'Arry Quilter's activities.
The interview delighted Quilter; he had a Whistler story to tell in
London, and he could also tell how superior his drawing of the
doorway was compared to Whistler's and how generous he had been
in offering Whistler his gondola. Quilter, with all his blunted sensi-
bilities alert, was, as he told the story, a gentleman, and kind to an
inferior artist.

In Venice Whistler attempted to revive his Sunday morning break-
fasts in the rooms he shared with Maud Franklin. Maud was pert,
pretty and cheerfully helpful; she made excellent coffee but Whistler
could never learn to set the table correctly. He hovered over a spirit
lamp, laughed with melodramatic hollowness because the Italians had
no maple syrup and the making of good pancakes was unsuitable to
Venetian climates. The scene was a half deliberate parody of earlier
scenes in Lindsey Row and Tite Street. He shifted the hour of his
receptions to the high-tea hour of six o'clock in the afternoon and
the fare was a combination of Maud's coffee, hard-boiled eggs, sar-
dines, cigarettes and fruits, very like an American summer outdoor
lunch. Whistler showed his pastels and groups of his new etchings
and then gave burlesque reviews of them by London critics. The
showing closed with Whistler acting out the part of a London
business man, how he is waked up always at 8:30 each morning,
then a pantomime of his being closely shaved at a quarter of 9 and
arriving in the City at 10; Whistler waved his left arm in the direc-
tion of the pastels: "What will he make of this?" His obsession was
clear; he was thinking of Leyland. The guests seldom returned a
second time.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 153

To younger men whom he met in cafes over a plate of fish and
a bottle of the cheapest of Italian red wines, he would talk for hours
on the beauties of Vermeer and the small Dutch masters. In Venice
he was often possessed by memories of his extremely brief visits to
Holland; to him, the Dutch masters were always right; "their work
was covered with a single skin," and as he talked, he closed his eyes
to the sights and sounds of Venice.

XIV

V_?UDDENLY and without announcement in November, 1880,
Whistler was back in London. He dropped into his brother's house
in Wimpole Street and a few days later, he stepped from a cab into
the Fine Arts Society at a moment when it was holding a show of
Twelve Great Etchers. As he described the event later, "In one
hand I held my long cane; with the other I led by a ribbon a beauti-
ful little white Pomeranian dog; I spoke to no one, but putting up
rny glass I looked at the prints on the wall. 'Dear me! dear me!' I
said, 'still the same sad old work! Dear me!' And Haden was there
talking hard to Brown, and laying down the law, and as he said,
'Rembrandt/ I said, 'Ha, ha!' and he vanished/'

As he told the story the spirit of his arrival in London also re-
turned; the dark, soft, chill air was tonic to him he was out of the
wings and back on the stage again. He had kept his promise to the
Arts Society. He had only to make prints of his etchings; he had a
collection of pastels; he was unlocked for in London and generally
unwanted, but he was back in a homeless (for him) milieu that
had become and would remain his home.

The start was to be made all over again; the absence of slightly
more than a year had refreshed him. The retreat to Venice was
hardly a stay in a desert or wilderness; his work had changed; if
anything it was more selective, more certain of its refinements in
design, but less intense; there would be no more Miss Alexanders,
no more Battersea Bridges, no more Carlyles; there would be more
letter-writing to the papers there would be the same, and yet a
different Whistler, a Whistler who was more completely a public
figure, more of an art critic, more of a conversationalist on the subject
of art than a painter. The new Whistler was one who etched,

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 155

sketched pastels, talked, moved about London, met more people than
ever. He was there to preserve the best of the painting he had
already done. As for new work, there were the etchings; even among
unfriendly critics, a company which included Henry James (and
James represented the opinion of a younger generation), the etch-
ings were considered of established excellence. That was a realiry
that Whistler faced. Whether people liked him or not, whether they
liked his theories about art or briskly dismissed them, they would
concede that he was an able craftsman in the art of etching.

This new position was not by any means a happy one but it
could be made secure. He could talk and hold the attention of those
he wished to hear him; he could insist that Ruskin had made a mis-
take.

Ruskin had discontinued the publication of FOTS Clavigera for
fourteen months; he had resigned the Slade Professorship at Oxford,
but was re-elected to it. Through sleepless nights he fought against
his own particular devil, "The Evil One," he called it; it had trans-
formed him into an old man.

As Ruskin retired into the shadows, Whistler's figure slowly and
with some few reverses at first reemerged, and indeed, the new
generation with more enthusiasm than the preceding one accepted
him, not as a startling young artist, but as a singularly prodigal
godfather.

The 1880's ushered in a distinct variation of the Victorian age;
it was a slight, yet perceptible change in atmosphere that was to
prepare London for the turn of the century. On the second day of
1880 Ruskin wrote in his diary, "Utterly jaded and feverish with
nearly sleepless night and crowding thoughts." On this occasion
the self-named "Don Quixote of Denmark Hill" with no thought
of uttering a prophecy defined (by setting down in words the con-
dition of his own distracted mind) the temper of the next two
decades.

The changing mores of the British nineteenth century which
included a popularization of Darwinism, a revival of Roman Cathol-
icism, headed by Newman's Oxford Movement earlier in the cen-
tury, William Morris's and Ruskin's crusade for Socialism shook
the foundations of Anglican complacencies, causing as they did so,
many a "sleepless night and crowding thoughts." In the arts an

156 THE WORLD OF

"utterly jaded" atmosphere prevailed; a something "new" was sought,
which found one answer in the poems of Swinburne, another in
the pages of Henry Harland's The Yellow Book, the plays of Oscar
Wilde and Bernard Shaw, and still another in the presence of Whis-
tler as a public figure. In these the artist emerged as the "enemy"
of middle-class society.

The London of the l890 J s was not the same London that Whis-
tler had hoped to conquer in the 60's. It had conquered him in
1879. A sharp indication of a change in spirit came with the success
of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. The Pre-Raphaelites and the
Gothic revivals were waning slowly. The Romantic seriousness of
an earlier moment had begun to fade, was visibly "jaded." The
aesthetic atmosphere was changing from deep reds and purples
into violet blues and lavenders. Melodrama, never to be entirely
absent from the stage from that day to the midtwentieth century,
permitted topical comedy and burlesque to flourish side by side with
scenes of untarnished vice and virtue. Broad strokes of humor were
less frequent, had almost died with Dickens in 1870, was in a
grave with memories of Fielding and Tom Jones. Signs of wit ap-
peared; the age was becoming far more critical.

The new London was prepared, if not to welcome, to tolerate
a resurrected Whistler. He had contributed his share to the chang-
ing temper of the times in the Ruskin trial. In the rush of events
preceding and following that trial, lawsuits came and went like
a succession of thunderbolts and rainbows within the Whistler
circle, A week after the Ruskin trial Charles Augustus Howell's
case against the Metropolitan District Railway came up in Sheriffs
Court, Red Lion Square. Chaldon House in Fulham that had been
given to him by Ruskin stood in the path of the railway's de-
velopment; it was a Queen Anne house on which Howell claimed
to have spent seventeen hundred pounds so as to make it fit for
his selling of art objects as well as a home for his wife and chil-
dren. In private conversation he also claimed to have written a num-
ber of Ruskin 's books.

Visitors who had attended the Ruskin trial strolled into Sheriffs
Court, Red Lion Square. Howell, the plaintiff, took his cue from
Whistler and strode bravely into the witness box. He said that
Chaldon House at the time he entered it was the wreck of a very

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 157

fine Queen Anne house, that he immediately agreed to spend (he
did not tell the source of the money which probably came from
Ruskin) five hundred pounds for repairs, that the costs of repairs
mounted to two thousand pounds of which he had receipts for
seventeen hundred, that he had converted the house into an artists'
paradise with walls covered by William Morris's wallpaper, so
that he could fill a room with Rossetti's drawings one day and
Titian's paintings the next.

"My connection in the art world," Howell said, "is very con-
siderable. I am known as a collector of works of art. If people are
in a collecting humor they wall buy, and if they are not in that
humor I soon put them in it." He waited for the laugh that he
received, then went on, "I know the collections of most con-
noisseurs. People come to the house because they like me, and
because I make them comfortable." Another laugh followed this;
among the visitors were some who knew of the handsome young
women Howell also collected and whose presence in the house
materially added to its beauty. "I buy Whistler's pictures at his
house. I take them home and hang them up and I never laugh,
I never even smile. A man comes who appreciates a Nocturne, and
he goes mad till he gets that particular one. I cannot allow a
friend to remain in that critical state and then he gets it."

At that moment Whistler walked into the courtroom; Howell
waved a hand in his direction and said, "An arrangement in black
and white."

The cross-examining attorney asked Howell questions winding
up with a few remarks about arrangements of color, and then con-
cluded with: "I suppose the green is the customer and the gold
is the money they bring?"

Howell, cool as ever, replied, "No. The gold is thrown in to
show there is no ill-feeling."

Judgment was awarded to Howell for the sum of three thousand
six hundred and fifty pounds. Howell had talked of art to his own
advantage, and during the proceedings the presence of Whistler
gave the general atmosphere of the trial the quality of being in view
behind the footlights, a comedy acted out for the entertainment of
the public.

On Whistler s return to London it was less the painter than the

158 THE WORLD OF

actor that the public was willing to read about and to see. And
there was also Whistler, the pamphleteer who was read by the
few, a few young men who were about to enter the arts; his
brown paper-covered pamphlet, Whistler vs Ruskin, was being read,
especially its closing paragraphs:

'Taste" has long been confounded with capacity, and
accepted as sufficient qualification for the utterance of
judgment in music, poetry, and painting. Art is joyously
received as a matter of opinion; and that it should be based
upon laws as rigid and defined as those of the known sci-
ences, is a supposition no longer to be tolerated by modern
cultivation . . . The whole scheme is simple: the galler-
ies are to be thrown open on Sundays, and the public,
dragged from their beer to the British Museum, are to de-
light in the Elgin Marbles, and appreciate what the early
Italians have done to elevate their thirsty souls! An inroad
into the laboratory would be looked upon as an intrusion;
but before the triumphs of Art, the expounder is at ease,
and points out the doctrine that Raphael's results are within
reach of any beholder, provided he enroll himself with
Ruskin or hearken to Colvin in the provinces . . . Elo-
quence alone shall guide them and the readiest writer or
the wordiest talker is perforce their professor . . . The
Observatory at Greenwich under the direction of an
Apothecary! The College of Physicians with Tennyson as
President! and we know that madness is about. But a school
of art, with an accomplished litterateur at its head disturbs
no one! . . . Still, quite alone stands Ruskin, whose writ-
ing is art, and whose art is unworthy of his writing . . .
Let him resign his present professorship to fill the chair of
Ethics at the university. As master of English literature he
has a right to his laurels, while as the populariser of
pictures he remains the Peter Parley of painting.

As Whistler assumed his role of controversalist, young men in
London began to disregard the weightier aspects of Victorian moral-
ity, like the Prince of Wales himself Prince Edward Albert who in
middle-age was to become Edward VII. An emotional as well as an

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 159

intellectual revolt against domestic morality was taking place. Seeds
of that revolt had existed in an earlier generation, but the present
signs of it were vocal and consciously so. The scene was now pre-
pared for the arrivals of Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw at the
end of the decade. Whistler 's style of wit in print and in conver-
sation (he remarked that Henry James had been waiting for a
custom-made face but had not yet found one) was beginning to
set the fashion.

Whistler was correct enough in pointing out that the aging
Ruskin's first concern was in the field of Ethics and Morality, that
his teaching of art was not likely to produce painters. (Ruskin's
teaching of drawing classes in the Working Men's College during
the 50's was an experiment in social reform rather than an actual
teaching of art; this was freely admitted by Ruskin who said, "They"
his working-class students "are taught drawing primarily in order
to direct their attention accurately to the beauty of God s work in
the material universe," which thirty years later was the very concep-
tion of teaching art against which the younger generation was in
arms.)

Ruskin's later concerns with art were not only moral but dis-
tinctly literary; Whistler's later concern with art was to keep alive
what he had learned from his observation of Oriental art. But to
do so he was forced to use literary means of making his message
clear; paradoxically, he became a man of letters (as well as an
actor) by tour de force.

When Whistler returned to London he lived in rooms near Ox-
ford Circus and later in Belgravia. He remained within walking
distance of Regent Street where the Fine Arts Society gave him
two rooms in Air Street in which to work. In a very real sense he
was living on the town: Piccadilly Circus flowed beneath him, and
when he stepped out, the street flowed around him; he wore a long
fawn-colored frock coat and pink or yellow ribbons as shoe laces
in highly polished black slippers; as he walked from Regent Street
to Bond Street, he was more than visible; it was impossible not to
see him, not to be aware of his presence, not to know he was back
in town. The Fine Arts Society in preparation for an exhibition of

160 THE WORLD OF

his Venetian etchings gave him the use of a press above their show
rooms and it was there that he received his visitors, several of them
young men who had read his Whistler vs Ruskin pamphlet and
from then onwards, treated him as their "Master"; they watched him
pull proofs from the press and helped him, and in December, 1880,
the Venetian set of twelve etchings was shown. The show met with
a flurry of adverse criticism from the press; the etchings which
some five years later were to attract general approval gave Whistler
the chance to further his attacks on the critics. His notoriety had
again increased, but his income was largely non-existent; one of
his young admirers, Mortimer Menpes, loaned him a room in his
house.

No matter what the critics said of the Venetian etchings (Whis-
tler saved press cuttings of the review's and his replies to them in
the papers to publish later in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies')
the Fine Arts Society had received attention. It w r as publicity for
the Gallery as well as for Whistler, and the Gallery supported him
by a showing of his Venetian pastels early in 1881. The Gallery
was soon rewarded by a sale of the pastels that brought in eighteen
hundred pounds and Whistler moved out of his furnished room
back into a house in Tite Street, near the White House.

As the show prospered Whistler was suddenly called by his
brother, the doctor, down to Hastings. His mother who had been
ill since 1877 was dying and was dead before his arrival. Looking out
over the bleak January countryside where the Saxons fought the
Norman invaders hundreds of years ago, Whistler turned to his
brother and said, half in grief and half in irony, "It would have
been better if I had been the parson she had first wanted me to
be." The brothers buried her at Hastings; whatever restraint she had
over Whistler's movements and domestic behavior had melted away.

The year brought another important event in Whistler's life; the
portrait of his mother was shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Aside from an article by W. C. Brownell
in Scribner's, Whistler had received very little notice in the United
States. Following the Philadelphia showing of his mother's portrait,
the picture was shown (through the enthusiastic offices of the Ameri-
can painter, Alden Weir) at the Society of American Artists in New
York. This was the beginning of a growing appreciation of Whistler's

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 161

painting in the United States, the beginning of his legend in this
country, which in the last years of his life was to save him from the
extremes of poverty in London. From this time onward visiting
Americans in London and Paris made efforts to meet him, and in
London in particular, groups of Americans divided their hero-wor-
ship of their countrymen who lived abroad between Henry James
and Whistler. The two groups did not often mix; they formed two
temperamentally antagonistic camps with no love lost between them;
those who could listen to and talk to Whistler, found James stolid,
silent, unfeeling; those who admired James found Whistler's vanity,
wit, levity overtly spectacular and wearying. The followers of James
were genuinely annoyed by Whistler's shrill "Ha ha's" of simulated
laughter; they were inclined to think that Ruskin's judgment of
Whistler's character was not far wrong.

In his new quarters in Tite Street where walls were painted a
brilliant yellow and where Whistler's friends felt they were standing
at the center of an egg, Whistler expected crowds of carriages to
line the walks in front of his door. A few people came; but fashion-
able ladies did not care to risk sharing his notoriety. The exception
was Lady Meux and as she stood for him would not permit his usual
dictation to and criticism of his models. She talked back to him
softly but pointedly.

"Jimmy Whistler," she said, "either you keep quiet or 111 call in
someone to finish the portraits you've been trying to do of me."

Whistler flushed and danced with anger.

"How dare you, how dare you, how dare you/' he shouted back,
but could say no more. Lady Meux did not sit again. A few of the
portraits of this period were successful, but the greater number were
either unfinished or destroyed. Whistler could not recreate the for-
tunate moments that produced, even at great labor, his Miss Alex-
ander, or his Carlyle, or even the felicities of his Battersea Bridge.
To those who visited him he began reciting Poe:

Ah, broken is the golden bowl!
The Spirit flown forever!
* * #

The sweet Lenore
Hath gone before'

162 THE WORLD OF

With young Hope at her side,

And thou art wild

For the dear child
That should have been thy bride

For her the fair

And debonair,

That now so lowly lies

The life still there

Upon her hair,
The death upon her eyes.

"Of all poems/' he said, "this was the best." He was no longer
singing usual music-hall refrains. He rubbed out portions of his can-
vases with greater frequency, and began to confess openly to those
who sat for him his discontent with what he painted. Comments by
newspaper critics fretted him, and on days when he felt progress
on a canvas impossible, he rushed from his studio to his writing desk
and jotted down his replies. His great consolation at that moment
was the spoken admiration of Theodore Duret who wrote an article
on him in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Duret was a French business
man of considerable means and of scarcely less appreciation of subtle
painting; as he stood for Whistler to have his portrait done, he re-
newed Whistler's confidence in his own work. So far as his painting
was concerned, Duret's understanding was a prop he needed. To bal-
ance his self-criticism he needed French approval from someone he
respected. Duret was both intelligent and worldly and in return for
Duret's friendship, the portrait of Duret was done with a rightness
of touch that showed Whistler at his best. "The Spirit" had not quite
"flown forever."

Two local quarrels interrupted the further growth of Whistlers
confidence: the first was over the White House and the alterations
made by Harry Quilter:

Shall 'Arry, whom I have hewn down, still live among
us by outrage of this kind, and impose his memory upon
our pavement by the public perpetration of his posthumous
philistinism?

* * #

Shall the birthplace of art become the tomb of its parasite
in Tite Street?

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 163

The second was a record of an amusing if trivial complication
of the sale of a cabinet, in which Howell figured as the chief cause
of complication. A Mr. Morse bought Whistler's Chinese cabinet,
of which the top had been stolen by Howell. \\Tiistler, at last fear-
ing that Howell's dubious financial dealings would add deeper
stains to his own recent fall into bankruptcy, wrote his story of the
sale of the furniture under the title of The Paddon Papers: TJie
Owl and the Cabinet. Rossetti and Whistler had nicknamed Howell
"the Owl" partly because of Howell's nocturnal activities and his
decidedly shady business transactions; what had once had the nature
of a family joke now became a public one.

In 1883 there was a second showing of the Venetian etchings at
the Fine Arts Society. Yellow was the dominant color of floors and
hangings; the walls were white; there were buttercups in yellow
pots. Whistler wore yellow socks and gave his friends white and
yellow paper butterflies. The color anticipated by several years "the
yellow Ws" and The Yellow Book. "As I was hanging trie prints,"
said Whistler, "I could hear whispers that I was hanging them too
high, that no one could see the etchings. I laughed. 'Dear me, of
course not that's all right. In an exhibition of etchings the etchings
are the last things people come to see.' "

The activity of planning the showing, decorating the room, dress-
ing up for the part he had to play in presenting it, restored the
poise that he had too frequently lost as he stood before a canvas. He
was delighted to welcome the Prince and Princess of Wales and
escort them around the room at his private showing. It no longer
mattered what critics thought or wrote. Not every bankrupt in Lon-
don could play host to Royalty and turn a semi-public Gallery into
an afternoon as intimate as a garden party. It was precisely as inti-
mate as that and no more. Actually London society patronized
Whistler; he amused it, and he seemed to be amused. His signature,
the butterfly, had become very like a trademark or a reiterated slogan;
it had become too easy for people to remember the butterfly and to
forget everything else associated with the painter.

Without knowing it, Whistler stood in great danger of becoming
a bore, but it was clear that however successful his raids upon public
attention were, the results were unsubstantial. A warning came in
the ascendancy of Oscar Wilde. At one of Whistler's last Sunday
breakfasts in the White House, Theodore Watts-Dunton warned

164 THE WORLD OF

him that the tall, "smock-faced," young Irishman who strode into the
room would soon know ten people in London society to Whistler's
knowing one. Theodore Watts (when he assumed the hyphenated
"Dunton" to commemorate a legacy left him by someone of that
name, Whistler had telegraphed him: "Theodore, what's Dunton?")
was in appearance both plump and flabby, looking a little like the
Walrus in Sir John Tenniel's illustrations for Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland, but he was immensely shrewd. There was nothing
walrus-like or sleepy in his understanding of slightly off-color rela-
tionships between human beings. As a lawyer, which was his profes-
sion (he was a poet by desire and a novelist through industry), his
movements were slow, but his mind was quick. Later when Swin-
burne had suffered a mental collapse and physical debility through
heavy drinking, the poet's mother appointed Watts as her son's
guardian or caretaker. And Watts saw to it that Swinburne did not
escape his clutches nor did Swinburne dare to leave the ugly attached
villa he shared with Watts in the depressing middle-class suburb
of Putney where they lived.

After a successful tour of the United States Wilde had returned
to London. Wherever Whistler went, Wilde was there: he was large,
pale, moon-faced, heavy lipped, as easy in manner as Whistler was
nervous. He had the art of picking up a few of Whistler's epigrams,
and then, with a touch of his own style, improving upon them. He
had begun to patronize Whistler, and overhearing the elder man
speak, said calmly, "I wish I had said that." Then came Whistler's
famous reply, "You will, Oscar, you will/' Wilde and Whistler were
soon engaged in a game of sending telegrams to each other, and
then showing copies of them to friends. Punch had published an
imaginary conversation between them. Wilde telegraphed Whistler:
"Punch too ridiculous when you and I are together we never talk
of anything except ourselves"; to which Whistler wired back, "No,
no, Oscar, you forget when you and I are together we never talk
about anything except me."

The contest between the two men was a thinly draped, almost
obscene, struggle for superiority at dinings-out and at receptions, and
Whistler, the elder man, who had created the fashion of verbal ex-
change that Wilde graced with ease and brilliance, was not always
at advantage. Beneath the surface, the strain was all too evident;

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 165

Whistler's laugh was far too shrill, too loud; he was too fond of
alliterative phrases to compete with full success against Wilde's
neatly balanced paradoxes. Concealed within Whistler's contest was
a fundamentally serious argument concerning graphic art. Wilde's
wit was social and in the dialogue of his plays. That kind of wit
was Wilde's true art. Whistler's art was either on paper or on canvas.
Whistler was tortured by a play of intellectual problems within his
mind, especially those concerned with abstract design. Wilde, less
abstract, was more humane, more generous to an adversary, more
erratic in temperament, less embittered and always half-willing
to forgive an insult, which Whistler never was.

The contest was an unequal one. Wilde, even at the start, had
the greater chance of winning popularity. As Whistler's foil he
gained sympathy with those who took sides; he was younger, was
"new," and not likely to disrupt a gathering by a show of ill-temper.

One of Whistler's efforts was to dissociate his name from Oscar
Wilde. Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, performed in 1881, adroitly
written as it was for it did not offend Victorian moralities, domes-
tic or otherwise dimly conveyed the idea that its principal character,
Bunthorne, who certainly did not care for ladies, was homosexual.
And Bunthorne, as far as he could be identified with anyone, was
Oscar Wilde. This meant that gossip, involving the names of those
who represented the newer arts of the Grosvenor Gallery, whispered
shreds of scandal behind Regent Street crescent. Gilbert in writing
his lyrics cleverly fused the Pre-Raphaelites with the aesthetes of the
younger generation all were sketched in, retouched, smeared, gilded
with the same brush. In the play a triangular satire came to life: a
contest between Ouida's heroic Guardsmen, the Heavy Dragoons,
virile but foolish, the Aesthetes, and the Philistines, the bouncing
young men who were certain to be the "City men" of tomorrow.
Gilbert had never been so skillful, nor was he to be more effective
in his later satires.

After the performance of Patience shreds of gossip concerning
Wilde were swiftly woven together. It was impossible for Whistler
to be ignorant of it, and also impossible for him not to grow more
uneasy at its implications. He, for one, could not afford scandals
other than the public humiliation of bankruptcy, association with
Charles Augustus Howell, and stories of his two mistresses, Jo and

166 THE WORLD OF

Maud Franklin. Any further drop into the darker shadows of gossip
might well be fatal.

To disassociate his name from Wilde's was by no means easy.
Wilde had married Constance Lloyd, a beautiful, helpless, brain-
less little Dublin heiress, whom Wilde dressed in Greek, early Vene-
tian and Dutch costumes, and then leased a house for her and himself
in Tite Street. John Singer Sargent, the portrait painter from Amer-
ica who had done a spectacular portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Mac-
beth, had a studio nearby. (Sargent never allowed his sitters to
speak ill of Whisder; he combined the virtues of a gentleman, a
patriot, and one who respected himself and other members of his
profession.) The street had been touched with the fame of Godwin
and Whistler, which even today it still has, and the house that Wilde
leased, though red-bricked and turreted in Gothic Victorian fashion,
still retains its charm. Wilde called in Godwin and Whisder to rede-
sign its interior. Colors of blue, white and yellow were on its walls,
reproducing many of the same effects that prevailed in Whistler's
new Tite Street house; and Whistler gave Wilde a few of his Vene-
tian etchings. Wilde celebrated his marriage with the remark, "The
proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding/' and when
a small boy in Tite Street, who noted the extraordinary dress of
bride and bridegroom, shouted after them " 'Amlet and Ophelia out
for a walk I s'pose," Wilde answered, "My little fellow, you are
quite right. We are."

As for Whistler, Wilde said, "Ah, Whistler! Yes, wonderful, of
course, but how he fears beauty! He puts a blot, a mere stain like a
petal, a butterfly upon a sheet of paper and dares not touch it, lest
its charm be lost. His portraits remind me of the painter in Balzac's
Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, laboring his canvas for years and when he
draws the curtain to show the masterpiece, lo, there is nothing. Then
Jimmy explains things in the newspapers. Art should always remain
mysterious. Artists, like gods, must never leave their pedestals."

Proximity to Wilde of Tite Street had become slightly dangerous.
There was enough truth in what he said to cause Whistler a bad
night, to make him rush from canvas to writing desk. On Wilde's
return from the United States, Whistler had already written to The

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 167

World: "Oscar We, of Tite Street and Beaufort Gardens, joy in
your triumphs and delight in your success; but we are of the opinion
that, with the exception of your epigrams, you talk like S C
[Sidney Colvin] who lectured at Cambridge in the provinces; and
that, with the exception of your knee-breeches, you dress like 'Any
Quilter."

The World supplied the dashes after "S" and "C" to which Whis-
tler replied, "My dear Atlas, if I may not always call a spade a spade,
may I not call a Slade Professor Sidney Colvin?"

It is almost an understatement to say that Whistler felt himself
under fire from both Oxford and Cambridge; Colvin had been
scarcely less critical than Ruskin and in Whistler's eyes, Wilde,
aside from his presence in Tite Street, had come down to London
from Oxford; there was a fusion of the two universities in Whistler's
mind, and the image of them had become a hostile one. Later Wilde
appeared in Tite Street wearing a Polish cap and a furred, frogged,
green greatcoat. Whistler wrote, "Oscar. . , . Restore those things
to Nathan's, and never again let me find you masquerading the
streets of my Chelsea in the combined costumes of Kossuth and Mr.
Mantalini." His break with Wilde was clear enough for anyone who
could read to understand.

Yet the quarrel with Wilde was not without positive as well as
negative results. Whistler had gained the friendship of Mrs. D'Oyley
Carte, wife of the producer of Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, and
she, an ex-actress, enjoyed Whistler's flair for histrionics. She was
sure that he had few if any true affinities with Wilde; she was enter-
tained by him, yet had glimpses into his theories of art; she and her
husband agreed to stage a lecture to be given by him at Prince's
Hall at ten o'clock on the evening of February 20, 1885. The event
was preceded by a long period of rehearsal, of writing and rewriting
a lecture called Ten O'clock, the hour safely beyond the dinner hour
to insure the seating of everyone before the lecturer began his talk;
it was to outshine the performance in the witness box at the Ruskin
trial; it was to attract a fashionable audience; it was to show London
that it held an actor as gifted as Wilde, an apostle of aesthetics who
had moved above and beyond popular taste a Whistler in evening
clothes who discarded the unnecessary white tie because the starched
low-cut collar and starched shirt front were white. On this occasion

[68 THE WORLD OF

the accent struck would be an exaggerated simplicity so as to contrast
with the more elaborate dress of Wilde; at the very best it would
correct misconceptions of the aesthetic movement and separate Whis-
tler from the fusion of aesthetes who danced and sang to Sullivan's
melodies in Patience. The occasion made public Whistler's telegram
to the church where Wilde held his wedding. "Fear I may not be
able to reach you in time for the ceremony. Don't wait" and Whis-
tler s famous aside, "Oscar, bourgeois malgre lui"

Whisder had recited the lecture to fog and wind, mist and rain
above the waters of the Thames on the Embankment; he recited it
to Menpes, and the night before his engagement at Prince's Hall,
he rehearsed it for the last time in Prince's Hall itself before Mrs.
D'Oyley Carte. On February 20th crowds streamed from Piccadilly
into the hall; Whistler was on the platform and not quite at ease;
he placed his stick against the wall, and on the table before him,
his opera hat; his nervousness was obvious, but it was appropriate
to his opening paragraph: "Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great
hesitation and much misgiving that I appear before you in the char-
acter of The Preacher." Subjectively, and of course not known to the
audience, the last phrase recalled his mother's fondness for her
pastors and her early wish that he become one. The public meaning
of the phrase was the deliberate irony of taking Ruskin's place as
preacher on a public platform.

He opened his lecture with the same air of modesty that preceded
his brilliance in the witness box at the Ruskin trial. He said that art
was upon the town to be coaxed into company as a proof of culture
and refinement, that art had been brought to its lowest stage of
intimacy. He remarked that artists were not reformers, and then sud-
denly, "Beauty is confounded with virtue, and, before a work of Art
it is asked: 'What good shall it do'?". Then remembering Patience
and the Pre-Raphaelites, he directed satire against the desire to imi-
tate literally the past; "Useless! quite hopeless and false is the effort!
built upon fable, and all because a wise man has uttered a vain
thing and filled his belly with the East wind!

"Listen! There never was an artistic period.

"There never was an Art-loving nation."

The talk began to strike fire, and Whisder deftly separated the
artist from all other men, one who perceived in Nature about him

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 169

curious curvings, as faces are seen in the fire . . . "was the first
artist."

The lecture was seriousness itself; and then came his plea for the
particular art of his best work and his view of Nature:

The sun blares, the wind blows from the east, the sky is
bereft of cloud, and without, all is of iron. The windows of
the Crystal Palace are seen from all points of London. The
holiday maker rejoices in the glorious day, and the painter
turns aside to shut his eyes.

How little this is understood and how dutifully the
casual in Nature is accepted as sublime, may be gathered
from the unlimited admiration daily produced by a very
foolish sunset.

The dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in dis-
tinctness, but the joy of the tourist is to recognise the
traveler on the top. The desire to see, for the sake of see-
ing is with the mass alone the one to be gratified, hence the
delight in detail.

And when the evening mist clothes the riverside ... as
with a veil and the poor buildings lose themselves in the
dim sky . . . and the whole city hangs in the heavens . . .
then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and
the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure
cease to understand as they have ceased to see, and Nature,
who, for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to
the artist alone, her son and her master.

Whistler was, of course, speaking for the validity of his Noc-
turnes, but he had also advanced a principle of aesthetic rightness in
the artist being of his own time. As for the future, he stated with
admirable clearness the standards he had in view:

We have then but to wait until, with the mark of the
gods upon him there come among us again the chosen
who shall continue what has gone before. Satisfied that,
even were he never to appear, the story of the beautiful
is already complete hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon
and broidered with the birds upon the fan of Hokusai
at the foot of Fujiyama.

170 THE WORLD OF

Whistler's prose was of le grand homme manque. But what took
his audience by surprise and justly so was the air of seriousness, of
conviction behind the rhetoric and between the words. The man
was not a professional lecturer; for the moment, he was an amateur
actor who had dramatized the position of a maligned and widely
misinterpreted, misunderstood artist. Those who came to laugh at
or with Whistler were shocked into being moved by the excellence
of the performance as well as by the evidence of its sincerity. He
was suddenly heroic, a little man with a dark face above a gleaming
white shirt front, stepping out of the darkness behind him toward
the audience. The lecture was very nearly stripped bare of invective
and the expected epigram. It made no attempt to compete with
Wilde's conversational style, and by this thoroughly unexpected ac-
tion on Whisder's part, he stepped out of Wilde's reach. The field
was his own, and his winning it in the fashion that he did, had the
appearance of victor} 7 in a hard-fought battle.

The lecture could not of course bring the Wilde- Whistler con-
troversy to a close that evening, nor could the lecture change the
minds of Whistler's adverse critics. But he had made a long stride
in the direction away from Wilde and away from other figures in
the aesthetic movement. He had succeeded in making clear to those
who heard him that he stood in a singular position.

Wilde's reply to Whistler's Ten O'clock was in his review of the
lecture for the Pall Mall Gazette and he said, "I differ entirely from
Mr. Whistler. An artist is not an isolated fact; he is the resultant of
a certain milieu and a certain entourage and can no more be born
of a nation that is devoid of any sense of beauty than a fig can grow
from a thorn or a rose blossom from a thistle . . . The poet is the
supreme Artist, for he is the master of color and of form, and the
real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts; and so
to the poet beyond all others are these mysteries known; to Edgar
Allan Poe and Baudelaire, not to Benjamin West and Paul Dela-
roche."

Whistler's answer to that was: "Nothing is more delicate, in the
flattery of 'the Poet' to 'the Painter' than the naivete of 'the Poet' in
the choice of his painters Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche!"

It was clear that Wilde had stepped out on to very uncertain
aesthetic grounds, nor was his reply one that gave him better footing.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 171

It was also clear that his knowledge of painting and of painters was
superficial. He confessed that his information about West and Dela-
roche was picked up from a biographical dictionary, that it was there
he learned they had lectured on art and that since he knew nothing
more of them he concluded "they explained themselves away."

This led Whistler, at a later date, to the remark: "Oscar had the
courage of the opinions ... of others."

The quarrel was in the open and it was to remain a public one
beyond the deaths of the two antagonists.

Meanwhile Whistler had joined the Society of British Artists
in 1884; his reasons for doing so were not obscure: he had been
snubbed by the Royal Academy and his showings at the Grosvenor
Gallery had fallen off. The Society of British Artists, a moribund
group of elderly minor painters, met at their rooms and showed their
work in a rundown building in Suffolk Street The institution was
barely alive but it was better to go there than to go no place at all; its
members scarcely approved of Whistler, but they thought, rightly
enough, that his name would bring attention to their Society,
and he saw hopes of galvanizing the group into a semblance of
life.

The Ten O'clock Lecture was impressive enough to convince the
Society's membership that the election of Whistler into its fold had
not been a mistake, and Whisder found the walls of the Society an
excellent place to hang his portrait of Sarasate; the picture was con-
servative enough to please conservative taste. He also hung a por-
trait of Mrs. Cassatt on its walls; she protested, saying it did not look
like her, and Whistler admitted that it did not, but he assured her
that anyway it looked like a Whistler and the picture continued to
be shown.

The British Artists were five hundred pounds in debt and to cut
expenses Whisder told its president to do away with entertainment,
an annual luncheon to newspaper critics "The press ye have al-
ways with ye, feed my lambs" and to that showing Whisder sent
an empty frame. Of course, the president had ignored Whistlers
advice and the critics arrived; remarking the empty frame, one critic
turned to Whisder and said, 'Tour picture is not up to your best, it's
not so good this time/' Whistler replied, 'Tou should not say it
isn't good, you should say you don't like it, and then, you know,

172 THE WORLD OF

you're perfectly safe; now come and have something you do like
a drink of whiskey/'

The British Artists went further into debt Whistler had given
them more than enough publicity, but no extended and wealthy
membership. Instead he packed the membership with young men
who admired him, but had their own reputations to make, whose
work did not sell and whose support of British art for its own sake
was extremely uncertain. To the horror of the elder members of the
Society, Whistler was elected president of the institution by its new
members, and they were walling to adopt the "propositions" that
Whistler had written as standards for work done by members of the
Society. Among the "propositions" were:

A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to
bring about the end has disappeared.

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it
shows great and earnest labor, is to say that it is incomplete
and unfit for view.

The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the
painter perfect in its bud as in its bloomwith no reason
to explain its presence no mission to fulfil a joy to the
artist a delusion to the philanthropist a puzzle to the
botanist an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the
literary man.

No artist in London at that moment, especially among the British
artists, was prepared to take these maxims lying down. Millais was
still in high favor, Sir Frederick Leighton, president of the Royal
Academy, afterwards Lord Leighton, had considerable weight, and
he with Bume-Jones was in full authority. Watts was still enshrined
at Little Holland House and the wealthy family of the Princeps were
still guides of well-to-do patronage of all the arts. It was extremely
likely that Whistler's presidency of the British Artists would lead
that dying institution to financial ruin and its grave. His election
was on June 1, 1886; he had planned to visit the United States, but
the honor (if it was one) of being President of the British Artists
changed his plans. At the very least it offered a new battlefield on
which he could gain another semblance of victory.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 173

The Ten O'clock Lecture had brought about a final rift with
Swinburne. In 1884 Dante Gabriel Rossetti had died at Birching-
ton-on-the-Sea away from London; his health was gone; he had
wandered among the clutter of the rooms at Cheyne Walk refusing
to see visitors, sinking deeper than ever into the melancholia that
had clouded his mind; he did not like country air, nor did he have
any fondness for the sea. Its noise disturbed him; the trip to Birch-
ington was a last hopeless effort to change the fantasies that haunted
his mind; the change of scene was literally a last resort. Rossetti's
ill health and death also closed the period of association between
Whistler and Swinburne. Swinburne, passing under the domination
of Watts-Dunton in Putney, was adroitly separated from all the
friends of his more dissolute years. Watts-Dunton slowly, softly, as
one might shrewdly nurse a spoiled child, had worked a miracle.
The drunken poet had all the outward attribute of a frightened and
excessively well-trained household pet. His drink had been changed
from wine and stronger waters to ale. From the attached villa in
Putney he made a few "escapes" to a public house on the rise of a
hill over which Putney High Street ran, but these ventures were
sporadic. The drink was ale and Watts-Dunton without loss of dig-
nity would seek Swinburne out at a table near the bar, speak to him
quietly and guide him home.

One reason for Watts-Dunton's extraordinary care of Swinburne
was Swinburne's fascination for and later horror of the company of
Charles Augustus Howell. Whistler had said of Howell that he was
of the greatest service to his friends: "He had the gift of intimacy.
He introduced everybody with everybody, and it was easier to get
involved with Howell than to get rid of him." Howell enjoyed the
sport of getting Swinburne drunk, obscene, pliant. On such occa-
sions, opportunities arose for blackmail, and Howell saw in Swin-
burne an ever greater source of income than payment for the lease
of a house that he had akeady received from Rusltin. However
deeply Swinburne enmeshed himself in what he fondly regarded his
"vices/* his instincts, not his brain, became singularly active. He
began to fear Howell, and rushed to Watts-Dunton for consolation
(since Watts-Dunton was a lawyer) and protection. Watts-Dunton
distrusted artists, particularly new artists, who advanced what he
considered dangerous theories concerning Japanese art. Whistler was

174 THE WORLD OF

one of these; and Whistler had gone through bankruptcy. Swinburne
had become his charge, his care. The sum of money Swinburne in-
herited was large. Watts-Dunton would not permit any chance of
Howell's associates, including Whistler, having any claims whatever
on Swinburne's time, money or affections; these were risks that he
did not care to take.

Led by the opinions of Watts-Dunton, Swinburne reviewed the
published version of Whistler's Ten O'clock Lecture in the Fort-
nightly Review, June 1888. His action was as deliberate in its inten-
tion to disassociate his name from Whistler's as had been Whistler's
effort to break all associations of his name with Oscar Wilde's. Swin-
burne's desire was to undo his poem, "Before the Mirror," with its
inscription to "J. A. Whistler" and its tribute to Whistler's painting
of Jo, Symphony in White. No. II, The Little White Girl. The inci-
dent and the poem belonged to a past that Watts-Dunton encour-
aged Swinburne to reject How Swinburne actually felt concerning
that earlier moment in his career C1865) is uncertain, but there can
be no doubt that in the spring of 1888 he washed to quarrel with
Whistler, to open Whistler's praise of Japanese art to ridicule. His
attack on Whistler was a tedious argument to prove Greek art su-
perior to Japanese. To say the least, Swinburne's prose lacked wit
and ease. On this occasion it was heavy and prolix. He implied that
Whistler was "thick-witted, tasteless, senseless" and an "impenetrable
blockhead." He objected to Whistler's statement that "Art and Joy
go together" and interpreted it as denying the existence of Greek
tragedy.

In his attack on Whistler, Swinburne committed the crime of
being dull. His only success in the writing of his review was increas-
ing Whistler's sense of persecution which of course was part of
Swinburne's intention and desire. If Whistler's quarrels in print
released his own sadistic impulses, Swinburne was no less sadistic
in his efforts to break with Whistler.

Yet to Whistler, the Swinburne attack was quite unlike the in-
jury to his vanity that was suffered in the quarrels with Ruskin,
Wilde, Howell and Harry Quilter. He was not merely injured, but
hurt; he had admired Swinburne and valued the poem that had
accompanied The White Girl with a Fan; it was true that Watts-
Dunton had not permitted him to visit Swinburne at Putney, that

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 175

the green gate at number ten the Pines was closed to him, yet he had
not thought of Swinburne going out of his way Cas he did) to join
other critics in general assault upon his Ten O'clock Lecture. In
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, his reply to Swinburne was
both florid and rhetorical and what was rare in Whistler's contro-
versial pieces sentimental : "Do we not speak the same languager"
Whistler wrote. "Are we strangers, then, or, in our Father's house are
there so many mansions that you lose your way, my brother, and
can not recognize your kinr"

In the last paragraph of his reply, Whistler added, <c You have
been misled"; it is probable that he knew Watts-Dunton had in-
spired the article. Whistler knew Putney well; he had gone up the
river to Putney on all-night journeys at the time he was painting
his early Nocturnes, and before six in the morning he had gone
swimming with Howell there in the broad curve of the river. He
knew its suburban fastnesses, its stolid remoteness from Chelsea and
Regent Street, its distance from Paris where he had first met Swin-
burne.

In his attempt to quote Ten O'clock against Whistler, Swin-
burne had referred to himself as an "outsider." In a brief reply
to Swinburne's Fortnightly article that he sent off to The World
Whistler thought of Putney and the attached villa, which even today
has a legend of a ghost visiting those who are left alone in the house
on Sunday afternoons, and he wrote: "Thank you, my dear! I have
lost a confrere; but, then, I have gained an acquaintance one Alger-
non Swinburne 'outsider' Putney."

XV

T

JL HE death of this friendship was soon to be followed by Whis-
tler's marriage to E. W. Godwin's widow. Since the break with Jo,
Whistler's relationships with women had been of gallant but brief
duration. The exception to the general rule, one that included semi-
platonic relationships with Lady Colin Campbell and Rosa Corder,
was Maud Franklin, who for the most part was content to remain in
the sub-official position as Whistler's model. Not until the early
1880's did Maud begin to think of herself as "Mrs. Whistler" and
then the thought of her being so came too late. Beatrix Godwin
had already appeared on the scene. She was the daughter of John
Birnie Philip, the sculptor whose designs are represented at Burling-
ton House and in the details of the Albert Memorial. Beatrix God-
win had grown up with artists; she had a talent for book illustration,
but this was the least of her abilities, her knowledge, her under-
standing. She knew how to take care of men who possessed, or
rather were possessed by, "artistic temperaments/' She also knew her
way about in semi-fashionable, semi-artistic society; her hair was
dark; she looked un-English; she was slightly taller than Whistler
and inclined to plumpness; her social ease permitted her to be both
absentminded and a good hostess, but her greatest asset was a cheer-
ful disposition. As Whistler held the center of the floor, either in his
studio or at an afternoon tea in a drawing-room Beatrix Godwin was
content to sit in a corner of the room and join in the general laughter
that followed his telling the story of the Ruskin trial.

She spoke of herself as one of Whistler's pupils; it was both seri-
ous in its implications and yet had a cheerful irony. She had a small
income, quite her own, which had relieved the immediate anxieties
of living with Godwin; but her financial independence did not free

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 177

her of strain in taking care of him. He was ill, and taking care of a
sick man imposed a burden on a cheerful temperament.

Godwin who had long been interested in the experimental and
amateur stage turned from architecture to the management of the
Pastoral Players whose efforts were staged in the open air and whose
patronage was derived from the Prince of Wales and Lady Archibald
Campbell. From this example it is not extraordinary that his son,
Gordon Craig, by Ellen Terry conceived radical ideas of stage craft.
In the pursuit of these interests, it was also not surprising that with
his drifting back and forth between city and country, Beatrix God-
win solved her domestic problem by being with Whistler in London
when Godwin took the Pastoral Players to the countryside and then
living in Oxford whenever Godwin stayed in London. This resulted
in a friendly separation. Between the management of theatricals,
Godwin made plans of a new house for Whistler and a house for
Mrs. Louise Jopling, and in August of 1886 he wrote to her, 'The
next move I make is to St. Peter's Hospital where I have bespoken
a ward all to myself; then the next ward may be 6x4x2." He went
to the hospital and his friends called Beatrix Godwin home from
Paris. Dr. Whistler, Whistler's brother, was put in charge of God-
win's case, and Whistler called on him every 7 day. On the night of
Godwin's death Whistler was at his bedside and so were Lady Archi-
bald Campbell and Beatrix Godwin. Early the following morning,
October 7th, Whistler walked from his brother's house to Mrs. Jop-
ling's; his errand was to tell her to go to Ellen Terry's house with
news of Godwin's death; he wished to spare her the shock of reading
of it in the papers.

Within a day or two, the three friends of Godwin who had sat
at his deathbed lifted the coffin containing his body onto a farm
wagon, and as they were driven to Northleigh in Oxfordshire, they
spread a cloth over the coffin's top and ate the lunch they had
brought with them in baskets. Godwin was buried in the corner of a
field at Northleigh. This, to say the least, was a strange tribute to
the builder of the White House, and a markedly grotesque one;
but it was probably a better one than the kind that Ellen Terry held
in mind. Among her papers she saved a few mawkish lines of verse
written in memory of Godwin by a poet who preferred not to sign
them and remained anonymous.

178 THE WORLD OF

From this time onward Beatrix Godwin devoted most of her atten-
tion to Whistler's affairs. Judging from her relationship to Godwin,
Whistler had small cause to think her relationship to him ivould be
either sentimental or indulgently maternal; but her social tact, both
in managing him and those who met him, began to soften the edges
of his more violent hostilities toward the world. 'If I died before
Jimmy," Beatrix Godwin said, "he would not have a friend left in
a week." In becoming his wife she was both aware and confident of
the part she had to play.

Maud Franklin still presented a difficulty; it was Maud, the Eng-
lish version of Jo, who shared with Whistler the distresses of unpaid
debts at the White House, though she had done little to reduce
them. It was she who shared the discomforts of the places he lived
in Venice, and when they returned to London, the uneasy lodgings
before they came back to Chelsea. It was she, who, like Jo, vanished
to Paris, soon after her child, this time, a daughter, was born to
Whistler. One sees sketches of her as the little nude in Whistler's
chalk drawings, lightly draped, with a face that is a trifle over-
sweet, but also with certain elegance in the turn of the head
or shoulder. After the brief stay in Tite Street (the period that
Maud spent in Paris), Whistler moved with her into a studio in
Fulham, a neighborhood which today faindy resembles New York's
Greenwich Village; a little theatre group now flourishes there, houses
are of mixed eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century de-
signs, a number of back gardens are kept in irregular order, and peo-
ple dress as they choose.

Maud's life with Whistler was a day-to-day battle with ill-paid
servants, grocers, butchers. From Fulham, Maud and Whistler moved
to a cottage in the Vale,* Chelsea, with its wrought-iron railing be-
fore the door and with a tree, struggling to life, its branches climbing
upward to throw green-tinted shadows through its front windows.
Maud did not accompany Whistler as he rushed off to dinner par-
ties in more fashionable quarters of the West End, yet she had cards

*The Vale was a cul-de-sac along King's Road, a strangely countrified
setting-in-a-city, of which A.M.W. Stirling wrote: "On one side stretched
a former deer-park and opposite to it was a lovely spot where Whistler grew
his larkspurs.*' It was undoubtedly too countrified for Whistler during the
restless months he spent there, too much of a "come-down" from the more
fashionable quarters in Tite Street.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 179

engraved with the name "Mrs. Whistler" on them, which were use-
ful enough to show to her few friends and to shopkeepers who w r ere
doubtful when she demanded extended credit. In West End com-
pany she was seldom seen. She attended the openings at the Society
of British Artists, where Whistler introduced her as Madame Whis-
tler; the other ladies at such assemblies merely nodded at her, slipped
by her quickly, and referred to her as Whistler's pupil. She was
docile enough but lacked ease; she talked brightly but without wit or
color; in entering a dining-room, unless Whistler took her arm,
she was in danger of trailing the company.

When Duret called at the Vale, he was careful to bring with him
bottles of wine, fruit and pastry for Maud; he knew something of
the strain she suffered, knew that she and Whistler did not eat well
at home.

Maud was powerless against the rivalry of Beatrix Godwin. Mrs.
Godwin, Whistler's other "pupil," felt she had the right to walk in
on Whistler at any hour, whether he was at work in his studio or
not. The fact was that Whistler did almost no work; the energy that
he had expended during the 70 s could not be revived; larger can-
vases seemed to frighten him; as he left the White House he de-
stroyed almost everything he began, and the habit had grown on him
to destroy more. During moments of self-distrust, portaits of Maud
and Lady Archibald Campbell were destroyed. His quarrel with
critics had reawakened a critical faculty (which had always existed)
in the back of his mind, and the results of his present efforts in
painting fell far short of what he wished to see on canvas and he
lacked both the patience and the energy to practice the theories that
he preached. He could too easily content himself with the thought
that his earlier work contained sufficient proof of what he had to
say in print.

He did a number of minor pieces, things that required only the
slightest effort; they displayed, as always, the characteristics of his
style, but did little to raise his ego or heal the wounds that his
vanity had received. He received more attention, more invitations
to dinners through publication of a letter in The World or the de-
livery of his Ten O'clock Lecture than any showing of a new canvas
to a sitter in his studio. Nor was the Fulham house or the Vale quite
the right place to bring visitors, who would see too clearly that the

180 THE WORLD OF

middle-aged Whistler did not prosper, that the faithful Maud man-
aged well but not brilliantly, that the household lacked chic, that
however sincerely young men called him the Master, his affairs were
not handled in a masterly manner.

Too late Maud lost her temper. She had been, so far as the world
was concerned, correct enough. Since Whistler chose to be absent
from the Vale and in the company of Mrs. Godwin, she decided to
find another painter who could and did find her an admirable model.
Through visits to the British Artists she discovered William Stott
who had small talent but an appreciative eye; his portrait of Venus,
becomingly unclothed, was shown at the British Artists in 1887.
Those who saw it were amused because the goddess sweetly resem-
bled Maud. Another portrait of Maud by Whistler at the same show-
ing received less attention, but one reviewer remarked that Whis-
tler's painting showed Venus in clothes that were now fashionable
to wear. The ladies who saw the show concluded that they had been
right about Maud, and Maud left London to live in the country with
Mr. and Mrs. Stott.

Whistler also left the Vale and did not return to the cottage.
Throughout his life Whistler did his best to avoid unpleasant scenes
with women; if he failed to dominate them, he did his best to charm
them in the fashion he had charmed his mother. If both efforts failed,
he walked away. He would say nothing against them; he pointed out
their charms in the sketches he had done of them; he would indulge
in light gallantries when he spoke of them, or if he had quarreled
with them, cut them distantly with the room between them.

He moved into lodgings and hotel rooms with Mrs. Godwin.
There was enough dining-out to be done to keep both in circulation
and Whistler was planning to resettle in Tite Street. They drifted
cheerfully enough from London to Paris, but their affairs were not
in order. They put off the actual ceremony of getting married; out-
wardly they knew how to take care of themselves; they were middle-
aged; they did not care to be thought of as romantic children.

Labouchere, a genial Tory politician, whose hobby it was to move
among artists, was one of the guests at a dinner party where Whis-
tler and Mrs. Godwin were present. Labouchere was brisk, practical,
witty, the kind of man who could make a personal gesture at a semi-
public occasion without offense to anyone in the company.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 181

At the dinner table he turned jauntily to Whistler, his voice
slightly raised: "Jemmy, will y ou marry Mrs. Godwin?" "Certainly,"
said Whistler lightly. The scene was a parody of a marriage service
and within an atmosphere that Labouchere delighted to create; he
turned to Mrs. Godwin, "Mrs. Godwin, will you marry Jemmy?"
"Certainly," she said in imitation of Whistler's light manner.
"When?" Labouchere said. "Oh, some day," said Whistler. 'That
won't do/' Labouchere replied, "we must have a date."

Whereupon Whistler turned the entire matter over to Labouchere,
date, church, minister. A few days later on August 11, 1888, Whis-
tler married Beatrix Godwin.

The day before the wedding Labouchere met Beatrix Godwin
to remind her of the coming event; she told him she \vas going out
to buy her trousseau. "I am going to buy a new toothbrush and a
new sponge, because one should have new ones when one gets
married." Her manner had the coolness of the Shavian heroine,
who a decade later was to make an appearance on the London
stage.

London and August are not the best of possible combinations
for a wedding, but Labouchere with his usual felicity found an
eminently respectable church for the ceremony. It was St. Mary's
Abbot, Kensington, a few steps behind Kensington Palace, fronting
Kensington Road, as it turns slightly into the High Road. The
church was large and cool, and the wedding parry an extremely se-
lective one: Labouchere, Dr. Whistler and his wife, the Jopling-
Rowes, and Mrs. Charles Whibley, a sister of Mrs. Godwin, were
there. After the ceremony the party went south into Chelsea where
Whistler had recently moved into the Tower House; he was back
again on Tite Street; the wedding breakfast was ordered from the
Cafe Royal, Whistler's favorite restaurant, in Regent Street.

It was characteristic of Whistler to like the Cafe Royal, which at
that time in London had an atmosphere not unlike Florian's in
Venice, and its decor was a British version of the more lavish restau-
rants in Paris. The place was famous for the number of well-known
political and literary figures who lunched and had midnight din-
ners there; its English decor was of the Regency, its French was of
the Second Empire; red plush and gilt predominated; cut-glass chan-
deliers, mirrors, small murals, heavy white damask table cloths

182 THE WORLD OF

gleamed. To step into the Cafe Royal was like attending the first
night at the theatre.

The Cafe Royal was certainly one of the places where the new
Mrs. Whistler would be thoroughly at ease and so would Whistler.
Ascending its red carpeted marble stairway they would be instantly
recognized by those whom Whistler regarded as his enemies (in-
cluding Oscar Wilde) and by a few of his friends.

The wedding at St. Mary's Abbot, the church where Rudyard
Kipling's parents had been married, where the more respectable
Pre-Raphaelites (including Burne-Jones) had been married, was an
omen of a change that had entered Whistler's social life, and his
wife, Beatrix, was largely responsible for it. Her circle, through her
sister, the wife of Charles Whibley, was to lead him into another
world.

The newly married Whistlers went to France for a brief holiday;
they wandered into Touraine and visited Chartres; Whistler made a
new set of etchings which cost him little effort; they loafed. In
London Maud still insisted that she was the "real Mrs. Whistler,"
but the relationship between them was at an end and she knew it.
She had not lost her figure; she sat for several painters, and at last
married a well-to-do South American who provided for her and for
Whistler's daughter.

The year of Whistler's marriage also brought him a little notice
from Germany; largely because he had been elected president of the
Society of British Artists, he was invited to hang a picture at the
International Exhibition held at Munich. He was happy to receive
the invitation; his picture, The Yellow Buskin, was given second
prize, a medal, and to the committee of awards Whistler wrote that
he accepted it with "sentiments of tempered joy" and with complete
appreciation of "a second-hand compliment"

The other event of the year was Whistler's removal, by vote of
the membership, from the presidency of the Society of British Art-
ists, and the event caused a little explosion in the press. By 1888
Whistler had become the subject of good newspaper "copy"; that
is, he had become regarded as a well-established figure who could
be relied upon by reporters to give them a "story." The Ruskin trial
had insured that kind of reputation for him, and he knew how to
make reporters ask him questions that he could answer. He turned

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 183

his interviews into "press-conferences"; he had learned how to please
young men sent out on an assignment.

The British Artists had admitted him to membership with the
obvious purpose of drawing attention to itself, but within a few
vears, it became equally clear that Whistler had gained more through
the connection than had the institution. The sales of pictures from
the w r alls of the Society had continued to drop. When Whistler
joined it in 1885, the total sum of sales was under four thousand
pounds; in 1888 it was under one thousand. At one time, Whistler
had raised a loan of five hundred pounds for it, but its losses had
increased so rapidly that the Society had the sensation of hearing
clods of earth falling on its coffin as it was being lowered into the
ground.

What Whistler gained from the connection was shown by the in-
vitation to send a picture to Munich, a piece of news that did not
delight the elder members of the Society; they had never cared
greatly for Whistler's painting, and what was natural, elements of
envy and jealousy (since their own work was neglected) entered
into their mistrust of Whistler. In matters of publicity for the So-
ciety, it was Whistler who was talked about, not the Society. They
elected in Whistler's stead, a Mr. Wyke Bayliss, whom die Pall
Mall Gazette described as "a strong man." He was a Board-School
Chairman, champion chess-player of Surrey, a Fellow of the So-
ciety of Antiquarians, a Shakespearean student, and an ardent, skillful
bicycle rider. Whistler never failed to refer to "the mad machine" he
rode and his speed in driving. The situation had all the elements
of farce and Whistler made the most of them.

Tlie Pall Mall Gazette sent a young man to the Vale in Chelsea
(this was shortly before Whistler's marriage) to interview the ex-
president. Whisder was at his best; when the young man asked him
about the state of affairs at the Society, Whisder raised his eye-
brows and sparkled: 'Why, my dear sir, there's positively no state
of affairs at all ... everything is in order, and just as it should
be. The survival of the fittest as regards the presidency, don't you see,
and well Suffolk Street is itself again ... as I told the members
the other night, I congratulate the Society on the result of their
vote, for no longer can it be said that the right man is in the wrong
place. Eh, what? Ha, ha?"

184 THE WORLD OF

'Then how do you explain the bitterness of the opposition?"

"A question of 'pull devil, pull baker/ and the devil has gone and
the bakers remain in Suffolk Street."

"And the moral of it all?"

The way was open for Whistler's last remark that was certain to
be heard and quoted many times: "The organization of this Royal
Society of British Artists could not remain together, and so, you see,
the artists have come out, and the British remain and peace and
sweet obscurity are restored to Suffolk Street! Eh, what? Ha, ha!"

Of the twenty-five artists who resigned from the Society with
Whistler, only one had lasting merit; he was Alfred Stevens, the sculp-
tor; of the "British" who remained, all are mercifully forgotten. As
far as posterity is concerned, Whistler's victory was won by an ex-
tremely narrow margin, but it was a victory.

If Beatrix Godwin was a Shavian heroine who had arrived in
London ahead of Shaw's reputation, her new husband had some
of the attributes of a devil's disciple before Shaw had written his
Three Plays for Puritans. Beatrix Whistler could not refashion
Whistler's character, but she did succeed in making him seem less
strained, less violent in casual conversation, and among a few friends,
more friendly. Her presence also modified his social life in a way that
Maud Franklin, and, earlier, Jo, had failed to do. She herself was
acceptable in any social gathering to which Whisder would be in-
vited and where Maud Franklin was merely tolerated. In the past
Whistler had drifted into many light but dubious relationships with
women, and these brief, half-gallant, half-uneasy affairs kept him
on the nether side of London's caste-ridden society. It was true that
through Lady Colin Campbell and Lady Archibald Campbell he
moved on the fringes of a set that included a notoriously reckless
Prince of Wales* The Prince was not a model of virtue nor did he
wish to be, but because he was the Prince, he avoided ugly conse-
quences that were shouldered proudly by those who followed in his
wake; they entertained the Prince, amused him and paid the bills.

Among those who followed the Prince was Lord Colin Campbell,
son of the Duke of Argyle. His wife was Vera, a handsome Irish
girl, who was six feet tall, dark-haired and, dark-eyed; she painted
her lips in the newly arrived fashion of Parisian night clubs. Her
marriage to Lord Colin had been one of convenience; Lord Colin

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 185

had thought vaguely of marriage, and Vera's mother had chosen
him as the object of ambition for the improvement of Vera's position
in society. She rented a house near the Duke's estate in Scotland,
and in spite of the Duke's warning that his son would not make
the most virtuous of husbands, Vera's mother had had her ambition
gratified. The girl seemed willing, and Lord Colin was, for the mo-
ment, pleased, but a few years later he brought suit for divorce
against his young wife and named six co-respondents. Vera brought
counter-suit against Lord Colin and he lost his case. The lower-
middle-class jury who had been brought up on the novels of Ouida
believed readily enough that a lady could have a lover, but they
did not grasp the possibility that a real lady might have six; that
disillusionment was too great to bear.

Whistler's name did not appear among the co-respondents, but
had his letters to Lady Colin Campbell been read aloud in court,
further questioning of her conduct would have followed. They were
extremely gallant, yet vague enough in naming places of appoint-
ment to be dismissed as inconclusive evidence. But he did enjoy her
company; she was intelligent and had a fancy for the attentions of
Whistler as well as those of a younger American, Henry James.
Within her own set of bright young people who followed the Prince
of Wales, and preceded the brighter set of the Edwardian era, Lord
Colin's suit against her had left her hopelessly declassee. She then
turned to journalism and the writing of art reviews. Of this latter
period Gertrude Atherton told a story of calling on her one after-
noon. As Mrs. Atherton walked into her drawing room, she saw
Vera reclining on a sofa with an expectant face turned toward the
door, but when she saw who her visitor was, her expression froze.
Obviously Mrs. Atherton had been admitted by mistake; she was
not the expected guest, but before she left, Henry James, smartly
dressed and brisk, walked into the room. He had come at the safe
hour of four o'clock tea and sat himself in a chair, opposite his hostess
with the tea table and silver tea urn between them; he took com-
mand of the scene and talked of Whistler, of how he hoped to out-
live him, so that he could write a proper and revised tribute to Whis-
tler's art after the artist's death; Lady Colin had the wit to conceal
her disappointment at the turn the conversation had taken; Mrs.
Atherton left, assured that James would talk more of art than of Lady

186 THE WORLD OF

Colin's remarkable good looks; he would be flattering but decidedly
platonic.

But by this time, Beatrix Whistler had gently guided her hus-
band out of the reaches of the fashionably declassee; the circle into
which she led him was perhaps more modest in its pretensions
they had moved from Tite Street to Cheyne Walk, a few doors from
the house where Rossetti had once lived-a circle that was smartly
literary rather than merely smart.

The direction in which the Whistlers moved was toward Henry
Harland, the American, who was soon to edit The Yellow Book, W.
E. Henley, the vigorous editor of The National Observer, and Wil-
liam Heinemann, the publisher, and of these three, Henley was the
most spectacular figure. Henley was the son of an impoverished
Gloucester second-hand bookseller, and, as if that handicap were
not sufficient, he was also a victim of tuberculosis of the bone. He
came to London through the aid and patronage of three men, George
Wyndham, the Conservative statesman, Leslie Stephen, the editor
and critic, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Henley selected as the
object of his hero-worship, Disraeli. Within a short time, he became
noted as a leader of Conservative opinion in the arts as well as
in politics, and he had the gift of attracting young men to his house
in Richmond Park and to the offices of the Observer.

Henley had a few entirely loyal admirers, and among them were
G. S. Street and Charles Whibley. Whibley was one of those rare
young men who fitted perfectly into the radical Conservative mold
into which Henley tried to force the rest of his contributors. He
shared Henley's romantic love of underworld characters, of which
Stevenson made such excellent uses by having Henley himself sit
as model for "Long John Silver" in Treasure Island. He shared
Henley's hatred of the Rossettis and of Oscar Wilde; he shared Hen-
ley's enthusiasm for the extremes of Conservative political thinking,
and was an active, often brilliant political journalist. His mind was
better trained, more firmly built than Henley's; he was an eminently
"safe" young man.

At Henley's orders, he had written an attack on Whistler as
a public figure, but defended his art because Whistler's views ran
counter to Holman Hunt's and the credos of the Pre-Raphaelites.
In usual circumstances Whistler would have fought against both

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER i87

Henley and Whibley, but through Beatrix Whistler, whose sister
was about to marry Whibley, an open and sustained quarrel with
the Observer was first deferred, then avoided. Whibley 's article on
Whistler (which was one of a portrait series run under the title
Modern Man and was a forecast of what The New Yorker Profiles
were to become) had its value in increasing Whistler's fame among
the younger intellectuals, for the Observer was read in club rooms
and in university libraries. Since Henley had championed Whistler's
cause in an earlier magazine he edited, The Magazine of Art, Whis-
tler could afford to overlook unfavorable comment on his Ten
O'clock Lecture, and the way w T as clear for Henley and Whistler
to dissolve their differences in the intense and narrow stream of their
mutual likes and dislikes.

What Whistler had in common with Henley was several con-
victions. The first was implied in the title of Whibley's series, Mod-
ern Man; Whistler believed in modernity, which was sharply said
on a brief visit to Rome "It is nothing but ruins." Another belief
was the superiority of the individual standing alone against the
world. "I am the Master of my fate," wrote Henley. Whistler be-
lieved, as Henley did, in the superiority of an informed minority as
against the choices made by those who appealed to popular taste, a
conviction that he expressed during the Ruskin trial and after it.

Friends of Henley called him a "crippled giant" Their affection
held in it the image of a burly, broad-shouldered man who limped
like Vulcan and was as coarsely fibered as he, and was innately
brutal. He had not quite conquered London, but he had threatened
to. Something of the same thing could be said of Whistler, who
tripped (quite unlike Henley s weight and limping step) onto the
center of London's stage, (fen years later Henry Adams, who ad-
mired the historian Gibbon more than the art critic Ruskin, remarked
that Whistler had become more brutalized by the brutalities of his
world; this world was of course the same world of London that
Henley knew.)

Both Henley and Whistler had cause to think of themselves as
self-made men, and as Charles Whibley was drawn closer to Whis-
tler's domestic circle, the friendship, though never intimate, grew
cordial; this was the kind of association that Beatrix Whistler en-
couraged.

188 THE WORLD OF

One of the fashionable publishers of the '90's was William Heine-
mann, who like Murray Marks the art dealer might well have been
mistaken for the Prince of Wales. His smartly clipped beard, his
rotund, somewhat Germanic figure, his fashionable dress made him
a welcome guest at dinner parties that the Whistlers frequented.
The acquaintance with Heinemann was to lead to the publication of
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.

But before Heinemann became Whistler's publisher, the book was
to have its moments of publicity and violent dispute. Its title was
the invention of an American newspaper man who had arrived in
London to do a series of articles for The New York Herald; his
name was Sheridan Ford. Ford interviewed Whistler, and in doing
so came upon the happy idea of making a collection of Whistler's
waitings. These were to include reports of the Ruskin trial and the
Ten O'clock Lecture as well as the letters Whistler had written to
the papers, to his friend, Yates, who edited The World, to Labour-
chere, the ex-diplomat who edited Truth. Both the Whistlers were
delighted with the idea and spent their days in Cheyne Walk going
over boxes filled with old newspapers and clippings.

Ford was indigent, enthusiastic and naive; he had his wife with
him and they had been living beyond their means in a London that
had already begun to glitter with premonitions of Edwardian "high
living." He went to his friends to borrow money against the future
publication of Whistler's book. One friend advanced him fifteen
pounds but when Ford approached him for the loan of a hundred,
promptly said "Good-bye."

Ford was unaware of Whistler's latent brutality that had caught
the eye of Henry Adams; Adams had sat at dinner with Whistler and
had perceived that much of his wit had become the crystallization
of bitterness, that the pearls he cast before those who saw and heard
him had been cultured and polished by acid and gall.

Ford worked at the British Museum going through newspaper
files to collect Whistler items until one day he received a letter from
Whistler with a check for ten pounds enclosed for his labors and
instructions to stop work on the book. Ford went to his friend,
McLure Hamilton, and showed him Whistler's letter. The friend,
reasonably enough, concluded that Mrs. Whistler saw possibilities
of making money on the book and had advised her husband to pub-

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 189

lish the book without Ford's help. Ford went ahead with the book
and received Hamilton's assistance in reading proof. Then, suddenly,
as the book was in press, Ford told Hamilton that Whistler had
found out who the printer was, had threatened suit against him, and
had effectively stopped the publication of the book. Hamilton who
had never met Whistler received a letter from him accusing him of
helping Ford in furthering an unauthorized book, and Hamilton re-
plied with a letter denying the charges.

At this point Ford's unstable mind and health collapsed. He fell
ill; he had dreamed of making a reputation for himself by use of
Whistler's name, and now he saw too clearly that the end of his
own career was just around the corner. A few weeks later he and
his wife left London for Antwerp where the book was reset and
issued only to be seized by Whistler's lawyer, which was followed by
a suit in a Belgian Court in October, 1891, against Ford. At the
trial Whistler was in the witness box bringing his charges against
Ford in rapid French. The reporters thought of him as the devil in
the box, and probably the Judge did too, for with particular sharpness
he asked Whistler the nature of his religion, and when Whistler
paused in reply, the Judge said dryly, "Protestant, perhaps?" Whis-
tler shrugged his shoulders and then refused to tell his age. If he
was taken for the devil, he played his part well and won his suit
against the unfortunate Ford, who was forced to pay court costs and
damages beyond the total of three thousand five hundred francs.

Later Hamilton attempted to argue with Whistler and to plead
Ford's side of the case; he got nowhere and Whistler spoke of Ford
as one who would steal his host's spoons at a dinner party.

Meanwhile Whistler had made a friend of the brilliant William
Heinemann. Whistler and his wife spent the greater part of their days
and nights polishing the book of letters, notes, and documents that
Heinemann now (since the book had received so much advance
publicity) was eager to publish. The Whistlers had appropriated
with less honor than worldliness the tide Ford had suggested, The
Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and without credit to the latest of
the "enemies." From its tide page to its inscription of "fini" the book
was decorated by drawings of the butterfly in all its graphic varieties
of joy, rage, and triumph the creature's wings seemed to dance,
trip, point and accuse and it had acquired a forked tail. The book

190 THE WORLD OF

was inscribed to "The rare Few, who, early in Life have rid Them-
selves of the Friendship of the Many/* and in this appeal to the rare
few Whistler echoed Stendhal's "the happy few/' It was the kind of
echo, which so often happens in the case of Whistler's conversation
and his writings, that "came out of air/' out of the dinners he at-
tended, the company he kept and not from the little reading that
he did; he had always been quick to overhear a phrase and then
transform it sharply to the character of his own personality.

At the moment of publishing The Gentle Art, he had never been
more popular; that is, popular in the sense of having his name
known. The work that he had done twenty to ten years before was
recognized, and though fashionable sitters did not rush in crowds to
his studio, he was well in command of his celebrity in Paris as well
as in London. In 1891 the Glasgow Corporation decided to buy the
portrait of Carlyle. The arrival at that decision had all the weight
of Scotch deliberation behind it. The picture had been shown at
the Glasgow Institute in 1888, and the showing had coincided with
one of the revivals of interest in painting in Scotland. A few young
Scottish painters had gone to Paris to study and in 1889 Whistler
had received the French Legion of Honor, which in the nineteenth
century was a singular distinction for an American painter of Scots
descent; it was quickly remembered that Whistler's mother was a
McNeill of the McNeills of Barra.

Two other circumstances aided Whistler's fortunes in Scotland.
Alexander Reid, a Glasgow art dealer, who had been associated with
Vincent Van Gogh and his brother in Paris and who had studied
painting as well as the art of dealing with them, was Glasgow's
authority on the French Impressionists. To his enthusiasm for the
Impressionists he added an appreciation of Whistler. Reid knew
Pissarro, and Pissarro highly admired Whistler's etchings, and
though he did not care greatly for Whistler's paintings, he defended
them against thoughtless criticism and wrote to his son Lucien,
'Whistler is very artistic; he is a showman, but nevertheless, an
artist," which meant that when Lucien Pissarro went to London in
1890 he made a point of seeing Whistler. Whistler's French con-
nections, however slight they were in actuality, had increased his
prestige in Scotland, and particularly so with the alert Alexander
Reid. He felt that he could not go wrong in speaking well of Whis-

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 191

tier and with proper caution invest in a few of his paintings
and etchings. And then he gave his son the middle name of Mc-
Neill.

The other turn of good fortune was that before Mary Bacon
Martin had become Mrs. Sheridan Ford and had become entangled
in the unhappy experience of trying to edit Whistlers letters, she
had come to Glasgow from the United States to pick up ideas about
art and inspiration for interior decoration. She had been sent to Eu-
rope by her employer, a manufacturer of wallpaper in the United
States. She made trips down to London and discovered more of
Whistler's work and reputation. In Glasgow she spread news of
Whistler's need for money and generous patronage. In London her
appreciation of Whistler's painting (which in her hands seems to
have taken on the character of a crusade and a revolution com-
bined) led to her getting the French firm of Boussod Valadon & Co.
(which was then opening offices in London) interested in Whistler.
Through Reid she got Boussod, one of the firm's partners, to see
Whistler's work in Glasgow. Her scheme was to form a group of art
dealers, backed by her employer in America and represented by Reid
in Glasgow and by Boussod and Valadon in London and Paris, to
sell Whistler's pictures. Her enthusiasms embraced Whistler, all the
Glasgow artists and the French Impressionists in one vast trans-
atlantic adventure. As Macaulay Stevenson, who was responsible
for telling this story and who was among the lesser Glasgow painters,
remarked: she tried to form a syndicate that would run Whistler.
How deeply she failed in her intention we already know, for the
Sheridan Fords met their defeat when Whistler testified against
them in Antwerp. According to Stevenson, Valadon got in touch
with her employer in the United States and persuaded him to send
passage money to the Fords so that they could return to America.
Valadon distrusted bright, energetic young women who had large
ideas.

Whistler's immediate gain from the activities of Reid and Mrs.
Ford was the purchase of the Carlyle portrait by the Glasgow Cor-
poration at the price of a thousand guineas. A petition had been
drawn up which included Millais' name (and since Millais had
married Mrs, Ruskin, nee Effie Gray, and therefore had small
respect for Ruskin's opinion he was glad to sign) and sent a letter

192 THE WORLD OF

to the Corporation urging it to buy the Carlyle. As Whistler later
told the story of the purchase to Joseph Pennell, the American
etcher, a group of members of the Corporation called on him and
its spokesman said that Whistler's price of a thousand guineas for
the picture was too high "why the figure was not even life-size."
"But you know/' Whistler replied, "few men are life-size" and the
members left the room to think over the problem of spending a thou-
sand guineas.

The next day they returned and asked Whistler whether he had
been thinking of the thousand guineas, to which he replied again,
"Why, gentlemen, why well, you know, how could I think of any-
thing but the pleasure of seeing you again" and he then received
the Corporation's check without further questioning.

A slightly different story of the purchase was told by the spokes-
man of the Corporation's delegation to Whistler's house in Cheyne
Walk. Mr. Robert Crawford, the spokesman, said one member of
the delegation had first hoped to get the picture for four hundred
guineas, then when he heard that Whistler had asked a thousand,
hoped to settle the deal for eight hundred. Mr. Crawford in writing
about him called his hard-headed fellow-member of the Corporation
a Philistine. To the delegation the house in Cheyne Walk seemed 1
almost bare of furniture. The drawing room was large; a few screens
were set up; a few rush-bottomed chairs were scattered about the
room, and there was a table; the room was cold a few sticks of wood
smouldered on bricks in a large fireplace. At the sight of the room the
Philistine whispered that Whistler would be glad to accept the
lower figure.

As if on tiptoe, Whistler stepped into the room. His necktie was
loosely knotted; his hair was long and curled; he wore a brown
velveteen jacket; he was very much the artist and to Mr. Crawford,
his speech and actions were like those of a canary one moment and a
doe the next. He served his guests tea that contained less tea than a
mixture of rum and lemon; he introduced them to what he called
Vienna tea, was very gay, and shied away from talk of money. At last
he said: "The picture; yes, of course, the picture is yours. The great
Corporation of Glasgow, most enlightened and humane, most liberal
in its ideas certainly into no better hands can I desire to see my
Carlyle placed. With great pleasure I see that many artists with

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 193

whom I have not the pleasure to see eye to eye have honored me
by asking you to take my picture for your city I honor them for
this."

"But," Mr. Crawford replied, "Mr. Whistler, we have not yet
decided whether the picture can be ours. My friend the Philistine
here and others in Glasgow think that the price now fixed is, per-
haps, too high and we think of suggesting say, eight hundred
guineas/*

"My dear ruddy-faced Scot," said Whistler, "what is this we are
doing? You and I will never condescend to haggle about money. If
it was in my power to bestow this picture on the people of Glasgow
as a gift I would gladly do so, as proof of my appreciation of their
good judgment in desiring to possess it. They do so choose, do they
not? Alas, I cannot make it a gift, and I wish you to have it. What
need, then, to discuss the question of money? But you have not yet
seen the picture. It is not here tomorrow will you give me the
felicity to see you again and I will show you the Carlyle?"

As the group was leaving, the Philistine turned to Whistler with
a question: "Is it true, as I have heard, that modern pictures don't
stand up as well as the old masters? The colors, they say, fade
sooner?"

Whistler's voice suddenly stormed back at him.

"No, it is not true modern pictures do not fade and therein lies
their complete damnation!"

The next day, Mr. Crawford again approached the question of the
price of the picture; he and his friends were called "most estimable
of Scotchmen." They were offered cigarettes and Vienna tea and at
last taken upstairs to see the Carlyle resting on an easel. The Philis-
tine, looking at it, said, "Mr. Whistler, do you call this life size?"

"No, I don't," said Whistler. "There is no such thing as life size.
If I put you up against that canvas and measured you, you would
be a monster."

The Philistine attempted one more question.

"The tones of this portrait are rather dull, are they not? Not very
brilliant, are they?"

Whistler was ready for him.

"Not brilliant! No, why should they be? Are you brilliant? No.
Am I brilliant? Not at all. We are not highly colored, are we? We

194 THE WORLD OF

are very, very ordinary looking people. The picture says that and
no more."

Mr. Crawford and his delegation left, and on their return to Glas-
gow sent Whistler a check for a thousand guineas. If the good mem-
bers of the Glasgow Corporation had been impressed by the pre-
liminary work of Mrs. Ford and Mr. Reid in giving Whistler pub-
licity among their fellow citizens, the actual meeting with the
author of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, increased their con-
fidence that they had made a bold choice. They at least could under-
stand why Whistler had said that the Bible was a mine of remarkable
invectives and a book to study well; his conversation had born proof
of it. After meeting him the attacks from the Scottish newspapers on
the Carlyle came as an anti-climax. When reporters spoke of a
"senile Carlyle" in the picture and the picture itself as a "doubtful
masterpiece/' the Glasgow Corporation remained unmoved.

The buying of the Carlyle shortly preceded the buying of the
mother portrait by the French Government for the walls of the
Luxembourg (and today the picture is loaned for exhibitions by the
director of the Louvre). The picture had had a career of its own:
it had been shown at the Royal Academy in 1872, at the Pennsyl-
vania Academy of Fine Arts in 1881-82 (and was responsible for
Whistler's growing reputation in the United States; Americans never
resist a portrait of a mother, even when this one carried the abstract
title of Arrangement in Grey and Black). It was shown in Paris in
1883 and in Dublin in 1884 (which was the occasion when a Dublin
collector tried to buy it and Whistler wrote, "How can it ever have
been supposed that I offered the picture of my mother for sale? I
should never dream of disposing of it"). It was shown in Glasgow
in 1889, and in Amsterdam the same year. Whistler accepted the
French Government's offer as an honor and he received the nominal
sum of 4,000 francs for the picture and by that time the picture
held promise of achieving a kind of immortality.

Whistler's opinion of the picture had Whistlerian moments of
contradiction; it ran from the fatuous remark, "One must always
do best by one's Mummy," to "Art should be independent of all clap-
trap, should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or
ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it,
as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like . . . Take the picture

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 195

of my Mother ... as an Arrangement in Grey and Black. Now
that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother:
but what can or ought the public to care about this identity of the
portrait."

The truth was that many who saw it did care; Carlyle did when
the picture convinced him that he should have his portrait done by
the same hand. Americans cared, and as recently as 1934 the figure
of Whistler's mother, looking like a rather modish Quaker lady star-
ing at a large pot of flowers, was reproduced on a United States
three-cent postage stamp, issued "in memory and in honor of the
mothers of America." The date of issue was May 2nd, to prepare the
public for the annual celebration of Mother's Day on a Sunday in
early May, which is a holiday that combines filial sentiment with
a hopeful increase of business in the florists' trade.

Nothing could have been happier for the furtherance of Whis-
tler's reputation during the 1890's than these two disposals of his
famous portraits. He had become one of those rare figures whose
career had been advanced by the extremes of adverse criticism. All
Whistler needed were a few tangible expressions of public ap-
proval; recognition from Glasgow and Paris had arrived at the right
moment, and to celebrate this occasion Whistler and his wife
moved from Cheyne Walk to 110 Rue du Bac, near Montparnasse
in Paris.

His studio was a few steps away in Rue Notre Dame-des-Champs;
his arrival in Paris in 1892 had for him the atmosphere of a well-
earned holiday.

It is significant that Whistler's return to Paris brought with it
little recognition from contemporary French painters; the French
who formed friendships with him were writers; Marcel Proust re-
membered meeting Whistler at a reception and being charmed, so
much so that when Whistler put his gray, lavender-tinted gloves
upon a table, Proust quietly slipped them into his own pocket and
treasured them as a souvenir.

XVI

HISTLER'S delightful little pavilion with its garden at
110 Rue du Bac, charming as it was, was not exactly another Eden.
Small domestic disasters became enlarged there. He had a large par-
rot * of whom he had grown fond; he was proud of the bird and
had showed him off to visitors. One day the bird flew out into the
garden, settled himself high in the branches of a tree and refused
either to be caught or to be lured back into captivity. The bird also
refused to eat; he died of starvation.

It was generally admitted that as popular as Whistler was among
visitors who came to Paris from London and New York, Boston and
Philadelphia, he was a less impressive figure at 1 10 Rue du Bac than
in Chelsea. It became part of a visitor's ritual to be introduced to
Whistler or to secure an invitation to his house to tea, and some
were interested in being invited to look at canvases in his studio. But
fewer ladies of fashion cared to sit to him they had found another
American painter whose manner was less intense, less nervous and
who stood before them with all the ease of a professional portrait
painter John Singer Sargent. Sargent had something of the social
manner of a Harley Street physician; he was handsome, bearded,
well-set up, correctly conservative in dress, and robust; his deep
voice, his formality without affectation, inspired confidence. Like
Whistler he admired Velasquez and his painting showed that he
had also looked at Zurbaran and Goya. He frankly confessed his
indebtedness to the Spanish school and his liking of it.

To his sturdy knowledge of the Spanish masters, and his applica-
tion of what he had learned from them, he added lively touches of
* This was probably in memory of Courbet's parrot.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 197

style that he had picked up from Manet and Degas. Sargent had the
art of pleasing those who sat to him, and as Sir Osbert Sitwell has
remarked, "They loved him, I think, because, with all his merits, he
showed them to be rich: looking at his portraits, they understood at
last how rich they really were."

There were times when the effects that Sargent produced were
obviously meretricious, but he was a good craftsman; his eye was
clear, his hand was steady, he was almost never dull and frequently
brilliant. All his qualities were of a kind that led to his success as
a portrait painter: he charged high prices for his portraits (three
thousand guineas was a rate he favored and his clients felt that his
prices were a compliment to their wealth); he was an excellent guest
at dinner; he seldom spoke ill of anyone and his good-humored dig-
nity made it difficult for others to speak ill of him; his appeal was
to the younger set of American and British millionaires those who
regarded Watts and Millais fosse as painters, who, after all, be-
longed to an elder generation.

If anything, John Singer Sargent, born 1856, in Florence, Italy,
of American parents, was far more of a European painter than
Whistler. It was not until he was twenty-one, a student in Paris at
the Atelier Carolus-Duran where instruction followed the Spanish
school of portrait painting, that he paid his first, a four-month, visit
to the United States. The trip was a courtesy visit to American rela-
tives, and he was accompanied by his mother and his sister. It is
believed, and not without foundation since Henry James was one of
the very few friends of Sargent who had gained his confidence
that James's famous short story, 'The Pupil," had one point of origin
in Sargent's recollections of his childhood. Sargent's family, drifting
about in Europe on a small income, were as hard-pressed for funds
as the Moreen family in James's story, and little Morgan Moreen,
"the pupil/' in his sensitivity and erratic brilliance, does resemble
the often inarticulate, yet gifted and precocious young John Singer
Sargent.

At twelve young Sargent worked in the studio of a German-
American painter, Carl Welsh at Rome, and from Welsh's studio,
he attended Domenge's school in Florence and passed from there to
the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence. His precocity in painting
had all the skill, the facile graces of the mid-nineteenth-century

198 THE WORLD OF

Italian school of landscape and figure painting, and it would seem
that he had grasped, instinctively and at second-hand, a few of the
disciplines and a touch of the poetic insights of Jean Baptiste Camille
Corot. Ten years later these came to light in his Luxembourg Gar-
dens at Twilight and his painting, The Capri Girl. Meanwhile he
had entered the studio of Carolus-Duran in Paris where his early
admiration for the seventeenth-century school of Spanish painting
strengthened his hand.

His biographer, Charles Merrill Mount, believes that his first
meeting with Whistler took place in Venice in the mid-eighteen-
seventies, which is, of course, an impossibility of dates and place.
Whistler never saw Venice until after the Ruskin trial. It is pos-
sible that Whistler first praised young Sargent's drawings and water-
colors in London; and the great probability is that young Sargent's
cordial, first greetings from Whistler took place in Venice in 1880.
At that dark moment for Whistler, he was glad enough to see an
American face; and among young artists on holiday in Venice, Sar-
gent was easily the most distinguished and most brilliant.

The personal, invisible, tenuous, almost inarticulate bond between
Whistler and Sargent may be interpreted as the attraction of oppo-
sites: Whistler was fluent and verbal at moments when Sargent was
impelled to hold his tongue. Yet both artists in their paintings had
an affinity in producing brilliant effects. Both had an eye tor ele-
gance in portrait painting. No rivalry disturbed them. Sargent, a
generation younger than Whistler, moved in distinctly different and
far more respectable circles than Whistler. Sargent's personality as
well as his skilled and rapidly executed craftsmanship caught and
held the admiration of Henry James. Sargent was a professional
painter in the sense that Whistler was not. His portrait painting was
scarcely a matter for introspection, reappraisal, and tortuous repaint-
ings; this was done with the speed that Whistler painted some of his
Nocturnes and almost none of his portraits. Whistler never achieved
true ease in portrait painting.

The distance between Whistler and Sargent is best illustrated
by Sargent's comments on portrait painting to Joseph Pulitzer. The
modest seriousness of his tone; his quiet air, his evident sincerity,
his very lack of verbal wit point up the contrast of his aesthetic to
Whistler's:

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 199

I paint what I see. Sometimes it makes a good portrait;
so much the better for the sitter. Sometimes it does not; so
much the worse for both of us. But I don't dig beneath the
surface for things that don't appear before my eyes.

This confession makes Sargent seem far more literal-minded than
he was, yet it was true that he had none of Whistler's power to call
on the resources of his memory, nor had he Whistler's drive (which
was sometimes self-destructive) toward perfection. If the picture
failed, he shrugged his massive shoulders at it, locked his lips, and
went on painting. Internally as well as in his relationships with his
patronesses and women sitters, he could be counted on to keep a
secret. It was by this quality of restraint that he kept the respect of
British society. He was often painfully silent, yet a few of his terse
remarks took on the character of epigrams. Near the end of his long
career, and when he became "nervous" in completing his portrait
of Woodrow Wilson, he thought of Whistler and wrote to Mrs.
"Jack" Gardiner of Boston, the most romantic, exhilarating, and will-
ful of his American patronesses: "It takes a long time for a man to
look like his portrait, as Whistler used to say but he [Wilson] is
doing his best." Sargent's nervousness in painting portraits was a rare
experience for him, and occurred only near the close of his career.

Seldom if ever was Sargent troubled by problems of design in
portrait painting. (Problems of design had been Whistler's bete
noire, his digging "beneath the surface," which when he solved
them in his Nocturnes and in a dozen of his portraits were the trade-
marks of his genius.) They did not exist as problems for Sargent,
but were rather the mechanics of his well-trained skill, a skill that
accepted and reproduced the conventions of Velasquez. Sargent's
brilliance was nine-tenths manual, a rapid co-ordination of hand
and eye which accounts for the impressions of spontaneity and
freshness conveyed in his remarkable watercolors. His success as a
portrait painter came to him, not through literal flattery of his sit-
ters, but because his skill recreated in their portraits the courtly con-
ventions of Velasquez which became a display of elegance in late
Victorian and Edwardian dress.

Whistler and Sargent enjoyed one another's company. Mrs. "Jack"
Gardiner cleverly divided her enthusiasm for the two painters be-

200 THE WORLD OF

tween them but it was Sargent who painted the memorable, spec-
tacular, and not flattering portrait of her in a very low-cut black
evening gown. The lady was an exhibitionist and a candid one; she
was far too arrogant and intelligent to deny the fact. When she came
to Paris Whistler advised Rothenstein to guide her about the city,
which he did, and he also brought her on a visit to Whistler's studio.
Rothenstein wrote of the incident in his memoirs:

Whistler was in his most genial mood, and showed a
number of his canvases, among which was a lovely sea
piece with sailing ships. Mrs. Gardiner nudged me; I could
see she was eager to have it. "Why don't you put it under
your arm and carry it off?" I whispered. She was always
ready for any unusual adventure, and she boldly told
Whistler that she was going to take the picture with her.
Whistler laughed and did nothing to stop her.

Later Rothenstein learned that Whistler had given her the pic-
ture for three hundred pounds.

To Rothenstein Whistler confided a few disparaging remarks
about Sargent, and to his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pennell,
Whistler made a few uncharitable remarks but quickly checked
himself with "I like Sargent, and I am afraid if these things are
repeated, people will get the idea that I am ill-natured ... I
may be wicked, but what? never ill-natured."

The truth was that in Paris, which was to him "the city of the
sun" Whistler still felt, and in some respects, keener than before,
cold draughts of adversity. Mallarme translated Whistler's Ten
O'clock Lecture and sat for a lithographed portrait by him. The
lithograph was not successful but the friendship was. Degas happen-
ing to see Whistler in a cafe strolled up to him and said, "My dear
Whistler, you have too much talent to behave the way you do/'
and then calmly strolled away again. It was made clear that French
painters would have little to do with him; even Manet was tolerantly
half-friendly, half-indifferent.

The most complete view of Whistler through French eyes is
not Theodore Duret's well-balanced and appreciative study, but one
obtained through the restless gaze of Comte Robert de Montesquiou-
Fezensac (Proust's Baron de Charlus) and this by way of Edmond

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 201

de Goncourt's journals (1891-1893). The occasion was Montes-
quiou's sittings to Whistler for his portrait. That picture is now in
the Frick Collection in New York, nearly unseeable, looking very like
a glossy sheet o oil-spattered, rain-darkened asphalt paving, still
impervious to the efforts of restoration, its original grace glimpsed
only through faint outlines of a figure with a stick.

A kind of posthumous irony attends this portrait of the highly
affected, wealthy, homosexual, ungifted, would-be poet Montesquieu.
In the Whistler portrait, time has given his vanity the light touch
of ironic defeat that it so painstakingly deserved. As early as 1862
the de Goncourts, excellent critics of eighteenth-century French
painting as they undoubtedly were, had been jealous of Whistler's
discoveries in Japanese art; the brothers, Jules and Edmond, point-
edly ignored him. Thirty years later (Jules had died in 1870), Ed-
mond through the agency of Montesquieu, gave Whistler notice
in his journal. On a visit to Montesquieu's apartment he wrote:

As I happened to pause in front of an etching by Whis-
tler, Montesquiou informed me that Whistler was work-
ing on two portraits of him: one in a black suit with a fur
coat draped over one arm, the other in a large fur great-
coat, the collar turned up, a thin border of his cravate
showing at the neck this with a certain nuance of a
nuance of which he could not express, but which the
idealistic glow in his eyes revealed well enough.

It is fascinating to hear Montesquiou describe Whistler's
method of painting, for he has had seventeen sittings dur-
ing his month-long stay in London. For Whistler, the
first sketch is a "storming of the canvas': one or two hours
of feverish insanity at the end of which the whole thing
is slapped into its desired shape . . . Then come the sit-
tings, the interminable sittings at which for most of the
time the brush hovers in front of the canvas, the painter
seldom allowing it to touch his palette, and then this brush
is thrown aside, and he takes up another one and some-
times this goes on for three hours, without more than
fifty light strokes being applied to the portrait "each
stroke/' to use his expression, 'lifts a veil from the hidden
form of the sketch." O those sittings at which they seemed

202 THE WORLD OF

to Montesquieu that Whistler with the intensity of his at-
tention was drawing the very life-force from him! was
pumping out of him vital strains of his individuality, and
at the end of it all, Montesquiou felt drained so dry that
he experienced something like a shrinking of his whole
being. And it was indeed fortunate that he happened to
discover a certain coca wine which helped him to recover
fragments of himself from these terrible sittings!

Later, Wednesday, April 5, 1893, Edrnond continued, and not
without his delicate shades of malice, the saga of the Montesquiou-
Whistler relationship:

Montesquiou dropped by to inquire after me, and to pick
up his copy of the Chauves-Souris so as to have it illustrated
by a portrait of himself by Whistler.

Montesquiou told me that he had collected a great many
notes on Whistler and much information concerning him,
that one day he hoped to write a study of him, and re-
vealed his admiration for that painter who, as he said, had
managed to arrange his life so as to gain the victories which
for others in the usual course of events are inevitably
posthumous victories. And he spoke again about Whistler's
law suit with an English journalist who had emphasized
the impertinence of asking a thousand guineas for "throw-
ing a pot of paint in the public's face." And Whistler's per-
fectly beautiful reply when asked how much time he had
taken to paint the picture, a disdainful volley: "One or two
sittings/' and on the "Os" which this provoked, he added:
"Yes, I worked on it for only one or two mornings, but that
canvas contains the work of a lifetime."

Whistler lives, at this moment, in Rue du Bac, in a
hotel that overlooks the garden of the Missions Etrangeres.
Montesquiou, recently invited to dinner there, witnessed a
performance that impressed him immensely. In the gardens
of the Missions Etrangeres, at dusk, a male choir was sing-
ing Laudates, the men lifting their voices Montesquiou
supposes that the singers had before them several dreadful
paintings representing the terrifying martyrdom of some

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 203

of their fellow-missionaries in tropic climes lifting their
voices and exalting before these ghastly portrayals of their
comrades' tortures, as though they in the garden were eager
to emulate the examples before them.

Anyone who has read Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdti
will quickly recognize its Baron de Charlus revived for the moment
under Edmond de Goncourt's hand but what a place, overlooking
as it did, the garden of the Mission Etrangeres, for Whistler to have
lived! To English readers it may seem strange to see Ruskin referred
to as an "English journalist" by Edmond de Goncourt all the
stranger because a few years later Marcel Proust announced himself
as an admirer of Ruskin's prose and was engaged in translating
fragments of it for French periodicals. Was Whistler pulling Mon-
tesquiou's leg? Was he torturing him? Which, of course, Mon-
tesquiou, being what he was, would have enjoyed. Perhaps. With
Montesquieu as a sitter, Whistler could not have resisted exerting his
own powers of showmanship to the limit. If Montesquieu was a
dandy and he was Whistler could readily out-dandy him, prove
himself to be a far more precious aesthete than he; more than that,
carry his preciosity with more levity, more wit than Montesquiou
could command.

Something of Whistler's attitude toward the Montesquiou portrait
may be gleaned from a letter by Logan Pearsall Smith to his mother.
Smith, the wealthy Philadelphian exile (afterwards the author of
several appropriately titled volumes of Trivia), was footloose in
Europe. He ran into Whistler which was during the year, a sum-
mer day, Whistler was painting the portrait. Smith was small-boned
and short; Montesquiou was tall. The day was hot. Whistler invited
Smith to take Montesquiou's place at one of those "terrible sittings."
Smith was highly flattered as he wrote to his mother: he had gained
the honor of sweltering for several hours in a fur great-coat that ac-
tually belonged to Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac! This
was a rare privilege indeed for a Philadelphian. The young man
was beginning to make his way in the world!

The Smith incident is characteristic of the grotesque form that
Whistler's wit so often assumed. At times its shafts were boomerangs
and self-destructive. Certainly ill-luck attended the career of the
Montesquiou portrait, which when it was first viewed, outshone the

204 THE WORLD OF

brilliance of Whistler's contemporaries in portrait painting. In re-
touching it, he had probably worn his canvas thin with too much
scraping of the palette-knife; his surface paint was probably over-
loaded with turpentine; in any event, the portrait began to "spoil"
at an early date. Whistler's habit of "storming the canvas/' of too
vigorously scraping it with his palette-knife has created problems in
restoration of his paintings by directors of present-day museums.

Whistler's great love of fame and his contempt of it were of one
piece in bitter conflict within his psyche. As he grew older, and as
his nervous sensibility increased while working before the canvas,
his tendencies toward inward-reaching self-criticism, outpaced his
renewals of creative energy. In painting he had formed the danger-
ous habit of "living on his nerves," which, by the way, is an Amer-
ican disease, and one not often shared by European painters who
have reached maturity. Whistler's French contemporaries were well-
poised and free of American "nerves."

The Whistler apartment, an eighteenth-century pavilion set in the
courtyard of 110 Rue du Bac, became a center for young men from
London and the United States; it was they rather than the French
who knocked at the green and white door, who came and were
admitted to the sitting-room with its few pieces of Empire furniture
and to the dining-room with its blue and white china and rare pieces
of English silver. A Japanese bird-cage was set at the center of the
table; there was a pleasant garden behind the pavilion, and next
door was a convent where nuns chanted morning and evening
prayers.

To these chambers came William Rothenstein, a young artist from
the Slade school in London who had come to Paris to study art at
Julian's. At the Slade he had worked under Legros; he saw in
Whistler (as a number of young men did in London) the leader of
everything shockingly new. Rothenstein was smartly dressed, short,
dark and spectacled. More important than his manner which was
both alert and deferential was his desire to find a hero. Whistler was
affable, toyed with his eyeglass, looked over the young man's draw-
ings and praised them.

Whistler took Rothenstein to a dance at the American Ambas-
sador's apartments, and to keep up the role of being shocking to the

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 205

young man from London, he remarked that the Union Jack covered
a union of hypocrites. Whistler fell in neatly with the lighter, half-
irreverent spirit of the Ws; at the dance a pretty young American
girl was draped scantily in the folds of the American flag; Rothen-
stein delighted Whistler by observing that the Stars and Stripes con-
cealed almost nothing.

For some time after this incident, Whistler accepted Rothenstein
as part of his retinue, and with Rothenstein other young men from
across the Channel drifted in. Whistler was host to them on Sunday
afternoons in his garden; he would sit with an etching plate in his
hand, lightly sketching the surface and talking rapidly of many
things. He was "in character/* dressed in a short black velveteen
jacket, dazzling white shirt, white duck trousers, and at intervals he
drew from his pocket adverse reviews of his work he had clipped
from newspapers and read them aloud.

To this circle came Aubrey Beardsley, a pale thin young man,
straight yellow hair falling over his forehead. The patronage of
Burne-Jones had released him from a clerkship in an insurance
office, and a commission to illustrate a new edition of Morte d' Arthur
had given him means to visit Paris. Beardsley had scarcely turned
twenty and was fatally ill with tuberculosis, but like many who were
afflicted with that disease (and the list includes Keats, Robert Louis
Stevenson, and D. H. Lawrence) he was remarkably productive. It
was as though he knew too well that his gifts, were they to find any
expression at all, had to be released and to receive recognition in the
shortest possible time. Whistler was as enthusiastic over his drawings
as Burne-Jones had been, and in Whistler Beardsley discovered an
affinitythe affinity of being one who regarded art as a vocation,
rather than a profession. In a traditional and literal sense, Beardsley
did not know how to draw; his gift was a gift of perceiving design,
of having an "eye" like those who are said to have an "ear" for
music, and yet cannot read a note. He had no time to learn because
his illness precluded any extended period of training. In Paris he
found another kind of affinity in the posters of Lautrec; he quickly
if superficially grasped the elements of Oriental design from Whis-
tler's example and combined with them the compositions of space and
masses that he had found in Lautrec's posters.

Quite as Whistler would scrape and rub out that which displeased
him in painting a canvas, so Beardsley would painfully erase lines

206 THE WORLD OF

and work over the same surface in his drawings. Whistler saw in the
boy's drawings much that reflected his own temperament and
Beardsley's admiration for The Gentle Art of Making Enemies was
everything that the elder artist wished to hear. Another trait they
had in common was the desire to write as well as draw; Beardsley's
nervous, delicate hand traced drawings with the same effort toward
precision that he sought in words. In going to Whistler, Beardsley
went to the source of much that had prepared London for the 'Tel-
low '90V Young as he was, ill-trained as he was, gifted as he was
(and not without a touch of genius) within four years, Beardsley
became the most clearly defined example of the Aesthetic Movement
in English art. It was said of Beardsley that even his lungs were
affected, yet he evolved a manner, and a style (derived from the Pre-
Raphaelites, Whistler, Lautrec and probably the erotic drawings of
Fuseli did he see Rosa Corder's imitations of Fuseli?) that was his
own.

Certainly through Beardsley's admiration Whistler strengthened
his association in London with what the younger generation thought
and felt. Beardsley's rooms in Pimlico where he lived with his
mother and his sister, Mabel, were painted bright orange, and doors,
sills, wainscoatings were painted black and these were inspired by
rumors of the rooms where Whistler lived in Chelsea. Beardsley's
sister, Mabel, was several years older than he; in her own right she
was known as a woman of wit and of remarkable intelligence; W. B.
Yeats was attracted to her and wrote poems in tribute to her. It was
probably she who led her brother to the reading of The Gentle Art.
In the four years of Beardsley's rise to fame (he illustrated Wilde's
Salome, and in the process of doing so, William Morris's rosebriar
designs became transformed into Whistler's peacock feathers and
butterflies) the Beardsleys moved into fashionable literary circles. It
was known that Burne-Jones, Wilde and Whistler had influenced
him, encouraged him.

Through Rothenstein's admiration (or rather it was short-lived
hero-worship) Whistler's name was heralded among young English
artists of a more robust school than those of the Aesthetic movement.
Rothenstein numbered among his friends Max Beerbohm, who had
come down from Oxford to London, and had captured the town.

One of the best of the stories that Rothenstein told of Whistler in

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 207

Paris ran as follows. He had dined with Whistler at the Hotel du
Bon Lafontaine. "After dinner Whistler proposed we should go to
his studio. We walked to the Rue Notre Dame des Champs. Climbing
the stairs we found the studio in darkness. Whistler lighted a single
candle. He had been gay enough during dinner, but now he became
very quiet and intent, as though he forgot me. Turning a canvas
that faced the wall, he examined it carefully up and down, with the
candle held near it, and then did the like with some others, peering
closely into each. There was something tragic, almost frightening, as
I stood and waited, in watching Whistler; he looked suddenly old,
as he held the candle with trembling hands, and stared at his work,
while our shapes threw restless, fantastic shadows all around us ...
I followed him silently down the stairs."

This picture of Whistler is one that has more conviction in it than
the many of those telling of his social ease. It shows, by contrast,
something of the strain he labored under as he played the part of a
celebrity in Paris. Of French painters, who attained any stature,
Toulouse-Lautrec was alone in remarking that Whistler had made a
contribution to the painting of his day; other French painters who
had anything good to say of him at all were minor figures and
Whistler knew it. Pissarro had already granted his gifts as an etcher,
as a graphic artist. Whistler was distressed when he learned that
Montesquieu had sold the portrait he had finally completed for him.

Visitors to Whistlers house too closely resembled the tourist trade.
This was not enough, and the strain of bitterness that Henry Adams
had noted in Whistler's conversation, still streamed beneath the sur-
face of talk that was held in check by a look from Beatrix Whistler.
The surface broke when Whistler read an installment of Du
Maurier's new novel, Trilby, in an issue of Harper's Magazine in
1894.

In the intervening forty years between Whistler's student days in
Paris and the early years in London, du Maurier and Whistler had
seen little enough of each other. Du Maurier had made an excellent
place for himself as Punch's leading social satirist. He was not a
political cartoonist, like Sir John Tenniel, the illustrator of Lewis
Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. If
Thackeray as a Punch "cartoonist" may be described as a Victorian
James Thurber, Du Maurier was a Victorian Peter Arno; his wit was

208 THE WORLD OF

the wit of understatement, and in his drawings he flattered his fash-
ionable London by making it seem far smarter, more glittering, more
fashionable than it actually was. He was both industrious and clever.

As Whistler and Du Maurier went their separate ways in the
London of the 1860's, du Maurier's road took its turning by be-
coming an intimate of the Princeps at Little Holland House, at
whose center was the portrait painter, G. W. Watts. The Princep
fortune was maintained by wealth made in India and as we have
seen, when Ellen Terry was Watts' wife, the household (which
Thackeray used as a model for a number of details in The New-
comes') was dominated by Princep's wife and her two sisters, three
women of extraordinary character; they had strength of will and re-
markably good looks. The women took a fancy to young George du
Maurier. He was ambitious, cheerful, an easy-to-look-at, easy-to-talk-
to Philistine. He had lost the sight of his left eye, the loss of which
warned him that he could not be the painter he had hoped to be;
yet the fact that he pursued the career of an illustrator, despite a
physical handicap, gave him an heroic air. He was the kind of young
man to whom middle-aged women offer maternal advice and aid. In
writing to his mother, the daughter of the notorious Mary-Anne
Clarke, the mistress of the Duke of York, he professed to be shocked
by the low-cut evening gowns worn by the beautiful ladies of Little
Holland House; their manners were far more easy than those of the
demure young woman who became his wife. He married early, and
with the connections he had formed at Little Holland House he had
became a member of Punch's staff.

When he himself had grown middle-aged, he turned to the writ-
ing of two romantic novels, Peter Ibbetson and Trilby. Whistler
called him "the new Thackeray" and a "new Thackeray" he was,
but without the original's touch of cynicism and mastery of a theme
in writing Vanity Fair. Like Thackeray his drawings enlivened the
chapters of his fiction; he was accomplished in both arts and in both
he practiced the same skill and charm.* In Trilby, his romantic

* Daphne du Maurier's popular romantic novels, Rebecca and My C&usin
Rachel, are twentieth-century versions of her grandfather's highly successful
ventures into popular fiction. She like him has the same skill in making an
appeal to the taste of the lending libraries; George du Maurier and his grand-
daughter were singularly expert in writing "the summer hammock and an
apple" kind of romance.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 209

memoirs (in fiction) of his student years in Paris, the drawings were
as much a feature of the romance at the text. Harper's Magazine
(which for many years had reprinted Du Manner's drawings from
Punch in their "Editor's Easy Chair" and had extended Du Maurier's
influence upon illustrators to the United States) ran Trilby serially
in monthly installments. It also welcomed the chance to publish Du
Maurier's illustrations to the story. The caricatures of Whistler as
Joe Sibley were obvious; Joe Sibley wore Whistler's white duck suit,
his broad brimmed straw hat and he was described as "the most
irresistible friend in the world as long as the friendship lasted, but
that was not forever ... his enmity would take the simple and
straightforward form of trying to punch his ex-friend's head; and
when the ex-friend was too big he would get some new friend to
help him . . . He is now perched on such a toppling pinnacle (of
fame and notoriety combined) that people can stare at him from two
hemispheres at once."

There is little evidence of deliberately turned malice in Du
Maurier's caricature, but there is much hidden malice floating be-
neath the surface. The day had long passed when Whistler sub-
rented a London room to him for ten shillings which included the
use of Whistler's formal evening jacket. It was natural enough for
Du Maurier, who had given up painting for the commercial pro-
fession of illustrating Punch, to feel a touch of envy at Whistler's
fame; that touch of envy had made itself felt early as early as
Du Maurier heard of At the Piano being shown at the Royal
Academy Exhibition in 1860. Du Maurier, like many a successful
illustrator, also had a slight twinge of jealousy toward painting that
represented an art more "pure" than his, and the fact that he had
known Whistler when both were young and quite unfamous
brought a twinge of jealousy home to him with especial sharpness.
This was the kind of feeling that so many people have toward the
acquaintances of their youth who have moved into circles either
above them or into other spheres. Du Maurier was in the position of
someone who had "known Whistler when "

His comment on Whistler's character was not without its thorn of
truth. Whistler was hurt, rather than angry, hurt in much the same
fashion that Swinburne's attack on his Ten O'clock Lecture had left
its scar. Whistler had long treasured the friendship of Charles Keene

210 THE WORLD OF

who was also on the staff of Punch. Punch represented the world of
fashionable London taste toward which the elder Whistler glanced
in the hope of receiving belated recognition. Du Maurier's Trilby
showed him clearly enough that his conquest of London was as in-
complete as ever. Du Maurices informal patronage of his gifts and
character were of greater hurt to his vanity than open slander.

Whistler threatened Harper's Magazine with suit unless the
offending Joe Sibley was removed from its pages and afterwards en-
tirely expunged from the novel. It was then Du Maurier's turn to feel
grieved; he protested that he wished to recall "the good old days" in
Paris. But Whistler stood his ground; Joe Sibley was suppressed and
a figure called Bald Antony took his place. In January 1895, the Du
Maurier farce was over; Harper's Magazine published an apology to
Whistler. Whistler afterwards told William Rothenstein that Du
Maurier submitted the manuscript of his book to him before sending
it to press; Whistler deleted what he saw fit, so he said. But the story
has an air of Whistler bragging of his power to silence Du Maurier;
it should not be forgotten that the story was told to an admiring
young man.

As 1894 came to its close, Whistler's domestic life at 110 Rue du
Bac came to an abrupt change. Beatrix Whistler was stricken with
cancer. The pavilion in Rue du Bac had never been the paradise
that the Whistlers hoped it would be, yet it was to Whistler and in
his half-ironic phrase, a "palatial residence." Although he would not
have regretted a return to London, the occasion which forced the
return was filled with anxiety. From now onward 110 Rue du Bac
was not a settled household; like his studio in Rue Notre Dame des
Champs, it was a stopping-off place in Paris. Beatrix Whistler's ill-
ness (he called her "Trixie") was to transform Whistler into elderly
middle-age. Graham Robertson has a sketch of him on one of his
visits to London before his wife's illness which shows very nearly the
last of his spriteliness and the direct influence of Beatrix Whistler
upon his temper. Robertson, a tall, fair-haired young man with a
large income, was a pupil of Albert Moore. (His portrait had been
painted by Sargent, a long, frockcoated portrait, fashionably brilliant,
and he always looked as though he had just stepped out of a

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 211

picture.) Robertson was saying good-bye to the Whistlers in Kensing-
ton High Street. The three had just been visiting Albert Moore;
Moore was one of Whistler's constant British admirers and an undis-
tinguished painter. Whistler never hung one of Moore's pictures on
his walls and the single Whistler that Moore owned was not of the
best, so it was hung face to the wall in a dark corner of Moore's
studio. Robertson was turning west as he said good-bye; to the east
were St. Mary's Abbot and the trees of Kensington Gardens as well
as the Albert Memorial that Mrs. Whistler's father had helped to
design. As Robertson turned west:

"What are you going down there for?" asked Whistler suspi-
ciously.

"I'm going to see Burne-Jones."
"Who?"
"Burne-Jones."

"O Mister Jones. But what on earth are you going to see him
for?"

"I suppose because I like him."

"Like him. But what on earth do you like him for? Why do you
like him?"

Whistler circled Robertson and barred his way; by this time they
were standing in the middle of Kensington High Street, forcing
traffic to detour around them, and Whistler's stick rapped the pave-
ment.

"I suppose because he amuses me," said Robertson.
"Amuses you? Good heavens and you like him because he amuses
you! I supposeI suppose I amuse you!"

"Don't tease him, Jimmy," said Mrs. Whistler. "Surely he may
choose his own friends/'

Robertson then told how suddenly and lightly Whistler touched
his hand. "He doesn't mind, do you?" he said with one of his rare
smiles. And in his memoirs Robertson observed, "Though he
laughed much he seldom smiled, the carefully studied sardonic grin
being merely a stage effect and counting for nothing."

Beatrix Whistler's tact had smoothed the surface of Whistler's
sleepless sense of persecution, for he had never forgiven Burne-Jones's
testimony in the Ruskin trial and Whistler's vanity was also sleep-
less. His wife's illness told him plainly enough that his protection

212 THE WORLD OF

from the world and from himself was to be short-lived. He worked at
water colors, lithographs, paintings fitfully; almost nothing was com-
pleted that he wished to keep. He received large commissions and
accepted advances, yet almost nothing was done. He and Beatrix
Whistler drifted between doctors' offices in Mayfair (and a hotel in
Bond Street) and Paris. Living expenses mounted; to his friends
Whistler would not admit that his wife was hopelessly ill; every-
thing possible must be done for her.

And what of Whistler's friends in the period in which he rose to
fame, in which he did little of his best work, and much that was
literally perishable? Of a slightly earlier period, Walter Sickert, a
Danish painter who, like Whistler, had adopted London, was the
most gifted. In Whistler's latter Chelsea days, Sickert became one
of his followers, and was second only to the Greaves brothers in his
devotion to Whistler and his theories of art. Sickert's father had
been a painter and a friend of Whistler's old friend, Fantin-Latour.
Sickert had picked up French, German and Italian with the facility
that Whistler had for acquiring languages, and in his boyhood had
traveled freely on the European continent His early worship of
Whistler was natural enough. When he came to England Whistler
was precisely the person for a young painter of Sickert's background
to discover a decidedly unBritish artist in Chelsea, and upon
Whistler's advice, he, too, settled in Chelsea. It was characteristic of
Sickert to choose another aspect of Chelsea than that which Whistler
saw, and to some degree, created, for Whistler's contributions to
Chelsea were river Nocturnes, and pastel-tinted walls of rooms and
studios. Sickert welcomed rundown rooming houses, dark, dingy
walls, cast-iron bedsteads and rather the worse-for-wear Cockney girls
between the sheets. If the subjects of his paintings were of a differ-
ent world than Whistler's, the smartness of his dress, his verbal wit
and the liveliness of his personality showed an affinity with the
elder man.

Early in their acquaintance (as William Rothenstein remembered
the incident), Sickert shared Whistler's admiration for Ellen Terry's
acting. He weighted a bouquet of roses with a piece of lead and
tossed it on the stage of the Lyceum on the opening night of an
Irving-Terry performance; it was thrown from the gallery and nar-
rowly missed braining Irving. Sickert heard Whistler's loud "Ha,

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 213

ha!" from a section of the orchestra, and it was rumoured that after
this episode they became close friends. When Whistler dashed into
London from Paris on a short visit, his frequent stopping-place was
Sickert's gloomy studio in The Vale, Chelsea, and on one occasion
he finished a painting Sickert had left sketched in upon his easel.

For Whistler Sickert supplied the last associations of Vie de
Boh&me, but when Whistler found in Paris that Degas paid more
attention to Sickert than to himself, and then praised his work, the
friendship cooled. Sickert received early encouragement from the
later Impressionists, particularly in Paris, where Whistler was ac-
knowledged and then quickly set aside. At his least Sickert antici-
pated the American, John Sloan; at his best, his genre painting an-
ticipated the work of another American, Edward Hopper.

Sickert had served an apprenticeship with Whistler from the days
when he delivered at Whistler's instructions the portrait of Whis-
tler's mother to the French Government and anxiously watched its
unloading, swung by a crane, on a pier at Dieppe. When he had
dropped an etching plate in Whistler's studio in Tite Street, he had
heard him say, "How like you," and when Whistler dropped a plate,
overheard the angry exclamation, "How unlike me!" He had left
the Slade School when Whistler told him, "You've wasted your
money there's no use wasting your time, too," and followed
Whistler; yet it was not extraordinary that once he had learned all
he could from Whistler that he turned to Degas. In a sense, Degas
represented to Sickert a relationship that Courbet once had had
toward Whistler; the attraction was a realistic, contemporaneous
view of life through art. Whistler had long discarded that particular
attitude; Sickert rediscovered it in Degas' statement, "I want to look
through the keyhole," and when a woman asked Degas why he
made women ugly, he replied, "Because, Madame, women usually
are ugly."

In bringing Sickert to his side Degas had the satisfaction of de-
priving Whistler of one of his disciples; Degas, sophisticated and
gifted as he was, was also not above displays of petty malice.

To compensate for the loss of Sickert, Whistler encouraged Mr.
and Mrs, Pennell Joseph and Elizabeth Bobbins, his wife to sit at
his feet and worship. The pair came from Philadelphia; Joseph Pen-
nell was tall, handsome, and presentable; he had a talent for etching

2|4 THE WORLD OF

which was of less durability than Seymour Haden; his gift and mind
were mediocre, yet his etchings, quite like his personal abilities to
dress well and to stride into a drawing room without upsetting chairs
and tables, were acceptable. Elizabeth, his wife, was bustling, active,
enthusiastic, and both were more than a little arrogant. They were
industrious and humorless; both could be trusted to believe every-
thing that Whistler told them. Whistler appointed them, male and
female, to be his collective Boswell; they became his official biogra-
phers and no one writing a life of Whistler can afford to overlook
what they have written. They quarreled with Whistler's "enemies"
and catered to his vanity; in actuality they made the study of Whis-
tler their life work, and although they lacked the tact and wit of
Beatrix Whistler, their presence at Whistler's side at home and in his
studio became a necessary tonic to his diminishing ego. As his lack of
confidence in his painting deepened into a well of self-distrust (Gra-
ham Robertson told of the many portraits he rubbed out or destroyed),
his dependence upon the uncritical praise of the Pennells grew.
According to William Rothenstein, Joseph Pennell became adroit
in stirring up trouble between the New English Art Club group
which included Tonks and Sickert as well as Rothenstein and Whis-
tler. Pennell, to increase Whistler's dependence upon him, probably
spread gossip that he had overheard, and Whistler was, of course,
always eager to overhear any mention of his name. In any case praise
from the Pennells was enough to compromise Whistler's reputation
among intelligent critics. Whistler lacked wisdom in allowing the
Pennells to surround him as completely as they did, yet their out-
ward appearance of respectability made them seem a safer deposit
for confidence then several young men, including Mortimer Menpes,
who clung to the fringes of the Aesthetic Movement in London.

Mortimer Menpes was a handsome young man, who in the mid-
nineteen-eighties was proud to be known as one of Whistler's "Fol-
lowers," and with Walter Sickert helped Whistler in manual tasks
in keeping his studio in order. There is little doubt that for ten years
Menpes was a devoted pupil and part-time servant of the "Master,"
yet Whistler was quick to avoid any emotional attachment to him.
Menpes' own gifts were those of the overly "artistic" illustrator of
books and magazine articles; he had taste, but no style, no marked
distinction, good or bad, that could be called his own. Slowly he

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 215

drifted into "commercial art/' illustrating as he did so, books of
memoirs on bohemian London of the eighteen 'nineties. His book,
Whistler as I Knew Him, is an unreliable, often emotional, often
pathetic, at times spiteful document of his relationship with Whis-
tler. Whistler did well to shake him off.

In the late 'nineties when Whistler was asked if he knew Menpes,
his reply was "Menpes, Menpes? What are Menpes?" A strained
and loud "Ha, Ha" followed the question. One feels that the reply
was self-defensive. Whistler had washed his hands of the Aesthetic
Movement.

1895 was the year of the Oscar Wilde trial, and the scandals that
had circulated through London before and after it threw the
Aesthetic Movement into the streets. As Whistler had said (but with
other meanings in mind) in his Ten O'clock Lecture, "art was upon
the town," and to those who eagerly followed the course of the trial
in the newspapers, art was scarcely fit to be seen. As early as the
1880's Whistler had sharply disassociated himself from Wilde, yet
in the minds of a generally ignorant public, Rossetti, Whistler,
and Wilde were closely joined as triplets of the Aesthetic Move-
ment.

Nor did the opening days of the Wilde trial dispel the likeness to
the Whistler-Ruskin trial which had taken place sixteen years be-
fore. In both trials the artist was the plaintiff; both trials were suits
for libel; in both trials the artist was the principal witness, and in
the opening testimonies the witness turned the issues of the trial into
a discussion of art.

That general resemblance of the two trials was lost upon no one;
but several important differences between the two artists in the
witness box remain. Wilde, in bringing suit against the Marquis of
Queensberry, a suit for libel because Queensberry had left a written
message to the porter at the Albemarle Club addressed "To Oscar
Wilde posing as a sodomite," was courting literary suicide. He could
have allowed the Marquis to gossip about his homosexual relation-
ship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the Marquis' son, and there would
have been small chance of overt action against him. Gossip had
pursued Wilde from the moment Robert Hichens wrote and pub-
lished a number of years before the trial The Green Carnation, a
parody of Wilde's social manner and writings that in its cleverness

216 THE WORLD OF

almost equaled the dialogue of Wilde's plays. Wilde's personal life
had been suspect ever since the publication of his novel, The Picture
of Dorian Gray, and Charles Whibley, Whistler's brother-in-law, had
written a nearly libelous review of the book for W. E. Henley's
The Observer. As far as rumor about Wilde's homosexuality was
concerned, Queensberry's gossip offered the public nothing new.

But Wilde had led himself into a tragic net of circumstances. Both
his mother (Lady Wilde was nearly insane, and certainly lacked
judgment in household matters, even to the extent of telling the
maid not to store dinner dishes in the coal scuttle, but to place them
on chairs throughout the house) and Lord Alfred Douglas (to spite
his father) encouraged Wilde to open suit, to air the case in court.
Wilde had two plays successfully running on the London stage;
there was no visible reason why he should expose himself to the risk
of social and financial ruin. A not too easily unraveled set of motives
for his action seems evident, and of these a hidden sense of guilt
demanding expiation is the most important. Another was his
Anglo-Irish sense of instability in London society and with it a
melancholy sense of doom; he deliberately handed himself over to
the "enemy" which to him was upper and middleclass Victorian
society and waited for it to pass judgment on his fate.

As he stepped into the witness box his position in two respects at
least was notably different from that of Whistler's sixteen years be-
fore. The sympathy of the public was on his side; he was the man of
wit, and a successful one, who promised to talk over the heads of the
public, and yet, at the same time, to entertain it He emulated
Whistler's skill in using the witness box as a platform from which to
discuss aesthetic paradoxes and beliefs, but he was all too obviously
adapting a part that had been played with effective sincerity by
another man. He was hiding something; the public may not have
known exactly what he was talking about, but it soon became aware
that his plea of art for art's sake lacked righteousnessand Whistler's
righteousness had actually wrung a farthing from a British jury
for the spirit of righteousness was something it could understand
and even in the person of a foreigner who insulted the public with
the ease of Wilde, it could half admire.

Wilde went to his doom by admitting to Sir Edward Carson, his
cross-examiner, another Anglo-Irishman, that he had no affection

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 217

for an Oxford servant boy because 'He was, unfortunately, ex-
tremely ugly."

Wilde's defeat in court and his term of imprisonment at Reading
Gaol were frightening in their immediate consequences. Wilde's col-
lapse and his dubious martyrdom were victories for all the deepest
dark brown shades of Victorian Philistinism. Every artist who was
even remotely associated with the movement that Whistler and
Walter Pater had brought into being in London felt the shock of
Wilde's punishment and his decline into a pathetic figure, an alco-
holic, an almost too substantial wraith, drifting through the streets
of Dieppe, Naples and Paris.

Wilde's trial conclusively defined the distance between the artist
and the readers of newspapers throughout the English speaking
world. Wilde's opponent, the Marquis of Queensberry, arch sports-
man, the nearly illiterate author of rules for boxing, had earned an
ill-deserved position of moral heroism. And lesser artists of the
aesthetic movement through Wilde's defeat were given the consola-
tions of sentimental regret to be dissolved only by recurrent tears of
self-pity.

The year brought Whistler a trial on his own account, the trial
that he described later in The Baronet and the Butterfly: The facts
in the case and the case itself produced nothing as clearly cut as the
issue in the Ruskin trial, yet behind a facade of personalities in con-
flict, Sir William Eden and Whistler himself, the dim outlines of an
issue and a principle do emerge, and they are relevant to the right of
a painter to control the sale and possession of his pictures.

Sir William Eden had been introduced to Whistler by George
Moore. And there was so much in common in the characters of
Moore and Whistler that their meeting at all may be regarded as one
almost certain to produce disastrous results. Moore was the son of an
Anglo-Irish landowner and was nearly twenty years Whistler's
junior; like Whistler he had spent a few of his student years in Paris;
Paris was his university, and he knew the Paris of the 1870s in some-
thing of the same fashion that Whistler had known the Paris of the
'50s. He studied painting and he came to know (on the easy and yet
uncertain terms of a foreign visitor) Degas and Manet. His gifts
were literary; he dabbled in art criticism in which he had flashes of
keenly perceptive insight, and he "found himself in the writing of

218 THE WORLD OF

several excellent (and today underrated) Anglo-Irish stories and
novels. He was a thin, tall, light-blue-fishy-eyed young man who was
deceptively naive in appearance, and at times deceptively brilliant in
conversation; he was a confirmed aesthete, a follower of Walter Pater,
yet like Sickert, he leaned strongly in the direction of Degas' "key-
hole" realism.

Sir William Eden was a water-colorist in his own right; he was an
English eccentric who had shrewd and well-developed tastes in art;
he bought pictures and when he grew bored with them, promptly
(and usually at a handsome profit) sold them. He also moved in the
same large orbit in which the Marquis of Queensberry was a
familiar figure; he could be and was both generous and brutal; and
he had a remarkably beautiful wife. Through George Moore, he
commissioned Whistler to do a portrait of her. From then onward
misunderstandings, vague terms concerning how much Whistler
charged for a portrait, clouded the scene. Whistler had allowed
Moore to understand that his price varied from one hundred to a
hundred and fifty pounds for a portrait sketch in pastel or water
color. Moore retailed this information to Sir William. Whistler was
enchanted by the amazingly smart good looks of Sir William's wife;
instead of doing a water color he did a small portrait of her in oil
and exhibited the portrait in a London gallery; Sir William admired
the portrait but was angry at Whistler exhibiting it without his per-
mission. On the 14th of February 1895 Whistler received a Valen-
tine of a hundred pounds from Sir William as payment for the pic-
ture and a demand for its delivery; Whistler cashed Sir William's
check, painted out Lady Eden's face and kept the picture.

The incident was not a pretty one. One element in the affair was
Whistler's great and urgent need for money; the expenses of living
en route between London and Paris and of medical care for Beatrix
Whistler completely unbalanced Whistler's always precarious
finances. He felt it within his rights to pocket a rich man's money
and to withhold the picture. He knew the Baronet was a bully and
he hoped to out-bully him. As Sir William stormed at Whistler in
his Paris studio, he was warned that he would betray his nationality
to an entire neighborhood. Sir William retaliated by opening suit
against him. The moral issue in the case was cloudy; it was easy to
see that Whistler should not have accepted Sir William's check, yet

JAMES McNEILL WHl'STLER 219

behind the cloudy issue, intangible rights of the artist to paint as he
wished, to distrust a hostile buyer who might at any moment resell
the picture, were also at stake. A French court sensibly forced
Whistler to repay Sir William the hundred pounds and to keep the
picture. The intangible rights were upheld. The case dragged on
through several phases and covered two years; Whistler was scolded
(justly enough) by the judge for defacing his own work. Whistler
acquired another grievance that he could exaggerate to such friends
as the Pennells and receive flattering sympathy.

Of the Whistler who dropped into Carmen's school Arthur
Symons wrote, "I never saw any one so feverishly alive" he prob-
ably had fever which accompanied his sore throats "as this little
old man, with his bright withered cheeks, over which the skin was
drawn tightly, his darting eyes . , . and above all his exquisite
hands, never at rest."

Symons went on: "And his voice, with its strange accent, part
American, part deliberately French, part tuned to the key of his wit,
was not less personal or significant." All this was very well for the
appreciation of Arthur Symons whose intuitive writings on the
Symbolists contributed to the knowledge of their work in London,
but Whistler's manner and appearance were far more suited to the
environment of a caf than to a studio filled with earnestly ignorant
and worshipping young men and women. Whistler brilliantly talked
over the heads of Carmen's pupils and left them impressed, be-
wildered and certainly no wiser than before. The school failed, but
Whistler's vanity was shielded by the fact that his visits were in-
frequent enough to absolve him of any mismanagement of classes.

It was during this period that he questioned the lavish praise of an
admirer who compared him to Velasquez "Why drag in Velas-
quez?" said Whistler, and this phrase remains the best example of
the play of his ego against his wit; the ambiguity of his remark
should be interpreted as a declaration of his pride rather than of his
vanity; he had never claimed to be the equal of Velasquez.

XVII

. O offset Whistlers unhappier hours in Paris came the friend-
ship, the sympathy of Charles Lang Freer. Freer was a multimillion-
aire, a railroad financier from the American middlewest, Detroit. He
was a bachelor of austere and delicately perceptive taste. He had a
lawyer, Howard Mansfield, who was less proficient in his knowledge
of law than in his skill for collecting etchings, He had an "eye" and
so had Freer, and on one of Freer's visits to New York, Mansfield
showed him a set of Whistler's etchings he had bought. It was the
sight of Whistler's etchings that converted Freer to visual aesthetics,
to the buying of pictures and objects of Oriental art.

Freer was born at Kingston, New York, in 1856. He was one of
those Americans who was never quite at home in the United States.
He was small-boned, meticulous in dress and manner. His career
began as a boy-clerk in a general store; his family was poor and
came of cultivated French Huguenot stock. He had an almost
abstract love of bookkeeping and the management of corporation
funds. The expansion of railroading in the United States gave him
a chance to exercise his superior skills in executive bookkeeping. He
detached himself from immediate scenes of money-making, of indus-
trial rivalries, of employees, strikes and conflicts of business manage-
ment. He hated the crude approach to industrial warfare. His com-
mands were on paper supplemented by rows of figures, his word was
law, his word was final.

On visits to New York he sought out the company of Stanford
White who was an aesthete of a kind Whistler could have under-
stood and Freer admired. Though vigorous and redheaded, White
the architect was as coolly poised as Freer. Legend has it that when

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 221

White was directing plans for a building he had designed near the
lower tip of Manhattan, a workman was crushed by a pile-driver
thrusting piles into the river. "Look," cried White, "what a wonder-
ful color that man's blood makes on the water."

White had taste in the selection of beautiful girls at dinner-parties
given to entertain his friends; so had Freer. Yet Freer's selection of
women seems to have been more impersonal than White's, for
Stanford White was shot dead by Harry K. Thaw in a fit of jealousy
after marrying Evelyn Nesbitt, one of White's mistresses. Freer's
signs of appreciating his women guests were shown in his selection
of roses to be placed in a vase at the side of their bathtubs.

In the mid-eighteen-nineties Freer's millions permitted him to take
extended trips to Europe and the Far East. On Monday, November
12, 1894 he walked into Whistler's Paris apartments in the Rue du
Bac. All three, James and Beatrix Whistler and Freer, were de-
lighted. Whenever Freer was in Paris, he saw the Whistlers. Be-
cause of the Oriental gifts he showered upon Whistler, Whistler
called him "General Utility," yet it was clear that Whistler had
found a patron who sincerely appreciated his tastes, who caught the
meaning implicit in his art. Freer did not like the Pennells, husband
and wife, and objected rightfully to their treatment of Whistler's
'wife's sister after his death. As her own death approached, Beatrix
Whistler was greatly charmed by a lark that Freer had sent her from
the jungles of India.

Proof of Freer's understanding of Whistler is in the excellent col-
lection of Oriental art housed in the Freer Museum in Washington,
D. C. In the United States it is Whistler's most enduring monument.

Through Freer's friendship with the New Englander, Ernest
Fenollosa, a tangible link was established between Whistler, Freer,
and Ezra Pound ten years after Whistler's death in 1903. Pound's
enthusiasm over his readings in Fenollosa's manuscripts led to his
discoveries in Far Eastern literatures.

When in London the wife of the American painter, John Alex-
ander, asked Whistler why it was he kept on railing against Ruskin
(Ruskin did not die until January 1900). "Why don't you let that
old man alone?" she said. "He has one leg in the grave." Whistler
replied, "It's the other leg I'm after." The grim joke scarcely brought
a laugh; Whistler himself looked too old, and if not battered and in

222 THE WORLD OF

the image of crazed King Lear which was Ruskin's look, so fragile
that his own death seemed a matter of months, not years.

Miss Birnie Philip, his wife's sister, took Whistler away from the
two cities he had adopted, London and Paris, into the country. Dur-
ing the summer of 1900 they went to Dublin but even that stay was
brief. He argued that London itself was beautiful; it had, he said, his
favorite landscape. His only pleasure in Dublin was the Hogarth in
the Irish National Gallery, the sketch of George II and his family.
Whistler had returned in his enthusiasims to his boyhood admira-
tion for Hogarth. He had no eyes for Dublin and its well-worn
eighteenth-century buildings with the red, almost insanely Victorian,
gothic pile of the Kildare Club settled down among them. He
turned restlessly away from Ireland back to London again. It was as
though, in his restlessness, he was trying to escape death. His
brother, William, the doctor, had died in February of that year. On
the day of his brother's death, he ran into an acquaintance, and
asked him to dine with him; he could not bear to be alone.

Yet his throat would not permit a stay through a London winter;
he went south to Corsica, to North Africa. A photograph of him,
taken in Corsica, shows a skeleton-like Whistler, shrunken into an
overcoat, looking away from the camera into nothingness. He went
down to South Africa, then to Marseilles, then back to London; he
had tried to teach himself to enjoy falling asleep in the sun and
failed. He moved from hotel to hotel in London. At Tallant's Hotel
in North Audley Street he was "offered," so he said, "a room where
Lord Somebody or other died; I tried to explain to them I wanted a
room to live in"

In London, the Pennells prodded him to tell all that his memory
would yield; they were his official biographers and were tremen-
dously businesslike. He had tried writing his autobiography for
Heinemann, but the effort was too great. It was easier to talk to the
Pennells; they were willing to listen to anything, everything; it
was as though their lives depended upon his; and in a sense they
did.

Miss Birnie Philip and her mother persuaded Whistler to build a
new house in Cheyne Walk with them. It was evident that the
Philips used their small income to augment Whistler's declining
credit. Whistler wrote letters to a New York dealer in an effort to

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 223

sell his lithographs and a few paintings; the dealer refused to believe
that Whistler was in actual need.

Almost as soon as he moved into his new quarters with the Philips,
"the Ladies," he called them, he received two visitors from foreign
shores, one was Richard A. Can field from New York, the other was
Rodin from Paris. The year was 1902, and Rodin the sculptor was
on the first large tidal wave of his reputation. His reason for flatter-
ing Whistler was clear enough; Whistler had been talked into
handing over the presidency of the International Society of Artists
to Rodin; Whistler could not bring himself to sanction C6zanne
who had been suggested for the post. The entire premises of Whist-
ler's painting, his love of two dimensional Oriental design, ran
counter to the contribution made by C6zanne, nor could he reconcile
the difference between them. Whistler was completely overcome by
Rodin's praise which was neither honest nor perceptive.

The other visitor shocked everyone who met him, and as he stepped
in to visit Whistler, he virtually took over the Philip household. He
had the air of a dictator, a burly, arrogant, clean-shaven man
Canfield the New York gambler, who had sued the New York dis-
trict attorney's office for six thousand dollars because his lavish
gambling house in East Forty-fourth Street in New York had been
raided by plainclothesmen. Canfield listed among his friends Vander-
bilt and Frick, as well as leaders of the underworld whose control
extended over houses of dubious reputation all the way from Sara-
toga Springs to New York City.

Canfield delighted Whistler; Canfield talked of money and not of
art. Whistler painted a little portrait of him, the picture called Hzs
Reverence which made Canfield look like one of the characters out
of Charles Whibley's A Book of Scoundrels. Canfield affected a taste
for art, not respectability; he had a fancy for Chinese porcelain and
an eye for Whistler's paintings.

In these declining days and months of Whistler's life it is reason-
able to assume that the outrageous Canfield had taken Charles
Augustus Howcll's place in Whistler's affections. When news of
Howell's death came to him in Paris, in April 1890, Whistler pre-
tended to ignore the fact; he treated it as a characteristic Howell
hoax, the latest trick of "The Owl" who could outwit both his
creditors and death. Yet the point is that no one he had met since the

224 THE WORLD OF

days of his friendship with Howell was as flagrantly tmrespectable
as Canfield. Whistler's ill-health forced him into a routine of domes-
tic boredom. Canfield's disreputable company was by no means
mediocre. The fact that Canfield's face was that of a red-nosed, de-
frocked Anglican bishop increased Whistler's delight in seeing and
talking to him.

Between the officious Pennells and the equally officious Canfield,
Whistler became completely isolated. He was as far removed from
the neo-Bohemianism of the youthful Augustus John who had just
begun his career as an enfant terrible of British art as he was from
the well-to-do Edwardians who sat for John Singer Sargent. His new
patrons in the United States were Freer and Frick (and it is signifi-
cant that his patrons were Americans), but in 1903 neither could
bolster Whistler's prestige in London. The London press had begun
to regard Whistler as a 'left-over" from an earlier generation. His
portraits of little London street children failed to arouse either
controversy or curiosity. The pictures were not "pretty enough" in
a sentimental manner to achieve post-card reproduction popularity;
no one could weep over them or say "how cute." At the same time
they fell into the now accepted conventions of vaguely realized
Impressionism. These portraits were not Whistler at his best. His
latest work could be dismissed without great loss, a disturbing fact
which partly accounts for Whistler's destruction of many of his
late canvases.

Meanwhile, when Graham Robertson sold his collection of
Whistlers which he had acquired from the bankrupt estate of
Charles Augustus Howell, Canfield bought them, including the
Rosa Confer that he resold to Frick. Within a short time Canfield
had bought enough of the contents of Whistler's studio to pay
Whistler's debts and to leave an inheritance for Miss Birnie Philip.
From Whistler's point of view he was a fallen Lucifer and the
rescuing angel; and Canfield had amusing stories to tell of life in the
United States. Canfield became Whistler's butler, warding off bores
who came to Cheyne Walk; he also turned away fashionable people
who shuddered at the sight of him and did not call again. Canfield's
aura of ready money was irresistible, if not irreproachable. Whistler's
ill health did not permit his leaving the house, and Canfield, stand-
ing guard at the front door, was a cheerful service which soothed the

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 225

nerves of Miss Birnie Philip and even kept the Pennells at bay.
Whistler's throat, since he had been troubled by it from childhood
onward, seemed a lifelong disease. His physicians warned him about
his heart. He did not care to sleep in bed; he preferred dozing on a
couch or in a chair; he walked about the house in a shabby greatcoat
which served as a substitute for a dressing gown; he felt unbearably
cold.

Kennedy, the New York dealer, was admitted; he brought him a
bottle of American cocktails, which Whistler preferred to soup. He
had all the pictures of his Paris studio sent to Cheyne Walk where
he burned most of them the collection he told some of his visitors
was worth twenty millions, or any wild, fantastically high figure
that came into his head. In the latter stages of his illness, was
Whistler amusing himself by indulging in flights of irony? Perhaps
he was. But it is also possible that his flights into high prices for his
pictures were moments of exaggerated recovery from the lowest
depths of his self-criticism. To be optimistic in the face of disaster
was an early habit of Whistler's; he had preached joy and levity on
many dark occasions. His optimism in the Peacock Room at Princes
Gate was a frightening example (and not without valor) of a refusal
to admit failure. That was one reason why the British, including
their art critics, could never take his pretensions seriously. They
preferred to regard him as a wit, as a clown an unscrupulous one
and as a "joker" among artists.

The dying Whistler was not a man to change his reflexes, his im-
pulses, his habits. Since he painted little, he increased his skills in
histrionics. As he drifted through the house that his sister-in-law
kept for him he scattered drawings and papers that fell in a wake
behind him.

Through the winter of 1902-03 Whistler could not be kept in bed
more than a day or two at a time, nor could he speak except in
flashes, brief as the telegrams he used to send to Oscar Wilde. He
moved always in the direction of the room where he tried to paint.
At the instigation of Freer (Freer sent the pictures to the United
States), Whistler received a Gold Medal of Honor at the Winter
Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadel-
phia. He also received an LL.D from the University of Glasgow; he
was pleased, but it took him many hours to write the short note

226 THE WORLD OF

acknowledging the honor. Wrapped in his old greatcoat, he wan-
dered through the house from bed to studio. On sunny days he was
taken out for short drives hy Freer or by John Lavery, director of the
Scotch National Academy. MacColl, the art-critic, took him out
to lunch at which Whistler refused to speak of art at all, but talked
about West Point

Between sleeping and waking, still reluctant to spend twenty-
four hours in bed, he floated through the spring months of 1903. He
laughed over Elbert Hubbard's faked interview with him in a Little
Journeys pamphlet which also told of how his mother and he came
from Russia to settle down in Chelsea.* He said . . . "why the ac-
count of my mother and me coming to Chelsea and finding lodgings
makes you almost see us wanderers bundles at the end of long
sticks over our shoulders arriving footsore and weary at the hour of
sunset. Amazing!" His remarks had something of the same charm
that had delighted his plain-featured, seriously minded mother when
he was a boy. Whistler was alarmed when he heard that Mon-
tesquiou had sold the portrait he had painted of him, yet his op-
timism returned when he also heard that Canfield had bought the
picture and resold it to Frick. Canfield had actually turned out to be
as useful as Howell was in the old days, and Whistler refused to
allow the Pennells to speak ill of him.

July had come; and on the thirteenth of the month, a Monday,
Whistler heard of W. E. Henley's death the day before. Henley,
though still in his fifties, had been dying for several years. He was a

* Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) was an American version of the Social-
istic wing of the Pre-Raphaelite movement; he popularized it so successfully
that he made a fortune out of it. After leaving Harvard, he made a pilgrim-
age to England where he met William Morris," and inspired by Morris set up
his Roycroft Press at East Aurora, New York. His passion was mass-distribution
of culture with a capital "C" to the American middle-class. His pamphlets,
Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Men, issued by the Roycroft Press, sold
into the millions of copies. They were highly valued mines of general mis-
information. He was on board the Lusitania when it was bombed hy a Ger-
man submarine. At the news of his death, a popular newspaper columnist,
Walt Mason, who wrote in verse, remarked: "Down to the deeps went Elbert
Hubbard/ with smiling eyes that knew no fear/ then all the lovely mermaids
rubbered/ And Neptune shouted, 'Look, who's here!' " This was Hubbard's
appropriate epitaph. Hubbard was a valiant, money-making forerunner of
those who comment on books and culture on radio and TV programs in the
United States today.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 227

victim of tuberculosis of the bone, had been a vigorous, cheerful
invalid since youth; he shared Whistler's optimistic temperament,
his ability to carry forward public quarrels. Henley belonged to the
more virile elements in the 1890 Zeitgeist, a brilliant, complex per-
sonality, who attempted (because of his editorship of The Observer")
to transform his literary influence into a literary dictatorship. He
failed. But his courage was of a kind that Whistler instinctively
admired; Henley, near the end of his career, made the tactless, tacti-
cal, fatal mistake of attacking Robert Louis Stevenson (an old friend
and benefactor, recently dead) at length in print. He was honest
enough, but as self-destructive as one of the men he attacked, Oscar
Wilde. His death closed an era of public controversy in the arts. It
was natural for Whistler to feel the approach of his own death in
Henley's. Henley, though often wrong, had been as soldierly as he.

Four days later, on Friday the 17th, Whistler forced himself out
of bed and tottered into his studio, where early in the afternoon he
was found dead. At that moment Freer was on his way to take
Whistler for a drive. He came too late.

Whistler's funeral services took place the following Wednesday,
July 22, in Old Chelsea Church. The London police had received
orders to be in attendance, to hold back crowds. It was a gray day,
an empty London summer day. It was almost as if London's
holiday August had begun too soon. The fact was that Whistler's
isolation from the world that had known him as a public figure had
grown complete. Such notoriety as he enjoyed in London itself is
often brief. No crowds arrived.

The services had an air of being austere and private. Less than
fifty people attended. Although the Pennells, his biographers, were
indignant at what they felt was a slight from official sources, the
American and French Embassies in particular, the lack of crowds at
Whistler's services was appropriate. His public reputation had been
too spectacular and. ephemeral to endure; the butterfly signature
stood for his public life; his private life was that of art. His art was
distinctly foreign to British art. It had no link with Constable or
Turner; it was never popular on British soil. There was no reason
for the British public to be moved at the news of Whistler's death
his orbit was outside the constellations of an English tradition.

Meanwhile his pallbearers were not undistinguished: they were

228 THE WORLD OF

Theodore Duret, Sir James Guthrie, Sir John Lavery, Edwin A.
Abbey, George Vanderbilt and Freer. Jo, Whistler's former mistress,
and mother of his son who changed his name and became an engi-
neer, had attended the services, and then, with her accustomed dig-
nity, withdrew quietly. Whistler was buried in Chiswick churchyard.

At Whistler's death, the fluctuations in his reputation as a painter
began their long career. The New York Times in its generous death
notices could not find, as it admitted freely, a standard by which
to judge his work, his life. The notices reiterated fragments of the
Whistler legend. They spoke (mistakenly of course) of Maud
Franklin as his "first wife." They reasserted that his etchings were
memorable.

His immediate reputation was in the hands of two American col-
lectors, Freer and Frick. Other American collectors of his work were
more attracted by stories of his wit, his elegance and his notoriety.
To possess anything he had done, and show it off, was very like
wearing a freshly cut, exotic flower in one's buttonhole. Yet such
display of taste was as short-lived as the wearing of that flower.
American collectors have the habit of always looking for something
"new." For a very brief moment it was good to own the work of an
American artist who had gained, however precariously, European
celebrity. Proof of that celebrity rested in the fact that the portrait of
the artist's mother occupied space on a wall in the Luxembourg.

Meanwhile there were efforts made to erect in Chelsea a memorial
to Whistler designed by Rodin. The time was 1908; the project
failed. Shortly before his death Whistler had been active as Presi-
dent of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers.
Rodin was now in his chair, an imposing figure who inspired people
to think he looked like Michael Angelo. His designs for sculpture
were equally pretentious. Visibly, symbolically and all too obviously
they embodied big ideas. His idea was to sculpt an image of a
winged victory symbolizing the triumph of art over Whistler's
enemies, which he changed later to an image of Venus (a stupid
looking Venus at that) leaning over a bas relief of Whistler as if to
protect him. He demanded ten thousand dollars to be raised by
subscription for the job. American millionaires were not enthusiastic.
Nor did his plan attract the people of London's Chelsea. John
Singer Sargent brought the project to an end. He wrote:

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 229

I must confess to a real antipathy to the idea of artists
erecting monuments to each other the moment they die. It
seems to me to have no meaning at all unless it comes from
the public and after a lapse of years. I also think that
Whistler would have hated the idea. He never was funnier
or more sarcastic than on the subject of the monument to
Rossetti on Cheyne Walk.

Sargent was right. He understood his fellow American better
than most of Whistler's admiring or adverse critics. Sargent's rejec-
tion of Rodin's scheme may be read as an almost silent tribute to
Whistler's memory. Sargent was notoriously inarticulate. When
pleased he danced a jig in his studio; when angry he would roar
unintelligible invectives in a fast-driving hansom cab. He saw
in Rodin's project a fantastic ironic denial of Whistler's art, a
denial of Whistler's contempt for art that told a story. Sargent seems
to have respected the hidden seriousness of Whistler's aesthetic, con-
cealed as it was behind his public display of wit, sadism, bitterness,
and nearly childish levity. Nor was Sargent hypocritical. His way of
painting was so different from that of Whistler's that loudly spoken
praise of his work by Sargent would ring false.

Epilog

ue

, ODAY several questions are pertinent concerning Whistler's
art and his career. The first is: where lies the meaning of Whistler's
influence? Some would deny that he exerts any influence at all. Is
he merely, then, an historical figure of an American expatriate, a
minor artist whose work shows less strength than that of a Winslow
Homer or that of the patient realist, Thomas Eakins? His influence
cannot be defined in terms of strength, nor is it entirely in the field
of painting. Its meaning is diffused. It is cultural rather than held
within a single art form. It is both literary and aesthetic, both con-
crete and abstract. Whistler's aims were high; his gifts, even his
skills, were limited.

Perhaps it is best to begin at the point where Whistler's art was
weakest and most belligerent, for Whistler's rhetoric was scarcely art
at all, and in the heat of quarrels, a mere slashing at his critics. Who
today can reread his Gentle Art? Almost no one. Its rhetoric is florid;
it seems far more affected in a bad sense than it intended to be.
Henry James, who had no love of Whistler, saw that behind the
"off-hand, colloquial style, much besprinkled with French a style
which might be familiar if one often encountered anything like it/'
that Whistler had something of importance to say. That something
was related to the general condition of art criticism in English, and
here James joined in common cause with Whistler. He continued,
"Few people will deny that the development of criticism in our day
has become inordinate, disproportionate, and that much of what is
written under that exalted name is very idle and superficial." He
went still further. "Art is one of the necessities of life." For James to
reach this conclusion there is no doubt that Whistler's pamphlet,
Whistler vs Ruskin, Art and Art Critics/' Dec. 24, 1878, inspired it.

232 THE WORLD OF

The serious aspect of Whistler's position was brought to light To
Whistler art was a vocation of the highest order, not a trade. He
always regarded payment of his work in pounds a deliberated insult.
He demanded the guinea, not the pound.

Whistler in Victorian London was early, if not the first, to per-
ceive the distance between those who regarded art as one of the
necessities of life and those of a middleclass society who merely
patronized it or worse, truckled to middleclass standards so as to
sell works of art. He was less Bohemian than he often seemed. Like
Baudelaire he was a "dandy " but his example was drawn, not from
Baudelaire directly, but from Delacroix. He had tried to enroll him-
self as one of Delacroix's students; Delacroix had rejected him. Yet
Whistler's discipleship was retained in symbolic form. Delacroix
wore delicately tinted lavender gloves, and later when Whistler's
credit permitted that luxury, so did he. These were the lavender
gloves that Marcel Proust observed, and as Whistler dropped them,
Proust slipped them into his pocket and kept as a souvenir.

Whistler's manifestos, stripped of their personal references and
quarrels, were of the artist poised against the mores, the aesthetic
standards of middleclass society. He chose to ride above them, not
below them. He was not, of course, a landed aristocrat, yet the
strange complex of American Southern plantation mores and Scots
Puritanism in his family heritage, and his West Point training, pro-
duced an aristocratic bearing that sustained his position. It was a
position that placed him at the side of the latter-day French Sym-
bolist poets, Laforgue and Corbi&re and this without his having
read a line of their poems. He memorized Poe, he admired Baude-
laire.

It is therefore not surprising that when Ezra Pound arrived in
London five years after Whistler's death, he emulated him. Art
was as necessary to the young Ezra Pound as it had been to
Whistler; for Pound Whistler provided, almost ready-made, an
American precedent of behavior in London. Traces of Whistler's
aesthetic made their appearances in Pound's early essays and verses,
for Whistler's Ten O'clock Lecture was a significant turning point
beyond art for art's sake toward recognition of art as a necessity for
civilized being. Whistler's lecture had released too many arrows in
all directions, yet his attacks on vulgarity, the Philistines, and

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 233

mediocrity were clearly voiced; all ages were included in his in-
dictment out of which only works of art endured then came the
famous statement which both Pound and W. B. Yeats assimilated,
"For Art and Joy go together, with bold openness . . . dreading no
exposure." Whistler assumed that his audience was of the lite, and
in this assumption, Pound also found an example for his conduct.

Pound's lines 'To Whistler, American," published in 1912, re-
flected his attitude and with discriminations as sharp as Whistler's:

You also, our first great,

Had tried all ways;

Tested and pried and worked in many fashions,

And this much gives me heart to play the game.

Here is a part that's slight, and part gone wrong,
And much of little moment, and some few
Perfect as Durer!

You were not always sure, not always set
To hiding night or tuning "symphonies";
Had not one style from birth, but tried and pried
And stretched and tampered with the media.

Show us there's chance at least of winning through.
From Pound's essay, "Patria Mia" there is the following:

Whistler left his message almost it would seem by ac-
cident. It was in substance, that being born an American
is no excuse for being content with a parochial standard.

And from Pound's The Spirit of Romance:

Art is a joyous thing. Its happiness antedates even
Whistler; apropos of which I would in all seriousness plead
for a greater levity, a more befitting levity in our study of
the arts.

234 THE WORLD OF

In a literary sense the reaches of Whistler's influence extend into
the mid-twentieth century. Since Pound and Yeats continue to be
powerful agents of that aspect of Whistler's contribution to the arts
this claim rests upon written evidence. One need not exaggerate or
underrate it. So far the road is clear of speculation. Even at his
weakest, for Whistler as writer falls far below his own standards of
ease and brilliance, he has been fortunate in making his appeal to
posterity. Had he lived to know the early Pound, he would probably
have enjoyed a meeting with him and afterwards, perhaps, a
quarrel.

Beyond Whistler's aesthetic come the mutations of his paintings.
His first picture of importance is his At the Piano 1858. The picture
is a tribute to his association with Courbet. What the youthful
Whistler contributed to it and made his own are in the placing
of the child's feet, the crisp details of her white dress against
the black piano, and the opposing dark mass of the woman facing
her, head bent slighdy over the keyboard of the piano. The picture
has a levity that Courbet lacked; the child's feet, the crispness of her
white dress save the picture from falling into static masses. Courbet
even then was a far stronger painter than his young American dis-
ciple, whom, from time to time, he pointedly ignored. Yet Courbet's
' static qualities had been observed by Delacroix; these were qualities
Whistler had to reject, yet for the moment, he accepted Courbet's
realism, shown in The Burial at Ornans and The Studio, those
spectacular paintings, admired by Delacroix and refused by The
Exposition Universelle 1855. Since Whistler read almost not at all,
he had probably overheard talk of Baudelaire's complete rejection of
Courbet's realism and Baudelaire's remark, "No more imagination:
therefore no more movement*" Baudelaire also spoke of Courbet's
"positive solidity" from which Whistler, the pupil, still had some-
thing to learn, something to hold him down to earth.

Signs of Courbet's example to Whistler continued through his
portraits of Jo, his White Girl symphonies, all excellent of their
kind, yet in the full length Symphony in White. No. I, Jo looking
full-face from her white brocade back drop, Whistler's original
genius and his distance from Courbet became clearly defined. In this
picture Whistler abandoned both Renaissance and natural perspec-

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 235

lives; he had moved as early as 1862 toward two-dimensional design.
Was this also a sign of his nearsightedness? That probability is great,
but the point is that he had found an aesthetic means of accepting
and surmounting a visual handicap and of relating Oriental design
to his painting. His gain was in linear movement; he dropped all
signs of "positive solidity"; and with it, the "unabashed indelicacy"
to which Baudelaire objected in Courbet. Courbet, great painter as
he was, lacked brains, a deficiency which showed in the heavily
portentous gestures of his bathing nudes. Whistler "flattened" his
perspectives, a hint of which began in At the Pimo and was ex-
tended throughout his studio portraits, most notably in his Carlyle
and his Miss Cicely Alexander.

Toward the same end and away from Courbet's warmth and
depth in recreating natural forms (for Courbet's non-intellectual
aesthetic was a realistic embrace of nature and almost literal in its
definition), Whistler turned to variations in color harmonies. He had
also probably heard of Walter Pater's remark, "All art tends toward
the condition of music," which gave him the right to speak of line
and color harmonies, and later, symphonies, and which were more
attractive titles than arrangements, and slightly less abstract.

Still other factors enter Whistler's choice in the mutations of his
painting and one in particular was to damage his professional repu-
tation. Unlike Sargent's his disciplines in training were under-
developed. Through Sargent's boyhood his art-school training was
continuous; not so Whistler's. Whistler never acquired complete
facility in drawing. There was a dangerous fragment of truth in du
Maurier's charge that he had been an "idle apprentice." The psy-
chological truth was that Whistler, all-too-readily, grew bored. He
could not sustain his interest in an object long enough to give his
forms internal structure. What amazed the friends he made in Paris
was that he produced so much between 1858 and 1878. At his weak-
est, he sought and achieved the rewards of immediate effectiveness
and yet conceptually his art moved toward perfection in its several
styles: "arrangements," "harmonies," "symphonies," "nocturnes." It
was in the actual printing that Whistler sometimes faltered. Like an
impatient child, he would lose his skill, misdraw, and after wasted
effort, regain his inspiration, A good example of his success drawn,

236 THE WORLD OF

almost torn, out of failure, was his portrait of Mrs. Leyland, now
shown in the Frick Collection in New York. His critical sense was
far too sleepless to give him ease.

In his painting it was easy enough for Whistler to evoke great
charm, and in his portraits, to repeat designs. The Carlyle portrait
repeats successfully the inspiration that guided his hand in painting
The Portrait of the Artist's Mother. Had Whistler been content with
repeating his successes, his establishment of a profitable career as a
portrait painter would have been assured. At the very least a recog-
nized "manner" in painting would have been acceptable to well-pay-
ing sitters and patrons. It is possible that his "manner" could have
developed into a popular style this in much the same fashion that
he achieved a recognized measure of popularity with his etchings.
But second-rate "success" of this order was not Whistler's destiny,
nor did it suit his temperament or his conscience as an artist. As
Ezra Pound observed, he "tried and pried/And stretched and tam-
pered with the media." His way led through many failures, yet made
no compromise with being mediocre.

Perhaps the most obvious of Whistler's failures (on display at The
Freer Gallery in Washington, D. C.) are in a series of chalk draw-
ings of the nude. These lightly draped female figureswho seem to
have no bodies in the flesh, but dance and trip and seem to flash in
airare intolerably sweet, the work, one might suppose, of a middle-
aged dilettante who failed his drawing-classes in night school. In
their bad way, they exhibit chann and "taste." And the gravest
charge against Whistler could be that he had too much "taste" to be
a major artist. Even at best, his work is haunted by a shadow of
"good taste" that cloys, that displays the art-collector or the dilettante.
A display of too much "taste" in painting can be more destructive
than the lack of it. That is one reason why Degas' remark to
Whistler, "How tiresome it must be to be a butterfly! It's better to
be an old bull like me," struck home. In painting Whistler's hidden
danger was in his ability to make a charming picture. This was the
other side of his medal that showed his courage, his determination
not to bore himself, nor to repeat himself at second-best.

In his drawings of his lightly draped figurines it is as though
Whistler's mother's "taste" possessed her son. Perhaps in a few un-
fortunate intervals it did. It should not be forgotten that little Miss

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 237

Alexander of his famous portrait wore a dress designed and stitched
by Whistler's mother.

At this point it is appropriate to compare and contrast Whistler's
work with that of one of his latter-day contemporaries Charles
Condor. Condor (1868-1909) was a British London-born artist,
raised in Australia, who returned to England by way of Rome and
Paris in the early 1890's. He grasped the essentials of French Im-
pressionism more quickly and with more success than Whistler, but
soon abandoned it in favor of recreating scenes inspired by reading
Browning and Balzac. His inspirations taken from literary subjects
were more mature, more independent of their literary sources than
those of Beardsley. His interests in Oriental design and in his paint-
ings on silk, his designs for women's fans, were points at which the
works of Condor and Whistler meet. It is highly probable that
Condor would have arrived at an appreciation of Oriental design,
even if Whistler had not opened the way for renewed consideration
of Oriental art. Yet in this field particularly in London art circles-
Whistler was there before him. One feels that the pastel tones in
Condor's water-colors have their source, or afr least a precedent, in
Whistler's paintings. Condor was no mere imitator of Whistler; he
had his own style, his own personality, his own approach to Oriental
design.

Condor's sensitivity, his tendencies toward over-refinement in his
work ran parallel to Whistler's. The great contrast between them was
that Condor was apparently conscious of and knew his limitations.
His fans were nearly perfect of their kind, and nearly succeeded in
recreating standards of decorative painting that equalled French
court painting of the early 18th century. Condor was a minor artist
who fully realized and fully employed the resources of his genius.
He produced rarities, and was notably unindustrious. Whistler in
moving beyond his limitations fell into failures (witness his Peacock
Room), yet his successes which include several of his Nocturnes
justified his refusal to admit defeat or rather to admit his weaknesses.

Visitors to the restoration of the Peacock Room in The Freer
Gallery of Art in Washington, D. G, will see the largest and most
curious of Whistler's mementos. Its pendants from the ceiling, its
dust-catching pseudo-Oriental shelfs ranged against walls, are at a
great distance from the true genius of Whistler's art shown in rooms

238 THE WORLD OF

where he lived in London's Chelsea, The Peacock Room, even be-
fore it was removed from Princes Gate to Washington, was among
the most curious of large museum pieces. Even as settings for his
paintings La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine, Rose and Silver and
his Rich and Poor Peacocks the room fails in its intention and fails
to charm. It has about as much aesthetic value as the interior of a
room restored in a Pompeian villa-with the disadvantage of reflect-
ing far less light. Its only value is to commemorate a spectacular in-
cident in Whistler's life. As an evocation of Whistler's personality
it is as funereal as an exhibition of General Grant's starched collars
and a half-smoked cigar in the room where he died.

Among Whistlerian artefacts the best are to be found neither in
chalk drawings nor in details of the Peacock Room, but rather in the
drawings of Chinese ceramics in Murray Marks' catalogues. These
remains which held no pretensions to being original works of art re-
flect the lightness, the fine discriminations of Whistler's spirit, and
are consistent with the pastel colors and austerities of line in the
houses he redecorated in Chelsea, in Lindsey Row and Tite Street.
These were environments he had made his own.

His art of decoration has a sustained relationship to eighteenth-
century interpretations of Oriental design. It is two-dimensional in
effect, and one in which the best of his paintings would look best,
permitting only the showing of a single canvas hung on an entire
wall. Freer in buying objects of Chinese art demanded of their sales-
man that he be shown one object at a time. Whistler's work demands
the same singular presentation. Because of its two-dimensional qual-
ities a picture by Whistler demands flat pastel tones behind it, and
it is not too much to say that his art in decoration held this necessity
in mind. In the Peacock Room he not only failed to find a place for
his Arrangement in Rose and Silver, but failed to create it The in-
teriors of the White House in Tite Street were of an order that per-
mitted his genius in design to find a habitation. In a late Victorian
London cluttered with effects of warmth, "coziness," and cave-like
richness, topped by a revival of Gothic styles in architecture,
Whistler's cool interiors established a contrast of austere elegance.

Whistler then set the fashion for Eastern designs emerging from
flatly painted walls and floors, a fashion that continued for forty
years in Bohemian Chelsea and crossed the Atlantic to New York's

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 239

Greenwich Village. One secret of its success in Bohemian quarters
was the low cost of reproducing its effects: a few sticks of painted
furniture, a flatly painted wall, light streaming through windows,
curtained and not draped, presented a gay environment. Clear yel-
lows, blues and grays provided back drops for active linear move-
ments in design. Historically at least he cleared the background for
presenting non-objective art. In practice he stressed a tendency in
the direction of "studio-painting/' His references to nature were of
forms of nature held in memory; this practice dominated the paint-
ing of his Nocturnes.

Whistler's painting was at opposite poles from the practice of
Renoir, and, most notably, Cezanne (what little he saw and knew
of Cezanne's painting he cordially hated). His animosity to
C6zanne's work was far deeper than surface annoyance at the rise
of a new generation beyond his own. Cezanne's treatment of
nature was of another world from that which Whistler knew. With
Whistler's drift away from the influence of Courbet's realism came
his dismissal of painting natural forms by means of direct observa-
tion and detailed study. What he remembered had become suf-
ficient. And what Whistler remembered was evoked in a way that
ran parallel to the aesthetic doctrines of the Symbolist poets. What
Whistler presented in his Nocturnes can be too thoughtlessly de-
fined as unschooled impressionism. Yet the word "impressionism"
does not explain fully why a Whistler Nocturne retains its character
apart from the technics practiced by the French school. Whistler's
Nocturnes evoke their individual character by the associations they
inspire. Of these The Falling Rocket is a spectacular example; it is
not inevitable that The Falling Rocket should represent a scene at
Cremorne Gardens; it is an explosion of color against the dark.
Cremorne Gardens (since it was a scene of firework festivals) could
be associated for the moment with a like explosion of gold against
black, but the place name is of less importance than the memory of
color exploding against the night. The picture then is an "im-
pression" that evokes associations, and is not evolved by seeing it
through a veil of atmosphere.

The Falling Rocket which aroused so much controversy in the
Whistler-Ruskin trial is the most famous of Whistler's ventures in
the direction of non-objective painting. Today it seems relatively

240 THE WORLD OF

close (closer than any other painting of the late eighteen seventies)
to the work of the American non-objective school. It seems less than
eighty years away from the painting of Jackson Pollock. Nor in the
company of mid-twentieth century painting should one find in
Whistler's two-dimensional perspectives true reason for adverse
criticism. Recent revivals of interest in Oriental art also tend to re-
establish the importance that Whistler credited to it.

By a far Eastern route, and also by closer cultural ties with Eu-
rope, those who appreciate current art in the United States are likely
to find Whistler at his furthest extremes less difficult to under-
stand than he was forty years ago. His Venetian etchings which be-
came the means of his nearest approach to popularity in his own day
are not likely to find new admirers in ours. They have "dated" more
to their disadvantage than anything Whistler did. To the critical eye
they seem both "fussy" and shallow; they "represent" too much and
say too little. The early London set of etchings are clearer and more
firm in line. The late London and Paris lithographs of Whistler still
possess their charms, but their charms seem to be related to polite
gestures recalling remembered scenes, scenes of his wife in the sick
room, as well as recollections of the Thames on misty evenings.
Through these minor examples of Whistler's art came his strongest
influence upon "artistic" illustration during the early years of the
twentieth century. That influence left its mark upon Joseph Pen-
nell's illustrations for Henry James's English Hours, a commissioned
book for which artist and writer wandered through English country-
side and town, jotting down their impressions as they went along.
Pennell's illustrations exhibit the refinements of "good taste" in such
fashion that the results are those of mediocre tastelessness. In book
illustration this kind of art, blurred in its outlines, a misconception
of impressionist technique, soon became a dying art.

It is clear enough that Whistler's diffused influences did not found
a school either in the plastic or the graphic arts. What he left behind
him were a half dozen etchings of scenes along the Thames, one
very extraordinary pastel of Venice (shown at the Freer Gallery in
Washington), and a series of paintings, starting with At the Piano
1858, and extending for twenty years. After 1878, the best of his
painting is less frequent and reaches its heights in the portraits of
Rosa Corder, Maud Franklin and Theodore Duret, all painted be-

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 241

fore 1890. 1890 opened the decade of his greatest notoriety but his
best work was done. He never recaptured the felicities of the best of
his earlier paintings, and their number would not exceed twenty
canvases. At the time of his death, his production was at its weakest,
yet his notoriety attracted American collectors of art.

For his day he underlined Walter Pater's dictum: "All art con-
stantly aspires towards the condition of music/' and we may look
no further than Pater's remark to understand why Whistler chose
words from a dictionary of musical terms to describe the step he
had taken toward non-representational art. There is no evidence
that Whistler ever listened at length to musical compositions. His
use of musical terms in painting was metaphorical, and brought with
it the kind of associations he desired for those who looked at his
paintings. In that sense his art was less purely a painter's art than
literary. This distinguished his painting from the painting of his
French contemporaries, who were far more firmly established in the
media they had chosen. At the same time Whistler's distinction
placed his work at a distance from the popular British painters of
his day, who, from Sir Frederick Leighton of the Royal Academy
to G. F. Watts, drew their inspirations from literary sources and
became literal illustrators of ideas and stories.

Whistler's work then, even at its best which admitted no com-
promise with aesthetic valuesexists within a penumbra between
poetic sensitivity and plastic art. This was his unique contribution to
the art of the latter nineteenth century. And for that reason, tenuous
and uncertain as his position seems today, his best work endures.

During the half century that has passed between Whistler's death
and the present his fame has undergone several mutations. The most
fitting memorial to his name is the Freer Gallery in Washington,
D. C. It is appropriate to look at the Whistlers housed in a gallery so
largely devoted as it is to Oriental art. The journey through its cor-
ridors recalls at a distance the days that Whistler as a child strolled
with his mother and his brother William through Charles Cameron's
Chinese Room of Catherine's Palace at Tsarsko Selo. The Chinese
and the Persian rooms at the Freer have, of course, objects of greater
authenticity than whatever Whistler and his mother sawwhat they
saw was a creation of an Oriental world to delight the senses of an
Empress who was once a German Princess. But in its creation it had

242 THE WORLD OF

also delighted its maker, the clever young Scot, who beneath his
cleverness and his learning, had genius, a genius for pleasing the
Empress one moment with a dressing-room so artfully designed that
it was like a jewelled snuff-box, and the next moment presenting her
with a view of the China he had never seen. The precision, the per-
fection of Cameron's art had no relationship to literal representation
of things as they were; the room was a metaphor of China; its ac-
tualities existed in the imagination only it was a world of elegance
beyond anything that the Empress Catherine had ever known. Its
nuances of color were compliments to the eye of the beholder; they
flattered her sense of appreciation, just as they flattered the senses of
the puritanical wife of an American engineer and her brilliant,
quick-witted boy. They could not have known exactly why they were
pleased; there is no proof that Mrs. Whistler knew that the Chinese
room had been designed by a Scot, and had she known it there
would have been good reason for her pleasure. It was enough for her
to share the vision of an ideal China, an ideal world of a farther East
beyond the Russia that frightened her, beyond the reach of servants
who could not be trusted, beyond a language she could never under-
stand.

Nor had her son ever heard of Cameron, yet he, like Cameron,
was possessed by a desire to please, and, first of all, to please his
mother to please her, and then bring her around slowly to his
will; the result was often a compromise. It was difficult, even
in manhood, for him to circumvent her silences. Without sacri-
rificing his aesthetic, he also wished to please others. If he could not
please in one way, then he would try another; if not by a sketch or a
drawing or etching or painting, then by verbal wit. Failing these, his
desire turned to anger, and became a desire to shock, to amaze.
"Amazing" was his favorite adjective if he could do nothing else,
he could surprise; if he did not please, revenge was in order, then
insult, blame until he peopled the outer world around him with
all his enemies. His extremes of showmanship were of the same
origin, and in his middle years the world through which he moved
had its standards for showmanship in the acting of Henry Irving.
There was nothing subtle in Irving's acting; there was nothing subtle
in Whistler's loud "ha-ha's," in the glitter of his eye glass, in the
dressing of his hair. His wit, more often than not, had the thrust of

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 243

a poisoned sword through the side of his opponent; it was seldom as
light as he wished it to be; the thrust was too urgently pressed. The
greater number of Whistler's subtleties went into his painting.
Whistler's verbal style particularly in the footnotes to The Gentle
Art of Making Enemiesflashed with the lightning of melodrama.
Behind the image of the Butterfly was du Maurier's image of the
hypnotist, Svengali, in his novel Trilby, the man in black, with long
curled hair, desperately fighting for his life. The fashionable world
of London accepted the image of the Butterfly, but it distrusted the
shadow of a Svengali behind it. It preferred bluntness, candor, any-
thing but the faintest suggestion of trickery. And Whistler loved
sensation and sleight of hand.

Whistler's worldliness had little or nothing of shrewdness in it; he
wore his pretensions on his sleeve, or rather in the cut of his clothes,
in the shrill falsetto of his laugh, and in the extravagances of living
on credit. The luxuries of living were his all too obvious necessities.
The professional artists among his London contemporaries, from the
British Millais to the American Sargent, had solid professional train-
ing behind equally solid professional accomplishment; they had
learned to work serenely, to fetch high prices for their work in an
age when art commanded the highest material rewards that England
had ever known. In their company Whistler was never the solid
man, yet he had pretensions to the rewards that they had earned
through professional skill. In their eyes and in the eyes of Victorian
London he behaved (a fact that he admitted readily) as though the
world owed him a living.

Whistler's optimism which served him so well in youth and dur-
ing his first twelve years in London had begun to fail him after the
Ruskin trial. During the earlier debacle of the Peacock Room, his air
of cheerful accomplishment, his belief that unsolved problems would
solve themselves, ran close to being a semi-tragic mask of self-decep-
tion. He could please neither Leyland nor himself; looking back
upon it, the episode has much of the hysteria of noon-day panic. It
had all the horror of wrongdoing in the brightest light of day with-
out the shielding darkness of a nightmare. Neither Whistler's gifts
nor his actions squared with his hopes. Leyland had to face the worst
of Whistler, Whistler the worst of Leyland and himself.

The experiences immediately preceding the Ruskin trial, the trial

244 THE WORLD OF

itself, the bankruptcy, turned much of Whistler's optimism to bitter-
ness. His self-confidence, never too secure, was undermined. His
conduct during the trial, his urgent use of wit, saved his self-esteem,
but the rescue of it was precarious; the trial involved a moral prin-
ciplethe question whether or not Whistler was a charlatan. Rus-
kin's charges would have been less serious if the affair of the Peacock
Room had been a clear aesthetic victory for Whistler. The general
agreement that he was a good etcher held but the quality of his
painting hung in the balance. London patrons did not rush to buy
his paintings; he had failed to please by means of his art alone;
quickened wit and showmanship saved him from complete disgrace,
saved him to the extent of exactly one farthing, no more. Much of
his activity thereafter was in the art of showmanship; he became
primarily "a talking artist," a writer of letters to The World; he be-
came violently amusing at dinner parties; he became a critic of the
arts. His Ten O'clock Lecture soon brought him an histrionic
celebrity. But he feared to be alone. He could not, like his great
French contemporary, Cezanne, retire to the country and paint.

Was Whistler "ruined'* by the society in which he had to make
his way? Did late Victorian London with its highest values placed
on material success, on "personalities," hasten the growth of Whistler
at his worst and submerge the best? Henry Adams' remark that he
had become brutalized is the clearest answer to these questions; any
further claim that society had ruined him is a flagrantly sentimental
view of his life and character. It was Whistler who said "There never
was an artistic period" and there is every reason to believe that he
meant it. He had chosen London, not Paris, as the setting for his
career; he came from Paris to London because he saw a chance of
making a living there, and small hopes of doing so in Paris. Much
as he loved Paris, London with its associations of his childhood, the
place where his half-sister lived (all her life she believed he was a
genius, whispered her belief to friends, even against her husband's
opinion) became Whistlers spiritual home. It was also doubtful if
Paris could have met with his mother's approval, and her opinion,
however mildly expressed, carried weight with him.

To make London accept him on almost any terms was one of the
central ambitions of Whistler's lifeto conquer the greatest city in
the world, to be known as he walked its streets, not as an Englishman,

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 245

but as the foreigner he was, became the romantic object of his his-
trionic art. And at evil moments when the devils of self-criticism
made him face the possibilities of failure in his art, his public
celebrity consoled him.

The psychiatrist would probably define many phases of Whistler's
conduct as the behavior of a paranoid, and there would be some
justice in that definition. But it is fortunate that he remained "un-
cured." Even at best, a "well-adjusted" Whistler in 1900 could not
have restored his earlier brillianceand a subdued, mild Whistler is
almost unthinkable.

It is significant that we can readily find analogies in Whistler's
paintings in twentieth-century poetry, in Ezra Pound's adaptations
from the Chinese, in the glimpses of London shown in T. S. Eliot's
poems, in the pages of Wallace Stevens' Harmonium. Twenty-five
years after Whistler's death, Virginia Woolf , as she wrote of evening
walks along the Thames Embankment, described the river and the
streets of the city as though she were describing one of Whistler's
Nocturnes; she had seen the gray lights of the Thames, the streets of
hammered silver. Whistler's power of suggestion in his Nocturnes
has an affinity with Symbolist poetry and prose; it is not surprising
that Arthur Symons, historian of the Symbolists, admired him.

And what of the famous portraits of the Artist's Mother and the
Carlyle? These were the pictures that gave him wide public recogni-
tion. They were, of course, good subjects for public praise; they
could be easily understood, for both have psychological and literary
content; one sees a resigned old woman, a tired, willful, elegantly
dressed old manone can easily read more into these pictures than
what is actually there; one can build fancies around them. Both
figures are in profile, both are in the perspective and flat tones of the
Japanese print, but his portrait of Miss Cecely Alexander is the better
example of Whistler's art. His light touch, so necessary to his work
at its best, so evident in the portrait of the child, is absent in the two
more famous portraits. Carlyle and the Artist's Mother are com-
paratively weighted and static; their design (which is much the
same) has less variety and movement than that of the little girl in
the white dress. In little Miss Alexander Whistler is the excellent
painter of sensibility. One does not ask for a depth of emotion here;
one does not ask for a profound reading of human character and its

246 THE WORLD OF

trials. It is what it is, a child in a white dress, a surprising variation
of Whistler's "white girl" theme seen in terms of Japanese design.

Today another aspect of Whistler's quality may be measured by
placing his Theodore Duret at the side of a brilliant Sargent;
Sargent's professional skill is in evidence and there should be no
need of underestimating its value, its faithfulness to the kind of
portrait his sitters wished to see. The portrait of Henry James in the
British National Gallery is precisely that kind of portrait; it is good;
it has lasting qualities; it is a document of considerable value. In
saying Sargent gave his sitters what they wished to see, one does not
mean that he merely flattered them; he enveloped them in the glitter-
ing fashionable atmosphere of the moment in which they livedthat
was his art, and he was not a dishonest painter. But Whistler's art
was transcendent; at his best he showed an impersonal elegance be-
yond style and fashion that his men and women aspired to; it is in
the lift of Rosa Corder's chin, it is the texture of the pink wrap
thrown across Duret's arm; it is in the design of the entire picture; it
is what Whistler learned from the Chinese and Japanese; beside it
Sargent's portraits look coarsely fibered and slightly less than works
of art. Sargent caught the moment and registered it faithfully and
well; Whistler moved in the direction of an immortality.

All roads in the best of Whistler's art lead back to the Chinese
Room in the Catherine Palace on a summer's day; and Whistler's
scenes, night or day, seldom reflect a winter's fall of snow; in little
Miss Alexander a butterfly flutters against the gray screen, the heads
of daisies lean toward the little girl in white. Whistler chose a single
and, perhaps for him, an eternal season. His limitations are clear
enough; he never was the greatest painter of his age. His official
biographers, the Pennells, overstated the case for him, and as Oscar
Wilde remarked of his brother Willy when he heard that Willy
would help him in his suit against Queensberry, "such a defense
would compromise a steam-engine."

Surely Whistler's affinities to international art can now be looked
at with the same eyes that judged the paintings shown in Alfred
Stieglitz's gallery, An American Place, or in the Whitney Museum
today. By that token his work is less that of an "exile" than it seemed
to be forty years ago, and has among its affinities the works of Arthur
B. Dove and John Marin. Today when Whistler seems most foreign

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 247

he is most American. It was not unseemly, however ironically some
of its implications may be interpreted, that in May of 1934 the
portrait of Whistler's Mother was reproduced on a United States
Postage Stamp.

In the United States tributes to the legend of Whistler have not
been neglected. The Whistler House, his birthplace in Lowell,
Massachusetts, is a public shrine. At West Point a simple shaft,
scarcely more than a tablet, was set up in his memory.

Nor is Whistler's grave in Chiswick cemetery a violation of
Whistler's aesthetic. Four semi-neo-classical female figures support
the cornices of a marble slab. Their simplicity, their Caryatid-like
austerity recall the eighteenth-century details of the Catherine
Palace Gardens at Tsarskoe Selo.

Index

Abbey, Edwin A., 228

Abbott, James, 23

Adam brothers, 36

Adams, Henry, 82, 187, 188, 207,

244

A la recherche du temps perdu, 203
Alcott, Louisa May, 41
Aldricb, Thomas Bailey, 50
Alexander, Cicely, 118, 134, 245
Alexander I, Emperor, 28
Alice in Wonderland, 99, 164, 207
Allen, Sir William, 39
Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence, 79
Angeli, Helen Rossetti, 130, n.
Angels of Creation, 121
A Rebour, 106
Armstrong, Thomas, 58, 101-102,

139

Arnold, Dr., 45
Arrangement in Grey and Black

The Portrait of the Artist's

Mother, 18, 108, 194 f., 236,

245

Arrangement in Rose and Silver, 238
Athenaeum, The, 87
Atherton, Gertrude, 185
At the Piano, 71 ff., 77 fL, 209, 234,

235
Awakened Conscience, The, 128

Baronet and the Butterfly, The, 217

Barrett, Elizabeth, 41

Bathers, The, 66, 67

Baudelaire, Charles, 60, 63, 67, 97,

99, 170, 232, 234
Bayliss, Wyke, 183
Beardsley, Aubrey, 205 .
Beardsley, Mabel, 206

Beerbohm, Max, 206
"Before the Mirror," 99, 100
Beguiling of Merlin, 121
Benham, Captain, 5 3 ff.
Bishop, Sir Edward, 20
Blessed Damozel, The, 110
Boabdil el Chico, 92
Boisbaudran, Lecoq de, 62 ff., 71, 88,

105

Bonheur, Rosa, 67
Bonvin, Francois, 71
Book of Scoundrels, A, 223
Boots, Kirk, 41

Borovikovski (Russian painter 5, 34
Botticelli, 110
Boucher, Francois, 36
Boughton, George, 132
Boussod Valadon & Co., 191
Bowen (lawyer), 138
Boxall, Sir William, 41, 44
Brief Lives, 19

Brodisco (Russian minister), 25, 33
Brodribb, John, 125
Brown, Ford Madox, 110, 154
Brownell, W. C., 160
Browning, Robert, 41
Burgoyne, John, 19
Bume-Jones, Sir Edward, 110, 121,

127, 136, 143, 172, 205, 206,

211

Cameron, Charles, 36, 123, 241
Campbell, Lady Archibald, 177, 179,

184

Campbell, Lady Colin, 176, 184
Campbell, Lord Colin, 184
Canfield, Richard A., 223 ff.
Capri Girl, The, 198

250

INDEX

Carlyle portrait sale, 192 ff.
Carlyle, Thomas, 95, 119, 128, 129,

135, 235, 245
Carolus-Duran, 197
Carroll, Lewis, 99, 207
Carson, Sir Edward, 216
Cassatt, Mary, 67, 171
Catherine II, Empress ("the Great"),

28, 36, 242
Cezanne, Paul, 72, 107, 223, 239,

244

Chardin, Jean, 34
Chauves-Souris, 202
Chevalier, GuiUaume Sulpice ("Ga-

varni"), 59 ff., 71
Clandestine Kiss, The, 34
Clarke, Ellen, 59
Clarke, Mary Anne, 59, 208
Collet (etcher), 71
Collins, Wilkie, 87
Colvin, Sidney, 166
Condor, Charles, 237
Conquest of Peru, 26
Conscious Stone, The, 118
Cooper, James Fenimore, 26, 32
Corder, Rosa, 90, 130, 132, 176, 206,

224, 240

Cornford, Fanny, 83
Cornwallis, Charles, 20
Corot, Jean, 198
Courbet, Gustave, 57, 64 ff., 71, 72,

74, 85 f., 88, 103, 107, 213,

234 f., 239

Craig, Gordon, 117, n., 122, 177
Crawford, Robert, 192 ff.
Creation, The, 112
Crighton, Sir Alexander, 39

"Daisy Miller," 15

d'Antnes, Georges, 39

David Copperfield, 124

Da Vinci, Leonardo, 93

Davis, Jefferson, 47, 53

Degas, Hilaire, 65, 107, 197, 200,

213, 217
Delacroix, Ferdinand, 62, 64, 232,

234

Delannoy, Ernest, 68, 70-71, 76
Delaroche, Paul, 170
de Musset, Alfred, 65

Derby Day, 127

Desoyne, Mme., 97

Dickens, Charles, 51

Disraeli, Benjamin, 135, 186

Douglas, Lord Alfred, 215ff.

Dove, Arthur B., 246

D'Oyly Carte, Richard, 94, 124

D'Oyly Carte, Mrs. Richard, 167 f.

Dublin University Magazine, 126

Dumas, Alexandre, 51, 54

du Maurier, Daphne, 208, n.

du Maurier, George, 58, 59, 60, 62,

74, 78, 80, 102, 103, 136, 139,

207 , 235
Duret, Theodore, 68, 162, 179, 200,

240, 246

Eakins, Thomas, 72, 231

Eastlake, Sir Charles L., 30, 78

Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth, 30 f.

Eden, Sir William, 217 ff.

Eliot, T. S., 245

Elizabeth, Empress, 28, 35

Eloise C'Tumette"), 57, 59, 60, 62,

68,70

English Hours, 240
Eug&iie, Empress, 67

Falling Rocket, The, 139, 142, 239 f.
Fantm-Letour, Ignace, 62 ff., 66, 68,

70, 76, 81, 87, 97, 98, 99, 105
Fenollosa, Ernest, 221
Fillmore, Millard, 46
Firsov (Russian painter), 34
Ford, Sheridan, 188f.
Fors Clavigera, 128 f., 134, 138, 145,

Fortnightly Review, The, 174

Fragonard, Jean, 34

Franklin, Maud, 134, 149, 152, 166,

176, 177 ff., 184, 228, 240
Frederick the Great, 24
Freer, Charles Lang, 220 ff., 228, 238
French Set, The, 77
Frick, Henry C., 228
Frith, William Powell, 79 ff., 95, 127,

143 f.
Funeral at Omans, The, 67, 71, 234

Gardiner, Mrs. "Jack," 199

INDEX

251

"Gavarni," see Chevalier

Gazette des Beaux- Arts, 162

Gentle Art of Making Enemies, The,

160, 175, 188 ff., 206, 231, 243
Gilbert, W. S., 165
Gin Lane, 34

Gleyre (art teacher), 58, 59, 62, 63
Godkin, William, 15 f.
Godwin, Beatrix (Whistler), 121 .,

134, 176ff., I80f., 184, 186,

210, 218, 221
Godwin, E. W., 117ff., 123, 127,

134, 147, 176 f.
Gold Scab, The, 146
Goncourt, Edmund de and Jules de,

60, 105, 200 S.
Goya, Francisco, 196
Graves, Henry, 135
Gray, Erne (Ruskin), 91, 118, n.,

129 f., 191
Greaves, Walter (and brother), 98,

100, 101, 105, 112, 114, 150
Green Carnation, The, 215
Greuze, Jean, 34
Guthrie, Sir James, 228

Haden, Dr. Francis Seymour, 41, 60,
73 ff., 87, 94, 102, 154,214

Hamerton, P. G., 133

Hamilton, McLure, 188 .

HarBron, Dudley, 118, n.

Hare, Augustus, 147

Harland, Henry, 156, 186

Harmonium, 245

Harmony in Grey and Green, 95,
134

Harper's Magazine, 207 F.

Heffernan, Joanna, 84 ff., 94, 100,
102 ff., 134, 228

Heinemann, William, 186, 188, 189

Henley, W. E., 186, 216, 226 f.

Hichens, Robert, 215

Hill, Octavius, 30

His Reverence, 223

Hoffmann, Ernst T. W., 59

Hogarth, William, 34, 35, 80, 222

Holbein, Hans, 63

Holland, Lady, 117, 118, nn.

Holland, Lord, 117, n.

Homage a Delacroix, 99, 104

Homer, Winslow, 231

Hopper, Edward, 213

Horse Fair, The, 67

"House of Life, The," 92

Howell, Charles Augustus, 89 ff., 98,
125, 130, 131, 135, 146, 156,
163, 165, 173, 174, 223 f.

Hubbard, Elbert, 226

Huddleston, Baron, 138, 142, 144

Hughes, Fanny, 90

Hugo, Victor, 51, 54

Hunt, Holman, 17, 74, 81, 95, 127 f.,
140

Hunting of the Snark, The, 99

Huysmans, J. K., 105, 106

lonides, Alecco, 58, 74, 102, 103, 104

lonides, Luke, 133

Irving, Henry, 117ff., 122, 124, 129,

135, 142, 212, 242
Ivanhoe, 27

Jaeckyll (architect), HO, 111, 114
James, Henry, 15 ff., 103, 138, 141,

149, 155, 159, 161, 185, 197,

231, 240, 246
John, Augustus, 224
Jopling, Mrs. Louise, 177

Keene, Charles, 136, 209

"King of the Golden River, The," 90

Kraft, Colonel, 24

Ku K'ai-chih, 105

La Belle Irlandaise, 85

Labouchere, Henry, 180f., 188

Lady Lilith, 110

Lalouette (restaurateur), 68

Lamont, Thomas Reynolds, 58

La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine,

104, 109, 111, 116, 236
L'Art, 147

La Touche, Rose, 129
Lavery, Sir John, 226, 228
Law, Edward, 33
Leaves of Grass, 98
Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, 166
Lee, Robert E., 47,49, 51, 52, 53
Legros, Alphonse, 62 ff., 66, 68, 70,

71, 76, 98, 103, 105, 110, 204

252

INDEX

Leighton, Sir Frederick, 172, 241
L'Enfant, Pierre Charles, 52
Levitski, Dmitri, 34
Leyland, Frederick, 97, 104, 108 ff.,

134, 135, 146, 152
Leyland, Mrs. Frederick, 139
Lindsay, Sir Coutts, 121, 132
Lisle-Adam, Villiers de, 106
Lippi, Filippo, 110

Little Journeys to the Homes of Great

Men, 226, n.
Little Women, 41
Lloyd, Constance, 166
Louis XIV, 35
Louise, Princess, 115
Loves of the Lobsters, The, 146
Lucas (friend of G. Whistler), 69
Luxembourg Gardens at Twilight,

198

MacColl (critic), 226
Magazine of Art, The, 187
Mahaffy, John P., 126
Mallarme, St<phane, 85, 200
Manet, Edouard, 65, 97, 107, 197,

217

Mansfield, Howard, 220
Mantz, Paul, 88
Marin, John, 246
Marks, Murray, 89, 96, 108ff.,

130, n.

Marriage a la Mode, 34
Marriage Feast at Cana, The, 64, 76
Martin, Mary Bacon (Ford), 191
Mary, Queen, 119
McNeill, Alicia, 30
McNeill, Anna Mathilda (Whistler),

22 ff., 100, 107, 160, 242
McNeill, Dr., 30
McNeill, Eliza (Winstanly), 30
McNeill, William Gibbs, 22, 23, 24
Melnikov, Colonel, 24
Menpes, Mortimer, 103, 160, 214
Meredith, George, 83
Meryon, Charles, 60, 64-65, 74
Meux, Lady, 161
Michael Angelo, 93, 112
Millais, John, 74, 79, 81, 110, 134,

135, 140, 172, 191, 197, 243
Miller, Joaquin, 7

Mirror of Venus, 121
Miss Cicely Alexander, 235
Mitford, Nancy, 115, n.
Modern Man, 187
Modern Painters, 81
Monet, Claude, 65, 107
Monroe, Harriet, 144
Montesquiou-Fezensac, Compte

Robert de, 200 ff.
Moore, Albert, 210 f.
Moore, George, 217, 218
Moore, Thomas, 23
Morris, William, 84, 92, 110, 143,

155, 157, 206, 226, n.
Motley, John, 33
Mount, Charles Merrill, 198
"Murders in the Rue Morgue, The/*

60

Murger, Henry, 55, 56, 61, 65, 93
Music Room, The,, 81

Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon), 61,

67, 86

Nation, The, 15, 16, 138
National Observer, The, 186ff.
Nesbitt, Evelyn, 221
Newcomes, The, 59
New York Herald, The, 188
New York Times, The, 228
Nicholas I, Tsar, 24 f., 28 f., 39, 42
Nightingale, Florence, 26
Nocturne in Black and Gold, 131,

132
"nocturnes," 32, 63, 101, 104, 105,

129, 131, 139 ff., 145, 148, 198,

199, 239

Observer, The, 216
Oliver Twist, 96
Oulevey, Henry, 68, 69

Pacific, The, 103

Paddon Papers, The, 163

Pall Mall Gazette, 170, 183

Park, Rev. Dr. Roswell, 45

Parrish, Maxfield, 118, n.

Parry, Serjeant, 138

Pater, Walter, 88, 96, 126 f., 217,

218, 235, 241
Patience, 165, 167, 168

INDEX

253

Paul, Tsar, 24

Peacock Room, HOff.

Pennell, Elizabeth Robbins, 213, 222,

227
Pennell, Joseph, 192, 200, 213, 222,

227, 240

Peter Ibbetson, 208
Peter the Great, 24, 28, 35, 39, 44
Petherham (lawyer), 138
Philip, John Birnie, 176
Philip, Miss Birnie, 222 ff .
Phillips, John, 79
Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 216
Pissarro, Camille, 190, 207
Pissarro, Lucien, 190
Poe, Edgar Allan, 60, 161, 170, 232
Pollock, Jackson, 240
Pound, Ezra, 221, 232 ff., 236
Poynter, Edward John, 58, 139
Praeterita, 129
Pre-Raphaelite Twilight: The Story

of Charles Augustus Howell,

130, n.
Prinsep, Valentine Cameron, 58,

118, 172

Proudhon, Pierre, 65 f.
Proust, Marcel, 129, 195, 232
Puccini, Giacomo, 61
Pulitzer, Joseph, 198
Punch, 81, 95, 136, 164, 207
"Pupil, The," 197
Pushkin, Aleksander, 39

Queensberry, Marquis of, 215ff.
Quilter, Harry, 145, 152, 162, 167,
174

Rake's Progress, The, 34
Rastrelli, Francesco, 35, 36
Reade, Charles, 118, n.
Redesdale, Lord, 115
Reid, Alexander, 190
Rembrandt, 66, 93
Remembrance of Things Past, 129
Renoir, Auguste, 107, 239
Residence on the Shores of the

Baltic, A, 31

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 27, 36
Rich and Poor Peacocks, 116, 238
Rtobvs. the, 30

Rimbaud, Arthur, 63

Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic,

The, 33

Robertson, Graham, 210, 224
Rodin, Auguste, 223, 228 f.
Rose, Anderson, 125, 136
Rossetti, Christina, 143
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 82, 89 f., 92,

96, 98, 99, 108 ff., 116ff., 121,

130, n., 134, 142 f., 157, 163,

173, 186, 215, 229
Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddall, 82, 84, 92,

131
Rossetti, William Michael, 78, 130,

n., 142 f.
Rothenstein, William, 200, 204 f.,

206, 210, 214
Ruskin, John, 15 ff., 30, 74, 81, 90 ff.,

98, 118, n., 126 ff., 155, 191,

221

Sand, George, 67

Sarasate, Pablo, 119, 171

Sargent, John Singer, 166, 196 ff.,

224, 228-229, 235, 243, 246
Saturday Review, The, 133
Scott, Sir Walter, 26, 55
Scott, Winfield, 50
Scribner's, 160
Shaw, George Bernard, 128, 156,

159, 184

Shaw, Norman, 110, 134
Sickert, Walter, 212 f., 214
Sisters, The, 118, n.
Sitwell, Sir Osbert, 197
Sloan, John, 213
Smith, Logan Pearsall, 103, 203
Solomon, Simeon, 96
Spartali, Christine, 101, 104, 105,

108

Spy, The, 32
Stephen, Leslie, 186
Stevens, Alfred, 184
Stevens, Wallace, 245
Stevenson, Macaulay, 191
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 186, 227
Stones of Venice, The, 149
Story of a Bad Boy, 50
Story of My Life, The (E. Terry),

118, n.

254

INDEX

Stott, Mr. and Mrs., 180
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 64
Street, G. S., 186
Studio, The, 67, 234
Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 165
Sutherland, Duchess of, 78
Swift, Dr. Foster, 21
Swift, Joseph G., 20 f., 23 f., 25
Swift, Mary (Whistler), 20 ff., 25,

26, 31
Swinburne, Charles Algernon, 82, 98,

129, 156, 164, 173, 209
Symons, Arthur, 219
Symphony in White No. I, see

White Girl, The
Symphony in White No. II, 174
Symphony in White No. Ill, 133

Tadema, see Alma-Tadema

Tales (Hoffmann), 59

Taylor, Tom, 144, 145

Tenniel, Sir John, 164

Tennyson, Alfred, 119

Ten O'Clock (lecture), 167, 170,

171, 173, 174, 175, 179, 187,

188, 200, 209, 215, 232, 244
Terry, Ellen, 117f., 122, 166, 177,

208, 212

Terry, Kate, 118, n.
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 30,

59, 78

Thaw, Harry K., 221
Thayer, Sylvanus, 47
Thomas, Serjeant, 74
Three Plays for Puritans, 184
Through the Looking Glass, 207
Times, The (London), 81, 129, 144,

145, 152
Titian, 66, 157

Todd, Charles Stewart, 24, 33, 40
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, 206, 207
Treasure Island, 186
Trilby, 58, 59, 60, 207 ff., 243
Turner, Joseph M. W., 131, 136

Valparaiso Bay, 103, 145
Vanbragh, Sir John, 36
Vanderbilt, George, 228
Van Gogh, Vincent, 190
Vanity Fair, 208

Velasquez, Diego, 34, 79, 87, 119,

196, 199, 219
Verlaine, Paul, 63
Veronese, Paolo, 64
Victoria, Queen, 115
Vie de Boheme (book), 55, 56, 61,

93

Vie de Boheme (opera), 61
Vues de Paris, 60, 64-65

Wales, Prince of, 126, 158, 163, 177,

184

Wales, Princess of, 163
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 163,

173ff.
Watts, George, 79, 110, 117, n., 118,

133-134, 197, 208, 241
Way, Thomas, 146
Webster, Daniel, 46
Weir, Alden, 48, 49, 53, 160
Welsh, Carl, 197
West, Benjamin, 170
Westminster, Marquis of, 115
Whibley, Charles, 186, 216, 223
Whibley, Mrs. Charles, 181, 182
Whistler as 1 Knew Him, 215
Whistler, Charles, 30, 31
Whistler, Deborah (Haden), 22, 30,

31, 40, 41, 73, 77, 102
Whistler, Dr. Daniel, 19
Whistler, George (Jr.), 22, 26, 30,

44, 46, 52, 53, 57 f.
Whistler, George Washington, 20,

21 ff., 44, 46 f.
Whistler, James McNeill

birth, 17, 23

childhood, 31 ff.

death, 227

education, 33, 38, 39, 45, 47

journey to Russia, 30

marriage, 180-182

Paris student, 57 ff.

Peacock Room work, 109 ff.

Ruskin trial, 15 ff., 98, 132 ff., 188,
215, 243 f.

Venice period, 148 ff.

West Point days, 46 ff.

Wilde-Whistler controversy, 163 ff.
Whistler, John, 19 f., 24
Whistler, Joseph, 22, 26

INDEX

255

Whistler, Sir Kensington, 19
Whistler vs Ruskin, Art and Art

Critics, 158, 160, 231
Whistler, Dr. William, 26, 30, 41,

44 ff., 52, 100, 103, 104-105,

160, 177, 181
White Girl, The: Symphony in

White No. I, 85 ff., 234
White Girl -with a Fan, 175
White, Stanford, 220
Whitman, Walt, 83, 98
Wilde, Lady, 216
Wilde, Oscar, 99, 103, 126 ff., 156,

159, 163 ff., 174, 182, 186, 206,

215ff., 225, 227, 246
Wilson, Woodrow, 199
Winans Locomotive Works, 22, 25,

30, 46

Windham, Hon. Percy, 139

Windham, Hon. Mrs. Percy, 139

Winstanly, Mr,, 30

Woman in White, The, 87

Woolf, Virginia, 245

World, The, 166-167, 175, 179,

188, 244

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 117, n.
Wyndham, George, 186

Yeats, W. B., 206, 233 f.
Yellow Book, The, 156, 163, 186
Yellow Buskin, The, 182
York, Duke of, 208

Zola, Emile, 65

Zurbaran, Francisco de, 196