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BY
E. R. and J. PENNELL

NEW AND REVISED EDITION THE SIXTH

ILLUSTRATED

PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

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Printed in Great Britain

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The Fifth Edition of our book was exhausted before war was declared, and not until peace was declared was it thought by the publishers advisable to issue this Sixth Edition, which has been revised and brought up to date, and contains new material and new illustrations. All the while we have been collecting and verifying documents, and all the while we have received suggestions, facts, and inquiries. The book has been published in French, but for the war it would have been long since translated into other languages. During these years of needless, senseless, useless horrors, the name and fame of Whistler have steadily grown. His works have served as propaganda—what a comment!—even the portrait of his mother has been used as a poster by the British, and his own portrait has obtained the glory of appearing as a tribute to the power of advertising. All the while, endless stories, most of them garbled from this book, when not invented, have gone from end to end of the world. Exhibitions of his paintings and prints and of documents relating to him have been held. Galleries and private collectors have acquired what little of his work was left to acquire. Even the National Gallery of Great Britain has accepted three of his pictures from the late Arthur Studd though Whistler had distinctly said that he did not wish to be represented in any English gallery. Dealers have found in his art inexhaustible attraction and asset for shows. Mr. Freer's collection in the National Museum, Washington, is about to open. Our collection is being installed in the Library of Congress, also in Washington—though it was damaged by unpardonable and undiscoverable carelessness in transit, caused by this cursed war. Washington must soon be visited to see Whistler as Madrid is to see Velasquez. All the while, too, the financial appreciation of Whistler—the standard by which art and everything is judged to-day—has vastly increased, the Mrs. Leyland and Lady Meux selling for more hundreds of thousands than he asked hundreds of dollars for. His etchings and lithographs have so improved in value in the collector's estimation that persons whom Whistler did everything to help in forming their collections have considered them too valuable to keep, and so have parted with them at an enormous rise over even his "posthumous prices." What would he [Pg vi] have thought of all this, he who so carefully selected the prints "kindly lent their owners?"

Whistler, fortunately, has escaped the indignity of commercial popularity, but he has come into his own; his name and his fame are world-wide, he is with the immortals; we said so in the beginning, and time has proved us right. There have been no books of importance issued about him of late years, though contemporary authors who spurned him during his life now claim his acquaintance and add a paragraph or a page, mostly from our book, as a bait to sell their own. Miss Philip delays, or awaits the lapse of twenty years, before issuing the letters. When she does print them—if properly edited—they will be a great addition to the knowledge of Whistler. Mr. Freer announces also a life which is to supersede or expose us, or Whistler. Still they tarry, but anything they may issue will add to the success and, we trust, the completeness of the authorized Life of Whistler. We should be grateful for any further information, suggestions, or corrections to that end from any of our readers.

We wish to thank, for the permission to reproduce paintings and drawings, to consult letters and documents, Mrs. A. J. Cassatt, Mr. Mitchell Kennerley, Mr. Roland Knvedler, Messrs. Keppel and Company, Mr. George J. C. Grasberger, Mr. A. E. Gallatin, Mr. R. C. Frick, Mr. West, Colonel Hughes, Mr. E. G. Kennedy, The Metropolitan Museum of New York, The Maryland Institute, the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Putnam, and Dr. Koch, Mr. Roberts, and Miss Wright, also of the Library of Congress.

Joseph Pennell
Elizabeth Robins Pennell

Washington, July 4, 1919

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Mr. and Mrs. Pennell's authorised Life of James McNeill Whistler appeared in two volumes in October 1908, and has had to be reprinted in that form three times since then. Its sale even in that comparatively expensive form has been an unexpectedly large one, proving without doubt that interest in Whistler's life is alive and growing. During the three years since its first publication much new material has come into the hands of the authors, and a complete revision of the book has therefore become necessary. The present volume is, to all intents and purposes, a new one. Many of the older illustrations in the earlier editions have been superseded by new ones, a number of which are reproduced for the first time.

For the new material included in this edition the authors and the publisher are indebted to friends and numerous sympathetic correspondents, and they wish to express their indebtedness especially to Mr. John W. Beatty, Director of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh; Mr. E. D. Brooks; Mr. Clifford Gore Chambers; Mr. E. T. Cook; Mr. Leon Dabo; Mr. Frederick Dielmann; Messrs. Dowdeswell; M. Théodore Duret; Mr. A. J. Eddy; Mrs. Wickham Flower; Right Hon. Jonathan Hogg; Mr. H. S. Hubbell; Mr. Will H. Low; Mr. Burton Mansfield; Judge Parry; Mr. H. Reinhardt; Mr. H. S. Ridings; Mr. Albert Rouiller; Miss Alice Rouiller; Mr. William Scott; M. Ströhlen; Mr. Ross Turner; Mr. C. F. G. Turner; Mr. C. Howard Walker; Mr. J. H. Wrenn.

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G., after an etching, refers to the Grolier Club Catalogue of Whistler's Etchings, 1910

W., after a lithograph, refers to Mr. T. R. Way's Catalogue of Whistler's Lithographs, 1905

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James Abbott McNeill Whistler was born on July 10, 1834, at Lowell, Massachusetts, in the United States of America.

Whistler, in the witness-box during the suit he brought against Ruskin in 1878, gave St. Petersburg as his birthplace—or the reporters did—and he never denied it. Baltimore was given by M. Théodore Duret in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (April 1881), and M. Duret's mistake, since corrected by him, has been many times repeated. The late Mrs. Livermore, who knew Whistler as a child at Lowell, asked him why he did not contradict this. His answer was: "If any one likes to think I was born in Baltimore, why should I deny it? It is of no consequence to me!" On entering West Point he stated that Massachusetts was his place of birth. But, as a rule, he met any one indiscreet enough to question him on the subject as he did the American who came up to him one evening in the Carlton Hotel, London, and by way of introduction said, "You know, Mr. Whistler, we were both born at Lowell, and at very much the same time. There is only the difference of a year—you are sixty-seven and I am sixty-eight." "And I told him," said Whistler, from whom we had the story the next day, "'Very charming! And so you are sixty-eight and were born at Lowell! Most interesting, no doubt, and as you please! But I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born at Lowell, and I refuse to be sixty-seven!'"

Whistler was christened at St. Anne's Church, Lowell, November 9, 1834. "Baptized, James Abbott, infant son of George Washington and Anna Mathilda Whistler: Sponsors, the parents. Signed, T. Edson"; so it is recorded in the church register. He was named after James Abbott, of Detroit, who had married his father's elder sister, Sarah Whistler. McNeill (his mother's name) was added shortly after he entered West Point. Abbott he always kept for legal and official documents. But, eventually, he dropped it for other purposes, "J. A. M." pleasing him no better than "J. A. W.," [Pg 2] and he signed himself "James McNeill Whistler" or "J. M. N. Whistler."

The Rev. Rose Fuller Whistler, in his Annals of an English Family (1887), says that John le Wistler de Westhannye (1272-1307) was the founder of the family. Most of the Whistlers lived in Goring, Whitchurch, or Oxford, and are buried in many a church and churchyard of the Thames Valley. Brasses and tablets to the memory of several are in the church of St. Mary at Goring: one to "Hugh Whistler, the son of Master John Whistler of Goring, who departed this life the 17 Day of Januarie Anno Dominie 1675 being aged 216 years"—an amazing statement, but there it is in the parish church durable as brass can make it, and it would have delighted Whistler. The solemn antiquary, however, has decided that the 21 is only a badly cut 4. This remarkable ancestor figures as a family ghost at Gatehampton, where he is said to have been buried with his money, and there he still walks, guarding the treasure he lived so many years to gather. The position of the Whistlers entitled them to a coat of arms, described in the Harleian MSS., No. 1556, and thus in Gwillim's Heraldry: "Gules, five mascles, in bend between two Talbots passant argent"; and the motto "Forward."

The men were mostly soldiers and parsons. A few made names for themselves. The shield of Gabriel Whistler, of Combe, Sussex, is one of six in King's College Chapel, Cambridge. Anthony Whistler, poet, friend of Shenstone, belonged to the Whitchurch family. Dr. Daniel Whistler (1619-1684), of the Essex branch, was a Fellow of Merton, an original Fellow of the Royal Society, a member and afterwards President of the College of Physicians, friend of Evelyn and Pepys. Evelyn often met him in "select companie" at supper, and once "Din'd at Dr. Whistler's at the Physicians Colledge," and found him not only learned but "the most facetious man in nature," the legitimate ancestor of Whistler. Pepys, who also dined and supped with him many times, pronounced him "good company and a very ingenious man." He fell under a cloud with the officials of the College of Physicians, and his portrait has been consigned to a back stairway of the Hall in Pall Mall. In the seventeenth century Ralph Whistler, of the Salters' Company, London, was one of the colonisers of Ulster, and Francis Whistler was a settler of Virginia. [Pg 3] When Whistler saw the name "Francis Whistler, Gentleman," in the Genesis of the United States, he said to us, "There is an ancestor, with the hall-mark F.F.V. [First Families of Virginia], who tickles my American snobbery, and washes out the taint of Lowell."

The American Whistlers are descended from John Whistler of the Irish branch. In his youth he ran away and enlisted. Sir Kensington Whistler, an English cousin, was an officer in the same regiment, and objected to having a relative in the ranks. John Whistler, therefore, was transferred to another regiment starting for the American colonies. He arrived in time to surrender at Saratoga with Burgoyne. He went back to England, received his discharge, eloped with Anna, daughter of Sir Edward Bishop or Bischopp, and, returning to America, settled at Hagerstown, Maryland. He again enlisted, this time in the United States army. He rose to the brevet rank of major and served in the war of 1812 against Great Britain. He was stationed at Fort Dearborn, which he helped to build, and Fort Wayne. According to Mr. A. J. Eddy (Recollections and Impressions of Whistler), Whistler once said to a visitor from Chicago:

"Chicago, dear me, what a wonderful place! I really ought to visit it some day; for, you know, my grandfather founded the city, and my uncle was the last commander of Fort Dearborn!"

In 1815, upon the reduction of the army, Major John Whistler was retired. He died in 1817, at Bellefontaine, Missouri. Of his fifteen children, three sons are remembered as soldiers, and three daughters married army officers. George Washington, the most distinguished son, was the father of James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

George Washington Whistler was born on May 19, 1800, at Fort Wayne. He was educated mostly at Newport, Kentucky; and from Kentucky, when a little over fourteen, he received his appointment to the Military Academy, West Point, where he is remembered for his gaiety. Mr. George L. Vose, his biographer, and others tell stories that might have been told of his son. One is of some breach of discipline, for which he was made to bestride a gun on the campus. As he sat there he saw, coming towards him, the Miss Swift he was before long to marry. Out came his handkerchief, and, leaning over the gun, he set to work cleaning it so carefully that he was "honoured, not disgraced," in her eyes. He was number one in drawing, and [Pg 4] his playing on the flute won him the nickname "Pipes." He graduated on July 1, 1819. He was appointed second lieutenant in the First Artillery, and, in 1829, first lieutenant in the Second Artillery. He served on topographical duty, and for a few months he was assistant professor at the Academy. There was not much fighting for American officers of his generation. But railroads were being built, and so few were the civil engineers that West Point graduates were allowed by Government to work for private corporations, and he was employed on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the Baltimore and Susquehanna, and the Paterson and Hudson River. For the Baltimore and Ohio he went to England in 1828 to examine the railway system. He was building the line from Stonington to Providence, when, in 1833, he resigned from the army with the rank of major, to carry on his profession as a civil engineer.

In the meanwhile Major Whistler had married twice. His first wife was Mary Swift, daughter of Dr. Foster Swift, of the United States army. She left three children: George, who became a well known civil engineer; Joseph, who died in youth; and Deborah, Lady Haden. His second wife was Anna Mathilda McNeill, daughter of Dr. Charles Donald McNeill, of Wilmington, North Carolina, and sister of William Gibbs McNeill, a West Point classmate and an associate in Major Whistler's engineering work. The McNeills were descended from the McNeills of Skye. Their chief, Donald, emigrated with sixty of his clan to North Carolina in 1746, and bought land on Cape Fear River. Charles Donald McNeill was his grandson and was twice married; his second wife, Martha Kingsley, was the mother of Anna Mathilda McNeill, who became Mrs. George Washington Whistler. The McNeills were related by marriage to the Fairfaxes and other Virginia families, and Whistler, on his mother's side, was the Southerner he loved to call himself.

In 1834 Major Whistler accepted the post of engineer of locks and canals at Lowell, and to this town he brought his family. There, in the Paul Moody House on Worthen Street, James McNeill Whistler was born, and the house is now a Whistler Memorial Museum. Two years later the second son, William Gibbs McNeill, was born. In 1837 Major Whistler moved to Stonington, Connecticut, and Miss Emma W. Palmer and Mrs. Dr. Stanton, his wife's nieces, still [Pg 5] remember his "pleasant house on Main Street." It is said that he had a chaise fitted with car wheels in which he and his family drove every Sunday on the tracks to church at Westerly; also that a locomotive named Whistler was in use on the road until recently. He was consulted in regard to many new lines, among them the Western Railroad of Massachusetts, for which he was consulting engineer from 1836 to 1840. In 1840 he was made chief engineer, and he removed to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he lived in the Ethan Chapin Homestead on Chestnut Street, north of Edward Street. A third son, Kirk Booth, born at Stonington in 1838, died at Springfield in 1842, and here a fourth son, Charles Donald, was born in 1841.

In 1842 Nicholas I. of Russia sent a commission, under Colonel Melnikoff, round Europe and America to find the best method and the best man to build a railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and they chose the American, George Washington Whistler. The honour was great and the salary large, 12,000 dollars a year. He accepted, and started for Russia in Midsummer 1842, leaving his family at Stonington.

The life of a child, for the first nine years or so, is not of much interest to any save his parents. An idea can be formed of Whistler's early training. His father was a West Point man, with all that is fine in the West Point tradition. Mrs. Whistler, described as "one of the saints upon earth," was as strict as a Puritan. Dr. Whistler—Willie—often told his wife of the dread with which he and Jimmie looked forward to Saturday afternoon, with its overhauling of clothes, emptying of pockets, washing of heads, putting away of toys, and preparation for Sunday, when the Bible was the only book they read. Of the facts of his childhood there are few to record. Mrs. Livermore remembered his baby beauty, so great that her father used to say "it was enough to make Sir Joshua Reynolds come out of his grave and paint Jemmie asleep." In his younger years he was called Jimmie, Jemmie, Jamie, James, and Jim, and we use these names as we have found them in the letters written to us and the books quoted. Mrs. Livermore dwelt on the child's beautiful hands, "which belong to so many of the Whistlers." When she returned to Lowell in 1836 from the Manor School at York, England, Mrs. Whistler's son, Willie, had just been born:

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"As soon as Mrs. Whistler was strong enough, she sent for me to go and see her boy, and I did see her and her baby in bed! And then I asked, 'Where is Jemmie, of whom I have heard so much?' She replied, 'He was in the room a short time since, and I think he must be here still.' So I went softly about the room till I saw a very small form prostrate and at full length on the shelf under the dressing-table, and I took hold of an arm and a leg and placed him on my knee, and then said, 'What were you doing, dear, under the table?' 'I'se drawrin',' and in one very beautiful little hand he held the paper, in the other the pencil."

The pencil drawings which we have seen, owned by Mrs. Livermore, are curiously firm and strong for a child of four.

In 1843, when Whistler was nine years old, Major Whistler sent for his wife and children. Mrs. Whistler sailed from Boston in the Arcadia, August 12, 1843, taking with her Deborah and the three boys, James, William, and Charles. George Whistler, Major Whistler's eldest son, and her "good maid Mary" went with them. The story of their journey and their life in Russia is recorded in Mrs. Whistler's journal.

They arrived at Liverpool on the 29th of the same month. Mrs. Whistler's two half-sisters, Mrs. William Winstanley and Miss Alicia McNeill, lived at Preston, and there they stayed a fortnight. Then, after a few days in London, they sailed for Hamburg.

There was no railroad from Hamburg, so they drove by carriage to Lübeck, by stage to Travemünde, where they took the steamer Alexandra for St. Petersburg, and George Whistler left them. Between Travemünde and Cronstadt, Charles, the youngest child, fell ill of seasickness and died within a day. There was just time to bury him at Cronstadt—temporarily; he was afterwards buried at Stonington—and his death saddened the meeting between Major Whistler and his wife and children.

Mrs. Whistler objected to hotels and to boarding, and a house was found in the Galernaya. She did her best to make it not only [Pg 7] a comfortable, but an American home, for Major Whistler's attachment to his native land, she said, was so strong as to be almost a religious sentiment. Their food was American, American holidays were kept in American fashion. Many of their friends were Americans. Major Whistler was nominally consulting engineer to Colonel Melnikoff, but actually in charge of the construction and equipment of the line, and as the material was supplied by the firm of Winans of Baltimore, Mr. Winans and his partners, Messrs. Harrison and Eastwick, of Philadelphia, were in Russia with their families.

Mrs. Whistler's strictness did not mean opposition to pleasure. Yet at times she became afraid that her boys were not "keeping to the straight and narrow way." There were evenings of illuminations that put off bedtime; there were afternoons of skating and coasting; Christmas gaieties, with Christmas dinners of roast turkey and pumpkin pie; visits to American friends; parties at home, when the two boys "behaved like gentlemen, and their father commended them upon it"; there were presents of guns from the father, returning from long absences on the road; there were dancing lessons, which Jemmie would have done anything rather than miss.

Whistler as a boy was exactly what those who knew him as a man would expect; gay and bright, absorbed in his work when that work was art, brave and fearless, selfish if selfishness is another name for ambition, considerate and kindly, above all to his mother. The boy, like the man, was delightful to those who understood him; "startling," "alarming," to those who did not.

Mrs. Whistler's journal soon becomes extremely interesting:

March 29 (1844). "I must not omit recording our visiting the Gastinnoi to-day in anticipation of Palm Sunday. Our two boys were most excited, Jemmie's animation roused the wonder of many, for even in crowds here such decorum and gravity prevails that it must be surprising when there is any ebullition of joy."

April 22 (1844). "Jemmie is confined to his bed with a mustard plaster on his throat; he has been very poorly since the thawing season commenced, soon becoming overheated, takes cold; when he complained of pain first in his shoulder, then in his side, my fears of a return of last year's attack made me tremble, and when I gaze upon his pale face sleeping, contrasted to Willie's round cheeks, my heart [Pg 8] is full; our dear James said to me the other day, so touchingly, 'Oh, I am sorry the Emperor ever asked father to come to Russia, but if I had the boys here, I should not feel so impatient to get back to Stonington,' yet I cannot think the climate here affects his health; Willie never was as stout in his native land, and James looks better than when we brought him here. At eight o'clock I am often at my reading or sewing without a candle, and I cannot persuade James to put up his drawing and go to bed while it is light."

The journal explains that Whistler as a boy suffered from severe rheumatic attacks that added to the weakness of his heart, the eventual cause of his death. Major and Mrs. Whistler rented a country-house on the Peterhoff Road in the spring of 1844. There is an account of a day at Tsarskoé Seló, when Colonel Todd, American Minister to Russia, showed them the Palace:

May 6 (1844). "Rode to the station, and took the cars upon the only railroad in Russia, which took us the twenty versts to the pretty town. It would be ungenerous in me to remark how inferior the railroad, cars, &c., seemed to us Americans. The boys were delighted with it all. Jemmie wished he could stay to examine the fine pictures and know who painted them, but as I returned through the grounds I asked him if he should wish to be a grand duke and own it all for playgrounds: he decided there could be no freedom with a footman at his heels."

July 1 (1844). "... I went with Willie to do some shopping in the Nevski. He is rather less excitable than Jemmie, and therefore more tractable. They each can make their wants known in Russ., but I prefer this gentlest of my dear boys to go with me. We had hardly reached home when a tremendous shower came up, and Jemmie and a friend, who had been out in a boat on a canal at the end of our avenue, got well drenched. Just as we were seated at tea, a carriage drove up and Mr. Miller entered, introducing Sir William Allen, the great Scotch artist, of whom we have heard lately, who has come to St. Petersburg to revive on canvas some of the most striking events from the life of Peter the Great. They had been to the monastery to listen to the chanting at vespers in the Greek chapel. Mr. Miller congratulated his companion on being in the nick of time for our excellent home-made bread and fresh butter, but, above all, the [Pg 9] refreshment of a good cup of tea. His chat then turned upon the subject of Sir William Allen's painting of Peter the Great teaching the mujiks to make ships. This made Jemmie's eyes express so much interest that his love for art was discovered, and Sir William must needs see his attempts. When my boys had said good night, the great artist remarked to me, 'Your little boy has uncommon genius, but do not urge him beyond his inclination.' I told him his gift had only been cultivated as an amusement, and that I was obliged to interfere, or his application would confine him more than we approved."

Of these attempts there remain few examples. One is the portrait of his aunt Alicia McNeill, who visited them in Russia in 1844, sent to Mrs. Palmer at Stonington, with the inscription: "James to Aunt Kate." In a letter to Mrs. Livermore, written in French, when he was ten or eleven, "he enclosed some pretty pen-and-ink drawings, each on a separate bit of paper, and each surrounded by a frame of his own designing." He told us he could remember wonderful things he had done during the years in Russia. Once, he said, when on a holiday in London with his father, he was not well, and was given a hot foot-bath, and he could never forget how he sat looking at his foot, and then got paper and colours and set to work to make a study of it, "and in Russia," he added, "I was always doing that sort of thing."

July 4 (1844). "I have given my boys holiday to celebrate the Independence of their country.... This morning Jemmie began relating anecdotes from the life of Charles XII. of Sweden, and rather upbraided me that I could not let him do as that monarch had done at seven years old—manage a horse! I should have been at a loss how to afford my boys a holiday, with a military parade to-day, but there was an encampment of cadets, about two estates off, and they went with Colonel T.'s sons to see them."

July 10 (1844). "A poem selected by my darling Jamie and put under my plate at the breakfast-table, as a surprise on his tenth birthday. I shall copy it, that he may be reminded of his happy childhood when perhaps his grateful mother is not with him."

August 20 (1844). "... Jemmie is writing a note to his Swedish tutor on his birthday. Jemmie loves him sincerely and gratefully. I suppose his partiality to this Swede makes him espouse his country's [Pg 10] cause and admire the qualities of Charles XII. so greatly to the prejudice of Peter the Great. He has been quite enthusiastic while reading the life of this King of Sweden, this summer, and too willing to excuse his errors."

August 23 (1844). "I wish I could describe the gardens at Peterhoff where we were invited to drive to-day. The fountains are, perhaps, the finest in the world. The water descends in sheets over steps, all the heathen deities presiding. Jemmie was delighted with the figure of Samson tearing open the jaws of the lion, from which ascends a jet d'eau one hundred feet.... There are some fine pictures, but Peter's own paintings of the feathered race ought to be most highly prized, though our Jemmie was so saucy as to laugh at them."

August 28 (1844). "I avail myself of Col. Todd's invitation to visit Tsarskoé Seló to-day with Aunt Alicia, Deborah, and the two dear boys, who are always so delighted at these little excursions.... My little Jemmie's heart was made sad by discovering swords which had been taken in the battle between Peter and Charles XII., for he knew, from their rich hilts set in pearls and precious stones, that they must have belonged to noble Swedes. 'Oh!' he exclaimed, 'I'd rather have one of these than all the other things in the armoury! How beautiful they are!'... I was somewhat annoyed that Col. Todd had deemed it necessary to have a dinner party for us.

"... The colonel proposed the Emperor's health in champagne, which not even the Russian general, who declined wine, could refuse, and even I put my glass to my lips, which so encouraged my little boys that they presented their glasses to be filled, and, forgetting at their little side-table the guests at ours, called out aloud, 'Santé à l'Empereur!' The captain clapped his hands with delight, and afterwards addressed them in French. All at the table laughed and called the boys 'Bons sujets.'"

They were at St. Petersburg again in September, preparing their Christmas gifts for America. Whistler, sending one to his cousin Amos Palmer, wrote in an outburst of patriotism that "the English were going to America to be licked by the Yankees": it was at the time of the disagreement over Oregon Territory. In another letter he gives the Fourth of July as his birthday.

Ash Wednesday (1845). "I avail myself of this Lenten season [Pg 11] to have my boys every morning before breakfast recite a verse from the Psalms, and I, who wish to encourage them, am ready with my response. How very thankful I shall be when the weather moderates so that Jemmie's long imprisonment may end, and Willie have his dear brother with him in the skating grounds and ice-hills. Here comes my good boy Jemmie now, with his history in hand to read to me, as he does every afternoon, as we fear they may lose their own language in other tongues, and thus I gain a half-hour's enjoyment by hearing them read daily."

April 5 (1845). "Our boys have left the breakfast table before eight o'clock to trundle their new hoops on the Quai with their governess, and have brought home such bright red cheeks and buoyant spirits to enter the schoolroom with and to gladden my eyes. Jemmie began his course of drawing lessons at the Academy of Fine Arts just on the opposite side of the Neva, exactly fronting my bedroom window. He is entered at the second room. There are two higher, and he fears he shall not reach them, because the officer who is still to continue his private lesson at home is a pupil himself in the highest, and Jemmie looks up to him with all the reverence an artist merits. He seems greatly to enjoy going to his class, and yesterday had to go by the bridge on account of the ice, and felt very important when he told me he had to give the Isvóshtclók fifteen copecks silver instead of ten."

In the archives of the Imperial Academy of Science there is a "List of Scholars of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts," and in this and the "Class Journal of the Inspector" for 1845 James Whistler is entered as "belonging to the drawing class, heads from Nature." In 1846 he was on March 2 examined and passed as first in his class, the number being twenty-eight. From 1845 to 1849 Professors Vistelious and Voivov were the masters of the life class.

On May 14 (1845) there was a review of troops in St. Petersburg, and the Whistlers saw it from a window in the Prince of Oldenburg's palace.

"Jemmie's eagerness to attain all his desires for information and his fearlessness often makes him offend, and it makes him appear less amiable than he really is. The officers, however, seemed to find amusement in his remarks in French or English as they accosted him. They [Pg 12] were soon informed of his military ardour, and that he hoped to serve his country. England? No, indeed! Russia, then? No, no; America, of course!"

May 2 (1846). "The boys are in the schoolroom now, reading the Roman history in French to M. Lamartine, promising themselves the pleasure of reviewing the pictures at the Academy of Fine Arts at noon, which they have enjoyed almost every day this week. It is the Triennial Exhibition, and we like them to become familiar with the subjects of the modern artists, and to James especially it is the greatest treat we could offer. I went last Wednesday with Whistler and was highly gratified. I should like to take some of the Russian scenes so faithfully portrayed to show in my native land. My James had described a boy's portrait said to be his likeness, and although the eyes were black and the curls darker, we found it so like him that his father said he would be glad to buy it, but its frame would only correspond with the furniture of a palace. The boy is taken in a white shirt with crimped frill, open at the throat; it is half-length, and no other garment could show off the glow of the brunette complexion so finely."

May 30 (1846). "Yesterday the Empress was welcomed back to St. Petersburg. Last night the illumination which my boys had been eagerly expecting took place. When at 10.30 they came in, Jamie expressed such an eager desire that I would allow him to be my escort just to take a peep at the Nevski that I could not deny him. The effect of the light from Vasili Ostrow was very beautiful, and as we drove along the Quai, the flowers and decorations of large mansions were, I thought, even more tasteful. We had to fall into a line of carriages in the Isaac Square to enter that Broadway, and just then a shout from the populace announced to us that the Empress was passing. I was terrified lest the poles of their carriage should run into our backs, or that some horses might take fright or bite us, we were so close, but Jamie laughed heartily and aloud at my timidity. He behaved like a man. With one arm he guarded me, and with the other kept the animals at a proper distance; and, I must confess, brilliant as the spectacle was, my great pleasure was derived from the conduct of my dear and manly boy."

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July 7 (1846). "My two boys found much amusement in propelling themselves on the drawbridge to and from the fancy island in the pond at Mrs. G.'s, where we went to spend the day; they find it such a treat to be in the country, and just run wild, chasing butterflies and picking the wild flowers so abundant. But nothing gave them so much pleasure as their 4th July, spent with their little American friends at Alexandrovsky, the Eastwicks; the fireworks, percussion caps, muskets, horseback riding, &c., made them think it the most delightful place in Russia. In some way James caught cold, and his throat was so inflamed that leeches were applied, and he has been in consequence confined to his room.... We spend our mornings in reading, drawing, &c. Then the boys take their row with good John across the Neva, to the morning bath, and in the cool of the afternoon a drive to the island, or a range in the summer gardens, or a row on the river."

July 27 (1846). "Last Wednesday they had another long day in the country, and got themselves into much mischief. They had at last broken the ropes of the drawbridge, by which it was drawn to and from the island, and there were my wild boys prisoners on it. I thought it best for them to remain so, as they were so unruly, but the good-natured dominie was pressed into their service, and swimming to their rescue, ere I could interfere; Jemmie was so drenched by his efforts that dear Mrs. R. took him away to her room to coax him to lie down awhile and to rub him dry, lest his sore throat return to tell a tale of disobedience.

"... On Thursday there was another grand celebration of the birthday of the Grand Duchess Olga. I gladly gave Mary permission to take the boys in our carriage.... They were gone so long that I grew anxious about them, but finally they arrived very tired, and poor Mary said she never wanted to go in such a crowd again. James had protected her as well as he was able, but she was glad to get home safely. The boys, however, enjoyed it immensely, as they saw all the Imperial family within arm's length, as they alighted from their pony chaises to enter the New Palace.... We were invited to go to the New Palace, and went immediately to the apartment occupied by his lamented daughter. On one side is the lovely picture painted by Buloff, so like her in life and health, though taken after death, as representing her spirit passing upwards to the palace above the blue sky. She wears her Imperial robes, with a crown on her head; at the back [Pg 14] of the crown is a halo of glory—the stars surround her as she passes through them. No wonder James should have thought this picture the most interesting of all the works of art around us."

In the autumn of 1846 Major Whistler "placed the boys, as boarders, at M. Jourdan's school. My dear boys almost daily exchange billet-doux with mother, since their absence of a week at a time from home. James reported everything 'first-rate,' even to brown bread and salt for breakfast, and greens for dinner, and both forbore to speak of homesickness, and welcome, indeed, were they on their first Saturday at home, when they opened the front door and called 'Mother, Mother!' as they rushed in all in a glow, and they looked almost handsome in their new round black cloth caps, set to one side of their cropped heads, and the tight school uniform of grey trousers and black jacket makes them appear taller and straighter; Jamie found the new suit too tight for his drawing lesson, so he sacrificed vanity to comfort, and was not diverted from his two hours' drawing by the other boys' frolics, which argues well for his determination to improve, as he promised his father. How I enjoyed having them back and listening to all their chat about their school—they seemed to enjoy their nice home tea. When it came time for them to go back, Willie broke down and told me all he had suffered from homesickness, and when I talked to my more manly James, I unfortunately said, 'You do not know what he feels.' Then Jamie's wounded love melted him into tears, as he said, 'Oh! mother, you think I don't miss being away from home!' He brushed away the shower with the back of his hand as if he was afraid of being seen weeping. Dear boys, may they never miss me as I miss them!"

Shortly after this, Mrs. Whistler's youngest son, John Bouttatz, born in the summer of 1845, died.

November 14 (1846). "Jamie was kept in until night last Saturday, and made to write a given portion of French over twenty-five times as a punishment for stopping to talk to a classmate after their recitation, instead of marching back to his seat according to order—poor fellow, it was rather severe when he had looked only for rewards during the week; as he had not had one mark of disapprobation in all that time, and was so much elated by his number of good balls for perfect recitations that he forgot disobedience of orders is a capital offence [Pg 15] under military discipline. He lost his drawing lesson, and made us all unhappy at home. We tried to keep his dinner hot, but his appetite had forsaken him, although only having eaten a penny roll since breakfast—he dashed the tears of vexation from his eyes at losing his drawing lesson, but his cheerfulness was soon restored and we had our usual pleasant evening."

January 23 (1847). "It is three weeks this afternoon since the dear boys came home from school to spend the Russian Christmas and holidays, and it seems not probable that they shall return again to M. Jourdan's this winter. James was drooping from the close confinement, and for two days was confined to his bed. Then Willie was taken. They are quite recovered now, and skate almost daily on the Neva, and Jamie often crosses on the ice to the Academy of Fine Arts to spend an hour or two."

January 30 (1847). "Jamie was taken ill with a rheumatic attack soon after this, and I have had my hands full, for he has suffered much with pain and weariness, but he is gradually convalescing, and to-day he was able to walk across the floor; he has been allowed to amuse himself with his pencil, while I read to him; he has not taken a dose of medicine during the attack, but great care was necessary in his diet."

February 27 (1847). "Never shall I cease to record with deep gratitude dear Jamie's unmurmuring submission these last six weeks. He still cannot wear jacket or trousers, as the blistering still continues on his chest. What a blessing is such a contented temper as his, so grateful for every kindness, and rarely complains. He is now enjoying a huge volume of Hogarth's engravings, so famous in the Gallery of Artists. We put the immense book on the bed, and draw the great easy-chair close up, so that he can feast upon it without fatigue. He said, while so engaged yesterday, 'Oh, how I wish I were well; I want so to show these engravings to my drawing-master; it is not everyone who has a chance of seeing Hogarth's own engravings of his originals,' and then added, in his own happy way, 'and if I had not been ill, mother, perhaps no one would have thought of showing them to me.'"

From this time until his death, Whistler maintained that Hogarth was the greatest English artist, and never lost an opportunity of saying [Pg 16] so. His long illness in 1847 is therefore memorable as the beginning of his love of Hogarth and also as a proof of his early appreciation of great art. Curiously, in his mother's diary there is no mention of the Hermitage, nor in his talks with us did he ever refer to it and to the pictures there by Velasquez, the artist he later grew to admire so enormously.

March 23 (1847). "After many postponements, the Emperor finally inspected the Railroad ... and many of the Court were invited. The day after his visit ... the Court held a levée, my husband was invited; when he arrived was summoned to a private audience in an inner apartment; the Emperor met him with marked kindness, kissed him on each side his face, and hung an ornament suspended by a scarlet ribbon around his neck, saying the Emperor thus conferred upon him the Order of St. Anne. Whistler, as such honours are new to Republicans, was somewhat abashed, but when he returned with the Court to the large circle in the outer room, he was congratulated by the officers generally."

It is said that when Major Whistler was asked to wear the Russian uniform he refused. The decoration he could not decline.

Whistler told us that the Emperor was most impressed with the way his father met every difficulty. When Major Whistler asked the Czar how the line should be built, showing him the map of the country between St. Petersburg and Moscow, the Czar, as everybody now knows, took a ruler, drew a straight line from one city to the other, and the railroad follows that ruled line. But everybody does not know that when the rolling stock was ready it was found to have been made of a different gauge from the rails. The people who supplied it demanded to be paid. Major Whistler not only refused, but burnt it, and took the responsibility.

Mrs. Whistler and the three children spent the summer of 1847 in England, where Major Whistler joined them. They visited their relations, and before their return Deborah was married. She had met Seymour Haden, a young surgeon, while staying with friends, the Chapmans, at Preston.

October 10 (1847). "Deborah's wedding day. Bright and pleasant. James the only groomsman, and very proud of the honour."

The next summer (1848) Mrs. Whistler went back to England. [Pg 17] Jamie had had another of his bad attacks of rheumatic fever, cholera broke out in St. Petersburg; "at its very name," she wrote, "my heart failed me." On July 6 she left for London with her boys. Jamie was better, and anxious to make a portrait of a young Hindu aboard.

July 22 (1848). "Shanklin, Isle of Wight. This is Willie's twelfth birthday and has been devoted to his pleasure; poor Jamie was envious that he could not bathe with us in the beautiful summer sea, for the doctors think the bracing air as much as he can bear; we three had a seaside ramble and then returned to rest at our cottage. I plied the needle, while my boys amused themselves, Willie in making wax flowers and Jemmie in drawing."

Monday [no date]. "This day being especially fine, Mrs. P. took the boys on a pedestrian excursion along the shore to Culver Cliffs. In the hope that Jamie might finish his sketch of Cook's Castle, we started the next day after an early dinner, taking a donkey with us for fear of fatigue for James or Deborah.... We availed ourselves of a lovely bright morning to take a drive, said to be the most charming in England, along the south coast of the Isle as far as 'Black Gang Chine,' where we alighted at the inn. Jamie flew off like a sea-fowl, his sketch-book in hand, and when I finally found him, he was seated on the red sandy beach, down, down, down, where it was with difficulty Willie and I followed him. He was attempting the sketch of the waterfall and cavern up the side of the precipice; he came back later, glowing with the exercise of climbing, with sketch-book in hand, and laughing at being 'Jacky last,' as we were all assembled for our drive back."

James did not return with Mrs. Whistler. It was feared his health would not stand another Russian winter. He stayed with the Hadens at 62 Sloane Street, and studied with a clergyman who had one other pupil. It was then that Boxall, commissioned by Major Whistler, painted his portrait, "when he was fourteen years old," Mrs. Thynne, his niece, says.

Mr. Alan S. Cole, C.B., recalls that "Whistler, as early as 1849, was staying with the Hadens in Sloane Street, and went to one or two children's parties given by the old Dilkes. To these also went my elder sisters and Miss Thackeray and so met Jimmy. Seymour Haden was our family doctor—with whose family ours was intimate— [Pg 18]very much on account of the early relations between my father, his brothers, and Seymour Haden, dating from schooldays at Christ's Hospital."

Major Whistler, through the summer of 1848, continued his work, though cholera raged. In November he was attacked. He recovered, but his health was shaken; he overtaxed his strength, and on April 9, 1849, he died: the immediate cause heart trouble, which his son inherited. He had been employed or consulted also in the building of the iron roof of the Riding House at St. Petersburg and the iron bridge over the Neva, in the improvement of the Dvina at Archangel, and the fortifications, the arsenal, and the docks at Cronstadt. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington, with three of his sons, and a monument was erected to his memory by his fellow officers in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

The Emperor suggested, Whistler told us, that the boys should be educated in the school for Court pages. But Mrs. Whistler determined to take them home, and the Emperor sent her in his State barge to the Baltic. She went to the Hadens, where she found James grown tall and strong. In London they forgot for a moment their sorrow in their visit to the Royal Academy (1849), in Trafalgar Square, where Boxall's portrait of James was exhibited. A short visit to Preston followed, the two boys carried off by "kind Aunt Alicia" to Edinburgh and Glasgow, and then they met in Liverpool. Economy made Mrs. Whistler hesitate between steamer and sailing-packet, but, by the advice of George Whistler, she took the steamer America, July 29, 1849, for New York, where they arrived on August 9, at once going by boat to Stonington.

"The boys were brought up like little princes until their father's death, which changed everything," Miss Emma W. Palmer writes us. Major Whistler's salary was large, so were his expenses; we have never heard there was a pension. He left his family comparatively poor—fifteen hundred dollars a year.

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Mrs. Whistler would have preferred to stay at Stonington, but for her two sons' sake she went to Pomfret, Connecticut, where there was a good school, Christ Church Hall. The principal was Rev. Dr. Roswell Park, a West Point engineer before he became parson and school teacher. At Pomfret Mrs. Whistler made herself a home. She could only afford part of an old farmhouse, and she felt keenly the discomfort for her boys. Yet she kept up the old discipline. On Christmas Day she wrote to her mother that they had been busy all morning bringing in wood and listing draughty doors, though she allowed them to lighten their task by hanging up evergreens and to sweeten it with "Stuart's Candy." After a snowstorm, they had, like other boys, to shovel paths, and all the while they had to study. "Jimmie was still an excitable spirit with little perseverance," she wrote; however, she would not faint but labour, and "I urged them on daily, and could see already their exertions to overcome habits of indolence." The Bible was read and the two boys were made to recite a verse every morning before breakfast. Miss Palmer, their schoolmate, during the winter of 1850, remembers that Mrs. Whistler "was very strict with them," and describes Whistler at this period as "tall and slight, with a pensive, delicate face, shaded by soft brown curls, one lock of which fell over his forehead.... He had a somewhat foreign appearance and manner, which, aided by his natural abilities, made him very charming even at that age.... He was one of the sweetest, loveliest boys I ever met, and was a great favourite."

The deepest impression he left at Pomfret was as a draughtsman. He made caricatures and illustrations to the books he read, portraits of his friends, and landscapes. Many of his sketches have been preserved. The late Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, also one of his schoolmates, describes him as "a man as fascinating as he was great, with a charm which from the very beginning everyone who knew him recognised." Whistler told us that he used to walk to school with her, carrying her books and basket, and she wrote us:

"He was very attentive and kind; full of fun in those days. The master of the school—Rev. Dr. Roswell Park—was one of the stiffest and most precise of clergymen, and dressed the part. One day Whistler came to school with a high, stiff collar and a tie precisely copied from Dr. Park's. Of course, the schoolroom was full of suppressed laughter. [Pg 20] The reverend gentleman was very angry, but he could hardly take open notice of an offence of that sort. So he bottled up his wrath, but when Jimmy—as we used to call him in those schooldays—gave him some trifling cause of offence, the Rev. Dr. went for him with a ferrule. The school was in two divisions—the girls sitting on one side of the large hall, and the boys on the other. Jimmy, pursued by the Dr. and the ferrule, went round back of the girls' row, and threw himself down on the floor, and the Dr. followed him and whacked him, more, I think, to Jimmy's amusement than to his discomfort."

Mrs. Moulton had further recollections of the maps he drew, which "were at once the pride and the envy of all the rest of us—they were so perfect, so delicate, so exquisitely dainty in workmanship."

The work done at Pomfret by Whistler which we have seen does not strike us as remarkable. It has its historic importance, but shows no greater evidence of genius than the early work of any great artist.

Though Whistler's mother was proud of his drawing, she did not see in art a career for him. She thought he had inherited a profession more distinguished. Many Whistlers and McNeills had been soldiers. West Point had made of them men—Americans. West Point must do the same for him. Through the influence of George Whistler with Daniel Webster, he was appointed cadet At Large by President Fillmore, and on July 1, 1851, after two years at Pomfret school, within ten days of his seventeenth birthday, he entered the United States Military Academy, West Point, where Colonel Robert E. Lee was Commandant. Whistler was not made for the army any more than Giotto for Tuscan pastures, or Corot for a Paris bonnet shop. It was inevitable that he should fail. Yet his three years at West Point were an experience he would not have missed.

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The record sent to us from West Point by Colonel C. W. Larned is: "He entered July 1, 1851, under the name of James A. Whistler; aged sixteen years and eleven months. He was appointed At Large.... At the end of his second year, in 1853, he was absent with leave on account of ill-health. On June 16, 1854, he was discharged from the Academy for deficiency in chemistry. At that time he stood at the head of his class in drawing and No. 39 in philosophy, the total number in the class being 43."

The Professor of Drawing was Robert W. Weir. Mr. J. Alden Weir, his son, remembers, "as a boy, my father showing me his work, which at that time hung in what was known as the Gallery of the Drawing Academy. There were about ten works by him framed. From the start he showed evidences of a talent which later proved to be unique in those fine and rare qualities hard to be understood by the majority."

Brigadier-General Alexander S. Webb, one of Whistler's classmates, says: "In the art class one day, while Whistler was busy over an India-ink drawing of a French peasant girl, Weir walked, as usual, from desk to desk, examining the pupils' work. After looking over Whistler's shoulder he stepped back to his own desk, filled his brush with India-ink [General Webb says he can see him now, rubbing the colour on the slab], and approached Whistler with a view of correcting some of the lines in the latter's drawing. When Whistler saw him coming, he raised his hands as if to ward off the strokes of his brush, and called out, 'Oh, don't, sir, don't! You'll spoil it!'"

Mr. William M. Chase told the story to Whistler and asked if there was any truth in it. "Well, you know he would have!" said Whistler.

Colonel Larned writes us: "I have here two drawings made by Whistler in his course of instruction in drawing, one of which is a water-colour copy of a coloured print, without special merit, and much touched up by Professor Weir, as was his wont; another, a pen-and-ink copy also of a colour print, quite brilliant and masterful in execution, which I presented to the officers' mess. The colour sketch bears the ear-marks all over it of Weir's retouching. It was his habit to touch up all water-colours of the cadets for the examination exhibition, and I don't believe Whistler at that time had any such facility in colour work as is indicated in this drawing. With my knowledge of my predecessor's practice, which we instructors follow to the best of our ability, I have always been suspicious of its integrity. At the same time Whistler was head in drawing, and it may be that Weir forbore in his case. The pen-and-ink, however, must have been his [Pg 22] own interpretation of a colour lithograph, and shows such facility that it makes me hesitate.

"Whistler did another water-colour of a monk seated at a table by a window writing. This is also a copy of an old print which was used by Weir through successive classes. I think it was —— who saw the thing and wrote a lot of tommy-rot and hi-falutin about it and Whistler's satiric genius, and his introduction in the monk's face of that of his room-mate, assuming it to have been an original production. As a matter of fact I have copies of the same thing by cadets in the gallery, all touched up by Weir, and I fancy about as good as Whistler's."

Of these West Point drawings, copies probably of lithographs by Nash or Haghe, only the pen drawing gives any promise. The water-colour is worthless. The pen drawing has in it the beginning of the handling of his etchings. Five drawings, four of An Hour in the Life of a Cadet in pen-and-ink, and one of An Encampment in wash, have lately been found at West Point. The cadet drawings are far the best of his early work that we have seen. The Century Magazine published (March 1910) a lithograph, called The Song of the Graduates, said to be by Whistler. It is evident, however, that if Whistler did make the sketch, it was re-drawn by a professional lithographer at Sarony's, who printed it. The Century also published (September 1910) a wood-engraving of some class function for which he is given the credit as draughtsman and engraver. But the work is that of a professional wood-engraver and could not have been done by Whistler at any period of his life. The attribution of these published prints to him is altogether unjustified.

Of his other studies there is little to record. This is Colonel Larned's account of his failure in chemistry: "Whistler said: 'Had silicon been a gas, I would have been a major-general.' He was called up for examination in chemistry ... and given silicon to discuss. He began: 'I am required to discuss the subject of silicon. Silicon is a gas.' 'That will do, Mr. Whistler,' and he retired quickly to private life."

According to Colonel Larned, Whistler then appealed to General Lee, but Lee answered, "I can only regret that one so capable of doing well should so have neglected himself, and must suffer the penalty."

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Another story is of an examination in history. "What!" said his examiner, "you do not know the date of the battle of Buena Vista? Suppose you were to go out to dinner, and the company began to talk of the Mexican War, and you, a West Point man, were asked the date of the battle, what would you do?" "Do," said Whistler, "why, I should refuse to associate with people who could talk of such things at dinner!"

Whistler's horsemanship was little better. It was not unusual, General Webb says, for him at cavalry drill to go sliding over his horse's head. Then Major Sackett, the commander, would call out: "Mr. Whistler, aren't you a little ahead of the squad?" Whistler said to us Major Sackett's remark was: "Mr. Whistler, I am pleased to see you for once at the head of your class!" "But I did it gracefully," he insisted. There are traditions of his fall when trotting in his first mounted drill, and the astonishment of the dragoon who ran to carry him off to hospital, when he rose unhurt with the complaint that he didn't "see how any man could keep a horse for amusement." Once Whistler had to ride a horse called "Quaker." "Dragoon, what horse is this?" "'Quaker,'" said the soldier "Well, he's no friend!" said Whistler.

His observance of the regulations was often as bad as his horsemanship, and his excuses worse. General Ruggles, a classmate, tells of the discovery of a pair of boots which were against the regulations, and of his writing a long explanation, winding up with the argument that, as this demerit added but a little to the whole number, "what boots it?"

General Langdon writes us: "The widow of a Colonel Thompson occupied a set of officer's quarters at the 'Point,' and, to eke out her pension, was allowed to take ten or twelve cadets to board. Very soon after his admission to the Academy Whistler discovered that the fare of the cadets was not of his taste, and he applied for permission to take his meals at Mrs. Thompson's. Now, though her house was in the row of officers' quarters and the nearest to the cadet barracks, it was 'off cadet limits,' except for the boarders at meals. One evening, long after supper, Whistler was discovered by Mrs. Thompson, leaning over her fence, talking with her pretty French maid. Mrs. Thompson inquired his business there. Whistler replied: 'I am [Pg 24] looking for my cat!' It was well known that cadets were not allowed to keep cats, dogs, or other beasts. The old lady nearly had a fit. As soon as she could recover she gasped out: 'Young man, go 'way!' and sent her pretty maid indoors. Of course, Whistler took no more meals at Mrs. Thompson's, but in the mess hall, where the fare in those days was far from inviting."

Whistler told Sir Rennell Rodd another story: "The cadets were out early one morning, engaged in surveying. It was cold and raw, and Jimmy, finding a line of deep ditch through which he could make a retiring movement, got back into college and his warm quarters unperceived. By accident a roll-call was held that morning. Cadet Whistler not being present, a report was drawn up and his name was sent to the commanding officer as absent from parade without the knowledge or permission of his instructor. The report was shown him, and he said to the instructor: 'Have I your permission to speak?' 'Speak on, Cadet Whistler.' 'You have reported me, sir, for being absent from parade without the knowledge or permission of my instructor. Well, now, if I was absent without your knowledge or permission, how did you know I was absent?' They got into terms after that, and the incident closed."

The stories of Whistler at West Point might be multiplied. Many have been published. The few we tell show that at the Military Academy, as everywhere, he left his mark. We have a stronger proof in the letters written to us by officers who were his fellow cadets. It is half a century since they and Whistler were together, and, with one exception, they never saw him in later years, yet their memory of him is fresh. General D. McN. Gregg and General C. B. Comstock, his classmates, General Loomis L. Langdon, General Henry L. Abbott, General Oliver Otis Howard, General G. W. C. Lee, in the class before his, have sent us their recollections. These distinguished officers agree in their affection and their appreciation of him. He was "a vivacious and likeable little fellow," General Comstock says, and we get a picture of him, short and slight, not over military in his bearing, somewhat foreign in appearance, near-sighted, and with thick, black curls that won him the name of "Curly." Others remember his wit, his pranks, his fondness for cooking and the excellence of his dishes; his excursions "after taps," for buckwheat cakes and oysters or ice-cream and soda-water to Joe's, and, for heavier fare, to Benny Haven's a mile away, a serious offence; they remember his indifference to discipline, and the number of his demerits, which they excuse as "not indicating any moral obliquity," but due to such harmless faults as "lates," "absences," "clothing out of order"; most of all, they remember his drawings—his caricatures of the cadets, the Board of Visitors, the masters, his sketches scribbled over his text-books, his illustrations to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo. General Langdon recalls a picture that he and Whistler painted together. Whistler gave these drawings away, and many have been preserved. Even the cover of a geometry book, on which he sketched and noted bets with General Webb, was kept by his room-mate, Frederick L. Childs—Les Enfants Whistler called him.

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Whistler looked back to West Point with equal affection. He failed, but West Point was the basis of his code of conduct. As a "West Point man" he met every emergency, and his bearing, his carriage, showed the influence of those days when he liked to look back to himself "very dandy in grey." For the discipline, the tradition, the tone of the Academy he never lost his respect. He knew what it could do in making men of boys. "From the moment we came," he said to us, "we were United States officers, not schoolboys, not college students. We were ruled, not by little school or college rules, but by our honour, by our deference to the unwritten law of tradition." He resented the least innovation that threatened the hold of this tradition over the cadets. "To take a cadet into court was destruction to the morale of West Point; it was such a disgrace to offend against the unwritten laws that the offender's career was ruined." In the most trivial matters he deplored deviation from the old standard. That was the reason of his indignation when he heard that cadets were playing football, and, worse, playing against college teams; to put themselves on the level of students "was beneath the dignity of officers of the United States." During our war with Spain, and the Boers' struggle in South Africa, there was not an event, not a rumour, that he did not refer to West Point and its code. The Spanish War, though, "no doubt, we should never have gone into it, was the most wonderful, the most beautiful war since Louis XIV. Never in modern times has there been such a war; it was conducted on correct West [Pg 26] Point principles, with the most perfect courtesy and dignity on both sides, and the greatest chivalry." When he came back to London from Corsica in 1901, and was telling us of the people and the way they clung to old custom and ceremonial, he said that he had found "the Roman tradition almost as fine as the West Point tradition," and this was a concession. We never knew him to show the least desire to return to Lowell or Stonington, to Pomfret or Washington, but he said, "If I ever make the journey to America, I will go straight to Baltimore, then to West Point, and then sail for England again." One evening we asked him to meet an officer just from West Point. His interest could not have been keener, had he left the Academy the day before. He wanted to know about everything—the buildings, the life, the discipline. He deplored every innovation, always, above all, football: West Point to him was in danger when cadets could stoop to dispute "with college students for a dirty ball kicked round a muddy field." This was the shadow thrown over his pleasure when he heard of the pride the Academy took in claiming him, of his reputation there, of his drawings hanging in places of honour. It was the military side of the Academy, however, that stirred him to enthusiasm. His face fell when, asking the officer, who, like Major Whistler, was in the artillery, "Professor of Tactics, I suppose?" the officer answered, "No, of French." He showed his affection for the Military Academy by sending to the library a copy of Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics, with autograph notes and on the title-page the inscription: "From an old cadet whose pride it is to remember his West Point days." This is signed with the butterfly, and newspaper cuttings about the trial are pasted at the end of the book. The authorities at West Point have honoured him by placing a memorial tablet, one of St. Gaudens' last works, in the library of the Academy, and at the suggestion of the late Major Zalinski, a number of American artists have given a series of works to the Academy in his honour. In this collection Whistler alone is not represented, we believe.

But it needs more than respect and love for the Military Academy to make a soldier, and Whistler, like Poe before him, was an alien at West Point. It was no question of the number of his demerits, or of his ignorance of chemistry and history; he had something else to do in life.

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When Whistler left West Point in 1854 he had not only to face the disappointment of his mother, but to find another career. The plan now was to apprentice him to Mr. Winans, in the locomotive works at Baltimore.

Mr. Frederick B. Miles writes us: "It was in 1854 that I first met Whistler in Baltimore, after he left West Point, at the house of Thomas Winans, who had returned from Russia. I was apprenticed to the loco. works of old Mr. Ross Winans, Thomas Winans' father. His elder brother, George Whistler, was a friend of my family; had been superintendent of the New York and New Haven Railroad, and had married Miss Julia Winans, sister of Thomas Winans, then came into the loco. works as partner and superintendent. I was in the drawing-room under him.

"Whistler was staying with Tom Winans or his brother, George Whistler. They were perplexed at his 'flightiness'—wanted him to enter the loco. works. His younger brother William was an apprentice along with me. But Jem never really worked. He spent much of his several short stays and two long ones in Baltimore loitering about the drawing-office and shops, and at my drawing-desk in Tom Winans' house. We all had boards with paper, carefully stretched, which Jem would cover with sketches, to our great disgust, obliging us to stretch fresh ones, but we loved him all the same. He would also ruin all our best pencils, sketching not only on the paper, but also on the smoothly finished wooden backs of the drawing-boards, which, I think, he preferred to the paper side. We kept some of the sketches for a long time. I had a beauty—a cavalier in a dungeon cell, with one small window high up. In all his work at that time he was very Rembrandtesque, but, of course, only amateurish. Nevertheless he was studying and working out effects."

Whistler saw enough of the locomotive works to know that he did not want to be an apprentice, and it was not long before he left Baltimore for Washington. To us he spoke as if he had gone to Washington straight from West Point. He was with us on the evening of September 15, 1900, after the news had come from the Transvaal of President [Pg 28] Kruger's flight, and our talking of it led him back to West Point, and so to the story of his days in the service of the Government. He followed the Boer War with intense interest:

"The Boers are as fine as the Southerners—their fighting would be no discredit to West Point," and he was indignant with us for looking upon Kruger's flight as diplomatically a blunder. "Diplomatically it was right, you know, the one thing Kruger should have done, just as, in that other amazing campaign, flight had been the one thing for Jefferson Davis, a Southern gentleman who had the code. I shall always remember the courtesy shown me by Jefferson Davis, through whom I got my appointment in the Coast Survey.

"It was after my little difference with the Professor of Chemistry at West Point. The Professor would not agree with me that silicon was a gas, but declared it was a metal; and as we could come to no agreement in the matter, it was suggested—all in the most courteous and correct West Point way—that perhaps I had better leave the Academy. Well, you know, it was not a moment for the return of the prodigal to his family or for any slaying of fatted calves. I had to work, and I went to Washington. There I called at once on Jefferson Davis, who was Secretary of War—a West Point man like myself. He was most charming, and I—well, from my Russian cradle, I had an idea of things, and the interview was in every way correct, conducted on both sides with the utmost dignity and elegance. I explained my unfortunate difference with the Professor of Chemistry—represented that the question was one of no vital importance, while on all really important questions I had carried off more than the necessary marks. My explanation made, I suggested that I should be reinstated at West Point, in which case, as far as I was concerned, silicon should remain a metal. The Secretary, courteous to the end, promised to consider the matter, and named a day for a second interview.

"Before I went back to the Secretary of War, I called on the Secretary of the Navy, also a Southerner, James C. Dobbin, of South Carolina, suggesting that I should have an appointment in the Navy. The Secretary objected that I was too young. In the confidence of youth, I said age should be no objection; I 'could be entered at the Naval Academy, and the three years at West Point could count at Annapolis.' The Secretary was interested, for he, too, had a sense of [Pg 29] things. He regretted, with gravity, the impossibility. But something impressed him; for, later, he reserved one of six appointments he had to make in the marines and offered it to me. In the meantime, I had returned to the Secretary of War, who had decided that it was impossible to meet my wishes in the matter of West Point; West Point discipline had to be observed, and if one cadet were reinstated, a dozen others who had tumbled out after me would have to be reinstated too. But if I would call on Captain Benham, of the Coast Survey, a post might be waiting for me there."

Captain Benham was a friend of his father, and Whistler was engaged in the drawing division of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, at the salary of a dollar and a half a day. This appointment he received on November 7, 1854, six months after he had left West Point. There was nothing to appeal to him in the routine of the office. What he had to do he did, but with no enthusiasm.

"I was apt to be late, I was so busy socially. I lived in a small room, but it was amazing how I was asked and went everywhere—to balls, to the Legations, to all that was going on. Labouchere, an attaché at the British Legation, has never ceased to talk of me, so gay, and, when I had not a dress suit, pinning up the tails of my frock-coat, and turning it into a dress-coat for the occasion. Shocking!"

Mr. Labouchere has told this story in a letter to us: "I did know Whistler very well in America about fifty years ago. But he was then a young man at Washington, who—if I remember rightly—had not been able to pass his examination at West Point and had given no indication of his future fame. He was rather hard up, I take it, for I remember that he pinned back the skirt of a frock-coat to make it pass as a dress-coat at evening parties. Washington was then a small place compared with what it is now, where everybody—so to say—knew everybody, and the social parties were of a simple character. This is really all that I remember of Whistler at that time, except that he was thought witty and paradoxically amusing!"

But long before something in his dress drew attention to him. Though he was never seen in the high-standing collar and silk hat of the time, some remember him in a Scotch cap and a plaid shawl thrown over his shoulder, then the fashion; others recall a slouch hat and cloak, his coat, unbuttoned, showing his waistcoat; while [Pg 30] traditions of his social charm come from every side. Adjutant-General Breck is responsible for the story of Whistler having invited the Russian Minister—others say the Chargé d'Affaires—Edward de Stoeckl, to dine with him, carrying the Minister off in his own carriage, doing the marketing by the way, and cooking the dinner before his guest in the room where he lived. And it has been said that never was the Minister entertained by so brilliant a host while in Washington.

Mr. John Ross Key, a fellow draughtsman in the Coast Survey, says that this room was in a house in Thirteenth Street, near Pennsylvania Avenue, and that Whistler usually dined in a restaurant close by, kept by a Mr. and Mrs. A. Gautier. According to the late A. Lindenkohl, another fellow draughtsman, Whistler also lived for a while in a house at the north-east corner of E. and Twelfth Streets, a two-storey brick building which has lately been pulled down. He occupied a plainly but comfortably furnished room, for which he paid ten dollars a month. The office records show that he worked six and one-half days in January, and five and three-fourths in February. He usually arrived late, but, he would say, it was not his fault. "I was not too late; the office opened too early." Lindenkohl described an effort to reform him:

"Captain Benham took occasion to tell me that he felt great interest in the young man, not only on account of his talents, but also on account of his father, and he told me that he would be highly pleased if I could induce Whistler to be more regular in his attendance. 'Call at his lodgings on your way to the office,' he said, 'and see if you can't bring him along.'

"Accordingly, one morning, I called at Whistler's lodgings at half-past eight. No doubt he felt somewhat astonished, but received me with the greatest bonhomie invited me to make myself at home, and promised to make all possible haste to comply with my wishes. Nevertheless he proceeded with the greatest deliberation to rise from his couch and put himself into shape for the street and prepare his breakfast, which consisted of a cup of strong coffee brewed in a steam-tight French machine, then a novelty, and also insisted upon treating me with a cup. We made no extra haste on our way to the office, which we reached about half-past ten—an hour and a half after time. I did not repeat the experiment."

[Pg 31]

Lindenkohl said that Whistler spoke of Paris with enthusiasm, that he sketched sometimes from the office windows, and made studies of people, taking the greatest interest in the arrangement and folds of their clothes. Whistler showed him "several examples done with the brush in sepia, in old French or Spanish styles," whatever this may mean. Mr. Key describes Whistler as "painfully near-sighted," and always sketching, even on the walls as he went downstairs. Though in Washington only a few months, he left the impression of his indifference to work except in the one form in which work interested him—his art.

If nothing else were known of this period, it would be memorable for the technical instruction he received in the Coast Survey. His work was the drawing and etching of Government topographical plans and maps, which have to be made with the utmost accuracy and sharpness of line. His training, therefore, was in the hardest and most perfect school of etching in the world, a fact never until now pointed out. The work was dull, mechanical, and he sometimes relieved the dullness by filling empty spaces on the plates with sketches. Captain Benham told him plainly, Whistler said, that he was not there to spoil Government coppers, and ordered all the designs to be immediately erased. This was Whistler's account to us. But Mr. Key, in his Recollections of Whistler, published in the Century Magazine (April 1908), says that these sketches were confined to the experimental plate given to Whistler, as to all beginners, and he adds that he watched Whistler through the process of preparing and etching it.

Only two plates have been as yet, or probably ever will be, found in the office that can be attributed, wholly or in part, to Whistler: the Coast Survey, No. 1, and Coast Survey, No. 2, Anacapa Island, first described in the Catalogue of the Whistler Memorial Exhibition in London, 1905. The Coast Survey, No. 1, is a plate giving two parallel views, one above the other, of the coast-line of a rocky shore, the lower showing a small town in a deep bay with, below them both to the extreme left, a profile map. Whistler was unable to confine himself to the Government requirements. In the lower design, chimneys are gaily smoking, and on the upper part of the plate several figures, obviously reminiscent of prints and drawings, are sketched: an old peasant woman; a man in a tall Italian hat, or, Mr. Key says, Whistler [Pg 32] himself as a Spanish hidalgo; another in a Sicilian bonnet; a mother and child in an oval, meant for Mrs. Partington and Ike, as Mr. Key remembers; a battered French soldier; a bearded monk in a cowl. The drawing is schoolboy-like, though it shows certain observation, but the biting is remarkable. The little figures are bitten as well and in the same way as La Vieille aux Loques, etched three or four years afterwards; to look at them is to know that Whistler was a consummate etcher technically before he left the Coast Survey. There is no advance in the biting of the French series. So astonishing is this mastery that, if the technique in some of the French plates were not similar, one would be tempted to doubt whether Whistler etched those little figures in Washington, especially as the plate is unsigned. The plate escaped by chance. Mr. Key, to whom it was given to clean off and use again, asked to keep it, and it was sold to him for the price of old copper. It is still in existence.

The second plate, Anacapa Island, is signed with several names. Whistler etched the view of the eastern extremity of the island, for many lines on the rocky shore resemble the work in the French series, and also the two flights of birds which, though they enliven the design, have no topographical value. This plate was finished and published in the Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, 1855. There is said to be a third plate, a chart of the Delaware River, but we have never seen it and can find out nothing about it.

One other record of Whistler at the Coast Survey remains, but of a different kind. He liked to tell the story. Captain Benham used to come and look through the small magnifying glass each draughtsman in this department had to work with. One day, Whistler etched a little devil on the glass, and Captain Benham looked through it at the plate. Whistler described himself to us, lying full length on a sort of mattress or trestle, so as not to touch the copper. But he saw Captain Benham give a jump. The captain said nothing. He pocketed the glass, and that was all Whistler heard of it until many years afterwards, when, one day, an old gentleman appeared at his studio in Paris, and by way of introduction took from his watch-chain a tiny magnifying glass, and asked Whistler to look through it—"and," he said, "well—we recognised each other perfectly."

Captain Benham is dead, but his son, Major H. H. Benham, writes [Pg 33] us: "I have heard my father tell the story. He was very fond of Whistler, and thought most highly of his great ability—or rather genius, I should say."

Genius like Whistler's served him as little at the Coast Survey as at West Point. He resigned in February 1855. His brother, George Whistler, and Mr. Winans tried again to make him enter the locomotive works in Baltimore. He was twenty-one, old enough to insist upon what he wanted; and what he wanted was to study art. Already at St. Petersburg his ability had struck his mother's friends. At Pomfret and West Point he owed to his drawing whatever distinction he had attained. And there had been things done outside of school and Academy and office work, he told us—"portraits of my cousin Annie Denny and of Tom Winans, and many paintings at Stonington that Stonington people remembered so well they looked me up in Paris afterwards. Indeed, all the while, ever since my Russian days, there had been always the thought of art, and when at last I told the family that I was going to Paris, they said nothing. There was no difficulty. They just got me a ticket. I was to have three hundred and fifty dollars (seventy pounds) a year, and my stepbrother, George Whistler, who was one of my guardians, sent it to me after that every quarter."

Whistler arrived in Paris in the summer of 1855. There he fell among friends. The American Legation was open to the son of Major Whistler. It was the year of the first International Exhibition, and Sir Henry Cole, the British Commissioner, the Thackerays, and the Hadens were there. Lady Ritchie (Miss Thackeray) writes:

"I wish I had a great deal more to tell you about Whistler. I always enjoyed talking to him when we were both hobbledehoys at Paris; he used to ask me to dance, and rather to my disappointment perhaps, for, much as I liked talking to him, I preferred dancing, we used to stand out while the rest of the party polkaed and waltzed by [Pg 34] There was a certain definite authority in the things he said, even as a boy. I can't remember what they were, but I somehow realised that what he said mattered. When I heard afterwards of his fanciful freaks and quirks, I could not fit them in with my impression of the wise young oracle of my own age."

George Whistler wanted him to go to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but there is no record of his having been admitted. He went instead to the studio Gleyre inherited from Delaroche and handed on to Gérôme, which drew to it all the students who did not crowd to Couture and Ary Scheffer. It was not extraordinary, as some have said, that Whistler should have gone there; it would have been extraordinary had he stayed away. He arrived in Paris when Courbet, slighted at the International, was defying convention with his first show and his first "Manifesto," and many of the younger men were throwing over Romanticism for Realism. Whistler found himself more in sympathy with the followers of Courbet than with Gleyre's pupils, and he became so intimate with the group, among whom were Fantin and Degas, who studied under Lecocq de Boisbaudran, that it is sometimes thought he must have worked in that school. But on his arrival in Paris the young American had heard neither of Lecocq de Boisbaudran nor Courbet, and Gleyre was the popular teacher. Fantin-Latour and M. Duret both have said that they seldom heard Whistler speak of Gleyre's. When we asked him about it, he only recalled the dignified principles upon which it was conducted. There was not even the case of the nouveau "If a man was a decent fellow, and would sing his song, and take a little chaff, he had no trouble." Whistler could remember only one disagreeable incident, in connection, not with a nouveau, but an unpopular student who had been there some time and put on airs. One morning, Whistler told us, he came to the studio late, "and there were all the students working away very hard, the unpopular one among them, and there, at the end of the room, on the model's stand was an enormous catafalque, the unpopular one's name on it in big letters. And no one said a word. But that killed him. He was never again seen in the place."

Gleyre was by no means colourless as a teacher. He is remembered as the successor of David and the Classicists, but he held theories disquieting to academic minds. He taught that before a picture was [Pg 35] begun the colours should be arranged on the palette: in this way, he said, difficulties were overcome, for attention could be given solely to the drawing and modelling on canvas in colour. He taught also that ivory-black is the base of tone. Upon this preparation of the palette and this base of black—upon black, "the universal harmoniser"—Whistler founded his practice as painter, and as teacher when he visited the pupils of the Académie Carmen.[1] As he has told us over and over again, his practice of a lifetime was derived from what he learned in the schools, and the master's methods he never abandoned. He only developed methods, misunderstood by those British prophets who have said he had but enough knowledge for his own needs.

Whistler spoke often to us of the men he met at Gleyre's: Poynter, Du Maurier, Lamont, Joseph Rowley. Leighton, in 1855, was studying at Couture's, developing his theory that "the best dodge is to be a devil of a clever fellow," and Mrs. Barrington says he made Whistler's acquaintance at the time and admired Whistler's etchings. But Whistler never recalled Leighton among his fellow students, though he spoke often with affection of Thomas Armstrong, who worked at Ary Scheffer's, and Aleco Ionides, not an art student but studying, no one seemed to know what or where. This is the group in Du Maurier's novel of Paris student life, Trilby. It is regrettable that Du Maurier cherished his petty spite against Whistler for twenty-five years and then printed it, and so wrecked what Whistler imagined a genuine friendship. Lamont, "the Laird," Rowley, the "Taffy," Aleco Ionides, "the Greek," and Thomas Armstrong are dead. Sir Edward J. Poynter remains, and also Mr. Luke Ionides, who was then often in Paris. He has given us his impressions of Whistler at the time:

"I first knew Jimmie Whistler in the month of August 1855. My younger brother was with a tutor, and had made friends with Jimmie. He was just twenty-one years old, full of life and go, always ready for fun, good-natured and good-tempered. He wore a peculiar straw hat, slightly on the side of his head—it had a low crown and a broad brim."

Whistler etched himself in this hat, which startled even artists and students, and became a legend in the Latin Quarter.

Mr. Rowley wrote us: "It was in 1857-8 that I knew Whistler, [Pg 36] and a most amusing and eccentric fellow he was, with his long, black, thick, curly hair, and large felt hat with a broad black ribbon round it. I remember on the wall of the atelier was a representation of him, I believe done by Du Maurier, a sketch of him, then a fainter one, and then merely a note of interrogation—very clever it was and very like the original. In those days he did not work hard, and I have a faint recollection of seeing a head painted by him in deep Rembrandtish tones which was thought very good indeed. He was always smoking cigarettes, which he made himself, and his droll sayings caused us no end of fun. I don't think he stayed long in any rooms. One day he told us he had taken a new one, and he was fitting it up peu à peu and he had already got a tabouret and a chair. He told me tales of being invited to a reception at the American Minister's, but, as he had no dress suit to go in, he had to borrow Poynter's, who fitted him out, all except his boots. So he waited until the guests at the hotel had retired, when he went round the corridors, found what he wanted, and left them at the door on his return. It was more his manner and the clever way he told the tale that amused us.... I have his first twelve etchings, which he did in 1858. I never saw him after I left Paris that year. He was never a friend of mine, and it was only occasionally he came to see us at the atelier in Notre-Dame-des-Champs."

Whistler was intimate for awhile with Sir Edward J. Poynter, who scarcely seems to have understood him. To Poynter Whistler was the "Idle Apprentice." In his speech at the first Royal Academy Banquet (April 30, 1904) after Whistler's death, Poynter said: "Thrown very intimately in Whistler's company in early days, I knew him well when he was a student in Paris—that is, if he could be called a student, who, to my knowledge, during the two or three years when I was associated with him, devoted hardly as many weeks to study. His genius, however, found its way in spite of an excess of the natural indolence of disposition and love of pleasure of which a certain share has been the hereditary attribute of the art student." And this bit of insolence was the final tribute to his memory paid by British Official Art.

"Whistler was never wholly one of us," Armstrong told us. Whistler laughed at the Englishmen and their ways, above all at the [Pg 37] boxing and sparring matches in their studios; "he could not see why they didn't hire the concierges to do their fighting for them." But he understood the French, and they understood him. He could speak their language, he knew Murger by heart before he came to Paris, and there got to know him personally. Mr. Ionides says that once, on the rive gauche, they met Murger, and Whistler introduced him. Whistler delighted in the humour and picturesqueness of it, and was always quoting Murger. The Englishmen at Gleyre's were puzzled by him and his "no shirt friends" as he called one group of students. Every now and then they palled, even on him, and he would then tell the Englishmen that he "must give up the 'no shirt' set and begin to live cleanly." The end came when, during an absence from Paris, he lent them his room, luxurious from the student standpoint, with a tin bath and blue china. The "no shirt friends" could not change their habits with their surroundings. They made grogs in the bath; they never washed a plate, but when one side was dirty, ate off the other, and Whistler had not bargained to make his room the background for a new chapter in the Vie de Bohèm. But this was later, after his adventures with them had been the gossip of the Quarter, and had confirmed the diligent English in their impressions of his idleness.

Among the French he made friends: Aubert, the first man he knew in Paris, a clerk in the Crédit Fonder; Fantin; Legros; Becquet, a musician; Henri Martin, son of the historian; Drouet, the sculptor; Henry Oulevey and Ernest Delannoy, painters. From Fantin we have notes made just before his death. Legros prefers to remember nothing, the friendship in his case ending many years ago. Drouet and Oulevey have told us almost as much as Whistler did of those days. When Oulevey first knew him, Whistler lived in a little hotel in the Rue St. Sulpice; then he moved to No. 1 Rue Bourbon-le-Château, near St. Germain-des-Prés; and then to No. 3 Rue Campagne-Première, where Drouet had a studio. When remittances ran out, he climbed six flights and shared a garret with Delannoy, the Ernest of the stories Whistler liked best to tell.

Mr. Miles writes us that he came to Paris in May 1857, with letters from Whistler's family and a draft for him: "At the Beaux-Arts he was not to be found, but I got his address. He had gone from [Pg 38] that. I was in despair, but went to the Luxembourg, hoping to find some trace of him. In looking at a picture, I backed into an easel, heard a muttered damn behind me—and there was Whistler painting busily. He took me to his quarters in a little back street, up ten flights of stairs—a tiny room with a brick floor, a cot bed, a chair on which were a basin and pitcher—and that was all! We sat on the cot and talked as cheerfully as if in a palace—and he got the draft. 'Now,' said he, 'I shall move downstairs, and begin all over again—furnish my room comfortably. You see, I have just eaten my washstand and borrowed a little, hoping the draft would arrive. Have been living for some time on my wardrobe. You are just in time; don't know what I should have done, but it often happens this way! I first eat a wardrobe, and then move upstairs a flight or two, but seldom get so high as this before the draft comes!' How true this is I can't say, but it sounds probable and very like Whistler at that age—he was then about twenty-three or just twenty-four at most—May 1857. Then Whistler showed me Paris: I met some of his painter friends. I remember only Lambert (French) and Poynter (English)—now a great swell. Whistler didn't care much for Poynter at that time, but was witty and amusing, as usual. He dined with me at the best restaurant in Paris, which he had not done for a long time, and dined me, the next day, at a little crémerie to show what his usual fare had been, and, indeed, usually was when the time was approaching for the arrival of his allowance."

The restaurant to which Whistler and his friends usually went was Lalouette's, famous for a wonderful Burgundy at one franc the bottle, le cachet vert, ordered on great occasions, and more famous now for Bibi Lalouette, the subject of the etching, the child of the patron. Lalouette, like Siron at Barbizon, understood artists, and gave credit. Whistler, when he left Paris, owed Lalouette three thousand francs, every sou of which was paid, though it took a long time. To-day, unfortunately, such debts are not always discharged, and the charming system of other days exists no longer. They also dined at Madame Bachimont's in the Place de la Sorbonne, a crémerie, where Whistler once gave a dinner to the American Consul, and invited "Canichon," the daughter of the house, and bought her a new hat for the occasion—a tremendous sensation through the Quarter.

[Pg 39]

Drouet did not think that Whistler worked much. "He was every evening at the students' balls, and never got up until eleven or twelve in the morning, so where was the time for work?" Oulevey cannot remember his doing much at Gleyre's, or in the Luxembourg, or at the Louvre, but he was always drawing the people and the scenes of the Quarter. In the memory of both his work is overshadowed by his gaiety and his wit, his blague, his charm: "tout à fait un homme à part," is Oulevey's phrase, with "un cœur de femme et une volonté d'homme." Anything might be expected of him, and Drouet added that he was quick to resent an insult, always "un petit rageur." George Boughton, of a younger generation, when he came to the Quarter, found that all stories of larks were put down to Whistler. Mr. Luke Ionides writes:

"He was a great favourite among us all, and also among the grisettes we used to meet at the gardens where dancing went on. I remember one especially—they called her the Tigresse. She seemed madly in love with Jimmie and would not allow any other woman to talk to him when she was present. She sat to him several times with her curly hair down her back. She had a good voice, and I often thought she had suggested Trilby to Du Maurier."

She was the model for Fumette, Eloise, a little modiste, who knew Musset by heart and recited his verses to Whistler, and who one day in a rage tore up, not his etchings as Mr. Wedmore says, as often, wrongly, but his drawings. Whistler was living in the Rue St. Sulpice, and the day he came home and found the pieces piled high on the table he wept.

Another figure was La Mère Gérard. She was old and almost blind, was said to have written verse, and so come down in the world. She sold violets and matches at the gate of the Luxembourg. She was very paintable as she sat huddled up on the steps, and he got her to pose for him many times. She said she had a tapeworm, and if in the studio he asked her what she would eat or drink, her answer was, "Du lait: il aimé ça!" They used to chaff him about her in the Quarter. Once, Lalouette invited all his clients to spend a day in the country, and Whistler accepted on condition that he could bring La Mère Gérard. She arrived, got up in style, sat at his side in the carriage in which they all drove off, and grew livelier as the day went [Pg 40] on. He painted her in the afternoon: the portrait a success, he promised it to her, but first took it back to the studio to finish. Then he fell ill and was sent to England. When he returned and saw the portrait again, he thought it too good for La Mère Gérard. He made a copy for the old lady, who saw the difference and was furious. Not long after he was walking past the Luxembourg with Lamont. The old woman, huddled on the steps, did not look up:

"Eh bien, Madame Gérard, comment ça va?" Lamont asked.

"Assez bien, Monsieur, assez bien."

"It votre petit Américain?"

To which she replied, not looking up, "Lui? On dit qu'il a craqué! Encore une espèce de canaille de moins!"

And Whistler laughed, and she knew him, as so many were to know him, by that laugh all his life.

For ages after, in the Quarter, he was called "Espèce de canaille." And this is where Du Maurier got the story which he tells in Trilby—as he got all Trilby, in fact.

Another character in the Quarter of whom Whistler never tired of telling us was the Count de Montezuma, the delightful, inimitable, impossible, incredible Montezuma, not a student, not a painter, but one after Whistler's heart. He never had a sou, but always cheek enough to see him through. Whistler told us of him:

"This is the sort of thing he would do, and with an air—amazing! He started one day for Charenton on the steamboat, his pockets, as usual, empty, and he was there for as long as he could stay. The boat broke down, a sergent de ville came on board and ordered everybody off except the captain and his family, who happened to be with him. The Montezuma paid no attention. With arms crossed, he walked up and down, looking at no one. They waited, but he walked on, up and down, up and down, looking at no one. The sergent de ville repeated, 'Tout le monde à terre!' The Montezuma gave no sign. 'Et vous?' the sergent de ville asked at last. 'Je suis de la famille!' said the Montezuma. Opposite, staring at him, stood the captain with his wife and children. 'You see,' said the sergent de ville, 'the captain does not know you, he says you are not of the family. You must go.' 'Moi,' and the Montezuma drew himself up proudly, 'Moi! je suis le bâtard!'"

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[Pg 40b]

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Though he was frequently hard up, Whistler's income seemed princely to students who lived on nothing. When there was money in his pockets, Mr. Ionides says, he spent it royally on others. When his pockets were empty, he managed to refill them in a way that still amazes Oulevey, who told us of the night when, after the café where they had squandered their last sous on kirsch had closed, he and Lambert and Whistler adjourned to the Halles for supper, ordered the best, and ate it. Then he and Lambert stayed in the restaurant as hostages, while Whistler, at dawn, went off to find the money. He was back when they awoke, with three or four hundred francs in his pocket. He had been to see an American friend, he said, a painter: "And do you know, he had the bad manners to abuse the situation; he insisted on my looking at his pictures!"

There were times when everybody failed, even Mr. Lucas, George Whistler's friend, who was living in Paris and often came to his rescue. One summer day he pawned his coat when he was penniless and wanted an iced drink in a buvette across the way from his rooms in Rue Bourbon-le-Château. "What would you?" he said. "It is warm!" And for the next two or three days he went in shirt-sleeves. From Mr. Ionides we have heard how Whistler and Ernest Delannoy carried their straw mattresses to the nearest Mont-de-Piété, stumbling up three flights of stairs under them, and were refused an advance by the man at the window. "C'est bien," said Ernest with his grandest air. "C'est bien. J'enverrai un commissionnaire!" And they dropped the mattresses and walked out with difficulty, to go bedless home. Then there was a bootmaker to whom Whistler owed money, and who appeared with his bill, refusing to move unless he was paid. Whistler was courtesy itself, and, regretting his momentary embarrassment, begged the bootmaker to accept an engraving of Garibaldi, which he ventured to admire. The bootmaker was so charmed that he spoke no more of his bill, but took another order on the spot, and made new shoes into the bargain.

Many of the things told of Whistler he used to tell us of Ernest or the others. Ernest he said it was, though some say it was Whistler, who had a commission to copy in the Louvre, but no canvas, paints, or brushes, and not a sou to buy them with. However, he went to the gallery in the morning, the first to arrive, and his businesslike [Pg 42] air disarmed the gardien as he picked out an easel, a clean canvas, a palette, a brush or two, and a stick of charcoal. He wrote his name in large letters on the back of the canvas, and, when the others began to drop in, was too busy to see anything but his work. Presently there was a row. What! an easel missing, a canvas gone, brushes not to be found! The gardien bustled round. Everybody talked at once. Ernest looked up in a fury—shameful! Why should he be disturbed? What was it all about, anyhow? When he heard what had happened no one was louder. It had come to a pretty pass in the Louvre when you couldn't leave your belongings overnight without having them stolen! Things at last quieted down. Ernest finished his charcoal sketch, but his palette was bare. He stretched, jumped down from his high stool, strolled about, stopped to criticise here, to praise there, until he saw the colours he needed. The copy of the man who owned them ravished him. Astonishing! He stepped back to see it better. He advanced to look at the original, he grew excited, he gesticulated. The man, who had never been noticed before, grew excited too. Ernest talked the faster, gesticulated the more, until down came his thumb on the white or the blue or the red he wanted, and, with another sweep of his arm, a lump of it was on his palette. Farther on another supply offered. In the end, his palette well set, he went back to his easel, painting his copy. In some way he had supplied himself most plentifully with "turps," so that several times the picture was in danger of running off his canvas. At last it was finished and shown to his patron, who refused to have it. Whistler succeeded in selling it for Ernest to a dealer; and, "Do you know," he said, "I saw the picture years afterwards, and I think it was rather better than the original!" Oulevey's version is that Whistler helped himself to a box of colours, and, when discovered by its owner, was all innocence and surprise and apology: why, he supposed, of course, the boxes of colour were there for the benefit of students.

On another occasion, when Ernest, according to Whistler, had finished a large copy of Veronese's Marriage Feast at Cana, he and a friend, carrying it between them, started out to find a buyer. They crossed the Seine and offered it for five hundred francs to the big dealers on the right bank. Then they offered it for two hundred and fifty to the little dealers on the left. Then they went back and offered [Pg 43] it for one hundred and twenty-five. Then they came across and offered it for seventy-five. And back again for twenty-five, and over once more for ten. And they were crossing still again, to try to get rid of it for five, when, on the Pont des Arts, an idea: they lifted it; "Un," they said with a great swing, "deux, trois, v'lan!" and over it went into the river. There was a cry from the crowd, a rush to their side of the bridge, sergents de ville came running, omnibuses and cabs stopped on both banks, boats pushed out. It was an immense success, and they went home enchanted.

Ernest was Whistler's companion in the most wonderful adventure of all, the journey to Alsace when most of the French Set of etchings were made. Mr. Luke Ionides thinks it was in 1856. Fantin, who did not meet Whistler until 1858, remembered him just back from a journey to the Rhine, coming to the Café Molière, and showing the etchings made on the way. The French Set was published in November of that year, and if Whistler returned late in the autumn, the series could scarcely have appeared so soon. However, more important than the date is the fact that on his journey the Liverdun, the Street at Saverne, and The Kitchen were etched. He had made somehow two hundred and fifty francs, and he and Ernest started out for Nancy and Strasburg. Mr. Leon Dabo tells us that his father was a fellow student of Whistler's at Gleyre's and lived at Saverne, in Alsace, and that it was to see him Whistler went there. And from Mr. Dabo we have the story of excursions that Whistler and Ernest made with his father and several friends: one to the ruins of the castle near the village of Dabo, where it is said their signatures may still be seen on a rock of brown sandstone; another to Gross Geroldseck, and the sketches Whistler made there were afterwards presented to the Saverne Museum. It may be that a third excursion was to Pfalzburg, the birthplace of Erckmann and Chatrian, whom Whistler knew and possibly then met for the first time.

On the way back, at Cologne, one morning, Whistler and Ernest woke up to find their money gone. "What is to be done?" asked Ernest. "Order breakfast," said Whistler, which they did. There was no American Consul in the town, and after breakfast he wrote to everybody who might help him: to a fellow student he had asked to forward letters from Paris, to Seymour Haden in London, to Amsterdam, [Pg 44] where he thought letters might have been sent by mistake. Then they settled down to wait. Every day they would go to the post-office for letters, every day the official would say, "Nichts! Nichts!" until they got known to the town—Whistler with his long hair, Ernest with his brown hollands and straw hat fearfully out of season. The boys of the town would follow to the post-office, where, before they were at the door, the official was shaking his head and saying "Nichts! Nichts!" and all the crowd would yell, "Nichts! Nichts!" At last, to escape attention, they spent their days sitting on the ramparts.

At the end of a fortnight Whistler took his knapsack, put his plates in it, and carried it to the landlord, Herr Schmitz, whose daughter, Little Gretchen he had etched—probably the plate called Gretchen at Heidelberg. He said he was penniless, but here were his copper-plates in his knapsack upon which he would set his seal. What was to be done with copper-plates? the landlord asked. They were to be kept with the greatest care as the work of a distinguished artist, Whistler answered, and when he was back in Paris, he would send the money to pay his bill, and then the landlord would send him the knapsack. Herr Schmitz hesitated, while Whistler and Ernest were in despair over the necessity of trusting masterpieces to him. The bargain was struck after much talk. The landlord gave them a last breakfast. Lina, the maid, slipped her last groschen into Whistler's hand, and the two set out to walk from Cologne to Paris with paper and pencils for baggage.

Whistler used to say that, had they been less young, they could have seen only the terror of that tramp. A portrait was the price of every plate of soup, every egg, every glass of milk on the road. The children who hooted them had to be drawn before a bit of bread was given to them. They slept in straw. And they walked until Whistler's light shoes got rid of most of their soles and bits of their uppers, and Ernest's hollands grew seedier and seedier. But they were young enough to laugh, and one day Whistler, seeing Ernest tramping ahead solemnly through the mud, the rain dripping from his straw hat, his linen coat a rag, shrieked with laughter as he limped. "Que voulez-vous?" Ernest said mournfully, "les saisons m'ont toujours devancé!" But it was the time of the autumn fairs, and, joining a lady who played the violin and a gentleman who played the harp, they gave entertainments in every village, beating a big drum, announcing themselves as distinguished artists from Paris, offering to draw portraits, five francs the full length, three francs the half-length. At times they beat the big drum in vain, and Whistler was reduced to charging five sous apiece for his portraits, but he did his best, he said, and there was not a drawing to be ashamed of.

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At last they came to Aix, where there was an American Consul who knew Major Whistler, and advanced fifty francs to his son. At Liège, poor, shivering, ragged Ernest got twenty from the French Consul, and the rest of the journey was made in comfort. On his return, Whistler's first appearance at the Café Molière was a triumph. They had thought him dead, and here he was, le petit Américain! And what blague, what calling for coffee pour le petit Whistler, pour notre petit Américain! And what songs!

"Car il n'est pas mort, larifla! fla! fla!
Non, c'est qu'il dort.
Pour le réveiller, trinquons nos verres!
Pour le réveiller, trinquons encore!"

That Herr Schmitz was paid and delivered up the plates the prints are the proof. Some years after Whistler went back to Cologne with his mother. In the evening he slipped away to the old, little hotel, where the landlord and the landlord's daughter, grown up, recognised him and rejoiced.

These stories, and hundreds like them, still float about the Quarter, told not only by Whistler, but by les vieux, who shake their heads over the present degeneracy of students and the tameness of student life—stories of the clay model of the heroic statue of Géricault, left, for want of money, swathed in rags, and sprinkled every morning until at last even the rags had to be sold, and then, when they were taken off, Géricault had sprouted with mushrooms that paid for a feast in the Quarter and enough clay to finish the statue: stories of a painter, in his empty studio, hiring a piano by the month that the landlord might see it carried upstairs and get a new idea of his tenant's assets; stories of the monkey tied to a string, let loose in other people's larders, then pulled back, clasping loaves of bread and bottles of wine to its [Pg 46] bosom; stories of students, with bedclothes pawned, sleeping in chests of drawers to keep warm; stories of Courbet's Baigneuse in wonderful Highland costume at the students' balls; stories of practical jokes at the Louvre. It was the day of practical jokes, les charges: and Courbet, whom they worshipped, was the biggest blageur of them all, eventually signing his death-warrant with that last terrible charge, the fall of the Column Vendôme, which Paris never forgave.

In this atmosphere, Whistler's spirit, so alarming to his mother, found stimulus, and it is not to be wondered if his gaiety struck everyone in Paris as in St. Petersburg and Pomfret, West Point and Washington.

The stories cannot be left out of Whistler's life as a student, for they lived in his memory. The English students brought back the impression that he was an idler, the French thought so too, and the English believe to-day that he was an idler always. And yet he worked in Paris as much as he played. His convictions, his preferences, his prejudices, were formed during those years. His admiration for Poe, a West Point man, was strengthened by the hold Poe had taken of French men of letters. His disdain of nature, his contempt for anecdote in art as a concession to the ignorant public, his translation of the subjects of painting into musical terms, and much else charged against him as deliberate pose, can be traced to Baudelaire. It is incomprehensible how he found time to read while a student, and yet he knew the literature of the day. With artists and their movements he was more familiar. He mastered all that Gleyre could teach on the one hand, Courbet on the other. He came under the influence of Lecocq de Boisbaudran, who was occupied with the study of values, effects of night, and training of memory. It is absurd for anyone to say that Whistler idled away his four full years in Paris.

The younger men in their rebellion against official art were not so foolish as to disdain the Old Masters. They went to the Louvre [Pg 47] to learn how to use their eyes and their hands. There they copied the pictures, and there they met each other. To Whistler the Frenchmen were more sympathetic than the English, and he joined them at the Louvre. Respect for the great traditions of art always was his standard: "What is not worthy of the Louvre is not art," he said. Rembrandt, Hals, and Velasquez were the masters by whom he was influenced. There are only a few pictures by Velasquez in the Louvre, and Whistler's early appreciation of him has been a puzzle to some, who, to account for it, have credited him with a journey when a student to Madrid. But that journey was not made in the fifties or ever, though he planned it more than once. A great deal could be learned about Velasquez without going to Spain. Whistler knew the London galleries, and in 1857 he visited the Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester, taking Henri Martin with him. There was a difficulty about the money for their railway fares, and he suggested to T. Armstrong that he might borrow it from a friend of the family who was manager of the North-Western. "But have you paid him the three hundred francs he has already lent you?" Armstrong asked. "Why, no," Whistler answered; "ought that to make any difference?" And he consulted the friend as to whether it would not be the right thing to ask for another loan. From this friend, or somebody, he managed to get the money, and Miss Emily Chapman finds in her diaries, which she has consulted for us, that on September 11, 1857, Rose, her sister, "went to Darwen and found Whistler and Henri Martin staying at Earnsdale" with another sister, Mrs. Potter; "a merry evening," the note finishes. Fourteen fine examples of Velasquez were in the Manchester Exhibition, lent from private collections in England, among them the Venus, Admiral Pulido Pareja, Duke Olivarez on Horseback, Don Balthazar in the Tennis Court, some of them now in the British National Gallery.

Whistler once described himself to us as "a surprising youth, suddenly appearing in the group of French students from no one knew where, with my Mère Gérard and the Piano Picture [At the Piano] for introduction, and making friends with Fantin and Legros, who had already arrived, and Courbet, whom they were all raving about, and who was very kind to me."

The Piano Picture was painted toward the end of his student [Pg 48] years in Paris, the Mère Gérard a little earlier, so that this agrees with Fantin's notes. In 1858, Fantin says, "I was copying the Marriage Feast at Cana in the Louvre when I saw passing one day a strange creature—personnage étrange, le Whistler en chapeau bizarre, who, amiable and charming, stopped to talk, and the talk was the beginning of our friendship, strengthened that evening at the Café Molière."

Carolus Duran writes us, from the Académie de France in Rome, that he and Whistler met as students in Paris; after that he lost sight of Whistler until the days of the new Salon, but, though there were a few meetings then, his memories are altogether of the student years. Bracquemond has recalled for us that he was making the preliminary drawing for his etching after Holbein's Erasmus in the Louvre when he first saw Whistler. Their meetings were cordial, but never led to intimacy. With Legros Whistler's friendship did become intimate, and the two, with Fantin, formed at that date what Whistler called their "Society of Three."

Fantin was somewhat older, and had been studying much longer, and had, among students, a reputation for wide and sound knowledge: "a learned painter," Armstrong says. M. Bénédite thinks that the friendship was useful to Fantin, but of the greatest importance to Whistler, on whose art in its development it had a marked influence. Mr. Luke Ionides, on the other hand, insists that "even in those early days, Whistler's influence was very much felt. He had decided views, which were always listened to with respect and regard by many older artists, who seemed to recognise his genius." The truth probably is that Whistler and Fantin influenced each other. They worked in sympathy, and the understanding between them was complete. They not only studied in the Louvre, but joined the group at Bonvin's studio to work from the model under Courbet.

With Courbet, we come to an influence which cannot be doubted, much as Whistler regretted it as time went on. Oulevey remembers Whistler calling on Courbet once, and saying enthusiastically as he left the house, "C'est un grand homme!" and for several years his pictures showed how strong this influence was. M. Duret even sees in Courbet's "Manifestoes" forerunners of Whistler's letters at a later date to the papers. Courbet, whatever mad pranks he might play with the [Pg 49] bourgeois, was seriousness itself in his art, and the men who studied under him learned to be serious, Whistler most of all.

The proof of Whistler's industry is in his work—in his pictures and prints, which are amazing in quality and quantity for the student who, Sir Edward Poynter believes, worked in two or three years only as many weeks. It would be nearer the truth to say that he never stopped working. Everything that interested him he made use of. The women he danced with at night were his models by day: Fumette, who, as she crouches, her hair loose on her shoulders, in that early etching, looks the Tigresse who tore up his drawings in a passion; and Finette, the dancer in a famous quadrille, who, when she came to London, was announced as "Madame Finette in the cancan, the national dance of France." His friends had to pose for him: Drouet, in the plate, done, he told us, in two sittings, one of two and a half hours, the other of an hour and a half; Axenfeld, the brother of a famous physician; Becquet, the sculptor-musician, "the greatest man who ever lived" to his friends, to the world unknown; Astruc, painter, sculptor, poet, editor of L'Artiste, of whom his wife said that he was the first man since the Renaissance who combined all the arts, but who is only remembered in Whistler's print; Delâtre, the printer; Riault, the engraver. Bibi Valentin was the son of another engraver. And there is the amusing pencil sketch of Fantin in bed on a winter day, working away in his overcoat, muffler, and top hat, trying to keep warm: one kept among a hundred lost. The streets where Whistler wandered, the restaurants where he dined, became his studios. At the house near the Rue Dauphine he etched Bibi Lalouette. His Soupe à Trois Sous was done in a cabaret kept by Martin, whose portrait is in the print at the extreme left, and who was famous in the Quarter for having won the Cross of the Legion of Honour at an earlier age than any man ever decorated, and then promptly losing it. Mr. Ralph Thomas says: "While Whistler was etching this, at twelve o'clock at night, a gendarme came up to him and wanted to know what he was doing. Whistler gave him the plate upside down, but officialism could make nothing of it."

There is hardly one of these etchings that is not a record of his daily life and of the people among whom he lived, though to make it such a record was the last thing he was thinking of.

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Whistler's first set of etchings was published in November 1858. The prints were not the first he made after leaving Washington. On the rare Au Sixième, supposed to be unique, Haden, to whom it had belonged, wrote, "Probably the first of Whistler's etchings," but then Haden wrote these things on others, and knew little about them. A portrait of himself, another of his niece Annie Haden, the Dutchman holding the Glass, are as early, if not earlier. There were twelve plates, some done in Paris, some during the journey to the Rhine, some in London. There was also an etched title with his portrait, for which Ernest, putting on the big hat, sat. Etched above is "Douze Eaux Fortes d'après Nature par James Whistler," and to one side, "Imp. Delâtre, Rue St. Jacques, 171, Paris, Nov. 1858." Whistler dedicated the set to mon vieil ami Seymour Haden, and issued and sold it himself for two guineas. Delâtre printed the plates, and, standing at his side, Drouet said, Whistler learned the art. Delâtre's shop was the room described by the De Goncourts, with the two windows looking on a bare garden, the star wheel, the man in grey blouse pulling it, the old noisy clock in the corner, the sleeping dog, the children peeping in at the door; the room where they waited for their first proof with the emotion they thought nothing else could give. Drouet said that Whistler never printed at this time. But Oulevey remembers a little press in the Rue Campagne-Première, and Whistler pulling the proofs for those who came to buy them. He was already hunting for old paper, loitering at the boxes along the quais, tearing out fly-leaves from old books. Passages in many plates of the series, especially in La Mère Gérard and La Marchande de Moutarde, are, as we have said, like his work in The Coast Survey, No. 1. For the only time, and as a result of his training at Washington, his handling threatened to become mannered. But in the Street at Saverne he overcame his mannerism, while in others, not in the series but done during these years, the Drouet, Soupe à Trois Sous, Bibi Lalouette, he had perfected his early style of drawing, biting, and dry-point. We never asked him how the French plates were bitten, but, no doubt, it was in the traditional way by biting all over and stopping out. They were drawn directly from Nature, as can be seen in his portraits of places which are reversed in the prints. So far as we know, he scarcely ever made a preliminary sketch. We can recall none of his etchings at any [Pg 51] period that might have been done from memory or sketches, except the Street at Saverne, the Venetian Nocturnes, the Nocturne, Dance House, Amsterdam, Weary, and Fanny Leyland portraits.

His first commissions in Paris were, he told us, copies made in the Louvre. They were for Captain Williams, a Stonington man, familiarly known as "Stonington Bill," whose portrait he had painted before leaving home. "Stonington Bill" must have liked it, for when he came to Paris shortly afterwards he gave Whistler a commission to paint as many copies at the Louvre as he chose for twenty-five dollars apiece. Whistler said he copied a snow scene with a horse and soldier standing by and another at its feet, and never afterwards could remember who was the painter; the busy picture detective may run it to ground for the edification of posterity. There was a St. Luke with a halo and draperies; a woman holding up a child towards a barred window beyond which, seen dimly, was the face of a man; and an inundation, no doubt The Deluge or The Wreck. He was sure he must have made something interesting out of them, he knew there were wonderful things even then—the beginnings of harmonies and of purple schemes—he supposed it must have been intuitive. Another Stonington man commissioned him to paint Ingres' Andromeda chained to the rock—probably the Angelina of Ingres which he and Tissot are said to have copied side by side, though a copy of an Andromeda by him has been shown in New York, and other alleged copies are now turning up. All, he said, might be still at Stonington, and shown there as marvellous things by Whistler. To these may be added the Diana by Boucher in the London Memorial Exhibition, owned by Mr. Louis Winans, and the group of cavaliers after Velasquez, the one copy Fantin remembered his doing. A study of a nun was sent to the London Exhibition, but not shown, with the name "Wisler" on the back of the canvas, not a bad study of drapery, which may have been, despite the name, another of his copies or done in a sketch class.

The first original picture in Paris was, he assured us, the Mère Gérard, in white cap, holding a flower, which he gave to Swinburne. There is another painting of her, we believe, and from Drouet we heard of a third, which has vanished. Whistler painted a number of portraits; some it would probably be impossible to trace, a few are well [Pg 52] known. One—a difficult piece of work, he said—was of his father, after a lithograph sent him for the purpose by his brother George, and he began another of Henry Harrison, whom he had known in Russia. A third was of himself in his big hat. Two were studies of models: the Tête de Paysanne, a woman in a white cap, younger than the Mère Gérard, and the Head of an Old Man Smoking, a pedlar of crockery whom Whistler came across one day in the Halles, a full face with large brown hat, for long the property of Drouet and left by him to the Louvre. But the finest is At the Piano, The Piano Picture as Whistler called it. It is the portrait of his sister and his niece, the "wonderful little Annie" of the etchings, now Mrs. Charles Thynne, who gave him many sittings, and to whom, in return, he gave his pencil sketches made on the journey to Alsace.

Mr. Gallatin, in Portraits of Whistler, and M. Duret, in the second edition of Whistler, have reproduced an oil portrait entitled Whistler Smoking, which was bought from a French family in 1913. The most cursory glance at even the reproduction is enough to show that the portrait is devoid of merit, while the statement that it was hidden from 1860 to 1913 would require considerable further proof. The whole thing is but a clumsy attempt to imitate the Whistler in the Big Hat, as well as the etching of the same subject. Every part of it is stolen from some other work, down to the hand or handkerchief, just indicated, which is taken from the portrait of his mother. It is true that the signature is on the painting, but this no longer proves anything, as a signature is the easiest part of a work of art to forge.

The portraits "smell of the Louvre." The method is acquired from close study of the Old Masters. "Rembrandtish" is the usual criticism passed on these early canvases, with their paint laid thickly on and their heavy shadows. Indeed, it is evident that his own portrait, Whistler in the Big Hat, was suggested by Rembrandt's Young Man in the Louvre. To his choice of subjects, in his pictures as in his etchings, he brought the realism of Courbet, painting people as he saw them, and not in clothes borrowed from the classical and mediæval wardrobes of the fashionable studio. Yet there is the personal note: Whistler does not efface himself in his devotion to the masters. This is felt in the way a head or a figure is placed on the canvas. The arrangement of the pictures on the wall and the mouldings of the dado in At the Piano, the harmonious balance of the black and white in the dresses of the mother and the little girl, show the sense of design, of pattern, which he brought to perfection in the Mother, Carlyle, and Miss Alexander. There was nothing like it in the painting of the other young men, of Degas, Fantin, Legros, Ribot, Manet; nothing like it in the work of the older man, their leader, when painting L'Enterrement à Ornans and Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet. M. Duret says that Whistler's fellow students, who had immediately recognised his etchings, now accepted his paintings, which confirms Whistler's statement to us.

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At the Piano was sent to the Salon of 1859 with two etchings the titles of which are not given. The etchings were hung, the picture was rejected. It may have been because of what was personal in it; strong personality in the young usually fares that way at official hands. Fantin's story is:

"One day Whistler brought back from London the Piano Picture, representing his sister and niece. He was refused with Legros, Ribot, and myself at the Salon. Bonvin, whom I knew, interested himself in our rejected pictures, and exhibited them in his studio, and invited his friends, of whom Courbet was one, to see them. I recall very well that Courbet was struck with Whistler's picture."

Two portraits by Fantin, some studies of still life by Ribot, and Legros' portrait of his father, which had also been rejected, were shown. The rejection was a scandal. The injustice was flagrant, the exhibitors at Bonvin's found themselves famous, and Whistler's picture impressed many artists besides Courbet. With its exhibition Whistler ceased to be the student, though he was a student all his life; it was only in his last years that he felt he was "beginning to understand," he often said to us.

It was now that Whistler began his endless journeys between Paris and London. At first he stayed with his sister, Lady Haden, at 62 Sloane Street, sometimes bringing with him Henri Martin or Legros. [Pg 54] In 1859 he invited Fantin, promising him glory and fortune. In his notes Fantin wrote:

"Whistler talked about me at this moment to his brother-in-law, Seymour Haden, who urged me to come to London; he had also talked about me to Boxall. I should like it known that it was Whistler who introduced me to England."

Fantin arrived in time for them to go to the Academy, then still in the east end of the National Gallery. Whistler exhibited for the first time, and Two Etchings from Nature—a perplexing title, for all his etchings were "from Nature"—were hung in the little octagon room, or "dark cell," reserved for black-and-white. "Les souvenirs les plus vifs que j'ai conservés de ce temps à Londres," Fantin wrote "étaient notre admiration pour l'exposition des tableaux de Millais à l'Academy." Millais showed The Vale of Rest, and the two young men, fresh from Paris studios, recognised in his work the realism which, though conceived and expressed so differently, was the aim of the Pre-Raphaelites as of Courbet.

Seymour Haden, who had already etched some of his finest plates, was kind to his visitors. He not only ordered copies from Fantin—amongst them one of the many Fantin made of Veronese's Marriage Feast at Cana—but he bought the pictures of Legros, who was "at one moment in so deplorable a condition," Whistler said to us, "that it needed God or a lesser person to pull him out of it. And so I brought him over to London, and for a while he worked in my studio. He had, before coming, sold a church interior to Haden, who liked it, though he found the floor out of perspective. One day he took it to the room upstairs where he did his etchings, and turned the key. When it reappeared the floor was in perspective according to Haden. A gorgeous frame was bought, and the picture was hung conspicuously in the drawing-room."

Whistler thought Haden restive when he heard that Legros was coming, but nothing was said. The first day Legros was impressed; he had been accustomed to seeing himself in cheap frames, if in any frame at all. But gradually he looked inside the frame, and Haden's work dawned upon him. That he could not stand. What was he to do? he asked Whistler. "Run off with it," Whistler suggested. "We got it down, called a four-wheeler, and carried it away to the [Pg 55] studio—our own little kopje," for Whistler told us the story in the days of the Boer War. Haden discovered his loss as soon as he got home, and in a rage hurried after them to the studio. But when he saw it on an easel, Legros repainting the perspective according to his idea, well, there was nothing to say. Where the studio was we do not know.

Haden even endured Ernest, who had not yet caught up with the seasons, and who went about in terror of the butler, taking his daily walks in slippers rather than expose his boots to the servants, and enchanting Whistler by asking "Mais, mon cher, qu'est-ce que c'est que cette espèce de cataracte de Niagara?" when Haden turned on the shower-bath in the morning. Fantin was almost as dismayed by the luxury at the Hadens'. "What lunches!" he wrote home, "what roast beef and sherry! And what dinners—always champagne!" And if he was distressed by the street organs grinding out the Miséréré of Verdi, he could console himself by listening to Lady Haden's brilliant playing on the piano, until paradisiaque was the adjective he found to describe his life there to his parents.

Whistler fell in at once with the English students whom he had known in Paris: Poynter, Armstrong, Luke and Aleco Ionides. Du Maurier came back from Antwerp in 1860, and for several months he and Whistler lived together in Newman Street. Armstrong remembers their studio, with a rope like a clothes-line stretched across it and, floating from it, a bit of brocade no bigger than a handkerchief, which was their curtain to shut off the corner used as a bedroom. There was hardly ever a chair to sit on, and often with the brocade a towel hung from the line: their decoration and drapery. Du Maurier's first Punch drawing—in a volume full of crinolines and Leech (vol. XXXIX., October 6, 1860)—shows the two, shabby, smoking, calling at a photographer's to be met with an indignant, "No smoking here, sirs!" followed by a severe, "Please to remember, gentlemen, that this is not a common Hartist's Studio!" The figure at the door, with curly hair, top hat, glass in his eye, hands behind his back smoking a cigarette, is Whistler. Probably it was then also that Du Maurier made a little drawing, in Mr. Howard Mansfield's collection, of Whistler, Charles Keene, and himself, with their autographs below; Whistler again with a glass in his eye.

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"Nearly always, on Sunday, he used to come to our house," Mr. Ionides tells us, and there was no more delightful house in London. Alexander Ionides, the father, was a wealthy merchant with a talent for gathering about him all the interesting people in town or passing through, artists, musicians, actors, authors. Mr. Luke Ionides says that Whistler came to their evenings and played in their private theatricals, and there remains a programme designed by Du Maurier with a drawing of himself, Whistler, and Aleco Ionides at the top, while Luke Ionides and his sister, Mrs. Coronio, stand below with the list of dramatis personæ between. And Whistler also took part in their masquerades and fancy-dress balls, once mystifying everybody by appearing in two different costumes in the course of the evening and winding up as a sweep. He never lost his joy in the memory of Alma-Tadema, on another of these occasions, as an "Ancient Roman" in toga and eye-glasses, crowned with flowers: "amazing," Whistler said, "with his bare feet and Romano-Greek St. John's Wooden eye!"

Mr. Arthur Severn writes us: "My first recollection of Whistler was at his brother-in-law's, Seymour Haden (he and Du Maurier were looking over some Liber Studiorum engravings), and then at Arthur Lewis' parties on Campden Hill, charming gatherings of talented men of all kinds, with plenty of listeners and sympathisers to applaud. The Moray Minstrels used to sing, conducted by John Foster, and when they were resting anyone who could do anything was put up. Du Maurier with Harold Sower would sing a duet, Les Deux Aveugles; Grossmith half killed us with laughter (it was at these parties he first came out). Stacy Marks was a great attraction, but towards the end of the evening, when we were all in accord, there were yells for Whistler, the eccentric Whistler! He was seized and stood up on a high stool, where he assumed the most irresistibly comic look, put his glass in his eye, and surveyed the multitude, who only yelled the more. When silence reigned he would begin to sing in the most curious way, suiting the action to the words with his small, thin, sensitive hands. His songs were in argot French, imitations of what he had heard in low cabarets on the Seine when he was at work there. What Whistler and Marks did was so entirely themselves and nobody else, so original or quaint, that they were certainly the favourites."

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"Breezy, buoyant and debonair, sunny and affectionate," he seemed to George Boughton, who could not remember the time when "Whistler's sayings and doings did not fill the artistic air," nor when he failed to give a personal touch, a "something distinct" to his appearance. His "cool suit of linen duck and his jaunty straw hat" were conspicuous in London, where personality of dress was more startling than in Paris. Boughton refers to a flying trip to Paris at this period, when he was "flush of money and lovely in attire." Others recall meeting him, armed with two umbrellas, a white and a black, his practical preparation for all weathers. Val Prinsep speaks of the pink silk handkerchief stuck in his waistcoat, but this must have been later. "A brisk little man, conspicuous from his swarthy complexion, his gleaming eye-glass, and his shock of curly black hair, amid which shone his celebrated white lock," is Val Prinsep's description of him in the fifties.

But the white lock is not seen in any contemporary painting or etching. It was first introduced, as far as we can discover, in his portrait owned by the late Mr. McCulloch—the portrait a few years ago was in Detroit—and in the etching Whistler with the White Lock, 1879, though there may be earlier work showing it. We never asked him about it, and his family, friends, and contemporaries, whom we have asked, cannot explain it. Some say that it was a birthmark, others that he dyed all his hair save the one lock. But he did not dye his hair. Du Maurier, according to Dr. Williamson, attributed it to a wound, either by bullet or sword-cut, received at Valparaiso: the wound was sewn up, the white lock appeared almost immediately. Mr. Theodore Roussel tells a somewhat similar story. But we think if this were so, Whistler would have told us of it. In an exhibition of oil paintings and pastels by Whistler held in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in March 1910, a painting was shown entitled Sketch of Mr. Whistler. It was lent by Mr. Charles L. Freer and was sold to him by an art dealer. We are by no means certain that it is genuine, though we have only seen the reproduction, the frontispiece of the catalogue. J. recently went to Detroit, but in Mr. Freer's absence he was not allowed to see the painting. If it is genuine, it is most likely a study by Whistler of the Chinese dress in which he posed for Fantin. In Freer's sketch the white lock appears. Though [Pg 58] it could easily have been added later, its presence to us seems proof that the picture is most probably not genuine, and certainly is not contemporary, because in Fantin's head of Whistler from the Toast, in Hommage à Delacroix, and Whistler's own portraits of that time the white lock is not shown. Many, seeing him for the first time, mistook the white lock for a floating feather. He used to call it the Mèche de Silas, and it amused him to explain that the Devil caught those whom he would preserve by a lock of hair which turned white. Whatever its origin, Whistler cherished it with greatest care.

Whistler had stumbled upon a period in England when, though painters prospered, art was at a low ebb. Pre-Raphaelitism was on the wane. A few interesting young men were at work: Charles Keene, Boyd Houghton, Albert Moore; Fred Walker and George Mason. But Academicians were at the high tide of mid-Victorian success and sentiment. They puzzled Whistler no less than he puzzled them.

"Well, you know, it was this way. When I came to London I was received graciously by the painters. Then there was coldness, and I could not understand. Artists locked themselves up in their studios—opened the doors only on the chain; if they met each other in the street they barely spoke. Models went round with an air of mystery. When I asked one where she had been posing, she said, 'To Frith and Watts and Tadema.' 'Golly! what a crew!' I said. 'And that's just what they says when I told 'em I was a-posing to you!' Then I found out the mystery; it was the moment of painting the Royal Academy picture. Each man was afraid his subject might be stolen. It was the era of the subject. And, at last, on Varnishing Day, there was the subject in all its glory—wonderful! The British subject! Like a flash the inspiration came—the Inventor! And in the Academy there you saw him: the familiar model—the soldier or the Italian—and there he sat, hands on knees, head bent, brows knit, eyes staring; in a corner, angels and cogwheels and things; close to him his wife, cold, ragged, the baby in her arms; he had failed! The story was told; it was clear as day—amazing! The British subject! What."

Into this riot of subject, to the Academy of 1860, At the Piano was sent, with five prints: Monsieur Astruc, Rédacteur du Journal [Pg 59] 'L'Artiste,' portrait, and three of the Thames Set. Whistler had given At the Piano, the portrait of his sister and niece, to Seymour Haden, "in a way," he said:

"Well, you know, it was hanging there, but I had no particular satisfaction in that. Haden just then was playing the authority on art, and he could never look at it without pointing out its faults and telling me it never would get into the Academy—that was certain."

However, at the Academy it was accepted, Whistler's first picture in an English exhibition. The Salon was not held then every year, and he could not hope to repeat his success in Paris. But in London At the Piano was as much talked about as at Bonvin's. It was bought by John Phillip, the Academician (no relation to the family into which Whistler afterwards married). Phillip had just returned from Spain with, "well, you know, Spanish notions about things, and he asked who had painted the picture, and they told him a youth no one knew about, who had appeared from no one knew where. Phillip looked up my address in the catalogue and wrote to me at once to say he would like to buy it, and what was its price? I answered in a letter which, I am sure, must have been very beautiful. I said that, in my youth and inexperience, I did not know about these things, and I would leave to him the question of price. Phillip sent me thirty pounds; when the picture was last sold, to Edmund Davis, it brought two thousand eight hundred!"

Thackeray, Lady Ritchie tells us, "went to see the picture of Annie Haden standing by the piano, and admired it beyond words, and stood looking at it with real delight and appreciation." It was the only thing George Boughton brought vividly away in his memories of the Academy. The critics could not ignore it. "It at once made an impression," Mr. W. M. Rossetti wrote. As "an eccentric, uncouth, smudgy, phantom-like picture of a lady at a pianoforte, with a ghostly-looking child in a white frock looking on," it struck the Daily Telegraph. But the Athenæum, having discovered the "admirable etchings" in the octagon room, managed to see in the "Piano Picture, despite a recklessly bold manner and sketchiness of the wildest and roughest kind, a genuine feeling for colour and a splendid power of composition and design, which evince a just appreciation of nature very rare among artists. If the observer will look for a little while at this singular [Pg 60] production, he will perceive that it 'opens out' just as a stereoscopic view will—an excellent quality due to the artist's feeling for atmosphere and judicious gradation of light."

We quote these criticisms because the general idea is that Whistler waited long for notice. He was always noticed, praised or blamed, never ignored, after 1859.

Whistler went back to Paris late in that year. December 1859 is the date of his Isle de la Cité, etched from the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre, with Notre Dame in the distance and the Seine and its bridges between. It was his only attempt to rival Méryon, and he succeeded badly. The fact that he gave it up when half done shows that he thought so and was too big an artist to be an imitator, especially of a "little man like Méryon." Besides, he was much less in Paris now, for, though he preferred life there, he found his subjects in London, which he soon made his home, as it continued to be, except for a few intervals, until his death. It was not the people he cared for, nor the customs. He was drawn by the beauty that no one had felt with the same intensity and understanding.

He went to work on the river. In these first years he dated his prints and pictures, as he seldom did later, and 1859 is bitten on many of the Thames plates. He saw the river as no one had seen it before, in its grime and glitter, with its forest of shipping, its endless procession of barges, its grim warehouses, its huge docks, its little water-side inns. And as he saw it so he rendered it, as no one ever had before—as it is. It was left to the American youth to do for London what Rembrandt had done for Amsterdam. There were eleven plates on the Thames during this year. To make them he wandered from Greenwich to Westminster; they included Black Lion Wharf, Tyzac, Whiteley and Co., which he never excelled at any period; and in each the warehouses or bridges, the docks or ships, are worked out with a mass and marvel of detail. The Pre-Raphaelites were not so faithful to Nature, so minute in their rendering. The series was a wonderful achievement for the young man of twenty-five never known to work by his English fellow students, a wonderful achievement for an artist of any age.

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Those who thought he idled in Paris were as sure of his application in London. "On the Thames he worked tremendously," Armstrong said, "not caring then to have people about or to let anyone see too much of his methods." He stayed for months at Wapping to be near his subjects, though not cutting himself off entirely from his friends. Sir Edward Poynter, Mr. Ionides, M. Legros, Du Maurier visited him. Mr. Ionides recalls long drives down by the Tower and the London Docks to get to the place, as out of the way now as then. He says Whistler lived in a little inn, rather rough, frequented by skippers and bargees, close to Wapping steamboat pier. But there is no doubt that much of his work was done from Cherry Gardens, on the other side of the river. Unfortunately it was not until after his death that we looked into this matter. At any rate, if he lived at Wapping, he worked a great deal at Cherry Gardens, also often from boats and barges, he told us, and this one can see in the prints. Sometimes he would get stranded in the mud, and at others cut off by the tide. "When his friends came," Armstrong wrote us, "they dined at an ordinary there used to be. People who had business at the wharves in the neighbourhood dined there, and Jimmie's descriptions of the company were always humorous." Mr. Ionides drove down once for a dinner-party Whistler gave at his inn:

"The landlord and several bargee guests were invited. Du Maurier was there also, and after dinner we had songs and sentiments. Jimmie proposed the landlord's health; he felt flattered, but we were in fits of laughter. The landlord was very jealous of his wife, who was rather inclined to flirt with Jimmie, and the whole speech was chaff of a soothing kind that he never suspected."

Another and more frequent visitor to Wapping was Serjeant Thomas, one of those patrons who recognise the young artist and appear when recognition is most needed. He bought drawings and prints from Holman Hunt and Legros when they were scarcely known, and he helped Millais through difficult days. Whistler had issued his French Set of etchings in London in 1859: Twelve Etchings from Nature by James Abbott Whistler, London. Published by J. A. Whistler, At No. 62 Sloane Street (Haden's house). The price, as in Paris, for Artist's Proofs on India, two guineas. Serjeant Thomas saw the prints, got to know Whistler, and arranged to publish them, and also the Thames etchings which he sold separately at 39 Old Bond Street, where he had opened a shop with his son, Edmund Thomas, as manager.

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Mr. Percy Thomas, a younger son, has told us that, as a little fellow, he often went with his father by boat to Wapping, and that his father and brother posed for two of the figures—the third is Whistler—in The Little Pool, used as an invitation card. He has also told us that much of the printing was done at 39 Old Bond Street, where the family lived in the upper part of the house. A press was in one of the small rooms, and Whistler would come in the evening, when he happened to be in town, to bite and prove his plates. Sometimes he would not get to work until half-past ten or eleven. In those days he put his plate in a deep bath of acid, keeping to the technical methods of the Coast Survey, though it is said that the Coast Survey plates were banked up with wax and the acid poured over them. This is supposed to have been the method of Rembrandt. Serjeant Thomas, in his son's words, was "great for port wine," and he would fill a glass for Whistler, and Whistler would place the glass by the bath, and then work a little on the plate and then stop to sip the port, and he would say, "Excellent! Very good indeed!" and they never knew whether he meant the wine or the work. And the charm of his manner and his courtesy made it delightful to do anything for him. Serjeant Thomas brought Delâtre from Paris, the only man, he thought, who could print Whistler's etchings as the artist would have printed them himself. "Nobody," Ralph Thomas wrote, "has ever printed Mr. Whistler's etchings with success except himself and M. Delâtre," and to-day many people are of the same opinion. Whistler's relations with the firm were pleasant while they lasted. But they did not last long. Edmund Thomas cared less for art than the law, and in the shop he would sit at his desk reading his law books, never looking up nor leaving them, unless someone asked the price of a print or drawing. A successful business is not run on those lines, and in a few years he gave up art for the law, to his great advantage.

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Whistler, in 1860, devoted more time to painting on the river and less to etching, though the Rotherhithe belongs to this year. One picture he described in a letter to Fantin. "Chut! n'en parle pas à Courbet" was his warning, as if afraid to trust so good a subject to anyone. It was to be a masterpiece, he had painted it three times, and he sent a sketch which M. Duret reproduced in his Whistler. M. Duret, unable to trace the picture, thought he might never have carried it beyond the sketch. But it was finished: the Wapping shown in the Academy of 1864, a proof how long Whistler kept his pictures before exhibiting them. In 1867 he sent it to the Paris Exhibition. It was bought by Mr. Thomas Winans, taken to Baltimore, where it has remained. Whistler wanted to exhibit it at Goupil's in 1892, but could not get it. Never seen in Europe since 1867, it has been forgotten. It was painted from an inn, probably The Angel on the water-side at Cherry Gardens which exists to-day, one of a row of old houses with overhanging balconies. In the foreground, in a shadowy corner of the inn balcony, is a sailor for whom a workman from Greaves' boat-building yard, Chelsea, sat; next, M. Legros; and on the other side of M. Legros, with her back turned to the river, the girl with copper-coloured hair, Jo, the model for The White Girl and The Little White Girl. On the river are the little square-rigged ships that still anchor there; on the opposite side is the long line of Wapping warehouses, which give the name. Artists feared Jo's slightly open bodice would prevent the picture being hung in the Royal Academy. But Whistler insisted, if it was rejected on that account, he would open the bodice more and more every year until he was elected and hung it himself.

He painted The Thames in Ice this year (1860) from the same inn. It was called, when first exhibited, The Twenty-fifth of December, 1860, on the Thames. For an idle apprentice it was a strange way of spending Christmas. Whistler told us that Haden bought it for ten pounds—ample pay, Haden said: three pounds for each of the three days he spent painting it, and a pound over. To Whistler the pay seemed [Pg 64] anything but ample. "You know, my sister was in the house, and women have their ideas about things, and I did what she wanted, to please her!"

Two other pictures of 1860 are the portrait of Mr. Luke Ionides and The Music Room. In both the influence of Courbet is evident. The portrait, painted in the Newman Street studio, has the heavy handling of The Piano, though much more brilliant. But the other picture is a tremendous advance.

Fantin could not have been more conscientious in rendering the life about him as he found it than Whistler in The Music Room; only, the room in the London house, with its gay chintz curtains, has none of the sombre simplicity of the interior where Fantin's sisters sit. Fantin's home had an austerity he made beautiful; the Haden's house had colour—Harmony in Green and Rose was Whistler's later title for the picture. He emphasised the gaiety by introducing a strong black note in the standing figure, Miss Boot, while the cool light from the window falls on "wonderful little Annie," in the same white frock she wears in The Piano Picture. Mrs. Thynne (Annie Haden) says:

"I was very young when The Music Room was painted, and beyond the fact of not minding sitting, in spite of the interminable length of time, I do not know that I can say more. It was a distinctly amusing time for me. He was always so delightful and enjoyed the 'no lessons' as much as I did. One day in The Morning Call (the first name of The Music Room) I did get tired without knowing it, and suddenly dissolved into tears, whereupon he was full of the most tender remorse, and rushed out and bought me a lovely Russia leather writing set, which I am using at this very moment! The actual music-room still exists in Sloane Street, though the present owners have enlarged it, and the date of the picture must have been '60 or '61, after his return from Paris. It was then he gave me the pencil sketches I lent to the London Memorial Exhibition. I had kept them in an album he had also brought me from Paris, with my name in gold stamped outside, of which I was very proud. We were always good friends, and I have nothing all through those early days but the most delightful remembrance of him."

This picture is described under three titles: The Morning Call, The Music Room, and Harmony in Green and Rose, The Music Room; the [Pg 65] present confusion in Whistler's titles is usually the result of his own vagueness. It became the property of Mrs. Réveillon, George Whistler's daughter, and was carried off to St. Petersburg, never to return to London until the exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1892.

It has become the fashion to say that Whistler had not mastered his trade and could not use oil paint. These early pictures are technically as accomplished as the work of any of his contemporaries. He never was taught, few artists are, the elements of his trade, and some of his paintings have suffered. The Music Room and The Thames in Ice, so far as we can remember, are wonderfully fresh. They were painted more directly, more thinly, than the Wapping, in which the paint is thickly piled, as in the Piano Picture, which has cracked, no doubt the result of his working over it probably on a bad ground. Of two pictures painted at the same period, the Wapping is badly cracked, and the Thames in Ice is in perfect condition. But this is due to his want of knowledge of the chemical properties of paints and mediums. Later, he gave great attention to these matters. He kept the Wapping four years before he showed it. Though started down the river in 1860, it contains a portrait of Greaves' man, whom he did not see for two or three years after. Walter Greaves stated, or allowed to be stated, in a preface to the catalogue of his exhibition in May 1911, that he met Whistler in the late fifties when Whistler lived in Chelsea and made the Thames series of etchings. But the statement was proved to be inaccurate, and the preface was withdrawn. We have quoted Greaves on several occasions, but, before doing so, we have verified every statement of importance he made to us, and we first met him some few years ago when his memory was clearer and more reliable, and when he possessed letters from Whistler which we have seen.

Mr. Thynne stood in 1860 for the beautiful dry-point Annie Haden, in big crinoline and soup-plate hat, the print Whistler told Mr. E. G. Kennedy he would choose by which to be remembered. It was the year also of the portraits of Axenfeld, Riault, and "Mr. Mann." In 1861 there were more plates on the Upper as well as the Lower Thames. Two of the plates of 1861 were published as illustrations by the Junior Etching Club in Passages from Modern English Poets, and Whistler proved the plates at the press of Day and Son, and met the lad he called "the best professional printer in England," Frederick Goulding.

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Whistler told us that he worked about three weeks on each of the Thames plates. He therefore must have spent on dated plates alone thirty-six weeks in 1861, leaving but fourteen weeks for other work and for play. Some of them are much less elaborate than the Drouet, which, Drouet said, was done in five hours, so that it seems difficult to reconcile the two statements. But it was about the Black Lion Wharf, one of the fullest of detail, that we asked Whistler. We had many discussions with him about them. Whistler maintained that they were youthful performances, and J. as strongly maintained that that had nothing to do with the matter; that he never surpassed the wonderful drawing and composition and biting. He insisted that his later work in Venice and in Holland was a great development, a great advance, and his final answer was: "Well, you like them more than I do!" But there is no doubt that the Thames plates, notably the Black Lion Wharf, have, for artistic rendering of inartistic subjects and for perfect biting, never been approached. Another thing that astonished J. was that he could see such detail and put it on a copper-plate. "H'm," was Whistler's comment, "that's what they all say."

Whistler got to know the Upper Thames when he stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Edwards at Sunbury. Edwards figures in his dry-point Encamping with M. W. Ridley, who was Whistler's first pupil, and Traer, Haden's assistant, not "Freer," as he has long masqueraded in Mr. Wedmore's catalogue. Ridley also is in The Storm and The Guitar-Player. To these visits we owe an etching of Whistler at Moulsey, by Edwards. Whistler introduced Fantin, who, in a note for 1861, refers to the "jolies journées chez Edwards à Sunbury." Mrs. Edwards wrote us shortly before her death:

"Whistler often came to see me, turning up always when least expected, perhaps driving down in a hansom cab from London. At that time there was no railway at Sunbury; Hampton Court three miles distant. He might send a line to be met by boat at Hampton Court. He was always very eccentric."

Doubtless the driving down was an eccentricity. But Whistler knew he might see some "foolish sunset," or a Nocturne, on the way. "We had a large boat with waterproof cover," Mrs. Edwards added; "my husband and friends several times went up the river and slept in the boat. Whistler went once," when he did the plate Encamping [Pg 67] and possibly Sketching and The Punt, and in Mrs. Edwards' words, "got rheumatism." It had been his trouble since St. Petersburg. He could not risk exposure.

Whistler, though not settled in London, sent work regularly to the Academy, where it was an unfailing shock to the critics. He showed his Mère Gérard in 1861. The Athenæum described the picture as "a fine, powerful-toned, and eminently characteristic study." The Daily Telegraph thought it "far fitter hung over the stove in the studio than exhibited at the Royal Academy, though it is replete with evidence of genius and study. If Mr. Whistler would leave off using mud and clay on his palette and paint cleanly, like a gentleman, we should be happy to bestow any amount of praise on him, for he has all the elements of a great artist in his composition. But we must protest against his soiled and miry ways." It seemed a good, serious study of an old woman and nothing more, when we saw it in the London Memorial Exhibition, and the appallingly low level of the Academy alone can explain the attention it attracted.

Whistler was in France in the summer of 1861, painting The Coast of Brittany, or Alone with the Tide, which might have been signed by Courbet—an arrangement in brown under a cloudy sky, a stretch of sand at low tide in the foreground, water-washed rocks against which a peasant girl sleeps, a deep blue sea beyond. It was "a beautiful thing," Whistler said years afterwards. At Perros Guirec he made his splendid dry-point The Forge. Another print of this year is the rare dry-point of Jo, who, for awhile, appeared in Whistler's work as often as Saskia in Rembrandt's. She was Irish. Her father has been described to us as a sort of Captain Costigan, and Jo—Joanna Heffernan, Mrs. Abbott—as a woman of next to no education, but of keen intelligence, who, before she had ceased to sit to Whistler, knew more about painting than many painters, had become well read, and had great charm. Her value to Whistler as a model was enormous, and she was an important element in his life during the first London years. She was with him in France in 1861-2, going to Paris in the winter to give him sittings for the big White Girl, which he painted in a studio in the Boulevard des Batignolles hung all in white. There Courbet met her, and, looking at the copper-coloured hair, saw beauty in the beautiful. He painted her, though perhaps not that winter, as La Belle Irlandaise, [Pg 68] and as Jo, femme d'Irlande. Whistler's study of Jo, Note Blanche, lent by Mrs. Sickert to the Paris Memorial Exhibition, was doubtless done in 1861, for the technique is like Courbet's. Drouet remembered breakfasts in the studio which Whistler cooked.

He fell ill before the end of the winter. Miss Chapman says he was poisoned by the white lead used in the picture. Her brother, a doctor, recommended a journey to the Pyrenees. At Guéthary Whistler was nearly drowned when bathing. He wrote to Fantin:

"It was sunset, the sea was very rough, I was caught in the huge waves, swallowing gallons of salt water. I swam and I swam, and the more I swam the less near I came to the shore. Ah! my dear Fantin, to feel my efforts useless and to know people were looking on saying, 'But the Monsieur amuses himself, he must be strong!' I cry, I scream in despair—I disappear three, four times. At last they understand. A brave railroad man rushes to me, and is rolled over twice on the sands. My model hears the call, arrives at a gallop, jumps in the sea like a Newfoundland, manages to catch me by the foot, and the two pull me out."[2]

At Biarritz he painted The Blue Wave, a great sea rolling in and breaking on the shore under a fine sky, but quite unlike the Coast of Brittany. Whistler painted few pictures in which the composition, the arrangement, is more obvious. It is an extraordinary piece of work. It has lately been said that he painted this picture after he had seen Courbet's Vague, now in the Louvre. But the Vague was not shown until 1870. If there was any influence, it was all the other way. At Fuenterrabia Whistler was in Spain, for the only time; "Spaniards from the Opéra-Comique in the street, men in bérets and red blouses, children like little Turks." He wanted to go farther, to Madrid, and he urged Fantin to join him. Together they would look at The Lances and The Spinners as together they had studied at the Louvre. In another letter he promised to describe Velasquez to Fantin, to bring back photographs. Such "glorious painting" should be copied. "Ah! mon cher, comme il a du travailler," he winds up in his enthusiasm. But the journey ended at Fuenterrabia. Fantin could not join him. Madrid was put off for another spring, for ever, though the journey was for ever being planned anew.

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Whistler sent The White Girl to the Academy of 1862, with The Twenty-fifth of December, 1860, on the Thames; Alone with the Tide; and one etching, Rotherithe. The White Girl was rejected. The two other pictures and the print were accepted, hung, and praised. The Athenæum compared the Rotherithe to Rembrandt. Whistler could scarcely be mentioned as an etcher without this comparison; since Rembrandt his were "the most striking and original" etchings, everyone then said, Mr. W. M. Rossetti being among the first in England to say it boldly. Alone with the Tide was approved as "perfectly expressed," and The Twenty-fifth of December as "broad and vigorous, though perhaps vigour was pushed over the bounds of coarseness to become mere dash." Other work he showed elsewhere was praised. The Punt and Sketching, published in Passages from Modern English Poets, were singled out for admiration. Thames Warehouses and Black Lion Wharf won him recognition as "the most admirable etcher of the present day," at South Kensington Museum, where in 1862 an International Exhibition was held. Whistler had no pictures, but the collection of modern continental art was one of the finest ever seen in England.

In nothing had Whistler been so completely himself as in The White Girl, and it failed to please. The artist is born to pick and choose, and group with science, the elements in Nature that the result may be beautiful, he wrote in The Ten O'Clock, and The White Girl was his first attempt to conform to a principle no one ever put so clearly into words. It was an attempt, we know now, comparing the painting to the symphonies and harmonies that came after. But at the time it was disquieting in its defiance of modern conventions. It was without subject according to Victorian standards, and the bold massing of white upon white was more bewildering than the minute detail of the Pre-Raphaelites. This summer (1862) the Berners Street Gallery was opened, "with the avowed purpose of placing before the public the works of young artists who may not have access to the ordinary galleries." Maclise, Egg, Frith, Cooper, Poynter forced their way in. But the Manager had the courage to exhibit The White Girl, stating in the catalogue that the Royal Academy had refused it. The Athenæum was independent enough to say that it was the most prominent picture in the collection, though not the most perfect, for, [Pg 70] "able as this bizarre production shows Mr. Whistler to be, we are certain that in a very few years he will recognize the reasonableness of its rejection. It is one of the most incomplete paintings we ever met with. A woman in a quaint morning dress of white, with her hair about her shoulders, stands alone in the background of nothing in particular. But for the rich vigour of the textures, we might conceive this to be some old portrait by Zucchero, or a pupil of his, practising in a provincial town. The face is well done, but it is not that of Mr. Wilkie Collins' Woman in White."

The criticism brought from Whistler his first letter to the press, published in the Athenæum, July 5:

The critics were spared the sting of his wit, but they disapproved strongly enough for him to tell his friends that The White Girl enjoyed a succès d'exécration.

A different success awaited his Thames etchings in Paris, where they were shown in a dealer's gallery. Baudelaire saw them and understood, as he was the first to understand the work of Manet, Poe, Wagner, and many others. He wrote:

"Tout récemment, un jeune artiste américain, M. Whistler, exposait à la galerie Martinet une série d'eaux fortes, subtiles, éveillées comme l'improvisation et l'inspiration, représentant les bords de la Tamise; merveilleux fouillis d'agrés, de vergues, de cordages; chaos de brumes, de fourneaux et de fumées tire-bouchonnées; poésie profonde et compliquée d'une vaste capitale."

According to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Whistler soon moved to Queen's Road, Chelsea: "I fancy that the houses in Queen's Road have been much altered since Whistler was there in 1862-63. They were then low (say two-storeyed), quite old-fashioned houses, of a cosy, homely [Pg 71] character, with small forecourts. I have a kind of idea that Whistler's house was No. 12, but this is quite uncertain to me.[3] As my brother and I were much in that neighbourhood, to and fro, prior to settling down in No. 16 Cheyne Walk, we came into contact with Whistler, who every now and then accompanied us on our jaunts. I forget how it was exactly that we got introduced to him; possibly by Mr. Algernon Swinburne, who was also to be an inmate of No. 16. Either (as I think) before meeting Whistler or just about the time we met him, we had seen one or two of his paintings. At the Piano must have been one, and we most heartily admired him, and discerned unmistakably that he was destined for renown."

The friendship may have led to Whistler's interest in black-and-white, for in England it was Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who revolutionised illustration and proved it a dignified and serious form of art. The more brilliant of the younger men were working for the illustrated magazines, and Whistler found a place among them. He made six drawings in 1862. Four appeared in Once a Week: The Morning before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, Count Burckhardt, The Major's Daughter, The Relief Fund in Lancashire, intended to be used as an illustration to the reprint of an address by Tennyson on the subject of the famine in Lancashire, but never written because of his illness. To this fund we believe Whistler contributed a drawing. The two other illustrations, for The First Sermon, were published in Good Words. They were drawn on wood in pencil, pen and wash, are full of character, and, in the use of line, are like his etchings. They were engraved by the Dalziel Brothers and Joseph Swain, and from Mr. Strahan, the publisher of Once a Week, we have these additional facts:

"They were arranged for by Edward Dalziel, and I cannot say how he came to know the artist or his work, as Mr. Whistler was young then, and, as far as I know, had not contributed to any magazine.

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The average price we paid to artists was nine pounds, and we reckoned that the same amount had to be paid for engravings. As a matter of fact, the sum paid to Mr. Whistler was nine pounds for each drawing."

We showed Whistler once The Morning before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. "Well, now, not bad, you know—not bad even then!" and he followed, with his expressive little finger, the flowing line, pointing to the hand lost in the draperies. This and The Major's Daughter were the two he preferred, and when J. was preparing The History of Modern Illustration Whistler picked them out as "very pretty ones" that should be reproduced, though, if but a single example of his work could be used, he wished The Morning before the Massacre to be selected, for it was "as delicate as an etching, and altogether characteristic and personal." Count Burckhardt he did not care for, insisting that he would rather not be represented if this were to be the only example in the book. "It was never a favourite," he added.

The four drawings of Once a Week were reprinted in Thornbury's Legendary Ballads, 1876. Thornbury implied that the drawings were made for the book, and thought that "the startling drawings by Mr. Whistler prove his singular power of hand, strong artistic feeling, and daring manner."

Our copy belonged to George Augustus Sala. On the margin of The Morning before the Massacre he wrote: "Jemmy Whistler.—Clever, sketchy, and incomplete, like everything he has done. A loaf of excellent, fine flour, but slack-baked." So Sala believed in 1883, and it is typical of the time.

Another important work of 1862 was The Last of Old Westminster. Mr. Arthur Severn knows more about it than anyone, as his account to us explains: "On my return from Rome to join my brother in his rooms in Manchester Buildings, on the Thames at Westminster Bridge (where the New Scotland Yard now is), I found Whistler beginning his picture of Westminster Bridge. My brother had given him permission to use our sitting-room, with its bow-windows looking over the river and towards the bridge. He was always courteous and pleasant in manner, and it was interesting to see him at work. The bridge was in perspective, still surrounded with piles, for it had only just been finished. It was the piles with their rich colour and delightful confusion that took his fancy, not the bridge, which hardly showed. He would look steadily [Pg 73] at a pile for some time, then mix up the colour, then, holding his brush quite at the end, with no mahlstick, make a downward stroke and the pile was done. I remember his looking very carefully at a hansom cab that had pulled up for some purpose on the bridge, and in a few strokes he got the look of it perfectly. He was long over the picture, sometimes coming only once a week, and we got rather tired of it. One day some friends came to see it. He stood it against a table in an upright position for them to see; it suddenly fell on its face, to my brother's disgust, as he had just got a new carpet. Luckily Whistler's sky was pretty dry, and I don't think the picture got any damage, and the artist was most good-natured about my brother's anxiety lest the carpet should have suffered."

The Last of Old Westminster was ready for the Academy of 1863, to which it was sent with six prints: Weary, Old Westminster Bridge, Hungerford Bridge, Monsieur Becquet, The Forge, The Pool. The dignity of composition in the picture and the vigour of handling impressed all who saw it in the London Memorial Exhibition, though they had to regret its shocking condition, cracked from end to end. It failed to impress Academicians in 1863, and was badly hung, as were the prints, reproductive work being then, as now, preferred to original etching.

The White Girl, after its Berners Street success, was sent by Whistler to the Salon. He took it to Paris, to Fantin's studio, there having it unrolled and framed. It is hard to say why the strongest work of the strongest young men was rejected from the Salon of 1863. Fantin, Legros, Manet, Bracquemond, Jongkind, Harpignies, Cazin, Jean-Paul Laurens, Vollon, Whistler were refused. It was a scandal; 1859 was nothing to it. The town was in an uproar that reached the ears of the Emperor. Martinet, the dealer, offered to show the rejected pictures in his gallery. But before this was arranged, Napoleon III ordered that a Salon des Refusés should be held in the same building as the official Salon, the Palais de l'Industrie. The decree was published in the Moniteur for April 24, 1863. The notice was issued by the Directeur-Général of the Imperial Museums, and the exhibition opened on May 15. The success was as great as the scandal. The exhibition was the talk of the town, it was caricatured as the Exposition des Comiques, and parodied as the Club des Refusés at the Variétés; everyone rushed to the galleries. The rooms were crowded by artists, because, [Pg 74] in the midst of much no doubt weak and foolish, the best work of the day was shown; by the public, because of the stir the affair made. The public laughed with the idea that it was a duty to laugh, and because the critics said that never was succès pour rire better deserved. Zola described in L'Œuvre the gaiety and cruelty of the crowd, convulsed and hysterical in front of La Dame en Blanc. Hamerton wrote in the Fine Arts Quarterly:

"The hangers must have thought her particularly ugly, for they have given her a sort of place of honour, before an opening through which all pass, so that nobody misses her. I watched several parties, to see the impression The Woman in White made on them. They all stopped instantly, struck with amazement. This for two or three seconds, then they always looked at each other and laughed. Here, for once, I have the happiness to be quite of the popular way of thinking."

On the other hand, Fernand Desnoyers, who wrote a pamphlet on the Salon des Refusés, thought that Whistler was "le plus spirite des peintres," and the painting the most original that had passed before the jury of the Salon, altogether remarkable, at once simple and fantastic, the portrait of a spirit, a medium, though of a beauty so peculiar that the public did not know whether to think it beautiful or ugly. Paul Mantz considered it the most important picture in the exhibition, full of knowledge and strange charm, and his article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts is the more interesting because he described the picture as a Symphonie du Blanc some years before Whistler called it so, and pointed out that it carried on French tradition, for, a hundred years earlier, painters had shown in the Salon studies of white upon white.

The picture hardly explained the sensation of its first appearance when we saw it with Miss Alexander, the Mother, Carlyle, The Fur Jacket, and Irving in the London Memorial Exhibition. But it seemed revolutionary enough in the sixties, to become the clou of the Salon des Refusés, though nothing was further from Whistler's intention. It eclipsed Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, then called Le Bain.

Whistler was in Amsterdam with Legros, looking at Rembrandt with delight, at Van der Helst with disappointment, etching Amsterdam from the Tolhuis, no doubt hunting for old paper and adding to his collection of blue and white, when the news came of the reception of [Pg 75] his picture in Paris, and he wrote to Fantin that he longed to be there and in the movement. It was a satisfaction that the picture, slighted in London, should be honoured in Paris. He was all impatience to know what was said in the Café de Bade, the café of Manet, and by the critics.

To add to his triumph in Paris, official honours were coming to him in Holland and England. Some of his etchings were in an exhibition at The Hague, though he said he did not know how they got there, and he was given one of three gold medals awarded to foreigners—his first medal. Though atrociously hung at the Academy, his prints were honoured at the British Museum, where twelve were bought for the Print Room this year.

The excitement did not keep him from work, to which, as he wrote to Fantin, wandering was a drawback. He felt the need of his studio, of "the familiar all about him." The "familiar" he loved best was in London, and when he returned he began to look for a house of his own. It was fortunate for him that his mother was in England. At the beginning of the Civil War, in which Whistler took the keenest interest as a patriot and a "West Point man," she had been in Richmond with her son William, serving as surgeon in the Confederate Army, had run the blockade, and come to join her other children in London.

Whistler no longer made the Hadens' house his home. The relations of the brothers-in-law had become strained, both being of strong character. Haden had had much to put up with, while Whistler, the artist, resented the criticism of Haden, the surgeon. One story we have from Whistler explains the situation, and though he never gave a date, it can be told here. Haden was the schoolmaster Whistler found him when they first met; one's older relatives have a way of forgetting one can grow up. Once, when Whistler had done something more enormous than ever in Haden's eyes, he was summoned to the workroom upstairs, and lectured until he refused to listen to another word. He started down the four flights of stairs, with Haden close behind still lecturing. At last the front door was reached. And then: "Oh, dear," said Whistler, "I've left my hat upstairs, and now we have got to go all through this again!" As there was no further question of Whistler living with the Hadens, it was decided that he and his mother should live together, and some of his most delightful years were those that followed.

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Whistler's first house in London was No. 7 Lindsey Row, Chelsea, now 101 Cheyne Walk. It adjoins the old palace of Lord Lindsey, which still stands, the original building divided into several houses, stuccoed and modernised, much of its stateliness gone, though the spacious stairway and part of the panelling have been preserved. Whistler's was a three-storey house, with a garden in front, humble compared with the palaces Academicians were building. "All these artists complain of nothing but the too great prosperity of the profession in these days," Hamerton wrote to his wife; "they tell me an artist's life is a princely one now." But Whistler lived his own life, and from his windows he could paint what he wanted. Only the road separated the house from the river; opposite was Battersea Church and a group of factory chimneys; old Battersea Bridge stretched across, and at night he could see the lights of Cremorne.

At the end of the Row the boat-builder Greaves lived. He had worked in Chelsea for years. He had rowed Turner about on the river, and his two sons were to row Whistler. One of the sons, Mr. Walter Greaves, has told us that Mrs. Booth, a big, hard, coarse Scotchwoman, was always with Turner when he came for a boat. Turner would ask Greaves what kind of a day it was going to be, and if Greaves answered "Fine," he would get Greaves to row them across to Battersea Church, or to the fields, now Battersea Park. If Greaves was doubtful Turner would say: "Well, Mrs. Booth, we won't go far," and afterwards for the sons—boys at the time—Turner in their memory was overshadowed by her. They had also known Martin, the painter of big Scriptural machines, whose house was in the middle of the Row. It had a balcony, and on fine moonlight nights, or nights of dramatic skies, Greaves or one of the sons would knock him up, and keep on knocking until they saw the old man in his nightcap on the balcony, where he would get to work and sketch the sky until daylight. Greaves remembered, too, Brunel, who built the Great Eastern, living at the end of the Row. Of other associations, dating a couple of centuries before, the little Moravian graveyard at the back was a reminder, for Lindsey Palace was one of the first refuges of Zinzendorf and the Brotherhood. A hundred years or so later Mrs. Gaskell was born there. The Row, indeed, was a place of history. But Whistler was to make it more famous.

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The two Greaves, Walter and Harry, painted, and Whistler let them work with and for him. We have often heard him speak of them as his pupils. From them he learned to row. "He taught us to paint, and we taught him the waterman's jerk," Mr. Walter Greaves says. Whistler would start with them in the twilight, Albert Moore sometimes his companion, and they would stay on the river for hours, often all night, lingering in the lights of Cremorne, drifting into the shadows of the bridge. Or else he was up with the dawn, throwing pebbles at their windows to wake them and make them come and pull him up or down stream. At night, on the river and at Cremorne, he was never without brown paper and black and white chalk, with which he made his notes for the Nocturnes and the seemingly simple, but really complicated, firework pictures. In the Gardens it was easy to put down what he wanted under the lamps. On the river he had to trust to his memory, only noting the reflections in white chalk.

Walter Greaves, in his exhibition of 1911, made the statement, or allowed it to be made, that before he and his brother knew Whistler, they were "painting pictures of the Thames and Cremorne Gardens, both day and night effects." This statement Mr. Greaves was unable to substantiate by dates and facts, and as other dates and facts given in his catalogue were wrong, little reliance can be placed upon it. He and his brother were Whistler's pupils, and they worked for Whistler for many years, helping him, at any rate until after The Peacock Room. Whistler naturally wished to control his pupils in their work as any other master would, as he controlled and directed the work of Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Addams, his last pupils. He also did his best to prevent Mr. Walter Greaves and his brother from appropriating his subjects, which letters from Whistler to Greaves prove was exactly what they were doing. They were to carry on his tradition, and this included his methods and even at times his colours which they used, while Whistler as undoubtedly worked on their canvases and plates as he worked on those of other pupils at later dates. But the statement that he refused to allow them to exhibit is untrue, for on the few occasions when we [Pg 78] are able to find that Greaves did exhibit, it was because Whistler, in his generosity, got the pictures hung. In his recent exhibition Greaves showed a painting called Passing under Old Battersea Bridge, signed and dated 1862, and he stated that he had exhibited it in the International Exhibition at South Kensington of that year. No other picture we have seen by him has any such date or signature on it, and his statement that it was in the International Exhibition of 1862 has been proved false. It is now admitted that he did not show until 1873. There are two distinct qualities of work in the picture which must be the work either of two people or of two periods. The piers of the bridge are hard and tight, the background resembles Whistler's work of years later, for neither Whistler nor Greaves had painted a Nocturne in that manner at the time. Nevertheless, these misstatements of Greaves were used by critics all over the world to belittle Whistler.

At one time, master and pupils attended a life class held in the evening by M. Barthe, a Frenchman, in Limerston Street, not far from the Row. Mr. J. E. Christie was another student, and from him we have the following account:

"Whistler was not a regular attender, but came occasionally, and always accompanied by two young men—brothers—Greaves by name. They simply adored Whistler, and were not unlike him in appearance, owing to an unconscious imitation of his dress and manner. It was amusing to watch the movements of the trio when they came into the studio (always late). The curtain that hung in front of the door would suddenly be pulled back by one of the Greaves, and a trim, prim little man, with a bright, merry eye, would step in with 'Good evening,' cheerfully said to the whole studio. After a second's survey, while taking off his gloves, he would hand his hat to the other brother, who hung it up carefully as if it were a sacred thing, then he would wipe his brow and moustache with a spotless handkerchief, then in the most careful way he arranged his materials, and sat down. Then, having imitated in a general way the preliminaries, the two Greaves sat down on either side of him. There was a sort of tacit understanding that his and their studies should not be subjected to our rude gaze. I, however, saw, with the tail of my eye, as it were, that Whistler made small drawings on brown paper with coloured chalks, that the figure (always a [Pg 79] female figure) would be about four inches long, that the drawing was bold and fine, and not slavishly like the model. The comical part was that his satellites didn't draw from the model at all, that I saw, but sat looking at Whistler's drawing and copying that as far as they could. He never entered into the conversation, which was unceasing, but occasionally rolled a cigarette and had a few whiffs, the Greaves brothers always requiring their whiffs at the same time. The trio packed up, and left before the others always."

Sometimes in the evening Whistler, with his mother, would go to the Greaves' house after dinner, and work there. Often he sent in dessert, that they might enjoy and talk over it together. Then he would bring out his brown paper and chalks and make studies of the family and of himself, or sketches of pictures he had seen, working until midnight and after. In those days he never went to bed until he had drawn a portrait of himself, he told us. Many of the portraits are in existence. The sister was an accomplished musician, and Whistler delighted in music, though he was not critical, for he was known to call the passing hurdy-gurdy into his front garden, and have it ground under his windows. Occasionally the brothers played so that Whistler might dance. He was always full of drolleries and fun. He would imitate a man sawing, or two men fighting at the door so cleverly that Mrs. Greaves never ceased to be astonished when he walked into the room alone and unhur. He delighted in American mechanical toys, and his house was full of Japanese dolls. One great doll, dressed like a man, he would take with him not only to the Greaves', but to dinners at Little Holland House, where the Prinseps then lived, and to other houses, where he put it through amazing performances.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was, by this time, settled in Tudor House (now Queen's House), not far from Lindsey Row, and Swinburne and George Meredith were living with him. Mr. W. M. Rossetti came for two or three nights every week, and Frederick Sandys, Charles Augustus Howell, William Bell Scott, and, several years later, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton were constant visitors.

For Rossetti Whistler had a genuine affection, and, in his early enthusiasm, wrote of him as "une grand artiste" to Fantin. But later his enthusiasm did not blind him. "A charming fellow, the only white man in all that crowd of painters," he assured us; "not an artist, [Pg 80] you know, but charming and a gentleman." Mr. Watts-Dunton says that Rossetti got tired of Whistler after awhile, and considered him a brainless fellow, who had no more than a malicious quick wit at the expense of others, and no genuine philosophy or humour. But Whistler never realised any change in Rossetti's feelings towards him.

It was inevitable that Whistler and Rossetti should disagree in matters of art. Whistler asked Rossetti why he did not frame his sonnets. Rossetti thought that the "new French School," in which Whistler had been trained, was "simply putrescence and decomposition." It is said that Rossetti influenced Whistler. Whistler influenced him as much. They influenced each other in the choice of models, in a certain luxuriance of type and the manner of presenting it, an influence which was superficial and transitory.

Upon many other subjects they agreed. Rossetti shared Whistler's delight in drollery and his love of the fantastic. No one understood better than Whistler why Rossetti filled his house and garden with strange beasts. It was from Whistler we heard of the peacock and the gazelle, who fought until the peacock was left standing desolate, with his tail strewed upon the ground. From Whistler, too, we had the story of the bull of Bashan, bought at Cremorne, and tied to a stake in the garden, and Rossetti would come every day and talk to him, until once the bull got so excited that he pulled up the stake and made for Rossetti, who went tearing round and round a tree, a little fat person with coat-tails flying, finally, by a supreme effort, rushing up the garden steps just in time to slam the door in the bull's face. Rossetti called his man and ordered him to tie up the bull, but the man, who had looked out for the menagerie, who had gone about the house with peacocks and other creatures under his arms, who had rescued armadilloes from irate neighbours, who had captured monkeys from the tops of chimneys, struck when it came to tying up a bull of Bashan on the rampage, and gave a month's warning. From Whistler also we first had the story of the wombat, bought at Jamrach's by Rossetti for its name. Whistler was dining at Tudor House, and the wombat was brought on the table with coffee and cigars, while Meredith talked brilliantly, and Swinburne read aloud passages from the Leaves of Grass. But Meredith was witty as well as brilliant, and the special target of his wit was Rossetti, who, as he had invited two or three of his patrons, [Pg 81] did not appreciate the jest. The evening ended less amiably than it began, and no one thought of the wombat until late, and then it had disappeared. It was searched for high and low. Days passed, weeks passed, months passed, and there was no wombat. It was regretted, forgotten. Long afterwards Rossetti, who was not much of a smoker, got out the box of cigars he had not touched since that dinner. He opened it. Not a cigar was left, but there was the skeleton of the wombat.

Whistler and Rossetti also agreed about many of the group who met at Tudor House, though eventually Whistler felt what appeared to him the disloyalty of Swinburne and Burne-Jones. He was never, at any time, so intimate with Burne-Jones as with Swinburne, who often came to the house in Lindsey Row, not only for Whistler's sake, but out of affection for Whistler's mother. Miss Chapman tells us that Swinburne was once taken ill there suddenly, and Mrs. Whistler nursed him till he was well. Miss Chapman also remembers Swinburne sitting at Mrs. Whistler's feet, and saying to her: "Mrs. Whistler, what has happened? It used to be Algernon!" Mrs. Whistler, who had accepted Whistler's friends and their ways, said quietly, "You have not been to see us for a long while, you know. If you come as you did, it will be Algernon again." And he came, and the friendship lasted until the eighties, when he published the article in the Fortnightly Review which Whistler could not forgive.

Meredith wrote us of these Chelsea days: "I knew Whistler and never had a dissension with him, though merry bouts between us were frequent. When I went to live in the country, we rarely met. He came down to stay with me once. He was a lively companion, never going out of his way to take offence, but with the springs in him prompt for the challenge. His tales of his student life in Paris, and of one Ernest, with whom he set forth on a holiday journey with next to nothing in his purse, were impayable."

Quarrels and distrust never made Whistler deny the charm of Charles Augustus Howell, remembered for the part he played in the lives of some of the most distinguished people of his generation. Who he was, where he came from, nobody knew. He was supposed to be associated with high, but nameless, personages in Portugal, and sent by them on a secret mission to England: he was said to [Pg 82] have been involved in the Orsini conspiracy, and obliged to fly for his life across the Channel. According to Mr. E. T. Cook, he was descended from Boabdil il Chico, though Rossetti called him "the cheeky." Mr. Cook says that in his youth, as he used to tell, he had supported his family by diving for treasure, and had lived in Morocco as the Sheik of a Tribe. But Ford Madox Brown described him as the Münchausen of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. The unquestionable fact is that he was a man of great personal charm and unusual business capacity. Mr. W. M. Rossetti has written of him: "As a salesman—with his open manner, winning address, and his exhaustless gift of amusing talk, not innocent of high colouring and of actual blague—Howell was unsurpassable."

He was secretary to Ruskin; he was Rossetti's man of affairs; he became Whistler's, though on a less definite basis. He appears in published reminiscences as the magnificent prototype of the author's agent. His talk was one of his recommendations to both Rossetti and Whistler. Rossetti rejoiced in Howell's "Niagara of lies," and immortalised them:

Whistler described him as "the wonderful man, the genius, the Gil Blas-Robinson Crusoe hero out of his proper time, the creature of top-boots and plumes, splendidly flamboyant, the real hero of the Picaresque novel, forced by modern conditions into other adventures, and along other roads."

Whistler gave Howell credit for more than picturesqueness. He had the instinct for beautiful things, Whistler said: "He knew them and made himself indispensable by knowing them. He was of the greatest service to Rossetti; he helped Watts to sell his pictures and raise his prices; he acted as artistic adviser to Mr. Howard, Lord Carlisle. He had the gift of intimacy; he was at once a friend, on closest terms of confidence. He introduced everybody to everybody [Pg 83] else, he entangled everybody with everybody else, and it was easier to get involved with Howell than to get rid of him."

Many years passed before there was any wish on Whistler's part to get rid of him. He was soon as frequent a visitor at Lindsey Row as at Tudor House. For a time he lived at Putney, and Whistler used to take his morning pull up the river to breakfast with him. Of none of the Rossetti group did Whistler so often talk to us as of Howell, telling us his adventures—adventures in pursuit of old furniture and china until he was known to, and loved and hated by, every pawnbroker in London, and seemed to spend all his time with rare and beautiful things; adventures with creditors and bailiffs: once his collection of blue pots saved by a device only Howell could have invented, forty blue pots carried off in forty four-wheelers to the law-courts, where he was complimented by the judge and awarded heavy damages by the jury; adventures as vestryman, giving teas to hundreds of schoolchildren; adventures at Selsea Bill, where three cottages were turned into a house for himself and he swaggered in the village as a great personage, finding an occupation in stripping the copper from an old wreck that had been there for years and possibly selling it to etchers; adventures ending eventually in The Paddon Papers, of which there will be something to say when the date of their publication is reached.

Frederick Sandys' work never interested Whistler, but Sandys the man was a delight to him, though the two lost sight of each other for many years. Sandys was usually without a penny in his pocket, but he faced the situation with calm and swagger. Accidents never separated him from his white waistcoat, though he might have to carry it himself to the laundry, or get his model, "the little girl" he called her, to carry it for him. You were always meeting them with the brown-paper parcel, Whistler said, and at the nearest friend's house he would stop for five minutes and emerge from it splendid in a clean waistcoat. In money matters he reckoned like a Rothschild. It was always, "Huh! five hundred," that he wanted. Late one afternoon, as Whistler was going into Rossetti's, he met Sandys coming out unusually depressed. He stopped Whistler:

"Do, do try and reason with Gabriel, huh! He is most thoughtless. He says I must go to America, and I must have five hundred, huh, and go! But, if I could go, huh, I could stay!"

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Once Whistler, Sandys, and Rossetti are said to have gone to Winchelsea with W. G. Wills, Irving, and Alfred Calmour, from whom the story comes. Whistler and Rossetti wanted to see a beautiful old house. A grumpy old man lived in it, but Irving warned them that he would probably ask them all to dinner. Rossetti said they must refuse, he hated dining with strangers; Whistler was sure the wine would be bad, Sandys as certain they would be bored by infernal chatter. But they went to the house. Whistler knocked. The servant opened. Whistler asked him to tell his master that "Mr. Whistler and Mr. Rossetti and Mr. Irving wish to see the place." A rough voice was heard: "Shut the door, Roger, I don't want these damned show people stealing my silver." Whistler and Rossetti were furious, and thought they should demand an apology. "He thinks we are confounded actors," Whistler said. "My dear James, he's never heard of you!" was Irving's comment. The only drawback to the story is that we doubt if Whistler knew Irving until after he had ceased to see anything of Rossetti and Sandys.

Whistler got to know other friends of Rossetti's, and he drifted to Ford Madox Brown's, in Fitzroy Square: "Once in a long while I would take my gaiety, my sunniness, to Madox Brown's receptions. And there were always the most wonderful people—the Blinds, Swinburne, anarchists, poets and musicians, all kinds and sorts, and, in an inner room, Rossetti and Mrs. Morris sitting side by side in state, being worshipped, and, fluttering round them, Howell with a broad red ribbon across his shirt-front, a Portuguese decoration hereditary in the family."

According to his grandson, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown thought so much of Whistler's work that once, knowing Whistler wanted money, he sent round among his friends a circular praising Whistler's etchings and urging their purchase.

Whistler shared Rossetti's interest in the spiritual manifestations that, for several years, agitated the circle at Tudor House. He told us once of the strange things that happened when he went to séances at Rossetti's with Jo, and also when he and Jo tried the same things in his studio, and a cousin from the South, long dead, talked to him and told him much that no one else could have known. He believed, but he gave up the séances when they threatened to become engrossing, for he felt that he would be obliged to sacrifice to them the work he had to do in the world.

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The chief bond between Whistler and Rossetti was their love for blue and white and Japanese prints. Whistler was in Paris in 1856, when Bracquemond "discovered" Japan in a little volume of Hokusai used for packing china, and rescued by Delâtre, the printer. It passed into the hands of Laveille, the engraver, and from him Bracquemond obtained it. After that, Bracquemond had the book always by him; and when in 1862 Madame Desoye, who, with her husband, had lived in Japan, opened a shop under the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, the enthusiasm spread to Manet, Fantin, Tissot, Jacquemart and Solon, Baudelaire and the De Goncourts. Rossetti was supposed to have made it the fashion. But the fashion in Paris began before Rossetti owned his first blue pot or his first colour-print. Whistler brought the knowledge and the love of the art to London. "It was he who invented blue and white in London," Mr. Murray Marks assured us, and Mr. W. M. Rossetti was as certain that his brother was inspired by Whistler, who bought not only blue and white, but sketch-books, colour-prints, lacquers, kakemonos, embroideries, screens. "In his house in Chelsea, facing Battersea Bridge," Mr. Severn writes, "he had lovely blue and white, Chinese and Japanese." The only decorations, except the harmony of colour, were the prints on the walls, a flight of Japanese fans in one place, in another shelves of blue and white. People, copying him, stuck up fans anywhere, and hung plates from wires. Whistler's fans were arranged for colour and line. His decorations bewildered people even more than the work of the new firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. The Victorian artist covered his walls with tapestry, filled his studio with costly things, and made the public measure beauty by price, a fact overlooked by Whistler, but never by Morris.

Rossetti joined in the hunt for blue and white. Henry Treffy Dunn, in his Recollections of Rossetti, whose assistant he was, writes that Rossetti and Whistler "each tried to outwit the other in picking up the choicest pieces of blue to be met with"; that both were for ever hunting for "Long Elizas," a name in which Mr. W. M. Rossetti thought "possibly a witticism of Whistler's may be detected." Howell rushed in and met with the most astounding experiences and adventures. A [Pg 86] little shop in the Strand was one of their favourite haunts, another was near London Bridge where a Japanese print was given away with a pound of tea. Farmer and Rogers had an Oriental warehouse in Regent Street. The manager, Mr. Lazenby Liberty, afterwards opened one on the other side of the street, and here, too, Whistler went, introduced to Mr. Liberty by Rossetti. Mr. Liberty rendered him many a service, and visited him to the last. Mr. Murray Marks imported blue and white, and he has told us how the fever spread from Whistler and Rossetti to the ever-anxious collector. Rossetti asked Mr. Marks if he knew anything about blue and white. Mr. Marks said yes; he could get Rossetti a shipload if he chose. Mr. Marks often ran over to Holland, where blue and white was common and cheap, and he picked up a lot, offering it to Rossetti for fifty pounds. Rossetti happened to be hard up and could not afford it. But he came with Mr. Huth, who bought as much as Rossetti could not take, and the rage for it began in England, Sir Henry Thompson, among others, commencing to collect. The rivalry between Whistler and Rossetti lasted for several years, until Rossetti, ill and broken, hardly saw his friends, and until Mr. Marks, in the early seventies, bought back from Whistler and Rossetti all he had sold them.

In Whistler's correspondence with Fantin between 1860 and 1865, published in part by M. Bénédite in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1905), it can be seen that he was outgrowing the influence of Courbet, and that his reaction against realism was bitter. In his revolt he deliberately built up subjects that had nothing to do with life as he knew it, and he borrowed the motives from Japan.

It was in the studio at No. 7 Lindsey Row—no huge, gorgeous, tapestry-hung, bric-à-brac crowded hall, but a little second storey, or English first floor, back room—that the Japanese pictures were painted. The method was a development of his earlier work. The difference was in the subjects. He did not conceal his "machinery." The Lange Leizen, The Gold Screen, The Balcony, the Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine were endeavours to render a beauty he had discovered [Pg 87] which was unknown in Western life. There was no attempt at the "learning" of Tadema or the "morality" of Holman Hunt. Whistler's models were not Japanese. The lady of The Lange Leizen sits on a chair as she never would have sat in the land from which her costume came, and the pots and trays and flowers around her are in a profusion never seen in the houses of Tokio or Canton. In The Gold Screen pose and arrangement are equally inappropriate. The Princesse, in her trailing robes, is as little Japanese. When he left the studio and took his canvas to the front of the house and painted The Balcony, though he clothed the English models in Eastern dress and gave them Eastern instruments to play upon, and placed them before Japanese screens and Anglo-Japanese railings, their background was the Thames with the chimneys of Battersea. We have heard of a Chinese bamboo rack he used for these railings, though some remember it as a studio property made from his design. Nothing save the beauty of the detail mattered to Whistler. It was not the real Japan he wanted to paint, but his idea of it, just as Rembrandt painted his idea of the Holy Land.

The titles he afterwards found for these pictures are Purple and Rose, Caprice in Purple and Gold, Harmony in Flesh Colour and Green, Rose and Silver. Harmony was what he sought, though no Dutchman surpassed their delicacy of detail, truth of texture, intricacy of pattern. And yet we are conscious in them of artificial structure as in none of his other work; the models do not live in their Japanese draperies; Eastern detail is out of place on the banks of the Thames; the device is too obvious.

The Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine is the portrait of Miss Christine Spartali, daughter of the Greek Consul-General in London, whom Whistler met at Ionides', and to whose dinners and parties he often went. There were two daughters, Christine (Countess Edmond de Cahen) and Marie (Mrs. W. J. Stillman), both beautiful. Whistler and Rossetti were struck by their beauty, and Whistler asked the younger sister, Christine, to sit to him. Mrs. Stillman, who always accompanied her, has told us the story of the picture. Before they came to the studio Whistler had his scheme prepared. The Japanese robe was ready, the rug and screen were in place, and he posed her at once. There are a number of small studies and sketches [Pg 88] in oil and pastel that show he knew what he wanted. She sat twice a week during the winter of 1863-64. At first the work went quickly, then it began to drag. Whistler often rubbed it out just as she thought it finished, and day after day she returned to find that everything was to be done over again. The parents got tired, but not the two girls. Mrs. Stillman remembers that Whistler partly closed the shutters so as to shut out the direct light; that her sister stood at one end of the room, the canvas beside her; that Whistler would look at the picture from a distance, then dash at it, give one stroke, then dash away again. As a rule, they arrived about half-past ten or a quarter to eleven; he painted steadily, forgetting everything else, and it was often long after two before they lunched. When lunch was served, it was brought into the studio, placed on a low table, and they sat on stools. There were no such lunches anywhere. Mrs. Whistler provided American dishes, strange in London; among other things, raw tomatoes, a surprise to the Greek girls, who had never eaten tomatoes except over-cooked as the Greeks liked them, and canned apricots and cream, which they had never eaten at all. One menu was roast pheasants, followed by tomato salad, and the apricots and cream, usually with champagne. One cannot wonder that there were occasional deficits in the bank account at Lindsey Row. But it was not only the things to eat and drink that made the hour a delight. Whistler, silent when he worked, was gay at lunch. Perhaps better than his charm, Mrs. Stillman remembers his devotion to his mother, who was calm and dignified, with something of the sweet peacefulness of the Friends. After lunch work was renewed, and it was four and later before they were released.

The sittings went on until the sitter fell ill. Whistler was pitiless with his models. The head in the Princesse gave him most trouble. He kept Miss Spartali standing while he worked at it, never letting her rest; she must keep the entire pose, and she would not admit her fatigue as long as she could help it. During her illness a model stood for the gown, and when she was getting better he came one day and made a pencil drawing of her head, though what became of it Mrs. Stillman never knew. There were a few sittings after this, and at last the picture was finished. The two girls wanted their father to buy it, but Mr. Spartali did not like it. He objected to it as a portrait [Pg 89] of his daughter. Appreciation of art was not among the virtues of the London Greeks. Alexander Ionides and his sons were almost alone in preferring a good thing.

Rossetti, glad to be of service, tried to sell the picture. Whistler agreed to take a hundred pounds, and Rossetti placed the canvas in his studio, where it would be seen by a collector who was coming to look at his work. The collector came, saw the Princesse, liked it, wanted it. There was one objection: Whistler's signature in big letters across the canvas. If Whistler would change the signature he would take the picture. Rossetti, enchanted, hurried to tell Whistler. Whistler was indignant. The request showed what manner of man the patron was, one in whose possession he did not care to have any work of his. However, Rossetti sold the Princesse to another collector, who died shortly afterwards, and then it was bought by Frederick Leyland, and so led to the decoration of The Peacock Room.

It is possible that this objection helped Whistler to realise the inharmonious effect of a large signature on a picture. It is sure that, about this time, he began to arrange his initials somewhat after the Japanese fashion. They were first interlaced in an oblong or circular frame like the signatures of Japanese artists. He signed his name to the earliest pictures, even to some of the Japanese. But with the Nocturnes and the large portraits the Butterfly appeared, made from working the letters J. M. W. into a design, which became more fantastic until it evolved into the Butterfly in silhouette, and continued in various forms. In the Carlyle the Butterfly is enclosed in a round frame, like a cut-out silhouette, behind the figure, and repeats the prints on the wall. In the Miss Alexander it is in a large semicircle and is far more distinctly a butterfly. Then it grew like a stencil, though in no sense was it one, as may be seen in M. Duret's portrait, where the Butterfly is made simply in silhouette, on the background, by a few touches of the rose of the opera cloak and the fan. It was introduced as a note of colour, as important in the picture as any other detail, and at times it was put in almost at the first painting to judge the effect, scraped out with the whole thing, put in again somewhere else, this repeated until he got it right. We have seen many an unfinished picture with a wonderfully finished Butterfly, because it was just where Whistler wanted it.

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The same development can be traced in his etchings, in which it began to appear as a bit of decoration. He originally signed the prints, and signed the plates with his name and date bitten in. But later the prints were signed with the Butterfly, followed by "imp," while the Butterfly alone was etched on the copper or drawn on the stone. Then he added the Butterfly to his signature to letters and his dedication on prints. And the Butterfly found its way to his invitation cards, and at last his correspondence, public and private, was usually signed with the Butterfly alone. This was elaborated ingeniously in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, the Butterfly not only decorating, but punctuating the paragraphs. Rumour says that Whistler went so far as to sign his cheques with the Butterfly, and that once, having signed a cheque for thirty-two francs in this manner, the man to whom it was paid demanded a more conventional signature. Whistler, provoked by the suggestion of doubt, wrote his name, knowing the bank would not then accept it, and was more provoked when he found the rare autograph had been sold within a day for eleven hundred and fifty francs. But rumour is probably wrong: on all the formal letters and documents we have seen, his name, and not the Butterfly, is used.

On the frames of early pictures Japanese patterns were painted in red or blue on the flat gold, and a Butterfly placed on them, in relation to the picture. He designed the frames, and they were carried out by the Greaves, who also copied his designs at Streatham Town Hall, which they decorated thirty years later. Shortly before his death, a few were done by his stepson, E. Godwin. The Sarasate, in Pittsburg, is an excellent example, and so is the Battersea Bridge at the Tate Gallery. Whistler applied a similar scheme to his etchings, water-colours, and pastels, reddish or bluish lines, and at times the Butterfly, appearing on the white or gold of their frames. Certain people want to make out that Whistler got the idea from Rossetti. It might as well be said that Rossetti got it from the beginning of the world. There is nothing new in the idea. Artists always have decorated special frames for special pictures, and Whistler only carried on tradition when he designed frames in harmony with his work and varied them according to the pictures for which they were used. In after years he gave up almost entirely these painted frames, and for his paintings substituted [Pg 91] a simple gold frame, with parallel reeded lines, now universally known as "the Whistler frame." For his etchings and lithographs he chose a plain white frame in two planes. His canvases and his panels were always of the same sizes; consequently they always fitted his frames. And in his studio, as in few, if any others, frequently there might be half a hundred canvases with their faces to the wall, and only half a dozen frames. But they all fitted, and Whistler never showed his work unframed. This was the outcome of Japanese influence, and of his knowledge of the way the Japanese display their art. His deference to Japanese convention went so far that he put a branch of a tree or a reed into the foreground of his seas and rivers as decoration, in early work, with no reference to the picture, sometimes the only Japanese suggestion in the design.

The Lange Leizen—of the Six Marks went to the Academy of 1864, with Wapping. The critic of the Athenæum, to whom the Japanese subject seemed "quaint" and the drawing "preposterously incorrect," could not deny the "superb colouring" and the "beautiful harmonies," nor fail to see in Wapping an "incomparable view of the Lower Pool of London." "Never before was that familiar scene so triumphantly well painted," Mr. W. M. Rossetti wrote.

Whistler did not send to the Salon of 1864, in which Fantin showed his now famous Hommage à Delacroix, who had died in 1863. Whistler was among the several admirers whom Fantin painted round the portrait of the dead master. Whistler wanted Fantin to find a place for Rossetti, who would be proud to pose, and Fantin was willing, but Rossetti could not get to Paris. There was also talk of including Swinburne. Unfortunately for both, they were left out of one of the most celebrated portrait groups of modern times, now in the Moreau-Nélaton Collection in the Louvre. The distinguished artists and men of letters were there nominally out of respect to Delacroix, but really to enable Fantin to justify his belief in the beauty of life as it is, and his protest against the classical dictionary and studio properties. Most of them were, or have since become, famous: Whistler, Manet, Legros, Bracquemond, Fantin, Baudelaire, Duranty, Champfleury, Cordier, De Balleroy. Fantin painted them in the costume of the time, as Rembrandt and Hals and Van der Helst, from whom he is said to have taken the idea, painted the regents and archers of [Pg 92] seventeenth-century Holland. Fantin's white shirt is the one concession to picturesqueness, and the one relief to the severity of detail are the flowers held by Whistler, a lithe, erect, youthful figure, with fine, keen face and abundant hair. That the young American should be the centre of the group was a distinction. When Rossetti saw the picture, he wrote to his brother that it had "a great deal of very able painting in parts, but it is a great slovenly scrawl after all, like the rest of this incredible new school."

Whistler was already working out of the artificial scheme of the Japanese pictures into a phase in which he was more himself than he had ever been. The next year, 1865, he sent to the Academy the most complete, the most perfect picture he ever painted, The Little White Girl, which will always be recognised as one of the few great pictures of the world. It was dated 1864, and there are reproductions showing the date. But about 1900 he painted it out. He had been working on the picture, he told us, and "did not see the use of those great figures sprawling there." Jo was the model. Now, there was no masquerading in foreign finery. Whistler painted her as he must often have seen her, in her simple white gown, leaning against the mantel, her beautiful face reflected in the mirror. The room was not littered with his purchases from the little shops in the Strand and the Rue de Rivoli. Japan is in the detail of blue and white on the mantel; the girl holds a Japanese fan; a spray of azalea trails across her dress. But these were part of Whistler's house, part of the reality he had created for himself, and he made them no more beautiful than the mantel, the grate, the reflection in the mirror. There was no building up, he painted what he saw. And there was in the handling an advance. The paint is thinner on the canvas, the brush flows more freely.

Swinburne saw the picture and wrote Before the Mirror: Verses under a Picture. The poem was printed on gold paper, pasted on the frame, which has disappeared, but we have a contemporary photograph showing the arrangement, and two verses were inserted in the Academy catalogue as sub-title. What Swinburne thought of the picture may be read in a letter he wrote to Ruskin in the summer of 1865 (Library Edition of the Works of Ruskin), in which he says that many, especially Dante Rossetti, told him his verses were better than the painting, and that Whistler ranked them far above it. But a closer examination of the picture only convinced him of its greater beauty, and he would stand up for Whistler against Whistler and everybody else.

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Swinburne's poem and praise could not make The Little White Girl at the Academy better understood than The White Girl had been in Berners Street. The rare few could appreciate its "charm" and "exquisiteness" with Mr. W. M. Rossetti, who found that it was "crucially tested by its proximity to the flashing white in Mr. Millais' Esther," but that it stood the test, "retorting delicious harmony for daring force, and would shame any other contrast." But the general opinion was the other way. The Athenæum distinguished itself by regretting that Whistler should make the "most 'bizarre' of bipeds" out of the women he painted. There was praise for two other pictures. "Subtle beauty of colour" and "almost mystical delicacy of tone" were discovered in The Gold Screen, and "colour such as painters love" in the Old Battersea Bridge, afterwards Brown and Silver. This is the beautiful Battersea, with the touch of red in the roofs of the opposite shore, the link between the early paintings on the river and the Nocturnes that were to follow. The Scarf, a picture we do not recognise, attracted less attention, and Whistler, the year before, declared "one of the most original artists of the day" was now dismissed as one who "might be called half a great artist."

Stranger than this was the change in the attitude of the French critics. In 1863 they overwhelmed him with praise. Two years later they had hardly a good word for him. Levi Legrange, forgotten as he merits, wrote the criticism of the Royal Academy of 1865 for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and all he could see in The Little White Girl was a weak repetition of The White Girl, a wearisome variation of the theme of white; really, he said, it was quite witty of the Academicians, who could have refused it and the two Japanese pictures, to give them good places and so deliver them to judgment. And then he praised Horsley and Prinsep, Leslie and Landseer. The Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine, in the Salon, made no more favourable impression. It seemed a study of costume to Paul Mantz, who, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, decided to forget it and remember merely the mysterious seduction of The White Girl of two years before. Its [Pg 94] eccentricity was only possible if taken in small doses like the homœopathist's pills, according to the incredible Jules Claretie, who, in the same article in L'Artiste, laughed at Manet's Olympia. For more than twenty years Whistler was hated in France.

In this Salon, 1865, Fantin showed his Hommage à la Vérité—Le Toast, the second of his two large groups including Whistler's portrait. In it he strayed so far from the real as to introduce an allegorical figure of Truth, and to allow Whistler to array himself in a gorgeous Chinese robe. "Pense à la robe, superbe à faire, et donne la moi!" Whistler urged from London, and Fantin yielded. "Je l'ai encore revu dans l'atelier en 1865, il me posa dans un tableau aujourd'hui détruit, 'Le Toast,' où il était costumé d'une robe japonaise," is Fantin's story of it in the notes to us, but Whistler, writing at the time, speaks of the costume as Chinese. He brought it to Paris for the sittings. Fantin was quick to regret his concessions. An allegorical figure could not be made real, the whole thing was absurd. When he got the canvas back he destroyed it, all but the portraits of Whistler, Vollon, and himself. Whistler's is now in the Freer Collection.

In the spring of 1865 Whistler was joined in London by his younger brother. Dr. Whistler had distinguished himself in the Confederate Army as a surgeon and by bravery in the field. He had served in Richmond Hospitals and in Libby Prison; he had been assistant-surgeon at Drewry's Bluff, and in 1864, when Grant made his move against Richmond, he had been assigned to Orr's Rifles, a celebrated South Carolina regiment. In the early winter of 1865 a few months' furlough was given him, and he was entrusted by the Confederate Government with important despatches to England. Sherman's advance prevented his running the blockade from Charleston, nor was there any passing through the lines from Wilmington by sea. He was obliged to go North through Maryland, which meant making his way round Grant's lines. The difficulties and dangers were endless. He had to get rid of his Confederate uniform, and in the state of Confederate finance the most modest suit of clothes cost fourteen hundred dollars; for a seat in a waggon he had to pay five hundred. The trains were crowded with officials and soldiers, and he could get a ride in them only by stealth. The roads were abominable, for driving or riding or walking. Often he was alone, and his one companion [Pg 95] toward the North was a fellow soldier who had lost a leg at Antietam and was trying to get to Philadelphia for repairs to an artificial one. Stanton's expedition filled the country near the Rappahannock with snares and pitfalls; to cross Chesapeake Bay was to take one's life in one's hand; and north of the Bay were the enrolling officers of the Union in search of conscripts. However, Philadelphia was at last reached and a ticket for New York bought at the railroad depot, where two sentries, with bayonets fixed, guarded the ticket-office, and might, for all Dr. Whistler knew, have seen him in Libby Prison. In New York he took passage on the City of Manchester, and from Liverpool he hurried to London. One week later came the news of the fall of Richmond and the Confederacy. The furlough was over. There was no going back. It was probably about this time, from the costume and the technical resemblance to Mr. Luke Ionides' portrait, that Whistler painted a head of Dr. Whistler—Portrait of my Brother—now owned by Mr. Burton Mansfield, though it should and might have been in the National Gallery in Washington.

Early in September 1865, Whistler's mother was suffering from trouble with her eyes, and went with her two sons to Coblentz to consult an oculist, and this gave Whistler the chance to revisit some of the scenes of the French Set of etchings. After that he spent a month or two at Trouville, where he was joined by Courbet. Whistler's work shows how far he had drifted away, though the two were always friends. In Sea and Rain, done at Trouville, there is not a suggestion of Courbet. But we have seen a sea by Courbet, owned by M. Duret, that Whistler might have signed. Jo was there too. The sea-pieces he had begun, including Courbet on the Shore, promised great things, he wrote to Mr. Luke Ionides, and as the autumn went on the place was more quiet for work, and the seas and skies more wonderful. He did not get back to London until November. A few months later, early in 1866, he sailed for Valparaiso.

This journey to Valparaiso is the most unaccountable adventure in his sometimes unaccountable career. Various reasons for it have been given: health, a quarrel, restlessness, a whim. But we tell the story as he told it to us:

"It was a moment when many of the adventurers the war had made of many Southerners were knocking about London hunting for [Pg 96] something to do, and, I hardly knew how, but the something resolved itself into an expedition to go and help the Chilians and, I cannot say why, the Peruvians, too. Anyhow, there were South Americans to be helped against the Spaniards. Some of these people came to me, as a West Point man, and asked me to join—and it was all done in an afternoon. I was off at once in a steamer from Southampton to Panama. We crossed the Isthmus, and it was all very awful—earthquakes and things—and I vowed, once I got home, that nothing would ever bring me back again.

"I found myself in Valparaiso and in Santiago, and I called on the President, or whoever the person then in authority was. After that came the bombardment. There was the beautiful bay with its curving shores, the town of Valparaiso on one side, on the other the long line of hills. And there, just at the entrance of the bay, was the Spanish fleet, and, in between, the English fleet, and the French fleet, and the American fleet, and the Russian fleet, and all the other fleets. And when the morning came, with great circles and sweeps, they sailed out into the open sea, until the Spanish fleet alone remained. It drew up right in front of the town, and bang went a shell, and the bombardment began. The Chilians didn't pretend to defend themselves. The people all got out of the way, and I and the officials, rode to the opposite hills, where we could look on. The Spaniards conducted the performance in the most gentlemanly fashion; they just set fire to a few of the houses, and once, with some sense of fun, sent a shell whizzing over toward our hills. And then I knew what a panic was. I and the officials turned and rode as hard as we could, anyhow, anywhere. The riding was splendid, and I, as a West Point man, was head of the procession. By noon the performance was over. The Spanish fleet sailed again into position, the other fleets sailed in, sailors landed to help put out the fires, and I and the officials rode back into Valparaiso. All the little girls of the town had turned out, waiting for us, and as we rode in called us 'Cowards!' The Henriquetta, the ship fitted up in London, did not appear till long after, and then we breakfasted, and that was the end of it."

Mr. Theodore Roussel says Whistler told him that, on another occasion, he got on one of the defending gunboats and had his baptism of fire amid a rain of shot and shell, and that then, as we have said, [Pg 97] the white lock appeared, a fact which, fine as it is, Whistler omitted from his story to us.

He made good use of his time in Valparaiso, and painted the three pictures of the harbour which are known and two others which have disappeared. These he gave to the steward or the purser of the ship to bring home, and the purser kept them. Once they were seen in his house in London by someone who recognised Whistler's work. "Why, they must be by Whistler!" he said. "Who's Whistler?" asked the purser. "An artist," said the other. "Oh, no," said the purser, "they were painted by a gentleman." The purser started back for South America, and took them with him. "And then a tidal wave met the ship and swept off the purser, the cabin, and the Whistlers." But we believe that one of these pictures is now in the United States.

The voyage back was vaguer than the voyage out. From this vagueness looms one figure: the Marquis de Marmalade, a black man from Hayti, who made himself obnoxious to Whistler, apparently by his colour and his swagger. One day Whistler kicked him across the deck to the top of the companion way, and there sat a lady who proved an obstacle for the moment. But Whistler just picked up the Marquis de Marmalade, dropped him on the step below her, and finished kicking him downstairs. After that Whistler spent the rest of the journey, not exactly in irons, but chiefly in his cabin.

The final adventure of the journey was in London. Whistler never told us, but everybody else says that when he got out of the train at Euston, or Waterloo, someone besides his friends was waiting: whether the captain of the ship, or relations of the Marquis de Marmalade, or an old enemy makes little difference. Somebody got a thrashing, and this was the end to the most unaccountable episode in Whistler's life.

It was late in 1866 when Whistler returned from Valparaiso. Soon after he moved into No. 2,[4] at the east end of Lindsey Row, now

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No. 96 Cheyne Walk. It was a three-storey house with an attic, part of the old palace remodelled, and, like No. 7, it looked on the river. Here he lived longer than anywhere else; here he painted the Nocturnes and the great portraits; here he gave his Sunday breakfasts. He had a house-warming on February 5 (1867), when the two Rossettis dined with him, and Mr. W. M. Rossetti wrote in his diary:

"There are some fine old fixtures, such as doors, fireplaces, and Whistler has got up the rooms with many delightful Japanesisms. Saw for the first time his pagoda cabinet. He has two or three sea-pieces new to me: one, on which he particularly lays stress, larger than the others, a very grey unbroken sea [probably Sea and Rain], also a clever vivacious portrait of himself begun."

No doubt this is the portrait in round hat, with paint-brushes in his hand.

Mr. Greaves says that the dining-room at No. 2 was blue, with a darker blue dado and doors, and purple Japanese fans tacked on the walls and ceiling; other friends remember "a fluttering of purple fans." One evening Miss Chapman was dining, and Whistler, wanting her to see the view up the river from the other end of the bridge, told her he would show her something "as lovely as a fan!" The studio, again the second-storey back room, was grey, with black dado and doors; from the Mother and the Carlyle one knows that Japanese hangings and his prints were on the walls; and in it was the big screen he painted for Leyland but kept for himself, with Battersea Bridge across the top, Chelsea Church beyond, and a great gold moon in the deep blue sky. The stairs were covered with Dutch metal. He slept in a huge Chinese bed. Beautiful silver was on his table. He ate off blue and white. "Suppose one of these plates was smashed?" Miss Chapman asked Whistler once. "Why, then, you know," he said, "we might as well all take hands and go throw ourselves into the Thames!"

The beauty of the decoration, as at No. 7, was its simplicity. Rossetti's house was a museum, an antiquity shop, in comparison. The simplicity seemed the more bewildering because it was the growth, not of weeks, but of years. The drawing-room was not painted until the day of Whistler's first dinner-party. In the morning he sent for the brothers Greaves to help him. "It will never be dry in time!" [Pg 99] they feared. "What matter?" said Whistler, "it will be beautiful!" "We three worked like mad," is Mr. Walter Greaves' account, and by evening the walls were flushed with flesh-colour, pale yellow, and white spread over doors and woodwork, and we have heard gowns and coats too were touched with flesh-colour and yellow before the evening was at an end. One Sunday morning Whistler, after he had taken his mother to Chelsea Church, as he always did, again sent for his pupils and painted a great ship with spreading sails in each of the two panels at the end of the hall; the ships are said to be still on the wall covered up. His mother was not so pleased when, on her return, she saw the blue and white harmony, for she would have had him put away his brushes on Sunday as once she put away his toys. But she had many other trials and revelations: coming into the studio one day, she found the parlour-maid posing for "the all-over!" The ships were in place long before the dado of hall and stairway was covered with gold and sprinkled with rose and white chrysanthemum petals. Miss Alexander (Mrs. Spring-Rice) saw Whistler at work upon it when she came to sit, and he had lived six years at No. 2. Whistler's houses were never completely decorated and furnished; they had a look as if he had just moved in or was just moving out. But what was decorated was beautiful.

Whistler sent to the exhibitions of 1867, in London and Paris. He began the year by showing at the French Gallery, in January, one of the paintings of Valparaiso: Crépuscule in Flesh Colour and Green. It is the long picture of Valparaiso Harbour in the early evening, ships moored with partly furled sails; the first painting of twilight, and one of the first paintings carried out in the liquid manner of the Nocturnes. There were critics to call it a poem "in colour," though Whistler had not taught them to look for the "painter's poetry" in his work. The upright Valparaiso, a perfect Nocturne, was done at the same time, 1866, but not exhibited until later, and there is an unfinished version of the same subject.

In the Salon of 1867, where it had been rejected eight years before, At the Piano was accepted, and also The Thames in Ice—Sur la Tamise: l'Hiver. It was the year of the French Universal Exhibition. M. Duret writes that probably Mr. George Lucas spoke of Whistler to Mr. Avery, the United States Art Commissioner at the Exhibition. The result [Pg 100] was that a number of his etchings and four pictures were hung: The White Girl, Wapping or On the Thames, Old Battersea Bridge, Twilight on the Ocean, the title then of the Crépuscule in Flesh Colour and Green. The Hudson River School dominated American art, and Whistler's paintings had to compete with the big machines of Church and Bierstadt. Tuckerman, in his Book of the Artists, quotes an unnamed American critic who, in 1867, found that Whistler's etchings differed from his paintings in meriting the attention they attracted, but he could see in the Marines only "blurred, foggy imperfections," and in The White Girl only "a powerful female with red hair, and a vacant stare in her soulless eyes. She is standing on a wolfskin hearthrug, for what reason is unrecorded. The picture evidently means vastly more than it expresses—albeit expressing too much. Notwithstanding an obvious want of purpose, there is some boldness in the handling, and singularity in the glare of the colours which cannot fail to divert the eye and weary it."

Americans were not treated with respect by the Hanging Committee. Their work was put in corridors and dark corners, and Whistler suffered. French critics, enthusiastic over his pictures four years earlier, were now no more appreciative than the American. Paul Mantz was distressed by the "strange white apparition" upon which, at the Salon des Refusés, he had lavished his praise. Burty thought that either time exaggerated the defects of the prints or else critical eyes had lost their indulgence, for the etchings were photographic and had a dryness and minuteness due to the early training of "Mr. Whystler." Both wrote in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Mr. Avery, however, had the sense to appreciate the etchings, and it was probably at this time he commenced his great collection, now in the New York Public Library.

Whistler and his brother, the Doctor, went to Paris in April. There they heard of the sudden death of Traer, Seymour Haden's assistant, and a member of the British Jury, on which Haden also served. Whistler liked Traer, and the circumstances of his death and burial led to a misunderstanding between the two brothers and the brother-in-law. The three met. The dispute was short and sharp; the result, a summons for the brothers to appear before a juge de paix. Whistler had been in the same court a few days earlier. A workman had dropped plaster on him as he passed through a narrow street in the Latin Quarter, and he had met the offence in the only [Pg 101] way possible according to his code. Whistler sent for the American Minister, and the magistrate apologised. When he appeared again, "Connu!" said the judge, and there was no apology, but a fine. Haden said he fell through a plate-glass window, Whistler that he knocked him through. Haden maintained that both brothers were against him, Whistler that he demolished Haden single-handed.

It happened just when London gossip got hold of the story of the Marquis de Marmalade and Whistler's return from Valparaiso. Dr. Moncure Conway, in his Reminiscences, recalls a dinner given by Dante Rossetti to W. J. Stillman, in the winter of 1867, when "Whistler (a Confederate) related with satisfaction his fisticuff with a Yankee [really the black Marquis] on shipboard, William Rossetti remarked: 'I must say, Whistler, that your conduct was scandalous.' (Stillman and myself were silent.) Dante Gabriel promptly wrote:

It was at this time, too, that Whistler had a difference with Legros, to which no reference would be made had it not also become a legend. Friends tried to reconcile them and succeeded badly. The rumours spread, and Whistler began to be talked of as quarrelsome. Haden, when he got back to London, resigned his post as Honorary Surgeon to South Kensington Museum, printed a pamphlet to explain, and threatened to resign from the Burlington Fine Arts Club, of which both he and Whistler were members, unless Whistler was expelled. The Burlington Club wrote to Whistler that if he did not resign they would have to consider his expulsion. Both the Rossettis considered this very improper, and when Whistler's expulsion was voted by eighteen against eight, William Michael Rossetti handed in his resignation at once and Dante Rossetti sent in his two or three days later.

Whistler's manner of resenting injury had a great deal to do with the way he was later treated in England. He explained his code to a friend: "If a man gives you the lie to your face, why, naturally you [Pg 102] hit him." People who did not know him became afraid of him, and this fear grew and was the reason of the reputation that clung to him for years and clings to his memory.

Before Whistler's pictures went to the Royal Academy, Mr. W. M. Rossetti saw them: "March 31 (1867). To see Whistler's pictures for the R.A. To the R.A. he means to send Symphony in White, No. III. (heretofore named The Two Little White Girls), and a Thames picture; possibly also one of the four sea pictures; and I rather recommend him to select the largest of these, which he regards with predilection, of a grey sea and a very grey sky."

Battersea was the Thames picture; Sea and Rain, painted while Whistler and Courbet worked together at Trouville, the sea picture; and The Two Little White Girls was sent under its new name, Symphony in White, No. III.—the first time one of his pictures was catalogued as a Symphony, his first use of a title borrowed from musical terms to explain his pictorial intention.

Baudelaire had given the hint in prose, Gautier had written Symphonies in verse, Murger's Bohemians had composed a Symphonie sur l'influence de bleu dans les arts. In 1863 Paul Mantz had described The White Girl as a "Symphony in White." There can be no doubt that from these things Whistler got the idea. It was the third variation of white upon white. The difference was in the thin liquid paint. The critic of the Athenæum had the sense to thank the "painter who endeavours by any means to show people what he really aims at." But he was almost alone. Burty, in noticing the Academy of 1867 for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, thought the Academy's hanging Whistler at all a fine piece of irony, and regretted the painter's failure to fulfil his early promise.

Hamerton, in the Saturday Review, June 1, 1867, represented the feeling of the insulted, solemn, bewildered Islanders: "There are many dainty varieties of tint, but it is not precisely a symphony in white. One lady has a yellowish dress and brown hair and a bit of blue ribbon; the other has a red fan, and there are flowers and green leaves. There is a girl in white on a white sofa, but even this girl has reddish hair; and, of course, there is the flesh-colour of the complexions."

Whistler answered in a letter, not printed, however, until it appeared [Pg 103] in the Art Journal (April 1887): "Bon Dieu! did this wise person expect white hair and chalked faces? And does he then, in his astounding consequence, believe that a symphony in F contains no other note, but shall be a continued repetition of F F F?... Fool!"

Whistler knew that to carry on tradition was the artist's business. Rembrandt, Hals, Velasquez, Claude, Canaletto, Guardi, Hogarth, Courbet, the Japanese, in turn influenced him. Some see, at this period, the influence of Albert Moore, which, if it existed, was as ephemeral and superficial as Rossetti's. It could be argued with more truth that Whistler influenced Albert Moore, who, in at least two pictures, Harmony of Orange and Pale Yellow, Variation of Blue and Gold, borrowed Whistler's titles. Whistler also knew that the end of all study of the masters should be to evolve something personal, and, in the endeavour to develop his personality, he was passing through experiments and working through difficulties. All this is in his letters to Fantin. A fourth Symphony in White was started: the Three Figures. In the Two Girls, he wrote to Fantin, the harmony was repeated in line and in colour, and he sent a sketch of it. He exulted in the rhythm of line; he despaired because he could not get it right. The picture was scraped out and rubbed down, then repainted, and with each fresh difficulty he deplored the mistakes of his early training. Mr. Eddy writes that Whistler used to call Ingres the "bourgeois Greek." This we never heard him say, nor is there any such want of respect in his letters to Fantin, for there he expresses regret that he "did not study under Ingres," whose work he may have liked moderately, "but from whom I would have learned to draw": which was absurd modesty, for he drew better than Ingres, if not so academically, as his etchings prove. He never execrated Courbet and denounced ce damné Réalisme so violently as in the autumn of 1867. This was not quite fair, for Realism had brought Courbet to the conclusions which Whistler, unaided, was now reaching: that knowledge of art, ancient and modern, has no end save the development of individuality, and that the artist is to go to Nature for inspiration, but to take from her only life and beauty. Whistler, in his impatience, recalled Realism as practised by the young enthusiasts gathered about Courbet, and denied that Courbet influenced him. "Ca ne pouvait pas être autrement, parce que je suis très personnel, et que j'ai été riche en qualités qu'il n'avait [Pg 104] pas et qui me suffisaient." The cry of Nature had appealed to his vanity, Whistler said, and so he had mocked at tradition, and in his early work had copied Nature with the self-confidence of "l'écolier débauché." If at one moment he boasted that the race was for Fantin and himself, because in art, as at the Derby, "c'est le pur sang qui gagné," the next he chafed over the time he had lost before discovering that art is not the exact reproduction of Nature, but its interpretation, and that the artist must seek his motives in Nature and weave from them a pattern on his canvas. He praised Fantin's flowers because he saw in them this pattern. Passages in the letters are the basis of The Ten O'Clock. His definition of the relation of drawing to colour—"son amant, mais aussi son maître"—suggests the later definition of the relation of the artist to Nature: "her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her." Whistler used the same ideas in his talk, in his letters, in his pamphlets, perfecting it.

It was the period of transition. Those who saw him know how hard he worked, and how he was discouraged. For a while he lived with Mr. Frederick Jameson. He never spoke to us of this interval away from Lindsey Row. Mr. Jameson says it was 1868 or 1869; most likely the winter of 1867-68, when Mrs. Whistler went home to visit her family, left poor by the war. Mr. Jameson lived at 62 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, in rooms that had first been Burne-Jones', and afterwards Poynter's. Mr. Jameson writes us:

"The seven months Whistler and I lived together were unproductive and uneventful. He was working at some Japanese pictures, one of which, quite unfinished, was hung at the London Memorial Exhibition. I have seen large portions of it apparently finished, but they never satisfied him, and were shaved down to the bed-rock mercilessly. The man, as I knew him, was so different from the descriptions and presentations I have read of him that I would like to speak of the other side of his character. It is impossible to conceive of a more unfailingly courteous, considerate, and delightful companion than Whistler, as I found him. We lived in great intimacy, and the studio was always open to me, whatever he was doing. We had all our meals together, except when elsewhere engaged, and I never heard a complaint of anything in our simple household arrangements from him. Any little failure was treated as a joke. His courtesy to servants and models was particularly charming; indeed, I can't conceive of his quarrelling with anyone without real provocation. His talk about his own work revealed a very different man to me from the self-satisfied man he is usually believed to have been. He knew his powers, of course, but he was painfully aware of his defects—in drawing, for instance. I can remember with verbal accuracy some very striking talks we had on the subject. To my judgment he was the most absolutely truthful man about himself that I ever met. I never knew him to hide an opinion or a thought, nor to try to excuse an action."

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The picture Mr. Jameson refers to was called Three Figures, Pink and Grey,[5] in the London Memorial Exhibition. It alone was carried out of the Six or Eight Schemes or Projects in which Whistler was trying to combine Japanese and classical motives, expressing a beauty of form and design that haunted him, and was perhaps best realised in some of the pastel studies. He never ceased to make these studies. There are pastels, chalk drawings, and etchings in which the separate figures of the Projects may be found, studies for the series; one was worked out as a fan, another like a cameo. The second version of the Three Figures, enlarged from a smaller design, Whistler explained to Mr. Alan S. Cole, was an arrangement he wanted to paint, and he then drew, with a sweep of the brush, the back of the stooping figure to show what he meant. W. M. Rossetti most likely referred to it when he wrote in his diary for July 28, 1867:

"Whistler is doing on a largish scale for Leyland the subject of women with flowers, and has made coloured sketches of four or five other subjects of the like class, very promising in point of conception of colour and arrangement."

The Projects were his first scheme of decoration for Leyland. The canvases are about the same size. They are painted with liquid colour, the canvas often showing through. The handling in all save the Venus, shown in the Paris Memorial Exhibition and worked on in his later years, is more direct than anything he ever did. They have the same relation to his pictures as the sketches of Rubens and Tiepolo to their decorations. The Venus is a single figure, the rest are groups arranged against a balustrade, round a vase of flowers, or on the sands by the sea. Their floating draperies give the scheme of

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colour. The experience gained in making these designs was of immense use in the Nocturnes, for the technique is the same, and the same treatment is in the pile of drapery of the Miss Alexander. He did not give up until much later this method of painting. The complete series had never been seen publicly before the Paris Memorial Exhibition. They belong to Mr. Freer.

During all his life, till he was given a commission for a panel in the Boston Public Library, Whistler hoped to have the chance to execute a great decorative scheme. When the Central Gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum was being decorated, Sir Henry Cole asked him to design one of the mosaic panels. For this, in the winter of 1873, he made a pastel, a richly robed figure carrying a Japanese umbrella. The scheme was in blue, purple, and gold, and a pastel study for it was shown at the London Memorial Exhibition as Design for a Mosaic. He spoke of it at the time as The Gold Girl. The design was to be enlarged and put on canvas by the brothers Greaves. Sir Henry Cole offered him a studio in the Museum when he was ready to begin his cartoon. "You know, Sir Henry Cole always liked me, and I told him he ought to provide me with a fine studio—it would be an honour to me—and to the Museum!" But models broke down, the fog settled over London, he wanted to get through his Academy picture, he was called to Paris. Whether the cartoon was finished, or whether it was found out of keeping with the machines of Royal Academicians in the Central Gallery, is not known. But the decoration was never done.

Hamerton's Etching and Etchers was published in 1868. Shortly before, he wrote to Whistler: "I wonder whether you would object to lend me a set of proofs for a few weeks. As the book is already advanced I should be glad of an early reply. My opinion of your work is, on the whole, so favourable that your reputation could only gain by your affording me the opportunity of speaking of your work at length."

Whistler took no notice of the request at the time, but printed it years afterwards as the Unanswered Letter in The Gentle Art. Hamerton, unused to being ignored by artists, expressed his astonishment in his book: "I have been told that, if application is made by letter to Mr. Whistler for a set of his etchings, he may, perhaps, if he chooses to answer the letter, do the applicant the favour to let him have a copy for about the price of a good horse."

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His praise was never without qualification. He saw in Whistler a strikingly imperfect artist, self-concentrated, without range or poetical feeling, whose work was rarely affecting, and most of these remarks were reprinted by Whistler with the Unanswered Letter as Inconsequences. In the end Whistler let Hamerton have a plate, Billingsgate, in its third state, published in the Portfolio (January 1878), and, two years after, in the third edition of Etching and Etchers (1880).

Hamerton, patronising in his estimate of Whistler's work, exaggerated in his comments on Whistler's prices. Success never induced Whistler deliberately to increase the price of his etchings by making them rare, in the fashion of the young men of to-day. It was different with his dry-points, the number of impressions being limited. Mr. Percy Thomas says that Whistler would throw them on the floor at Lindsey Row and consider them. "I think for this we must say five guineas, and for this six, and for this I must say—ten!" But Mr. Thomas remembers only one attempt to create a price. He had been sent from Bond Street to Lindsey Row with prints for Whistler to sign, and the next day he returned for them. Whistler and Mrs. Whistler were sitting together, silent and sad, and Whistler hurried from the studio without a word. "But what is it? What has happened?" Mr. Thomas asked, and Mrs. Whistler explained that Whistler had thrown the prints into the fire, thinking it would be a good thing to make them rare, and had been miserable since. If he destroyed work he was sure to regret it. "J'ai tant pleuré après," as he wrote to Fantin. Another incident remembered by Mr. Thomas would have altered Hamerton's idea of Whistler's business methods. Edmund Thomas had gone to the studio and offered a sum for all the prints in it. Whistler accepted the offer, Mr. Thomas drew a cheque, and carried off the prints. A couple of hours later a messenger appeared with a bundle of proofs. Whistler had come upon them, and sent word that, according to the bargain, they belonged to Mr. Thomas.

Towards the end of the sixties, or beginning of the seventies, Mr. Murray Marks tried to start a Fine Art Company with Alexander Ionides, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Morris to deal in pictures, prints, blue and white, and decorative work. They were to sell Watts', Burne-Jones', and Rossetti's pictures, and Whistler's etchings, possibly his paintings. Ionides, who was to advance two or three thousand [Pg 108] pounds, bought the sixteen plates by Whistler now known as the Thames Set, and the prints from them. The sum paid was three hundred pounds. A secretary was engaged for the company, but that was the end of it. The plates became the absolute property of Ionides. He had a hundred sets printed; he gave one set to each of his children; the others were taken over by Messrs. Ellis and Green, and published in 1871 as Sixteen Etchings of Scenes on the Thames, price twelve guineas. Later, the plates came into the possession of the Fine Art Society, who sold the prints unsigned as a set in a portfolio for fourteen guineas, or, singly, from half a guinea to two guineas and a half. Finally Mr. Keppel, of New York, bought the coppers, had the steel facing removed, for they had been steeled, Goulding printed a number from each, and some good prints were obtained. The plates were then destroyed.

Official recognition of Whistler, the etcher, continued. The British Museum bought his prints and only stopped when, some years ago, it was discovered that the work of living artists could not be purchased for the Print Room. The ignorance of this regulation was of value to the Museum, where there are now one hundred and nine etchings by Whistler. At the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, there are sixty-one prints, besides several issued in various publications and a second Thames Set in the Ionides Collection. For several years the late Sir Richard R. Holmes purchased prints for Windsor Castle Library, about one hundred and forty in all. He wrote us:

"It is difficult to say when, or how, I first began collecting Whistler's etchings. I had a few, and then I met several while I was looking after other things at Thibaudeau's, and, gradually, I found I had so many that I thought it best to make the collection as complete as I could, and got a number from Whistler himself."

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Often Sir Richard went to the studio; often Whistler sent to Windsor prints he thought should be there. The Venetian series was bought. Finally, after Sir Richard's retirement, they were sold "to improve the collection" at what was supposed the height of the "Whistler boom," and after they had been praised in the Memorial Exhibitions of London and Paris. As King Edward VII. on his visit to the London Memorial Exhibition expressed surprise at the few he looked at, it is certain that his Majesty was unaware that the collection was at Windsor. Even the portfolio, presented by Whistler to Queen Victoria with his autograph letter asking her acceptance, was first lost, and, when found, sold in 1906, the few prints in Princess Victoria's apartments only being kept. The disposal of the etchings was so badly managed that the Jubilee series brought more, when re-sold a few weeks after the King parted with them, than his Majesty got for the whole collection. During Whistler's lifetime important collections of his etchings were acquired also by the Museums of Dresden, Venice, and Melbourne, and the New York Public Library.

The success of Whistler's plates during the following years is a contrast to the fate of his pictures, which for a long period were neglected. He had nothing in the Academy of 1868. Mr. Jameson has told us of his despair because the Three Girls was not finished in time, and of their wandering together about town, in and out of galleries and museums, until at last, before Velasquez in the National Gallery, Whistler took heart again. And he delighted in the admiration of Swinburne in Notes on Some Pictures of 1868. The paintings which had not been submitted "to the loose and slippery judgment of an academy," but had been seen by Swinburne in the studio and seemed to him "to have grown as a flower grows," were evidently the Projects. A special quality of Whistler's genius, Swinburne said, is "a freshness and fullness of the loveliest life of things, with a high, clear power upon them which seems to educe a picture as the sun does a blossom or a fruit."

In 1869 the Academy moved to Burlington House, and there in 1870 Whistler showed The Balcony. From 1867 to 1870 he did not show in the Salon. Whistler, like Rossetti, was never without his public, though many years passed before he received Rossetti's rewards. He could rely on the Ionides, Leathart, Frederick Leyland, Huth, Alexander, Rawlinson, Anderson Rose, Jameson, Chapman, Potter. But, unlike Rossetti, he wanted to show his work and receive for it rewards. As far back as 1864 Fantin wrote to Edwin Edwards of Whistler's perseverance, his determination to get into the Salon, a phase of his character Fantin said he had not known. Whistler's absence from exhibitions was not his fault. It was his hatred of rejection and fear of being badly hung that drove him from them.

The tyranny of the Academy was no new thing. The opening [Pg 110] of the exhibition was every year the occasion of scandal and of protest against an institution that rejected and still rejects distinguished artists. One gallery after another took up the outsiders. After the Berners Street Gallery came the Dudley, which, in 1867, added to its show of water-colours a show of oils; in 1868, the Corinthian Gallery in Argyll Street; in 1869, the Select Supplementary Exhibition in Bond Street—these last two poor affairs more apt to justify than expose the Academy. Dealers came to the rescue: the French Gallery in Pall Mall, and the Society of French Artists, where Durand-Ruel brought his collection in 1870, and, under the management of M. Charles Deschamps, gave exhibitions until 1877. In the French Gallery and with M. Deschamps Whistler showed many times. He contributed often to the Dudley from 1871, and there the next year, 1872, exhibited for the first time a Nocturne. His use of titles to explain his intention was now so well established that in 1872, when The White Girl and the Princesse were in the International Exhibition at South Kensington, they were catalogued as Symphony in White, No. 1., and Variations in Flesh Colour, Blue, and Grey, later changed to Grey and Rose; and he supplied the explanation, printed in the "Programme of Reception." They were "the complete results of harmonies obtained by employing the infinite tones and variations of a limited number of colours."

His portrait of his mother was sent to the Academy of 1872—Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother. It was refused. Madox Brown wrote to George Rae: "I hear that Whistler has had the portrait of his mother turned out. If so, it is a shame, because I saw the picture, and know it to be good and beautiful, though, I suppose, not to the taste of Messrs. Ansdell and Dobson."

Sir William Boxall threatened to resign from the Council if the portrait was not hung, for he would not have it said that a committee to which he belonged had rejected it. Similar threats have been heard in recent years, and the rejected work has stayed out, and the Academicians have stayed in. Boxall would not yield, and the picture was hung, not well, yet not out of sight; groups, it is said, were always gathered before it to laugh. Still, there it was, the last picture by Whistler at the Academy, where nothing of his was again seen, save [Pg 111] one etching in 1879: Putney Bridge, published by the Fine Art Society and probably sent by them.

The whole affair made talk. But 1872 is interesting, above all, as the year when Whistler first exhibited a portrait as an Arrangement and an impression of night as a Nocturne.

As it was the last year he showed a picture in the Academy, it may be as well to complete here our account of his relations with this institution. It is said that he put his name down, or allowed it to be put down, for election. He was never elected. Other Americans were, for the Royal Academy is so broad in its constitution that an artist need not be an Englishman, need not be resident in Great Britain, need not have shown on its walls to become a member or honorary member. But though during all these years and until the day of his death Whistler would have accepted election, we have never heard that he obtained a single vote. George Boughton, an American artist and a member of the Royal Academy, explained the Academic attitude when he said that if Whistler had "behaved himself" he would have been President. Even this concession Boughton qualified: "Now, if anyone knowing Whistler and me should go about thinking me serious in imagining that he would make a good President—even of an East End boxing club—such persons live in dense error."

The only comment to make is that Boughton did not understand Whistler, and, in company with the Academy, had not the least artistic sense, or even business appreciation in this matter.

Whistler would have accepted election for one reason only—because of the official rank it would have given him in England. Other Americans hustled to get it; he expected it as an honour which he deserved. He knew himself to be more distinguished than any member of the Royal Academy. Though recognition was withheld during his lifetime, several Academicians attempted to secure for the Academy a posthumous glory by endeavouring to get together an exhibition of his works the winter after his death. It would, indeed, have been irony if the Academy had, in return for its neglect of Whistler, got the kudos and cash as their reward. Another instance of what Americans call "graft" is in the absence from the Chantrey Collection of a picture by Whistler, and the presence of the work of the Academicians who administer the Fund. The Trustees, although they have bought their [Pg 112] own work, paying as much as one thousand pounds to Sir Edward J. Poynter, three thousand to Sir Hubert von Herkomer, three thousand and fifty to Lord Leighton, two thousand to Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., over two thousand to Mr. Frank Dicksee, two thousand to Sir W. Q. Orchardson, two thousand to Vicat Cole, who are or were members of the Council of the Academy, never even offered the sixty pounds for which they might have bought Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, since purchased for two thousand by public subscription and given to the Tate Gallery. Is it any wonder that Whistler, disgusted with such conduct, especially on the part of his fellow countrymen, members of the Academy, and others, who might have elected him, left as his only written request relative to his pictures we have seen, the wish that none should ever find a place in any English Gallery? Death did not spare him Academical jealousy. Not content with ignoring him during his lifetime, officially insulting his memory after his death, Sir Edward Poynter, then Director, when he hung Old Battersea Bridge in the National Gallery, affixed to it, or allowed to be affixed, a label on which Whistler's name was misspelt, Whistler described as of the British School, the title of the picture incorrectly given, while Whistler's decorated frame was hung upside down. The picture has since, by the irony of fate, been placed in the Gallery of Modern British Art!

Whistler was the first to paint the night. The blue mystery that veils the world from dusk to dawn is in the colour-prints of Hiroshige. But the wood-block cannot give the depth of darkness, the method makes a convention of colour. Hiroshige saw and felt the beauty and invented a scheme by which to suggest it on the block, but he could not render the night as Whistler rendered it on canvas.

Though colour-prints suggested the Nocturnes, they were only the suggestion. Whistler never copied Japanese technique. But Japanese composition impressed him—the arrangement, the pattern, and at times the detail. The high or low horizon, the line of a bridge over a river, the spray of foliage in the foreground, the golden curve of a falling rocket, the placing of a figure on the shore, the signature in the oblong panel, show how much he learned. He abandoned the Japanese convention in a few years, but he never gave up, he developed rather, what he always spoke of as the Japanese method of drawing.[6] He translated Japanese art—translate is the word—though he said that he "carried on tradition." His idea was not to go to the Japanese as greater than himself, but to learn what he could from them and make another work of art; a work founded on tradition no less than theirs, and yet as Western as theirs was Eastern.

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Night, beautiful everywhere from Valparaiso to Venice, is never more beautiful than in London. First he painted the Thames in the grey day, but, as time went on, he painted it in the blue night. Only those who have lived by the river for years, as we have, can realise the truth as well as the beauty of the Nocturnes. He still, like Courbet, "loved things for what they were," but he chose the exquisite, the poetic. The foolishness of Nature never appealed to him. But Courbet was no more a realist than Whistler if realism means truth.

The long nights on the river were followed by long days in the studio. In the end he gave up making notes. It was impossible for him to work in colour at night, and he had to trust to his memory. In his portraits and his pictures done by day he had a model. But looking at colour and arrangement by night, and retaining the memory until the next morning simply means a longer interval between observation and execution. And, carrying on the tradition of the Japanese and the method of drawing from memory advocated by Lecoq de Boisbaudran, and practised by many of his most distinguished contemporaries in France, Whistler developed his powers of observation. Even then, as he said, to retain the memory of the subject required as hard training as a football player goes through. His method was to go out at night, and all his pupils or followers agree in this, stand before his subject and look at it, then turn his back on it and repeat to whoever was with him the arrangement, the scheme of colour, and as much of the detail as he wanted. The listener corrected errors when they occurred, and, after Whistler had looked long enough, he went to bed with nothing in his head but his subject. The next morning, as he

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told his apprentice, Mrs. Clifford Addams, if he could see upon the untouched canvas the completed picture, he painted it; if not, he passed another night in looking at the subject. However, it was not two nights' observation alone, but the knowledge of a lifetime that enabled him to paint the Nocturnes. This power to see a finished picture on a bare canvas is possessed by all great artists. But the greater the artist the more he sees and the better he presents it.

Whistler said "Nature put him out," because the arrangement as he found it put him out; Nature is never right. Few painters have understood the art of selection, and here Hiroshige and the other Japanese were of use. He went to Nature for the motive, to the Japanese for the design. This was why he said Nature was at once his master and his servant. The Nocturnes looked so simple to a public trained by Ruskin to believe that signs of labour are the chief merits in a picture, that they seemed unfinished—just knocked off. Yet his letters to Fantin are full of regret for his slowness: "Je suis si lent.... Les choses ne vont pas vite.... Je produis peu parceque j'efface tout!" No one knew the hard work that produced the simplicity. In no other paintings was Whistler as successful in following his own precepts and concealing traces of toil. One touch less and nothing would be left; one touch more and the spell would be broken, and night stripped of mystery. To give the silhouette of bridge or building against the sky; the lines of light trailing through the water or leading to infinite distance; the boats, ghosts fading into the ghostly river; the fall of rockets through shadowy air—to give all these things, and yet to keep them shrouded in the transparency of darkness was the problem he set himself in the Nocturnes painted in the little second-storey back room at Chelsea. It was the night he saw and studied at Cremorne, darker, more mysterious for the sudden flare of the fireworks, for the glow in which little figures danced, for the hint of draperies passing in and out of the shadows—night that toned the tawdry gardens and their vulgar crowd into beauty.

Now everyone can see, and "night is like a Whistler," for Whistler compelled people to look at his pictures, until it has become impossible to look at night without seeing the Nocturnes. He painted the impression that night made on him, and the great artist, like the great author, moves people until they think they see things as he does. Even [Pg 115] in that ever-quoted passage from The Ten O'Clock, he does not pretend to see Nature as people see her or as Nature seems to be; his concern is with the impression that Nature at night made on him, and in this he was an impressionist.

The brothers Greaves bought his materials and prepared his canvas and colours. "I know all these things because I passed days and weeks in the place standing by him," Walter Greaves has said to us. Whistler remade his brushes, heating them over a candle, melting the glue and pushing the hair into the shape he wanted. Greaves says that the colours were mixed with linseed oil and turpentine. Whistler told us that he used a medium composed of copal, mastic, and turpentine. The colours were arranged upon a palette, a large oblong board some two feet by three, with the butterfly inlaid in one corner and sunken boxes for brushes and tubes round the edges. This palette was laid upon a table. He had at various periods two or three; and at least one stand, with many tiny drawers, upon which the palette fitted. At the top of the palette the pure colours were placed, though, more frequently, there were no pure colours at all. Large quantities of different tones of the prevailing colour in the picture to be painted were mixed, and so much of the medium was used that he called it "sauce." Greaves says that the Nocturnes were mostly painted on a very absorbent canvas, sometimes on panels, sometimes on bare brown holland, sized. For the blue Nocturnes, the canvas was covered with a red ground, or the panel was of mahogany, which the pupils got from their boat-building yard, the red forcing up the blues laid on it. Others were done on a warm black, and for the fireworks there was a lead ground. Or, if the night was grey, then, Whistler said, "the sky is grey, and the water is grey, and, therefore, the canvas must be grey." Only once within Greaves' memory was the ground white. The ground for his Nocturnes, like the paper for his pastels, was chosen of the prevailing tone of the picture he wanted to paint or of a colour which would give him that tone, not to save work, but to avoid fatiguing the canvas.

When Whistler had arranged his colour-scheme on the palette, the canvas, which the pupils prepared, was stood on an easel, but so much "sauce" was used that frequently it had to be thrown flat on the floor to keep the whole thing from running off. He washed the liquid colour on, lightening and darkening the tones as he worked. In the [Pg 116] Nocturnes, the sky and water are rendered with great sweeps of the brush of exactly the right tone. How many times he made and wiped out that sweeping tone is another matter. When it was right, there it stayed. With his life's knowledge of both the effects he wanted to paint and the way to paint them, at times, as he admits himself, he completed a Nocturne in a day. In some he got his effect at once, in others it came only after endless failures. If the tones were right, he took them off his palette and kept them until the next day, in saucers, or gallipots, under water, so that he might carry on his work in the same way with the same tones. Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt tells us that when she lived in Cheyne Walk, she remembers "seeing the Nocturnes set out along the garden wall to bake in the sun." Some were laid aside to dry slowly in the studio, some were put in the garden or on the roof to dry quickly. Sometimes they dried out like body-colour in the most unexpected fashion. It was a time of tireless research. He had to invent everything, though he profited by the technical training he had gained in painting the Six Projects.

Whistler first called his paintings of night Moonlights. Nocturne was Mr. Leyland's suggestion, as we have heard from Mrs. Leyland, and her son-in-law, Val Prinsep, stated in the Art Journal (August 1892), that Whistler wrote to Leyland:

"I can't thank you too much for the name Nocturne as the title for my Moonlights. You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics, and consequent pleasure to me; besides it is really so charming, and does so poetically say all I want to say and no more than I wish."

Whether to mystify, or because he saw something new in his pictures, Whistler repeatedly changed their titles, especially of the Nocturnes, and repeatedly exhibited different pictures with the same title. It is true, as Mr. Bernard Sickert writes: "such alterations made by the artist himself stultify the whole idea, and prove that the analogy with music does not hold consistently. Any musician would tell us that we could not change the title of Symphony in C minor to Sonata in G major without making it an absurdity."

That he should either not have realised this fact, or else have disregarded it deliberately, is the more extraordinary because every Nocturne represents a different effect rendered in a different fashion. [Pg 117] Although he altered his titles, nothing offended him more than when others tampered with them or stole them.

The painting of the Nocturnes continued for many years, and in many places. But the greater number were painted when he lived at Lindsey Row, most from his windows, and few took him beyond Battersea and Westminster. He resented it when people suggested literary titles for them, and he put his resentment into words that "make history" in The Red Rag, one of the most interesting documents in The Gentle Art, published originally in the World (May 22, 1878):

"My picture of a Harmony in Grey and Gold is an illustration of my meaning—a snow scene with a single black figure and a lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. All that I know is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture. Now this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp. They say, 'Why not call it "Trotty Veck," and sell it for a round harmony of golden guineas?'"

Lord Redesdale told us that it was he who suggested this title, gaily. Whistler assured another of his friends that he had only to write "Father, dear Father, come home with me now" on the painting for it to become the "picture of the year." Subject, sentiment, meaning were for him in the night itself—the night in its loveliness and mystery. There is no doubt that he carried tradition further and made greater advance in the Nocturnes than in any of his paintings. The subjects are the simplest—factories, bridges, boats and barges, shops, gardens—but in his hands they became things of beauty that will live for ever. The Nocturnes are not all moonlights; we remember only a few in which the moon appears, some are illumined only by flickering lamplight. They are not invariably pictures of night, but at times of dawn or of twilight. Nocturnes, however, is the name Whistler chose for all, and by it they will always be known.

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While Whistler was painting the Nocturnes, he was working on the large portraits. The Mother was the first. We cannot say when he began it. He wrote of it to Fantin, promising to send a photograph, in 1871, but it was not shown until 1872. How many were the sittings, how often the work was scraped down or wiped out, no one will ever know. We have some interesting technical details from Walter Greaves. The portrait was painted on the back of a canvas, as J. saw when it was sent to the London Memorial Exhibition, as Otto Bacher saw when the picture was in Whistler's studio in 1883:

"I noticed that it was painted on the back of a canvas, on the face of which was the portrait of a child. My remark, 'Why, you have painted your mother on the back of a canvas!' received simply the reply: 'Isn't that a good surface?'"

There was scarcely any paint used, Greaves says, the canvas being simply rubbed over to get the dress, and, as at first the dado had been painted across the canvas, it shows through the skirt. Harper Pennington says that the canvas, being absorbent, was stained all through from the painting on the face. But this does not alter Greaves' statement. That wonderful handkerchief in the tired old hands, Greaves describes as "nothing but a bit of white and oil."

What Whistler wanted was to place upon canvas a beautiful arrangement, a beautiful pattern, of colour and line. No painter since Hals and Velasquez thought so much of placing his figure on the canvas inside the frame. No painter since Velasquez understood so well the value of restrained line and restrained colour. The long, vertical and horizontal lines in the background, the footstool, the matting, the brushwork on the wall, add quietness to the portrait, tranquillity to the pose that could be kept for ever; a contrast to the frenzied squirms preferred by his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Hamerton thought he must have found this pose, or the hint for it, in the Agrippina at the Capitol in Rome, or in Canova's statue of Napoleon's mother at Chatsworth. If Whistler found it anywhere, except in his own studio, it could only have been at Haarlem, where Franz Hals' old ladies sit together with the same serenity and are painted [Pg 119] in much the same scheme. Whistler had been to Holland and seen the beautiful group, and he was haunted by it.

Whistler wrote to Fantin that if the Mother marked any progress, it was in the science of colour. What he wanted people to see in it, he explained in The Red Rag:

"Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy 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 the identity of the portrait?"

And yet Swinburne was not alone in realising its "intense pathos of significance and tender depth of expression," while to a few Whistler gave a glimpse of the other side, as to Mr. Harper Pennington:

"Did I ever tell you of an occasion when Whistler let me see him with the paint off—with his brave mask down? Once standing by me in his studio—Tite Street—we were looking at the Mother. I said some string of words about the beauty of the face and figure, and for some moments Jimmy looked and looked, but he said nothing. His hand was playing with that tuft upon his nether lip. It was, perhaps, two minutes before he spoke. 'Yes,' very slowly, and very softly—'Yes, one does like to make one's mummy just as nice as possible!'"

Whistler told us that Madame Venturi, a friend of Carlyle's, determined that he too should be painted.

"I used to go often to Madame Venturi's—I met Mazzini there, and Mazzini was most charming—and Madame Venturi often visited me, and one day she brought Carlyle. The Mother was there, and Carlyle saw it, and seemed to feel in it a certain fitness of things, as Madame Venturi meant he should—he liked the simplicity of it, the old lady sitting with her hands in her lap—and he said he would be painted. And he came one morning soon, and he sat down, and I had the canvas ready and the brushes and palette, and Carlyle said: 'And now, mon, fire away!' That wasn't my idea how work should be done. Carlyle realised it, for he added: 'If ye're fighting battles or painting pictures, the only thing to do is to fire away!' One day he told me of others who had painted his portrait. 'There was Mr. Watts, a mon of note. And I went to his studio, and there was much meestification, and screens were drawn round the easel, and curtains were drawn, and I was not allowed to see anything. And then, at last, the screens were [Pg 120] put aside and there I was. And I looked. And Mr. Watts, a great mon, he said to me, "How do you like it?" And then I turned to Mr. Watts, and I said, "Mon, I would have ye know I am in the hobit of wurin' clean lunen!"'"

Carlyle told people that he sat there talking and talking, and that Whistler went on working and working and paid no attention to him whatever. Whistler found Carlyle a delightful person, and Carlyle found him a workman. And it has been said that they used to take walks together, but of this we have no record.

Before the portrait was finished, Whistler had begun to paint Miss Alexander, and another story is of a meeting at the door between the old man coming out and the little girl going in. "Who is that?" he asked the maid. "Miss Alexander, who is sitting to Mr. Whistler." Carlyle shook his head. "Puir lassie! Puir lassie!" Mrs. Leyland, at whose portrait also Whistler was working, remembered that Carlyle grumbled a good deal. Whistler, in the end, had, it is said, to get Phil Morris to sit for the coat. Walter Greaves' memories are of impatience in the studio, especially when Carlyle saw Whistler working with small brushes, so that Whistler either worked with big brushes or pretended to. William Allingham wrote of the sittings in his diary:

"Carlyle tells me he is sitting to Whistler. If C. makes signs of changing his position, W. screams out in an agonised tone: 'For God's sake, don't move!' C. afterwards said that all W.'s anxiety seemed to be to get the coat painted to ideal perfection; the face went for little. He had begun by asking two or three sittings, but managed to get a great many. At last C. flatly rebelled. He used to define W. as the most absurd creature on the face of the earth."

Around this portrait many legends are gathering. Mr. F. Ernest Jackson has told us that a few years ago, one evening in Hyde Park, he was seated on a bench sketching, and an old man came up to him and, seeing he was an artist, asked if he knew Whistler. Then the old man said that his father had posed for the picture. Whether this was Carlyle revisiting the haunts of his walks or a pure invention we do not know. Another tale is that Whistler never painted the picture, which is the work of an anonymous Academician, done as a bet that he could do a Whistler—it is a pity the Academician never did any more.

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If Carlyle liked the portrait of the Mother, he must have liked his own. There is the same quiet balance, the same careful spacing. Take away either the circular print or the Butterfly in its circle, and the repose is gone. But with such care has every detail been arranged, one never thinks of the balance, the arabesque, the pattern. It is done, and all traces of the thought and the work are gone. One sees only the result Whistler meant should be seen. It has been criticised for showing a want of invention. But if the background and the arrangement are somewhat the same as in the Mother, it was because he was deliberately carrying out the same scheme. It was his Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. II. In the London Memorial Exhibition it hung opposite the Mother, and as they were seen together, the pose and colour and design belonged as inevitably to the nervous old man as to the old lady in her beautiful tranquillity. Whistler is also said to have made a study of Carlyle's head, owned by Mr. Burton Mansfield, and there is a small study of the pose on the back of a canvas, once owned by Greaves.

The Harmony in Grey and Green; Portrait of Miss Alexander, a commission from Mr. W. C. Alexander, was painted at the same time, and proves how little Whistler's invention was at fault. There was no repetition. The little girl, in her white and green frock, holding at her side her grey feathered hat, butterflies hovering about her, the weariness of the pose expressed in the pouting red lips, as she stands by the grey wall with its long lines of black, is as familiar as Velasquez' Infantas. Less known is Whistler's care in every detail to make it a masterpiece. He, or his mother, gave Mrs. Alexander directions as to the quality of the muslin for the gown, where it was to be bought, the width of the frills, the ruffles at the neck, the ribbon bows, the way the gown was to be laundried. And only after repeatedly seeing and studying the picture, does one learn his care in weaving the colour through the design. He called the portrait Harmony in Grey and Green, but the colours which bind the arrangement together, which play all through it, are green and gold. So wonderfully are these colours used like threads in tapestry that one does not see them, one feels the result. As always, there was the great simple design; the pose of Velasquez, the decoration of Japan, worked out in his own way. The gold runs along the top of the dado; tiny gold [Pg 122] buckles fasten the rosettes of the shoes; there is a gold pin in the hair; the gold of the daisies is repeated in the butterflies which flutter above the head; a note of gold is in the pile of drapery, and the floor has a suggestion of gold in the matting. Green plays the same note. The green sash is carried down by the green feather of the hat, lost in the shadow, which is filled with green and gold. And the green of the daisies is repeated in the green of the drapery. It is not until one has gone all over the picture that these things become evident. The shoes look perfectly black, and so does the dado, and yet there is no pure black anywhere. The whole is bound together by this grey, green, black, and gold scheme running through the composition. It is a perfect harmony. And so subtle is it, that only the result is evident, never the means by which it was obtained.

The story of the sittings we have from Miss Cicely Alexander (Mrs. Spring-Rice):

"My father wanted him to paint us all, I believe, beginning with the eldest (my sister, whom he afterwards began to paint, but whose portrait was never finished). But after coming down to see us, he wrote and said he would like to begin with 'the light arrangement,' meaning me, as my sister was dark. So I was the first victim, and I'm afraid I rather considered that I was a victim all through the sittings, or rather standings, for he never let me change my position, and I believe I sometimes used to stand for hours at a time. I know I used to get very tired and cross, and often finished the days in tears. This was especially when he had promised to release me at a given time to go to a dancing-class, but when the time came I was still standing, and the minutes slipped away, and he was quite absorbed and had quite forgotten all about his promise, and never noticed the tears; he used to stand a good way from his canvas, and then dart at it and then dart back, and he often turned round to look in a looking-glass that hung over the mantelpiece at his back—I suppose, to see the reflection of his painting. Although he was rather inhuman about letting me stand on for hours and hours, as it seemed to me at the time, he was most kind in other ways. If a blessed black fog came up from the river, and I was allowed to get down, he never made any objection to my poking about among his paints, and I even put charcoal eyes to some of his [Pg 123] sketches of portraits done in coloured chalks on brown paper, and he also constantly promised to paint my doll, but this promise was never kept. I was painted at the little house in Chelsea, and at the time he was decorating the staircase; it was to have a dado of gold, and it was all done in gold-leaf, and laid on by himself, I believe; he had numberless little books of gold-leaf lying about, and any that weren't exactly of the old-gold shade he wanted, he gave to me.

"Mrs. Whistler was living then, and used to preside at delightful American luncheons, but I don't remember that she ever came into the studio—a servant used to be sent to tell him lunch was ready, and then he went on again as before. He painted, and despair filled my soul, and I believe it was generally teatime before we went to those lunches, at which we had hot biscuits and tinned peaches, and other unwholesome things, and I believe the biscuits came out of a little oven in the chimney, though I can't quite think how that could have been. The studio was at the back of the house, and the drawing-room looked over the river, and we seldom went into it, but I remember that he had matting on the floor, and a large Japanese basin with water and goldfish in it. I never met Mr. Carlyle in the studio, although he was being painted at the same time, but he shook hands with me at the private view at the Grosvenor Gallery, where the two portraits were exhibited for the first time. [This must have been at Whistler's own exhibition in 1874.] I didn't appreciate that honour at the time, any more than I appreciated being painted by Mr. Whistler, and I'm afraid all my memories only show that I was a very grumbling disagreeable little girl. Of course, I was too young to appreciate Mr. Whistler himself, though afterwards we were very good friends when I grew older, and when he used to come to my father's house and make at once for the portrait with his eye-glass up."

It is said that tears were not only the little girl's, but Whistler's, and that there were seventy sittings before he finished. Mrs. Spring-Rice writes nothing about the number of times the picture was rubbed out and recommenced. He was beginning to put in the entire scheme at once, but on such large canvases this was difficult. Walter Greaves says that the picture was painted on an absorbent canvas, and on a distemper ground. There is also a study for the head.

Whistler was as minute in his directions for the portrait of Miss [Pg 124] May Alexander. He recommended to Mrs. Alexander a milliner who sold wonderful "picture hats"; he suggested that he should paint the portrait in the house at Campden Hill, so that he could see the effect of the picture in the drawing-room where it was to hang. But it remains a sketch of a girl in riding-habit, drawing on her gloves, at her side a pot of flowers, the one detail carried out. He made a number of other sketches in oils, chalk, pen and ink, of the children, and there is a study for Miss May's head also. But only the Arrangement in Grey and Green was finished.

Frederick Leyland, the wealthy shipowner, who had met Whistler as early as 1867, about this time commissioned Whistler to paint his four children, Mrs. Leyland, and himself. Leyland had not yet bought his London house, but often came up to town, and Whistler made long visits at Speke Hall, Leyland's place near Liverpool. Mrs. Whistler spent months there. The record of his visits is in the etchings and dry-points of Speke Hall and Speke Shore, Shipping at Liverpool, The Dam Wood, and the portraits in many mediums. Speke Hall, Whistler said, put him in better mood for work. The house was not far from the sea, where he found much to do. But the beach was flat, at low tide the sea ran away from him, and at high tide the skies were wrong or the wind blew, and when the sea failed he turned to the portraits. The big canvases travelled with him, backward and forward, from Speke Hall to London, and the sittings were continued in both places. They all sat to him. The children hated posing as much as they delighted in the painter. The son, after three sittings, refused to sit again, which is to be regretted, for the pastel of him, lounging in a chair, with big hat pushed back and long legs stretched out, is full of boyhood. There are pastels of the three little girls, sketches in pen and ink and pencil, one among the few studies for etchings, and the dry-points. Of Florence Leyland, a large, full-length oil was started, the first of his Blue Girls in which he wished to paint blue on blue as he had painted white on white. Another portrait of her was never finished and, we believe, never exhibited until it was purchased, in 1906, for the Brooklyn Museum. The full-length of Leyland was the only one completed. Of this there is a small oil study.

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Whistler painted Leyland standing, in evening dress, with the ruffled shirt he always wore, against a dark background, the first arrangement of black on black. Leyland was good about standing, we know from Mrs. Leyland, but he had not much time, and few portraits gave Whistler more trouble. Leyland told Val Prinsep that Whistler nearly cried over the drawing of the legs. Greaves says that "he got into an awful mess over it," painted it out again and again, and finally had in a model to pose for it nude. It was finished in the winter of 1873. In the portrait of Leyland he began to suppress the background, to put the figures into the atmosphere in which they stood, without accessories. The problem was the atmospheric envelope, to make the figures stand in this atmosphere, as far within their frames as he stood from them when he painted, a problem at which he worked as long as he lived.

Mrs. Leyland had more leisure than her husband, and the sittings amused her. She had sat to Rossetti, she was to sit to others. She was beautiful, with wonderful red hair. Whistler made a dry-point of her, The Velvet Gown, and in black velvet she wanted to be painted. But he preferred a dress in harmony with her hair, and designed rose draperies falling in sweeping curves, and he placed her against a rose-flushed wall with a spray of rose almond blossoms at her side. In no other portrait did he attempt a scheme of colour at once so sumptuous and so delicate. The pose was natural to her, she said, though he made a number of pastel schemes before he painted it. Her back is turned, her arms fall loosely, her hands clasped behind her, her head in profile. Mrs. Leyland remembered days when, at the end of the pose, the portrait looked as if it needed only a few hours' work. But in the morning she would find it rubbed out and all the work to be done again. Notwithstanding the innumerable sittings, one of Whistler's models, Maud Franklin, whom he so often etched and painted, was called in to pose for the gown. Whistler knew what he wanted, and nothing else would satisfy him. It must be beautiful to be worthy of the weariness it caused her, he told Mrs. Leyland, and he was trying for the little more that meant perfection. The portrait was never finished, and yet it could not be lovelier. It was a problem, not of luminous dark, but of luminous light, and the accessories have not been suppressed. The matting on the floor, the dado, and the spray of almond blossoms are more elaborately carried out than the detail of any other portrait. What worried him, and probably prevented the picture being finished, [Pg 126] were the hands, almost untouched. It was not that he could not draw hands, for they are beautifully drawn sometimes, notably in the etchings. But he rarely painted them well. He nearly always left them to the last, and some of his later pictures were unfinished because he could not get the hands right. In the Sarasate, The Little White Girl, the Symphony in White, No. III., the hands are beautifully painted. Some one has said that an artist is known by his painting of hands. These three pictures prove that Whistler could paint hands, but it is as true that he did not paint them when he could help it.

The portrait of Mrs. Louis Huth was not only begun but finished during these years. It is Holbein-like in its dignity, its sobriety, the flat modelling, the exquisite rendering of the lace at the throat and the wrists. Mrs. Huth wears the black velvet Mrs. Leyland wanted to wear, and the background is black of wonderful, luminous, intense depth. She, too, stands with her back turned, and her head in profile. In this portrait, as in the full-length Leyland, Whistler carried out his method of putting in the whole subject at once. The background was as much a part of the design as the figure. If anything went wrong anywhere the whole had to come out and be started again. It was a difficult problem, but the theory taught by Gleyre, and developed in the Nocturnes, was perfected in the portraits of Frederick Leyland and Mrs. Huth.

Mrs. Leyland sometimes met Mrs. Huth as they came and went, and this fixes the date of the portrait. Mrs. Huth was not strong, and Whistler exhausted the strongest who posed for him. Almost daily, during one summer, he kept her standing for three hours without rest. At last she rebelled. Watts, she said, who had painted her had not treated her in that way. "And still, you know, you come to me!" was Whistler's comment. He had some mercy, however, and at times a model stood for her dress.

After the Academy of 1874 opened with nothing of his in it, Whistler took matters into his own hands, and, like Courbet in 1855, and Manet in 1867, organised a show of his own—his first "one man" show. The gallery was at No. 48 Pall Mall, and the collection included these large portraits, a few Nocturnes, one or two earlier paintings, and one or two of the Projects. Thirteen in all. There were fifty etchings. The walls were grey, the exhibits were well spaced, there were palms [Pg 127] and flowers, blue pots and bronzes. He designed the card of invitation, the simple card he always used, and his mother and Greaves wrote the names and addresses, "all making Butterflies as hard as we could," Walter Greaves says, rushing out and posting the cards until the letter-boxes of Chelsea were in a state of congestion. The private view was on June 6. The catalogue is vague.

The exhibition was a shock to London. The decorations seemed an indiscretion, for no one before had suggested to people, whose standard was the Academy, that a show of pictures might be beautiful. The work scandalised a generation blinded by the yearly Academic bazaar; they could not see the beauty of flat modelling and flesh low in tone, they preferred the "foolish sunset" to the poetry of night. But the pictures could have been forgiven more easily than the titles. From the moment he exhibited them as Arrangements and Nocturnes, his reputation for eccentricity was established. He wrote in The Gentle Art:

"I know that many good people think my nomenclature funny and myself 'eccentric'. Yes, 'eccentric' is the adjective they find for me. The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.... As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour."

Well received at first, his position in public favour had of late hung in the balance. The exhibition weighed in the scales against him, and for almost twenty years to come, ridicule was his portion. The Athenæum and the Saturday Review ignored the show. The Pall Mall saw in it more intellect than imagination. Here and there was a polite murmur of "noble conception" and "Velasquez touch." Of all that was said Whistler singled out for notice then, and preservation afterwards, the comments of a forgotten journal, the Hour. It has been wondered why he noticed papers of small importance. When he answered the critics and kept the correspondence, it was "to make history," he said, and he selected what he thought important, though it might come from an unimportant source. The Hour suggested that the best work was not of recent date; Whistler wrote to remove "the melancholy impression"; and notice and letter "make history," for it was about this time that English critics, following the lead of the [Pg 128] French, were beginning to say that he did not fulfil his early promise, and it is recorded in The Gentle Art.

The pictures of this period that remain may seem few in number. But others were completed or in progress, and disappeared before they were exhibited or seen outside the studio. We have reason to believe, however, that some have been recently discovered and eventually will not be lost to the world.

"Whistler laughed all his troubles away," it has been said. When the Academy rejected him, and the critics sneered at his pictures hung in other galleries, and the public took the critics seriously, he laughed the louder, and felt the more. English ears shrank from his laugh—"his strident peacock laugh," Sir Sidney Colvin called it.

"He was a man who could never bear to be alone," Mr. Percy Thomas remembers. "The door in Lindsey Row was always open," and Whistler liked to think that his friends' doors were open to him. Lord Redesdale, who came to live in the Row in 1875, said that Whistler was always running in and out. Through his own open door strange people drifted. If they amused him he forgave them however they presumed, and they usually did presume. There was a man who, he told us, came to dine one evening, and, asking to stay overnight, remained three years:

"Well, you know, there he was; and that was the way he had always lived—the prince of parasites! He was a genius, a musician, the first of the 'Æsthetes,' before the silly name was invented. He hadn't anything to do; he didn't do anything but decorate the dinner-table, arrange the flowers, and then play the piano and talk. He hadn't any enthusiasm; that's why he was so restful. He was always ready to go to Cremorne with me. At moments my mother objected to such a loafer about the house. And I would say to her, 'Well, but, my dear mummy, who else is there to whom we could say, "Play," and he would play, and "Stop playing," and he would stop right away!' Then I was ill. He couldn't be trusted with a message [Pg 129] to the doctor or the druggist, and he was only in the way. But he had the good sense to see it, and to suggest it was time to be going; so he left for somebody else! It never occurred to him there was any reason he shouldn't live like that."

We have heard of many others. One, to whom Whistler entrusted the money for the weekly bills, gave lunches to his friends and sent flowers and chocolates right and left, while Whistler's debt multiplied.

Artists and art students came in through the open door to see and to learn, and were welcomed. If they came to loaf and to play, they paid for it. They ran errands, posted letters, sat in the corner, interviewed greater bores than themselves. They had to give up their time, and then the end came, and out they went.

One story in Chelsea is of Barthe, who not only taught art but sold tapestry. Whistler bought a number of things from him. "But vill he pay, zis Vistlaire, vill he pay?" Barthe asked, and at last one evening he went to Lindsey Row. A cab was at the door. The maid said Whistler was not in, but Barthe heard his voice and pushed past, and said afterwards:

"Upstairs, I find him, before a little picture painting, and behind him ze bruzzers Greaves holding candle. And Vistlaire he say, 'You ze very man I vant; hold a candle!' And I hold a candle. And Vistlaire he paint, and he paint, and zen he take ze picture, and he go downstair, and he get in ze cab, and he drive off, and we hold ze candle, and I see him no more. Mon Dieu, il est terrible, ce Vistlaire!" But he was paid the next day.

Few men depended more on companionship than Whistler, and to few was the companionship women alone can give more essential. All his life he retained his cœur de femme, and most of his friends were women. For years, until her health broke down, his mother was with him. Many wondered, with Val Prinsep, who thought Whistler "always acting a part," whether "behind the poseur, there was not quite a different Whistler. Those who saw him with his mother were conscious of the fact that the irrepressible Jimmy was very human. No one could have been a better son, or more attentive to his mother's wishes. Sometimes old Mrs. Whistler, who was a stern Presbyterian in her religion, must have been very trying to her son. Yet Jimmy, though he used to give a queer smile when he mentioned them, never [Pg 130] in any way complained of the old lady's strict Sabbatarian notions, to which he bowed without remonstrance."

The models drifting in and out of the open door were mostly women. He liked to have them with him, and felt it necessary to see them about the studio, for, as he watched their movements, they would take the pose he wanted, or suggest a group, an arrangement. An admirable example is the Whistler in his Studio, done in the first house in Lindsey Row. It was a beautiful study, he wrote to Fantin, for a big picture like the Hommage à Delacroix, with Fantin, Albert Moore, and himself, the "White Girl" on a couch, and la Japonaise walking about, grouped together in his studio: all that would shock the Academicians. The colour was to be dainty; he in pale grey, Jo in white, la Japonaise in flesh-colour, Albert Moore and Fantin to give the black note. The canvas was to be ten feet by six. If he ever did more than the study of the two girls and himself, it has disappeared. The painting was owned by Mr. Douglas Freshfield, and now belongs to the Chicago Art Institute, and is as dainty as Whistler described it. He holds the small palette he sometimes used with raised edges to keep the liquid colour from running off, he wears the long-sleeved white waistcoat in which he worked, and he painted from the reflection in the mirror, for his brush is in his left hand. The two women most likely are the two models for Symphony in White, No. III., who have stopped posing. Another version of this studio interior is in the City of Dublin Art Gallery, but Whistler repudiated it. Mr. Gallatin says that Sir Hugh Lane, who presented the picture to the Dublin Gallery, gave it a very different record, holding that it was well known in Chelsea, that Whistler liked it, and eventually painted for Mr. Freshfield the version now in the Chicago Art Institute. The truth of the matter, however, is that not only did Whistler repudiate the Dublin picture, but, when it was shown as the original in the Whistler Memorial Exhibition in London, Mr. Freshfield demanded that this description be at once withdrawn or he would remove the picture and sue the International Society, who organised the Exhibition, for false statements and damages. Sir Hugh Lane did not produce during his lifetime one scrap of proof in corroboration of statements denied by Whistler, nor has any proof been produced since his death. Another reason to doubt Lane's description is that Whistler never [Pg 131] copied one of his pictures, and the Dublin Gallery's version is a slavish copy, save in the colour scheme. Whistler never painted it. There is nothing else of the kind so complete as Whistler in his Studio, but there are innumerable studies of figures, reading or sewing, not posing, though the minute he started to draw them they had to pose. Everybody who was with him, and somebody always was, had to sit and be painted, etched, or drawn.

Refugees from France in 1870 drifted through the open door, artists whose work was stopped by the Commune and who came to England to take it up again. There were Dalou, Professor Lantéri, and Tissot who, at Lindsey Row, found the inspiration for his pictures on the river. Fantin stayed in Paris, but later told stories of the siege which Whistler repeated to us. He asked Fantin what he did. "Me?" replied Fantin, "I hid in the cellar. Je suis poltron, moi." One of Fantin's many letters to Edwin Edwards shows Whistler's hold over those who were drawn to him for a better reason than curiosity. It was long since Fantin had heard from Whistler, for whom, however, he wrote, his affection was that of a man for a mistress still loved despite the trouble she might give. He did not understand women, they frightened him, "mais au fond, tout au fond, je sens que si j'étais aimé, je serais l'esclave le plus soumis et serais peut-être capable de toutes les plus grandes folies. Je sens que c'est la même chose pour Whistler: s'il savait comme il pourrait avoir un ami dévoué et aimant en moi. Malgré tout, il est séduisant."

And yet they saw less of each other as the years went on, perhaps because Fantin became more of a hermit, while Whistler's door opened wider.

Journalists and critics hurried to Lindsey Row once they knew the door was open. Mr. Walter Greaves, who sometimes showed the studio, remembers doing the honours for Tom Taylor. Whistler told Mr. Sidney Starr that, while the Miss Alexander was in the studio, Tom Taylor came:

"There were other visitors. Taylor said, 'Ah, yes, um,' then remarked that the upright line in the panelling of the wall was wrong, and the picture would be better without it, adding, 'Of course, it's a matter of taste.' To which Whistler replied, 'I thought that perhaps for once you were going to get away without having said anything [Pg 132] foolish; but remember, so that you may not make the mistake again, it's not a matter of taste at all, it is a matter of knowledge. Good-bye.'"

Journalists and critics filled columns with praise of forgotten masterpieces by unknown Academicians, but seldom spared space for the work in Whistler's studio. Their gossip after the visit was about the man, not his pictures.

Poets, the younger literary men, came in through the open door. Mr. Edmund Gosse, introduced by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, has described to us his impressions of the bare room with little in it but the easel, and of the small, alert, nervous man with keen eyes and beautiful hands who sat before it, looking at his canvas, never moving but looking steadily for twenty minutes or half an hour, perhaps, and then, of a sudden, dashing at it, giving it one touch, and saying, "There, well, I think that will do for to-day!" an astonishing experience to one used to tapestried studios and painters more industrious with their hands than their brains.

The fashionable world, royalty, crowded through the open door. Lindsey Row was lined with the carriages of Mayfair and Belgravia. Whistler was the fashion, if his pictures were not, and he could say nothing, he could do nothing, that did not go the rounds of drawing-rooms and dinner-tables. "Ha, ha! I have no private life!" he told a man who threatened him with exposure. And, from this time onward, he never had.

He knew what his popularity meant. It was among the numbers who gathered about him because he was the fashion, that he could not afford to have friends.

If the frequent use of the name "Jimmie" by people in speaking and writing of him implies a friendliness on his part with every Tom, Dick, and Harry, nothing could be further from the fact. His friends, who were his contemporaries, called him "Jimmie," but rarely to his face, and the rest who did once had not the courage to a second time. We remember a foolish youth who, meeting him at our table, addressed him in free and easy fashion as "Whistler." He said nothing. He only looked, but the youth did not forget the Mr. after that. Whistler was the last man to allow familiarity or to make friends. He understood how to keep at a distance those he did not know or did not want to know.

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It was thought that he could not live without fighting, that to him "battle was the spice of life." But he never fought until fighting was forced upon him. There were no fights, just as there was no mystery, at first. Every man was a friend until he proved himself an enemy. Whistler's temper was violent. Few who ever saw him roused can forget the fire of his eyes, the fury of his face, the sting of his tongue. He was terrible then, and lost all control of himself. But there was always good cause for his rage, and once the storm had passed he laughed this, as all his other troubles, away and when the fighting began enjoyed it. He liked a fight, roared over it. Lord Redesdale told us Whistler would come to him in the morning at breakfast, or in the evening after dinner, to read the latest correspondence, discovering the dullness of the enemy.

Whistler delighted in society, finding in it the change most men find in sport or travel. He hated anything that stopped his work. Hunting and fishing were an abomination. We never heard of his attempting to shoot, except once at the Leylands', when, he said: "I rather fancied I shot part of a hare, for I thought I saw the fluff of its fur flying. I knew I hit a dog, for I saw the keeper taking out the shot!" His solicitor, Mr. William Webb, tried once to teach him to ride a bicycle. "Learn it? No," he said to us. "Why, I fell right off—but I fell in a rose-bush!" Motoring offended him and he abused J. for taking it up. But people amused him, and he enjoyed the "parade of life." This is the explanation of the dandyism that has shocked more than one of his critics. Whistler was never content with half-measures. He would not have played the social game at all had he not been able to play it well, and if taking infinite pains with his appearance means dandyism, then he was a dandy. The very word pleased him, and he used it often, in American fashion, to express perfection or charm or beauty. Never was any man more particular about his person and his dress. He was as careful of his hair as a woman, though there was no need of the curling-tongs with which he has been reproached; the difficulty was to restrain his curls and keep them in order. The white lock gave just the right touch. However fashion changed, he always wore the moustache and little imperial which other West Point men of his generation retained through life. Even his thick bushy eyebrows were trained, and they added to the humorous [Pg 134] or sardonic expression of the deep blue eyes from which many shrank. His beautiful hands and nails were beautifully kept. In his dress was always something a little different from that of other men. His clothes were speckless, faultless, fitting irreproachably. He preferred pumps to boots, short sack-coats to tailed coats. His linen was of the finest, and a little Butterfly was embroidered on his handkerchief; and his near-sightedness was a reason for the monocle of which he knew how to make such good use. He was long at his toilet, minute in every detail. Before entering a drawing-room we have seen him pause to adjust his curls and his cravat. So it was with everything. There was dandyism in his delicate handwriting, and the same care went to the arrangement of his cards of invitation and his letters; he would consider even the placing of his signature on a receipt. And he devoted no less attention to his breakfasts and dinners that made the talk of the town. He respected the art of cookery—the "Family Bible" he called the cook-book; he ate little, but that little had to be perfect both in cooking and serving.

From the beginning at Lindsey Row he gave these breakfasts and dinners. Mr. Luke Ionides remembers calling one afternoon when "Jimmy was busy putting things straight; he asked me if I had any money. I told him I had twelve shillings. He said that was enough. We went out together, and he bought three chairs at two-and-sixpence each, and three bottles of claret at eighteenpence each, and three sticks of sealing-wax of different colours at twopence each. On our return he sealed the top of each bottle with a different coloured wax. He then told me he expected a possible buyer to dinner, and two other friends. When we had taken our seats at the table, he very solemnly told the maid to go down and bring up a bottle of wine, one of those with the red seal. The maid could hardly suppress a grin, but I alone saw it. Then, after the meat, he told her to fetch a bottle with the blue seal; and with dessert the one with the yellow seal was brought, and all were drunk in perfect innocence and delight. He sold his picture, and said he was sure the sealing-wax had done it."

All his life he invented wines and was continually making "finds." We remember his discovery of a wonderful Croûte Mallard at the Café Royal, and an equally wonderful Pouilly supplied by his French barber, who had been one of Napoleon III.'s generals or Maximilian's [Pg 135] aides-de-camp. Another thing at the Café Royal besides the menu was the N on the wine-glasses, which were said to have come from the Tuileries in 1870, but, no matter how many have been broken, it is still there. Though he liked good wine, he drank as little as he ate. One of the innumerable stories often repeated may give a different idea. After a dinner in somebody's new house he slipped on the stairs and fell. As he was helped up, he was asked if he had hurt himself. "No," he said, "but it's all the fault of the damned teetotal architect." Those who dined with him, or with whom he dined, knew that he was one of the most abstemious of men. On the other hand, it was astonishing how quickly some things went to his head. In later days when J. would stop with him at Frascati's, on the way home from the studio, the talk grew gayer, the "Ha! Ha!" louder with the first sip of his absinthe.

We have the story of his first dinner-party from Mr. Walter Greaves, whose workman was sent to Madame Venturi's to borrow, and came back hung about with, pots and kettles and pans, and from Mrs. Leyland, who lent her butler and at the last moment, with her sister, put up muslin curtains at the windows. Guests remember Whistler's alarm when a near-sighted young lady in white mistook the Japanese bath, filled with water-lilies, for a divan, and tried to sit on the goldfish; and Leyland's disgust when Grisi's daughter, whom he took in to dinner, would talk to him not of music, but of Ouida's novels. Everyone found the menu "a little eccentric, but excellent." The earliest menu we have seen is one, in Mr. Walter Dowdeswell's possession, of a dinner in the eighties, as simple as it is characteristic of Whistler, and we give it: Potage Potiron; Soles Frites; Bœuf à la Mode; Chapon au Cresson; Salade Laitue; Marmalade de Pommes; Omelette au Fromage.

Mr. Alan S. Cole's diary is the record of dinners in the seventies, of the company, and the talk:

"November 16 (1875). Dined with Jimmy; Tissot, A. Moore, and Captain Crabb. Lovely blue and white china, and capital small dinner. General conversation and ideas on art unfettered by principles. Lovely Japanese lacquer.

"December 7 (1875). Dined with Jimmy; Cyril Flower, Tissot, Story. Talked Balzac—Père Goriot—Cousine Bette—Cousin Pons—Jeune Homme de Province à Paris—Illusions perdues.

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"January 6 (1876). With my father and mother to dine at Whistler's. Mrs. Montiori, Mrs. Stansfield, and Gee there. My father on the innate desire or ambition of some men to be creators, either physical or mental. Whistler considered art had reached a climax with Japanese and Velasquez. He had to admit natural instinct and influence, and the ceaseless changing in all things.

"March 12 (1876). Dined with Jimmy. Miss Franklin there. Great conversation of Spiritualism, in which J. believes. We tried to get raps, but were unsuccessful, except in getting noises from sticky fingers on the table.

"March 25 (1876). Round to Whistler's to dine. Mrs. Leyland and Mrs. Galsworthy and others.

"September 16 (1876). Dined with W. Eldon there. Hot discussion about Napoleon (Napoléon le petit, by Hugo). The Commune, with which J. sympathised [some fellow-feeling for Courbet, the reason perhaps]. Spiritualism.

"December 29 (1876). To dine with J.—the Doctor. Goldfish in bowl. Japanese trays—storks and birds. He read out two or three stories by Bret Harte: Luck of Roaring Camp, The Outcasts of Poker Flat, Tennessee's Partner. Chatted as to doing illustration for a catalogue for Mitford, and as to his Japanese woman, and a decorated room for the Museum.

"February 18 (1878). To Whistler's. Mark Twain's haunting jingle in the tramcar: 'Punch, brothers, punch with care; punch in the presence of the passenjaire!'

"March 27 (1878). Dined with Whistler, young Mills and Lang, who writes. He seemed shocked by much that was said by Jimmy and Eldon."

Whistler delighted not only in Mark Twain's, but in all jingles. He had an endless stock and recited them in the most unexpected places and at the most inappropriate moments. He went to the trouble to write down for us the lines of the Woodchuck:

[Pg 137]

And as we read them in the familiar writing, we wonder why they never seemed foolish, but quite right, as he chanted them. In the Haden correspondence, published in The Gentle Art, a new version of Peter Piper may be found. He loved to quote the Danbury News man and the Detroit Free Press. He never lost his joy in American humour, and because there is something of the same spirit in Rossetti's limericks he never tired of repeating them, especially the two beginning:

and

Whistler invented Sunday breakfasts. The day was unusual in London and also the hour—twelve instead of nine. "Nothing exactly like them has ever been in the world. They were as much himself as his work," George Boughton wrote. Whistler arranged the table, seeing that everything placed on it was beautiful: the blue and white, the silver, the linen, the Japanese bowl of goldfish or the vase of flowers in the centre. If his resources failed, he borrowed from Lord Redesdale, or, after his brother was married, from Mrs. William Whistler, whose Japanese lacquer was his admiration. He prepared the menu, partly American, partly French, and wholly bewildering to joint-loving Britons. His description of the British breakfasts he was asked to were amazing: "Beef, the people or the rats had been gnawing, beer, and cheese rinds, salad without dressing and tarts without taste. Quite British!" His buckwheat cakes are not forgotten. He would make them himself, if the party were informal, and he never spoke again to one man who ventured to dislike them.

Sometimes eighteen or twenty sat down to breakfast, more often half that number. All were people Whistler wanted to meet, people who talked, people who painted, people who wrote, people who bought, people who were distinguished, people who were royal, people who were friends. From Mr. Cole we have notes of the company and talk at some of the breakfasts:

"June 17 (1877). To breakfast at J.'s. F. Dicey, young Potter, [Pg 138] and Huth there. He showed some studies from figures—light and elegant—to be finished.

"June 29 (1879). To Whistler's for breakfast. Much talk about Comédie-Française and Sarah Bernhardt.

"July 8 (1883). Breakfast at W.'s. Lord Houghton, Oscar Wilde, Mrs. Singleton, Mrs. Moncrieff, Mrs. Gerald Potter, Lady Archie Campbell, the Storys, Theodore Watts, and some others. Mrs. Moncrieff sang well afterwards. Lord Houghton asked me about my father's memoirs. Margie [Mrs. Cole] sat by him."

The breakfasts remain "charming" in Mrs. Moncrieff's memory. And "charming" is Lady Colin Campbell's word. Lady Wolseley writes us that she remembers "a flight of fans fastened up on the walls, and also that the table had a large flat blue china bowl, or dish, with goldfish and nasturtiums in it." Mrs. Alan S. Cole recalls a single tall lily springing from the bowl; though invited for twelve, it was wiser, she adds, not to arrive much before two, for to get there earlier was often to hear Whistler splashing in his bath somewhere close to the drawing-room. This was Mr. W. J. Rawlinson's experience once. He had been asked for twelve, and got there a few minutes before as for breakfast in Paris. Several guests had come, others followed, a dozen perhaps; one was Lord Wolseley. For Whistler they waited—and they waited and they waited. At about half-past one they heard a splashing behind the folding-doors. There was a moment of indignation. Then Howell hurried in, beaming on them. "It's all right, it's all right!" he said, "Jimmie won't be long now; he is just having his bath!" Howell talked and they waited, and two struck before Whistler appeared, smiling, gracious, all in white, for it was hot, and they went down to breakfast. As soon as he came in he was so fascinating that the waiting was forgotten. We have heard but of one person who did not like the breakfasts, an artist who went one morning, and his story was that he drove down to Chelsea from St. John's Wood, and found Whistler alone, and they went into the dining-room, and there was an egg on toast for Whistler and another egg on toast for himself, and that was all. Then Whistler wanted to show him pictures, but he was furious, and he said, "No, Whistler, I have paid three shillings and sixpence for a cab to come here, and I have eaten one egg, and I will look at no pictures!"

[Pg 139]

Sir Rennell Rodd writes us of the breakfasts at 13 Tite Street, "with the inevitable buckwheat cakes, and green corn, and brilliant talk. One I remember particularly, for we happened to be thirteen. There were two Miss C.'s, the younger of whom died within a week of the breakfast; and an elderly gentleman, whose name I forget, who was there, when he heard of it at his club, said, 'God bless my soul!' had a stroke, and died too."

J. was once only at a Chelsea breakfast, in 1884, at Tite Street, when Mr. Menpes was present. But we often breakfasted in Paris at the Rue du Bac, and in London at the Fitzroy Street studio. It made no difference who was there, who sat beside you, Whistler dominated everybody and everything in his own as in every house he visited. Though short and small—a man of diminutive stature the usual description—his was the commanding presence. When he talked everyone listened. At his table he had a delightful way of waiting upon his guests. He would go round with a bottle of Burgundy in its cradle, talking all the while, emphasising every point with a dramatic pause just before or just after filling a glass. We remember one Sunday in Paris in 1893—Mr. and Mrs. Edwin A. Abbey and Dr. D. S. MacColl the other guests—when he told how he hung the pictures at the annual Liverpool exhibition in 1891:

"You know the Academy baby by the dozen had been sent in, and I got them all in my gallery; and in the centre, at one end, I placed the birth of the baby—splendid; and opposite, the baby with the mustard-pot, and opposite that the baby with the puppy; and in the centre, on one side, the baby ill, doctor holding its pulse, mother weeping. On the other by the door, the baby dead, the baby's funeral, baby from the cradle to the grave, baby in heaven, babies of all kinds and shapes all along the line; not crowded, you know, hung with proper respect for the baby. And on varnishing day, in came the artists, each making for his own baby. Amazing! His baby on the line. Nothing could be better! And they all shook my hand, and thanked me, and went to look—at the other men's babies. And then they saw babies in front of them, babies behind them, babies to right of them, babies to left of them. And then, you know, their faces fell; they didn't seem to like it—and—well—ha! ha!—they never asked me to hang the pictures again at Liverpool! What!"

[Pg 140]

As he told it he was on his feet, pouring out the Burgundy, minutes sometimes to fill a glass. There were minutes between one guest and the next; he seemed never to be in his chair; it was fully two hours before the story and breakfast came to an end together. But though no one else had a chance to talk, no one was bored. It was the same wherever he went if the people were sympathetic. If they were not, he could be as glum as anybody, especially if he was expected to "show off"; or, he could go fast asleep. In sympathetic houses he not only led the talk, he controlled it. There is a legend that he and Mark Twain met for the first time at a dinner, when they simultaneously asked their hostess who that noisy fellow was? For there was noise, there was gaiety, and everybody was carried away by it, even the servants.

Whistler was an artist in his use of words and phrases, making them as much a part of his personality as the white lock and the eye-glass. His sudden "What," his familiar "Well, you know," his eloquent "H'm! h'm!" were placed as carefully as the Butterfly on his card of invitation, the blue and white on his table. No man was ever so eloquent with his hands, he could tell a whole story with his fingers, long, thin, sensitive—"alive to the tips, like the fingers of a mesmerist," Mr. Arthur Symons writes of them. No man ever put so much into words as he into the pause for the laugh, into the laugh itself, the loud, sharp "Ha, ha!" and into the deliberate adjusting of his eye-glass. So much was in his manner that it is almost impossible to give an idea of his talk to those who never heard it. We have listened to him with wonder and delight, and afterwards tried to repeat what he said, to find it fall flat and lifeless without the play of his expressive hands, without the malice or the music of his laugh. This is why the stories of him in print often make people marvel at the reputation they have brought him. Not that the talk was not good; it was. His wit was quick, spontaneous. "Providence is very good to me sometimes," was his answer when we asked him how he found the telling word. He has been compared to Degas, who, it is said, led up the talk to a witticism prepared beforehand; Whistler's wit met like a flash the challenge he could not have anticipated. He loved a good story, made the most of it, treated it with a delicacy, a humour that was irresistible. He could be fantastic, malicious, audacious, [Pg 141] serious, everything but dull or gross. He shrank from grossness. No one, not his worst enemies, can recall a story from him with a touch or taint of it. The ugly, the unclean revolted him.

We have heard of Sundays when Whistler sketched the people who were there, hanging the sketches in his drawing-room. One Sunday he made the dry-point of Lord (then Sir Garnet) Wolseley. Lord Wolseley himself has forgotten it: "I fear, beyond the recollection of an agreeable luncheon at his house at Chelsea, I have no reminiscence," he wrote to us. And Lady Wolseley thinks "Lord Wolseley may have gone to him for sittings early, and have breakfasted with him. I have a vague impression." But Howell was summoned that Sunday from Putney to amuse the sitter and prevent his hurrying off, and he put the date in his diary:

"November 24 (1877). Went to Whistler's, met Sir Garnet Wolseley. Whistler etched him; got two first proofs, second one touched, 42s. Met Pellegrini and Godwin."

Whistler went everywhere, and knew everybody, though he did not allow everybody to know him. When somebody said to him, "The Prince of Wales says he knows you," Whistler's answer was, "That's only his side." He lived at a rate that would have killed most men, and at an expense in details that was fabulous. "I never dined alone for years," he said. If no one was coming to him, if no one had invited him, he dined at a club. He was a familiar figure, at different periods, in the Arts, Chelsea, and Hogarth Clubs, the Arundel, the Beaufort Grill Club, or, for supper, at the Beefsteak Club. Many of his letters, for a period, were dated from "The Fielding." He was once put up at the Savile, he told us, but heard no more about it; and at the Savage, but that, he said, "is a club to belong to, never to go to." At the Reform, had he thought of it, he lost all chance of election one night when his laugh woke up the old gentleman whose snores were equally loud in the reading-room. An amusing proof of the number of his clubs is Mr. Alden Weir's story of passing through London and being asked to dine by Whistler, who suggested first one club, then another, and drove him about to half a dozen or more, at each getting out of the cab alone and coming back to say nobody of any account was there, or the dinner was not good, or some other excuse; and, at last, with an apology, driving him home to [Pg 142] Chelsea, where a large party waited and an excellent dinner was served, and Mr. Weir was the one guest not in evening dress, for Whistler kept the party waiting still longer while he changed. In the Lindsey Row days Whistler sometimes dined in a cheap French restaurant, "good of its kind," with Albert Moore and Homer Martin, a man he delighted in. Many artists dined there, he said, and would sit and talk until late. "But then, you know, the sort of Englishman who is entirely outside all these things, and likes to think he is 'in it,' began to come too, and that ruined it."

To Pagani's, in Great Portland Street, a tiny place then, he went with Pelligrini and others. He was often at the Café Royal in the eighties with Oscar Wilde; towards the end, Mr. Heinemann, Mr. E. G. Kennedy, and we were apt to be with him, when, if he ordered the dinner, Poulet en casserole was the principal dish, and sweet champagne the wine. Never shall we forget a dinner there, in 1899, to Mr. Freer, who had just bought a picture. We and Mr. Heinemann were the other guests. Much as Whistler wished to be amiable to Mr. Freer, he was tired, and, somehow, the dinner was not right, and there were scenes in our corner behind the screen. Mr. Freer felt it necessary to entertain the party, which he did by talking pictures like a new critic, and Japanese prints like a cultured school-ma'am. Whistler slept loudly and we tried to be attentive, until at length, at some psychological moment in Hiroshige's life or in Mr. Freer's collection, Whistler snored such a tremendous snore that he woke himself up, crying: "Good Heavens! Who is snoring?"

Whistler had the faculty of being late when invited to dinner. One official evening, he arrived an hour after the time. "We are so hungry, Mr. Whistler!" said his host. "What a good sign!" was his answer. At times he felt "like a little devil," and he told us of one of these occasions:

"I arrived. In the middle of the drawing-room table was the new Fortnightly Review, wet from the press; in it an article on Méryon by Wedmore, and there was Wedmore—the distinguished guest. I felt the excitement over the great man, and the great things he had been doing. Wedmore took the hostess in to dinner; I was on her other side, seeing things, bent on making the most of them. And I talked of critics, of Wedmore, as though I did not know who sat opposite. [Pg 143] And I was nudged, my foot kicked under the table. But I talked. And whenever the conversation turned on Méryon, or Wedmore's article, or other serious things, I told another story, and I laughed—ha ha!—and they couldn't help it, they all laughed with me, and Wedmore was forgotten, and I was the hero of the evening. And Wedmore has never forgiven me."

Whistler went a great deal to the theatre in the seventies and eighties, and was always at first nights. Occasionally he acted in amateur theatricals. In 1876 he played in Under the Umbrella, at the Albert Hall, and was elated by a paragraph on his performance in the Daily News. He showed himself at private views and at the ceremonies society approves. To see and to be seen was part of the social game, and the world, meeting him everywhere, mistook him for the Butterfly for which he seemed to pose.

For a year after the exhibition in Pall Mall, Whistler did not show any paintings. Artists said his pictures were not serious because not finished. Whistler retorted that theirs "might be finished, but—well—they never had been begun." Such remarks were not favoured by hanging committees. Probably Royal Academicians were honest, though malicious. Lord Redesdale remembered one whose work is forgotten, who used to say that Whistler was losing his eyesight, that he could not see there was no paint on his canvas. Mr. G. A. Holmes told us that a few artists in Chelsea, though they disliked him personally, thought him a man with new ideas who threw new light on art; Henry Moore said to Mr. Holmes that Whistler put more atmosphere into his pictures than any man living. But Academicians, as a rule, were afraid of him and Whistler would tell Mr. Holmes: "Well, you know, they want to treat me like a sheet of note-paper, and crumple me up!"

His prints were hung in exhibitions, many lent by Anderson Rose to the Liverpool Art Club in October 1874, and a few months afterwards to the Hartley Institution at Southampton. Shortly before the [Pg 144] Liverpool show opened, Mr. Ralph Thomas issued the first catalogue of Whistler's etchings: A Catalogue of the Etchings and Dry-points of James Abbott MacNeil Whistler, London, Privately Printed by John Russell Smith, of 36 Soho Square. Of the fifty copies printed, only twenty-five were for sale, so that it became at once rare. Mr. Percy Thomas etched Whistler's portrait of himself with his brushes as frontispiece. Mr. Ralph Thomas described the plates, and as he had been with Whistler when many were made and printed, he was far better qualified than any of his successors. It is much to be regretted that Wedmore did not follow Thomas's excellent beginning.

In 1875, Whistler exhibited pictures in the few galleries that would hang him. In October he sent to the Winter Exhibition at the Dudley Gallery a Nocturne in Blue and Gold, No. III., which is impossible to identify, and Nocturne in Black and Gold—The Falling Rocket, which Ruskin presently identified beyond possibility of doubt: the impression of fireworks in the gardens of Cremorne. But at the Dudley it created no sensation. F. G. Stephens, in the Athenæum, was almost alone in its praise. A month later, November 1875, Chelsea Reach—Harmony in Grey, and many studies of figures on brown paper were at the Winter Exhibition of the Society of French Artists, and three Nocturnes in the Spring Exhibition (1876) of the same Society. Thus Whistler managed without the Royal Academy.

[Pg 144a]

[Pg 144b]

[Pg 144c]

[Pg 145]

When Irving appeared as Philip II. in 1874, Whistler was struck with the tall, slim, romantic figure in silvery greys and blacks, and got him to pose. Mr. Bernhard Sickert thinks it extraordinary that Whistler failed to suggest Irving's character. We think it more extraordinary for Mr. Sickert to forget that Whistler was painting Irving made up as Philip II. and not as Henry Irving. Mr. Cole saw the picture on May 5, 1876, and found Whistler "quite madly enthusiastic about his power of painting such full-lengths in two sittings or so." The reproduction in M. Duret's Whistler differs in so many details from the picture to-day, that at first we wondered if two portraits were painted. M. Duret tells us that his reproduction is from a photograph lent him by George Lucas. Probably, M. Duret writes, the photograph was taken while Whistler was painting the picture, which afterwards he must have altered. On comparing the photograph carefully with the picture, we do not believe there were two portraits, but there were many changes. In the photograph the cloak is thrown back over the actor's right shoulder, showing his arm. In the exhibited picture his arm is hidden by the cloak, and his hand, which before seems to have been thrust into his doublet, rests upon the collar of an order. The trunks, apparently, were much altered, especially the right, and the legs are far better drawn, the left foot entirely repainted. Though Whistler was acquiring more certainty in putting in these big portraits at once, he was becoming more exacting, and he made repeated changes. When the Irving was hung at the Grosvenor Gallery, Mrs. Stillman remembers that three different outlines of the figure were visible. The portrait was not a commission. It is said that Irving refused the small price Whistler asked for it, but later, seeing his legs sticking out from under a pile of canvases in a Wardour Street shop, recognised them and bought the picture for ten guineas. Mr. Bram Stoker writes that, at the time of the bankruptcy, Whistler sold it to Irving "for either twenty or forty pounds—I forget which." The facts are that Whistler sold the Irving to Howell, for "ten pounds and a sealskin coat," Howell recorded in his diary, and that from him it passed into the hands of Mr. Graves, the printseller in Pall Mall, who sold it to Irving for one hundred pounds. After Irving's death, it came up for sale at Christie's, and fetched five thousand pounds, becoming the property of Mr. Thomas, of Philadelphia. On the death of Mr. Thomas it was purchased for the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

A portrait of Sir Henry Cole was begun this spring. Mr. Alan S. Cole, in his diary (May 19, 1876), speaks of "a strong commencement upon a nearly life-size portrait of my father. Looking at it reflected in a glass, and how the figure stood within the frame." This was never finished. Whistler's executrix says it was burned.

Lord Redesdale told us of a beautiful full-length of his wife in Chinese blue silk Whistler called fair, his word then for everything he liked. With two or three more sittings and a little work, it would have been finished. But it was a difficult moment, men were in possession at No. 2 Lindsey Row, and he slashed the canvas. The debt was small, thirty pounds or so, and the price agreed upon for the portrait was two hundred guineas. Lord Redesdale would gladly have settled [Pg 146] the matter, but Whistler said nothing. A portrait started of Lord Redesdale, in Van Dyck costume, and several Nocturnes were torn off stretchers and slashed. The Fur Jacket, Rosa Corder, Connie Gilchrist with the Skipping Rope—The Gold Girl, Effie Deans, were being painted. The Fur Jacket, Arrangement in Black and Brown his final name for it, is the portrait of Maud, Miss Franklin, who now becomes more important in his life and in his art. It is of great dignity. The dress is put in with a full, sweeping brush in long flowing lines, classic in the fall of the folds; the pale, beautiful face looks out like a flower from the depth of the background. In many portraits Whistler was rebuked for sacrificing the face to the design; here the interest is concentrated on the face, and that is why the shadowy figure has been criticised as a mere ghost, a mere rub-in of colour, on the canvas. That he carried the work as far as he thought it should be carried is certain when it is contrasted with Rosa Corder, also an Arrangement in Black and Brown, in which the jacket, the feathered hat in her hand, the trailing skirt, the face in severe profile, are more solidly modelled. M. Blanche has stated that Whistler, in Cheyne Walk, saw Miss Rosa Corder in her brown dress pass a door painted black, and was struck with the scheme of colour. This may be true, for, as we have shown, chance often suggested the effect or arrangement. Connie Gilchrist—The Gold Girl, a popular dancer at the Gaiety, attracted Whistler by her stage dress, which revealed her slight girlish form in its delicate youthful beauty. He posed her in the studio as he had seen her on the stage, skipping. But the movement which told on the stage by its simplicity its spontaneity, became in the picture artificial. The figure has the elegance of the little pastels, it is placed with the distinction of the Miss Alexander, but the suspended action gives the sense of incompleteness. A long line swept down the back of the figure proves he meant to change it.

The above was written before the painting was bought by George A. Hearn and presented to the Metropolitan Museum of New York. Whistler for years had been endeavouring to get possession of it in order to destroy it. It had been seized at his bankruptcy, and for long was the property of Henry Labouchere. That Whistler was dissatisfied is shown by that long black line from the girl's head to her heels. After it had hung for some time in the Metropolitan Museum the line [Pg 147] was removed, and what is left of the picture Whistler wanted to destroy can now be seen on the walls.

Always the pictures he was painting were in his mind. He memorised them as he did the Nocturnes, and over and over, instead of telling what he was painting, he would make, to show those he knew would understand, pen or wash sketches of the work he was engaged on, leaving the sketches, many of which exist, with his friends. There are records of the kind of most of these portraits.

No portraits were shown in 1876, for other work engrossed him. It was the year of The Peacock Room.

We do not know how he got the idea of the peacock as a motive for decoration, or where he obtained his knowledge of it. But the scheme was first proposed to Mr. W. C. Alexander for his house on Campden Hill, and Whistler put down a few notes in pen and ink. The work went no further, and he arranged, instead, a harmony in white for the drawing-room, replaced afterwards by Eastern tapestries. Then Leyland bought his house in Prince's Gate. Leyland's ambition was to live the life of an ancient Venetian merchant in modern London, and he began to remodel the interior and fill it with beautiful things. He bought the gilded staircase from Northumberland House, which was being pulled down. He commissioned Whistler to suggest the colour in the hall, and paint the detail of blossom and leaf on the panels of the dado. "To Leyland's house to see Whistler's colouring of Hall—very delicate cocoa colour and gold—successful," Mr. Cole wrote, March 24. Leyland covered the walls of drawing- and reception-rooms with pictures. He had work by Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Crivelli. He owned Rossetti's Blessed Damosel and Lady Lilith, Millais' Eve of St. Agnes, Ford Madox Brown's Chaucer at King Edward's Court, Windus' Burd Helen, Burne-Jones' Mirror of Venus and Wine of Circe. He bought Legros, Watts, and Albert Moore. Whistler's Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine was his, and he hung it in the dining-room amidst his splendid collection of blue and white china.

Norman Shaw was making the alterations to the house, and another architect, Jeckyll, was suggested by Mr. Murray Marks to decorate the dining-room and arrange the blue and white. Some say that originally Morris and Burne-Jones were to do the dining-room, but that when Whistler stepped in they vanished. Jeckyll put up shelves [Pg 148] to hold the china, and Whistler designed the sideboard. The Princesse was placed over the mantel, and space left at the opposite end of the room for another painting by Whistler, who wished the Three Figures, Pink and Grey to face the Princesse. The walls were hung with Norwich leather. The shelves were divided by perpendicular lines endlessly repeated, and the panelled ceiling, with its pendant lamps, was heavy. Whistler maintained that the red border of the rug and the red flowers in the centre of each panel of the leather killed the delicate tones of his picture. Leyland agreed. The red border was cut off the rug, and Whistler gilded, or painted, the flowers on the leather with yellow and gold. The result was horrible; the yellow paint and gilding "swore" at the yellow tone of the leather. Something else must be done, and again Leyland agreed. The something else developed into the scheme of decoration first submitted to Mr. Alexander: The Peacock Room.

He told us one evening, when talking of it: "Well, you know, I just painted as I went on, without design or sketch—it grew as I painted. And towards the end I reached such a point of perfection—putting in every touch with such freedom—that when I came round to the corner where I had started, why, I had to paint part of it over again, or the difference would have been too marked. And the harmony in blue and gold developing, you know, I forgot everything in my joy in it!"

He had planned a journey to Venice, and new series of etchings there and in France and Holland. The journey was postponed. At the end of the season, the Leylands went to Speke Hall. Whistler remained at Prince's Gate. Town emptied, he was still there, spending his days on ladders and scaffolding, or lying in a hammock painting. His two pupils helped him: "We laid on the gold," Mr. Walter Greaves says, and there were times when the three were found with their hair and faces covered with it. Whistler's description of this whirlwind of work was "the show's afire," an expression he used for years when things were going. He was up before six, at Prince's Gate an hour or so after, at noon jumping into a hansom and driving home to lunch, then hurrying back to his work. At night he was fit for nothing but bed, "so full were my eyes of sleep and peacock feathers," he told us. He thought only of the beauty growing in his hands. Autumn came. Lionel Robinson and Sir Thomas Sutherland, with whom he was to have gone to Venice, started without him. He could not drop the work at Prince's Gate.

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A record of his progress is in the short notes of Mr. Cole's diary:

"September 11 (1876). Whistler dined. Most entertaining with his brilliant description of his successful decorations at Leyland's.

"September 20. To see Peacock Room. Peacock feather devices—blues and golds—extremely new and original.

"October 26. To see room which is developing. The dado and panels greatly help it. Met Poynter, who spoke highly of Whistler's decoration.

"October 27. Again to see room with Moody. He did not like the varnished surface and blocky manner of laying on the gold.

"October 29. To Peacock Room. Mitford (Lord Redesdale) came.

"November 10. The blue over the brown (leather) background is most admirable in effect, and the ornament in gold on blue fine. W. quite mad with excitement.

"November 20. With Prince Teck to see Whistler and the room. Left P. T. with Jimmy.

"November 29. Golden Peacocks promise to be superb.

"December 4. Peacocks superb.

"December 8. Article in Morning Post on Peacock Room.

"December 9. Whistler in a state over article in Morning Post. Leyland much perturbed as I heard.

"December 15. Whistler now thinking of cutting off the pendant ceiling lamps in Peacock Room.

"December 17. My father and Probyn to see room. Jimmy much disgusted at my father's telling him that, in taking so much pains over his work, and in the minuteness of his etched work, he really was like Mulready, who was equally scrupulous."

Lord Redesdale told us that, returning from Scotland, he went to Prince's Gate. Whistler was on top of a ladder, looking like a little imp—a gnome.

"But what are you doing?"

"I am doing the loveliest thing you ever saw!"

"But what of the beautiful old Spanish leather? And Leyland? Have you consulted him?"

[Pg 150]

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

Everybody wanted to see it. Whistler held a succession of receptions at Prince's Gate. He was flattered when the Princess Louise and the Marquis of Westminster came, he wrote to his mother at Hastings, for they set the fashion, kept up the talk in London. Boughton said in his Reminiscences: "He often asked me round to The Peacock Room, and I see him still up on high, lying on his back often, working in 'gold on blue' and 'blue on gold' over the whole expanse of the ceiling, and, as far as I could see, he let no hand touch it but his own." Mrs. Stillman, however, remembers the two pupils working while she drank tea with Whistler. Lady Ritchie let us have her impressions of a visit:

"Long, long after the Paris days, Mr. Whistler danced when I would rather have talked. Some one, I cannot remember who, it was probably one of Mr. Cole's family, told me one day when I was walking up Prince's Gate that he was decorating a house by which we were passing, and asked me if I should like to go in. We found ourselves—it was like a dream—in a beautiful Peacock Room, full of lovely lights and tints, and romantic, dazzling effects. James Whistler, in a painter's smock, stood at one end of the room at work. Seeing us, he laid down his brushes, and greeted us warmly, and I talked of old Paris days to him. 'I used to ask you to dance,' he said, 'but you liked talking best.' To which I answered, 'No, indeed, I liked dancing best,' and suddenly I found myself whirling half-way down the room."

Jeckyll came, and his visit was tragic. When he saw what had been done to his work, he hurried home, gilded his floor, and forgot his grief in a mad-house.

Whistler received the critics on February 9, 1877. A leaflet, for distribution, was written, it is said, by Whistler, though the wording does not suggest it, and printed by Thomas Way. It explains that, with the Peacocks as motive, two patterns, derived from the eyes and the breast feathers, were invented and repeated throughout, sometimes one alone, sometimes both in combination; along the dado, blue on gold, over the walls, gold on blue, while the arrangement was completed by the birds, painted in their splendour, in blue on the gold shutters, in gold on the blue space opposite the chimney-place. [Pg 151] "Called and found Whistler elated with the praises of the Press of The Peacock Room," is Mr. Cole's note on the 18th of the month. Even then it was not finished. On March 5, Mr. Cole was "late at Prince's Gate with Whistler, consoling him. He trying to finish the peacocks on shutters. With him till 2 A.M., and walked home."

Whistler made no change in the architectural construction of the room. It was far from beautiful, with its perpendicular lines, its heavy ceiling, its hanging lamps, and its spaces so broken up that only on the wall opposite the Princesse and on the shutters could he carry out his design in its full splendour and stateliness, and give gorgeousness of form as well as colour; only there could he paint the peacocks that were his motive, so that it is by artificial light, with the shutters closed, that the room is seen in completeness. He could do no more than adapt in marvellous fashion the eye of the peacock, the throat and breast feathers to the broken surfaces. But in spite of drawbacks, The Peacock Room is the "noble work" he called it to his mother, the one perfect mural decoration of modern times. It was his first chance, and it is a lasting reproach to his contemporaries that there was no one to offer him another until too late.

Whistler, who in his pictures avoided literary themes, resorted to symbolism in his gold peacocks on the wall facing the Princesse. One, standing amid flying feathers and gold, clutches in his claws a pile of coins; the other spreads his wings in angry but triumphant defiance: "the Rich Peacock and the Poor Peacock," Whistler said, symbolising the relations between patron and artist.

Leyland had been away from Prince's Gate for months. He had seen his beautiful leather disappear beneath Whistler's blue and gold. He had heard of receptions and press views to which no invitations had been issued by him or to him, and he was annoyed at having his private house turned into a public gallery. The crisis came when Whistler, thinking himself justified by months of work, asked two thousand guineas for the decoration of the room. Leyland, who had sanctioned only the retouching of the leather, could restrain himself no longer. Like many generous men, he had a strict, if narrow, sense of justice. The original understanding was that Whistler should receive five hundred guineas. This grew to a thousand as the scheme developed. But when, at the end, Whistler demanded two thousand, and there [Pg 152] was no contract, Leyland sent Whistler one thousand pounds, not even guineas. To Whistler this was an insult. He felt he had been treated not as an artist, but as a tradesman. He never forgave Leyland, though, at one moment, Leyland was prepared to pay the whole sum if Whistler would leave the house. Whistler refused, preferring to make Leyland a gift of the decoration than not finish the panel of the Peacocks, and he told Mr. Cole:

"You know, there Leyland will sit at dinner, his back to the Princesse, and always before him the apotheosis of l'art et l'argent!"

And this was what happened. Leyland knew that, in return for the loss of his leather and his irritation with Whistler, he had been given something beautiful, and he kept the dining-room as Whistler left it, toning down not a flying feather, not a piece of gold in that triumphant caricature. Until the colour fades from the panel, the world cannot forget the quarrel. Whistler never forgot it, and his resentment against Leyland never lessened. It may be that he was over-sensitive, certainly he put himself in the wrong by his conduct to Leyland. But he could no more help his manner of avenging what he thought an insult, than the meek man can refrain from turning the other cheek to the chastiser. It will ever be to Leyland's credit that he left the work alone.

A few years ago the room was removed from the house in Prince's Gate, bought by Messrs. Brown and Phillips, sold by them to Messrs. Obach, who exhibited it in their Bond Street gallery, and it was then purchased by Mr. Charles L. Freer and taken to Detroit. As he owns the Princesse, The Peacock Room is probably once again just as it was when Whistler finished it.

Many exhibitions had been organised in opposition to the Royal Academy, but on too small a scale to contend against that rich and powerful institution. Sir Coutts Lindsay, the founder of the Grosvenor Gallery, brought to it money, a talent for organisation, and a [Pg 153] determination to show the best work in the right way. Nothing could have been more in accord with Whistler's ideas. He dropped in to smoke with Mr. Cole on the evening of March 19, 1876, "in great excitement over Sir Coutts Lindsay's gallery for pictures—very select exhibition, which he carried to an extreme by saying that it might be opened with only one picture worthy of being shown that season." Sir Coutts Lindsay proposed to exhibit no pictures save those he invited, and he might have succeeded had he ignored the Academy, and made the Grosvenor as distinct from it as the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers was under Whistler's presidency. He had the daring to invite Whistler, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, Walter Crane, Watts; but the weakness to include Millais, Alma-Tadema, Poynter, Richmond, Leighton. "To those whose work he wanted, he gave little dinners," Mr. Hallé has told us, and a very strange lot some of them seemed to Sir Coutts probably, to his butler certainly. One evening the butler could endure it no longer, and he came into the drawing-room and whispered: "There's a gent downstairs says 'e 'as come to dinner, wot's forgot 'is necktie and stuck a fevver in his 'air," for at this period Whistler, Mr. Hallé says, never wore a necktie when in evening dress. The white lock bewildered others. Mrs. Leyland remembered his going to her box at the opera once, where the attendant leaned over and said: "Beg your pardon, sir, but there's a white feather in your hair, just on top!"

At first, Burne-Jones and the followers of the Pre-Raphaelites were most in evidence at Sir Coutts Lindsay's exhibitions, and the "greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery" element prevailed. But the Grosvenor, by the time its traditions were taken over by the New Gallery, was little more than an overflow from the Academy.

Shortly before the first exhibition in 1877, Whistler's brother, the doctor, was married to Miss Helen Ionides, a cousin of Aleco and Luke Ionides. The wedding (April 17, 1877) was at St. George's, Hanover Square, and the Greek Church, London Wall. It brought to Whistler a good friend for the troubled years that were to come, and Mrs. Whistler's house in Wimpole Street was for long a home to him.

The first Grosvenor was a loan exhibition, and opened in May 1877. Whistler sent Nocturne in Black and Gold—The Falling Rocket shown [Pg 154] at the Dudley; Harmony in Amber and Black, the first title of The Fur Jacket; Arrangement in Brown; Irving as Philip II. of Spain, with the title Arrangement in Black, No. III. From Mrs. Leyland came Nocturne in Blue and Silver; from Mr. W. Graham another Nocturne in Blue and Silver—changed later by Whistler to Blue and Gold, Old Battersea Bridge, now at the Tate Gallery; from the Hon. Mrs. Percy Wyndham, Nocturne in Blue and Gold, at Westminster. The Carlyle was included, but it arrived too late to be catalogued. Boehm lent his bust of Whistler in terra-cotta, done in 1872, considered at the time a good portrait.

Whistler's work was also seen in a frieze, described by Mr. Walter Crane: "Whistler designed the frieze—the phases of the moon on the coved ceiling of the West Gallery which has disappeared since its conversion into the Æolian Hall, with stars on a subdued blue ground, the moon and stars being brought out in silver, the frieze being divided into panels by the supports of the glass roof. The 'phases' were sufficiently separated from each other."

We have heard of this decoration from no one else. Probably it was overshadowed by the crimson silk damask and green velvet hangings, the gilded pilasters and furniture, the monumental chimneypiece, of which complaints were heard from every side. The sumptuousness of the background was disastrous to the pictures. Whistler's suffered less than others, but were not liked the more on that account. Before the private view (April 30, 1877), Sir Coutts Lindsay had expressed his disappointment in the Irving and the Nocturnes. At the private view the crowd gathered in front of Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, Millais, Leighton, Poynter, Richmond. The critics sneered at Whistler, or patronised him. The Athenæum grudged meagre lines to this "whimsical, if capable, artist and his vagaries." The Times smiled with condescension at "Mr. Whistler's compartment, musical with strange Nocturnes," wondered how Irving enjoyed "being reduced to a mere arrangement," and deplored the theory that, in practice, covered "an entire absence of details, even details generally considered so important to a full-length portrait as arms and legs. In fact, Mr. Whistler's full-length arrangements suggest to us a choice between materialised spirits and figures in a London fog."

But no criticism was so insolent as the notice of the Grosvenor which [Pg 155] Ruskin delivered from his circulating pulpit, Fors Clavigera (July 2, 1877).

Ruskin, though social subjects engrossed him, was still the art critic powerful to the public, to himself infallible. He had made the Pre-Raphaelites, he set to work to unmake Whistler. Already he was attacked by the mental malady, the "morbid excitement" in Mr. Collingwood's words, that obscured the last years of his life; he had been very ill in the winter of 1877. Nothing else could pardon his malice and insolence. He reserved his chief abuse for Whistler's Falling Rocket at Cremorne, with the sudden burst of fire and shower of gold and detail disappearing in the illimitable darkness of night. That fireworks in a place of entertainment could have in them the elements of beauty was a truth Ruskin could not grasp, and with this wonderful canvas before him, he remained blind to the splendour of the subject and the mastery of the painter: "I have seen and heard much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."

Boughton, in his Reminiscences, tells that Whistler first chanced upon this criticism when they were alone together in the smoking-room of the Arts Club. "It is the most debased style of criticism I have had thrown at me yet," Whistler said. "Sounds rather like libel," Boughton suggested. "Well—that I shall try to find out!" Whistler replied.

Till now, his answer to abuse of his work had been the lash of his wit. But if critics had tried him by their stupidity, never, before Ruskin, had they outraged him by their venom. The insult appeared in a widely read print; he sought redress in the most public fashion possible in England, and sued Ruskin for libel.

The immediate result was that he found it harder to sell his pictures. To buy his Nocturnes was to be ridiculed, Mr. Rawlinson, one of the few who risked it, assures us. Whistler laughed away the new anxiety, and devoted more time to black-and-white. He had hoped to go to Venice, but the preparations for the trial kept him in London. And now Howell made himself as useful to Whistler as he had been to Rossetti:

"Well, you, know, it happened one summer evening, in those old [Pg 156] days when there was real summer, I was sitting looking out of the window in Lindsey Row, and there was Howell passing, and Rosa Corder was with him. And I called to them and they came in, and Howell said: 'Why, you have etched many plates, haven't you? You must get them out, you must print them, you must let me see to them—there's gold waiting. And you have a press!' And so I had, in a room upstairs, only it was rusty, it hadn't been used for so long. But Howell wouldn't listen to an objection. He said he would fix up the press, he would pull it. And there was no escape. And the next morning, there we all were, Rosa Corder, too, and Howell was pulling at the wheel, and there were basins of water, and paper being damped, and prints being dried, and then Howell was grinding more ink, and, with the plates under my fingers, I felt all the old love of it come back. In the afternoon Howell would go and see Graves, the printseller, and there were orders flying about, and cheques—it was all amazing, you know! Howell profited, of course. But he was so superb. One evening we had left a pile of eleven prints just pulled, and the next morning only five were there. 'It's very strange,' Howell said, 'we must have a search. No one could have taken them but me, and that, you know, is impossible!'" There is a record of this period in the etching, Lady at a Window, with Rosa Corder, or Maud, by the garret window, looking at a print, the press behind her.

It was a period of what he called his "fiendish slavery to the press." There were new plates. In 1878 St. James's Street was reproduced by lithography in the "Season Number" of Vanity Fair. The Athenæum objected to it because it was "not done as Leech or Hogarth would have done it." The World mistook the reproduction for the original, and so invited from Whistler one of the letters following each other fast: "Atlas has the wisdom of ages, and need not grieve himself with mere matters of art." Adam and Eve—Old Chelsea has a special interest, for it marks the transition from his early manner in the Thames Set to the later handling in the Venetian. A plate was made from the Irving as Philip of Spain, the only portrait Whistler reproduced on copper, and it was not a success. His plates of Jo and Maud were never from pictures, though often studies for pictures he proposed to paint. The dry-point of his Mother has no relation to the portrait. He was bored to death with copying himself, he would say, and, twenty years [Pg 157] afterwards, when he undertook a lithograph of his Montesquiou and failed, he said that "it was impossible to produce the same masterpiece twice over," that "the inspiration would not come," that when he was not working at a new thing from Nature he was not applying himself, "it was as difficult as for a hen to lay the same egg twice."

In 1878 he made his first experiments in lithography. His attention had been called to it by Mr. Thomas Way, who did more than any other man to revive the art in England. Lithography, appropriated by commerce, was almost forgotten as a means of artistic expression. In France, it was given over for cheaper and quicker methods of illustration; in England it was overweighted by the ponderous performances of Haghe and Nash, hedged about by trade unions, and reduced to the perfection of commonplace. Lithographers here and there preserved its best traditions and regretted the degradation. Mr. Thomas Way determined to interest artists again in a medium that had yielded such splendid results. He prepared stones for them, explained processes, and would not hear of difficulties. Some artists experimented, but lithography did not pay while the anecdote in paint fetched a fortune. Mr. Way appealed to Whistler, who tried the stone, grasped its possibilities, and was delighted. In his first five lithographs he did things never attempted before and found the medium adapted to him. He made nine this year on the stone, though his later work was mostly done on lithographic paper. He proposed to publish this first series as Art Notes, but there was no demand, and the plan fell through. The Toilet and the Broad Bridge were printed in Piccadilly (1878), edited by Mr. Watts-Dunton, and they had hardly appeared when the magazine came to an end. Neither Whistler nor lithography then meant success for any enterprise.

In 1878, the Catalogue of Blue and White Nankin Porcelain Forming the Collection of Sir Henry Thompson was published. Mr. Murray Marks and Mr. W. C. Alexander own delicate little designs of blue and white by Whistler for Mr. Marks, but never used. They were a good preparation for the drawings which, in collaboration with Sir Henry Thompson, he made to illustrate the Catalogue. Some are in brown, some in blue, reproduced by the Autotype Company. Nineteen of the twenty-six are by Whistler, simple and direct, the modelling in the drawing by the brush as the Japanese would have given it. As a rule [Pg 158] there are neither shadows nor attempts at relief. The series is a refutation of the assertion that he could not draw. Whenever he attempted drawing of this sort, or etchings like The Wine Glass, he eclipsed Jacquemart and all his contemporaries. Worried, anxious, the libel case hanging over him, his debts increasing, the general distrust in his work growing, Whistler, nevertheless, gave to the catalogue his usual care. We have seen another set of the drawings, which differ slightly from those reproduced, and with which, evidently, he was not satisfied. The book was edited by Mr. Murray Marks, and issued by Messrs. Ellis and White, of 29 New Bond Street, in May, and Mr. Marks exhibited the drawings and the porcelain, with the book, in his shop, 395 Oxford Street. The show was not a success, the book was a loss, though only two hundred and twenty copies were printed. Now it is almost impossible to get.

Of personal notice, Whistler had more than enough. He was caricatured this year in The Grasshopper at the Gaiety—it was in the days of Edward Terry and Nellie Farren. A large full-length, thought by many more a portrait than a caricature, was painted by Carlo Pellegrini, an Italian artist who lived in England and, under the names of "Singe" and "Ape," contributed to Vanity Fair caricatures which, unlike the characterless, artless scrawls of his more popular amateur successors, were works of art and, therefore, appreciated by Whistler. The painting shows Whistler in evening dress, no necktie, and a gold chain to his monocle; and in a scene parodying the studios and artists of the day, it was pushed in on an easel, some say by Pellegrini, with the announcement, "Here is the inventor of black-and-white!" It was a failure, and no wonder. It was impossible to see the point. The painting now belongs to Mr. John W. Simpson of New York. Whistler was also caricatured in Vanity Fair by "Spy," Leslie Ward, then rapidly rivalling "Ape" in popularity, and to be so caricatured was, in London, to achieve notoriety.

To the second Grosvenor in 1878 he sent, in defiance to Ruskin, another series of Nocturnes, Harmonies, and Arrangements. Among them was the Arrangement in White and Black, No. I., the large, full-length portrait of Miss Maud Franklin, that sometimes figures in catalogues and articles as L'Américaine. We believe it was never shown in England again. It passed in the early eighties into the collection [Pg 159] of Dr. Linde, at Lübeck, where it remained until 1904, was then sold through Paris dealers to an American, and remains one of the least known of Whistler's large full-lengths. We saw it in the spring of 1904 at M. Duret's apartment in the Rue Vignon. It is the only portrait, except the Connie Gilchrist and The Yellow Buskin, in which Whistler attempted to give movement to the figure. Miss Franklin wears a white gown in the ugly fashion of the late seventies, and walks forward, one hand on her hip, the other holding up her skirt. But she fails to fulfil Whistler's precept that the figure must keep within the frame. She seems walking out of the depths of the background, breaking through the envelope of atmosphere. The problem was difficult, an unusual one for Whistler, and, interesting as is the result, the portrait hardly ranks with the greatest. When shown in 1878, it did not help to reconcile the critics. The Athenæum said: "Mr. Whistler is in great force. Last year some of his life-size portraits were without feet; here we have a curiously shaped young lady, ostentatiously showing her foot, which is a pretty large one." It was a "vaporous full-length" in the opinion of the Times, babbling nonsense about the Nocturnes and glad to turn from Whistler's "diet of fog to the broad table of substantial landscape spread for us by Cecil G. Lawson." Whistler contributed a drawing of the Arrangement in White and Black to Blackburn's Grosvenor Notes, an illustrated catalogue published for the first time in 1878. For many years Whistler made these little sketches in pen and ink after his pictures for illustrated catalogues, and for papers that illustrated notices of the exhibitions, an aid to the identification of works where the titles fail.

In the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878, Whistler's only exhibit was the section of a room that may have been his design for Mr. Alexander, or more likely was his decoration for the White House which E. W. Godwin, the architect, was building for him in Tite Street, Chelsea. He called it a Harmony in Yellow and Gold, and others spoke of it as the Primrose Room. It seems to have been simply a room painted in [Pg 160] gold and yellow, the peacock pattern again used, but this time in gold on yellow and yellow on gold. There was simple furniture in yellow of a darker tone than the walls, also a chimneypiece which, twelve years or so afterwards, was found by Mr. Pickford Waller in a second-hand furniture shop and bought. The stove was taken out; two panels, with a pattern suggested for the dado, were turned into doors, and the chimneypiece is now a cabinet with Whistler's decorations almost untouched.

A few years ago Messrs. Obach had in their possession a set of glass panels for a door from the house of Anderson Rose, stated to be by Whistler, but there is no evidence of Whistler's work in them. Recently a set of Empire chairs were shown in New York said to have been decorated by Whistler for Wickham Flower, and so described at Christie's where they were sold, but Messrs. Christie do not guarantee the articles in their sales. To those who know Whistler's work there was no trace of it in the chairs, and we have it on Mrs. Flower's authority that the decorations were by Henry Treffy Dunn.

Mr. Sheridan Ford, in the suppressed edition of The Gentle Art, writes that, at Sir Thomas Sutherland's request, Whistler designed a scheme of decoration for his house, but that its "startling novelty caused such evident anxiety," Whistler carried it no further. Some houses he did decorate later on—those of Mrs. William Whistler, Mr. William Heinemann, Senor Sarasate, Mrs. Walter Sickert, Mrs. D'Oyly Carte, Mr. Menpes. But the decoration was simply the colour-scheme. Whistler mixed the colour, which was usually put on by house-painters. He frequently suggested the furniture, but of design, as in The Peacock Room, there was nothing, not even in any of his own houses after the White House. To one friend, thinking of decorating, who asked his advice, his answer was, "Well, first burn all your furniture." Often he gave elaborate directions as to what colours should be used and how they were to be applied. Mrs. D'Oyly Carte wrote us:

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"It would not be quite correct to say that Mr. Whistler designed the decorations of my house, because it is one of the old Adam houses in Adelphi Terrace, and it contained the original Adam ceiling in the drawing-room and a number of the old Adam mantelpieces, which Mr. Whistler much admired, as he did also some of the cornices, doors and other things. What he did do was to design a colour-scheme for the house, and he mixed the colours for distempering the walls in each case, leaving only the painters to apply them. In this way he got the exact shade he wanted, which made all the difference, as I think the difficulty in getting any painting satisfactorily done is that painters simply have their stock shades which they show you to choose from, and none of them seem to be the kind of shades that Mr. Whistler managed to achieve by the mixing of his ingredients. He distempered the whole of the staircase light pink; the dining-room a different and deeper shade; the library he made one of those yellows he had in his drawing-room at the Vale, a sort of primrose which seemed as if the sun was shining, however dark the day, and he painted the woodwork with it green, but not like the ordinary painters' green at all. He followed the same scheme in the other rooms. His idea was to make the house gay and delicate in colour."

When he left No. 2 Lindsey Row he suggested the colour arrangement throughout the house for the new tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Morse, got his man Cossens to do the distempering, and, Mrs. Morse writes us, "was so afraid that we should do it wrongly that he personally superintended the work and mixed the colour himself, though in consequence of this a whole wash for the dining-room was spoilt, as he forgot to stir it up at the right moment. There was great discussion about gold size."

To decoration Whistler applied his scientific method of painting, and on his walls, as in his pictures, black was often the basis. Colour for him was as much decoration as pattern was for William Morris, and in the use of flat colour for wall decoration Whistler has triumphed. His theory of interior decoration, though people do not realise it, has been universally adopted, even his use of distemper, in which he was only carrying on the beautiful tradition of whitewashing walls. Not only can this simple scheme be made more appropriate as a background than Morris' hangings and stencillings, but it has the virtue of utility and cheapness, which Morris for ever preached but never practised. In the painting of pictures, the idea of the Pre-Raphaelites was decoration—that is, convention. Their decoration was either wilfully or ignorantly founded on the realism of the Middle Ages. The great decorators of Italy were the realists of their day, their realism, except in the case [Pg 162] of the greatest, Piero della Francesca, is now regarded as convention, and it is the Pre-Raphaelites who stirred up these dead bones. In France, Puvis de Chavannes developed Italian methods, adapting them to modern subjects and modern wants, retaining the convention of flatness and simplicity. Whistler believed that a portrait or a Nocturne should be as decorative as a conventional design; that, by the arrangement of his subjects, and by their colour, they should be made decorative, and not by conventional setting and conventional lines. He also believed that walls should be in flat tones and not covered with pattern. Pictures then placed upon them were shown properly and did not struggle with the pattern. Lady Archibald Campbell writes us a few lines proving that he could make people understand his aims when they were willing to learn from him:

"The fundamental principles of decorative art with which Whistler impressed me, related to the necessity of applying scientific methods to the treatment of all decorative work; that to produce harmonious effects in line and colour grouping, the whole plan or scheme should have to be thoroughly thought out so as to be finished before it was practically begun. I think he proved his saying to be true, that the fundamental principles of decorative art, as in all art, are based on laws as exact as those of the known sciences. He concluded that what the knowledge of a fundamental base has done for music, a similarly demonstrative method must do for painting. The musical vocabulary which he used to distinguish his creations always struck me as singularly appropriate, though he had no knowledge of music."

Before the Ruskin case came into court, the idea of opening an atelier for students occurred to Whistler, and it was because the painting-room at No. 2 Lindsey Row was too small that he asked Godwin to build the house, ever since known as the White House, in Tite Street. Up to this time he had never had a studio in Chelsea. His pictures had been painted in rooms without a top-light, partly, no doubt, that he might paint his sitters under natural conditions. Even in his later studios of the Rue Notre-Dame des Champs in Paris, and Fitzroy Street in London, shades and screens were drawn so that the light might come in as from an ordinary window. He was trying to put the figure into the atmosphere that surrounded it, not to cut it out of this atmosphere. But he needed more space for the atelier ,[Pg 163] which promised success. Among artists, there were always a few who believed in Whistler. Duranty only expressed the prevailing feeling when, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1878), he referred to Whistler's influence on British painters represented in the Universal Exhibition.

The White House, low, three-storeyed, simple in ornament, is modest compared to many houses in Tite Street. It has been much changed, but the general plan survives. When it was built, it shared the fate, of everything associated with Whistler. The white brick of the walls, the green slate of the roof, the stone facings, the blue door and woodwork were as "eccentric" and "fantastic" as Whistler himself to art-critical journalists. To architectural papers they were the cause of debate and calling of names. To the Metropolitan Board of Works the simplicity of design was suspiciously plain, and mouldings in specified places were insisted upon in return for the licence to build. Discussion followed discussion, because the studio was the most important feature of the interior and placed at the top of the house, because windows and doors were made where they were wanted "and not with Baker Street regularity," because Godwin and Whistler liked the lovely effect of the green tiles with the white walls. Harry Quilter, who bought the house in 1879 and altered it, probably ruined the colour-scheme which Whistler had arranged, and the interior decoration, if it was ever carried out, does not now exist.

Whistler's tenancy of the Lindsey Row house came to an end on June 25 (1878), but he could not leave it in time for the new tenants. He did not get out of the studio until October. It was surprising that he moved at all. The moment was one of debts and difficulties. He was alone. His mother was ill at Hastings, he had just broken his engagement with Leyland's sister-in-law,[7] and he had quarrelled with Leyland. The criticism of the last few years told severely upon the sale of his pictures—upon himself. Howell, who had "started cheques and orders flying about" and attended to business details, kept a diary during part of 1877 and all of 1878. To look through it is to share Whistler's indignation that so great an artist should be reduced to such shifts. In Kensington and St. John's Wood palaces, Academicians could not turn pictures out fast enough for the competing crowd;

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Whistler was often compelled to borrow a few shillings. There are legends of his taking a hansom and driving to find somebody to lend him half a crown to pay for it, and before he had found anybody and could get rid of the cab the fare had mounted to half a guinea. Howell's diary shows that he had to raise money before he could lend it to Whistler. Sometimes larger sums than he could manage were arranged by Anderson Rose, Whistler's patron and solicitor. As "ill and worried," Howell describes Whistler on one of the visits to Mr. Rose, and there was every reason he should be. A Mr. Blott figures in other transactions. Whistler's letters to him have been sold and published, and it would be useless to ignore their relations. Money for the White House had to be obtained. To Mr. Blott he gave his Carlyle as security for a hundred and fifty pounds, agreeing to pay interest, offering other pictures as security if a sum of four hundred could be advanced. Cheques were protested, writs were threatened. The pictures he could not sell went wandering about as hostages. The Mother for awhile was with Mrs. Noseda, the Strand printseller. We have heard that she would have sold it for a hundred pounds. Mr. Rawlinson, who saw it either there or at Mr. Graves', has told us that nobody could have bought it under such circumstances, after having seen it in Whistler's bedroom, where it had hung and been shown by him with reverence. When Whistler heard that Mrs. Noseda was offering the picture for this price, he is said to have gone at once to remonstrate, and by his vehemence to have made her ill.

One man who helped him through these troubled times was Henry Graves, head of the firm in Pall Mall. Graves, introduced to Whistler by Howell, agreed to engrave the portrait of Carlyle in mezzotint, and Howell bought the copyright of the engraving from Whistler for eighty pounds and six proofs. W. Josey was commissioned to make the plate. Three hundred signed proofs of a first state were to be printed. The plate would not stand so large an edition; it was steel-faced and, as the steel-facing of mezzotint was not possible, turned out a failure. The attempt to remove the steel ruined the ground, and Josey had to be called in to go over it again. In the first state, the floor was perfectly smooth, but, the steel-facing taken off, a spot appeared in the plate which never could be got out and remained there through the edition. After every seventy proofs printed, Josey had to work on the plate and bring it back, as well as he could, to its original condition. Whistler did not like the first proofs and offered to show the printers how to do them. Mr. A. Graves went with him to Holdgate's, the printer, in London Street. Whistler brought his own ink, put on an apron, inked the plate as he would an etched one, while the whole shop looked on. When the plate, wiped and ready, was put through the press, it came out a shadow, the ink being far too weak. Whistler did not try a second time. Mr. Graves preserved the proof, writing on it that Whistler pulled it, and sold it for three guineas, to whom he does not remember. Eventually Whistler was satisfied, for Howell, on December 2, 1878, gave Whistler what he calls his first proof, and the diary says: "Whistler and the Doctor were delighted." It is also recorded in the diary that one of Whistler's six proofs was sold to Lord Beaconsfield.

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The print of the Carlyle was very successful. At Howell's suggestion, Graves agreed to give Whistler a thousand pounds for a portrait of Disraeli, and the copyright: a plate to be made from it also.

Mr. Alan S. Cole says Whistler went to see Disraeli:

"September 19 (1878). Called on J., who told me of his interview with Lord Beaconsfield as to painting a portrait of him. He had been down at Hughenden—saw the old gentleman, who, however, declined."