A Blue-black night, broken by sparks of bursting skyrockets and weird forms of light, in which two illuminated towers are vaguely indicated. To the left a cluster of foliage and a crowd of people, felt rather than seen. Such is the subject matter of this little 17 x 23 canvas which probably excited more controversy and discussion than any other of Whistler's pictures. It was scarcely noticed when it was first exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in October. But in 1877 the storm broke loose, and the famous libel suit against Ruskin, and the record of all details of the trial in a brown-covered pamphlet, under the title "Whistler v. Ruskin, Art and Art Critics" (in 1878), were the immediate results. And the discussion con or pro has not ceased to this very day. Some call it merely a clever sketch; others consider it one of the highest expressions beauty is capable of.

What is there so remarkable and fascinating in this picture, that it can exercise such an influence! Technically it is not perfect, the blacks are rather opaque, and it does not possess the haunting charm of the "Old Battersea Bridge" or even of the "Valparaiso Harbour."

Is it the subject matter? Fireworks were never painted before, or, at least, did not constitute the sole motif of a picture. Yet this should be no objection. Fireworks are one of the modern amusements that enjoy great popularity. There should be no objection to their representation, as little as to a baseball game, a prize fight or any realistic phase of our personal life. The curious interest of this painting, or any of Whistler's nocturnes, does not lie merely in the novelty of the subject (i. e. novel to pictorial representation), nor that it depicts the mystery of night in an unusual manner, as some artists and writers claim.

Its significance lies much deeper. It actually represents the beginning of a new way of painting, not merely of atmospheric conditions, but of an art different in its intentions from any previous form of representation.

During the trial Whistler himself gave the following definition of a nocturne:

"I have perhaps meant rather to indicate an artistic interest alone in the work, divesting the picture of any sort of interest which might have been otherwise attached to it. It is an arrangement of line, form and colour first, and I make use of any incident which shall bring about a symmetrical result. Among my works are some night pieces, and I have chosen the word 'Nocturne' because it generalizes and simplifies the whole set of them."

After Whistler had stated that he had worked two days on the "Falling Rocket," the General Attorney said:

"The labour of two days, then, is that for what you ask two hundred guineas?"

To which Whistler replied:

"No—I ask it for the knowledge of a life-time."

Owned by Mrs. Samuel Untermyer
NOCTURNE IN BLACK AND GOLD: THE FALLING ROCKET.

This is hardly a satisfactory explanation. It merely informs us that the consideration of line, form and colour is more important than the incident depicted. Have not all painters worked in that way! The actual manipulation of the pigment on the canvas is the supreme pleasure of every genuine painter. But the source of inspiration after all lies in the incident that is in the line, form and colour indicated by the incident. Or does Whistler wish to convince us that he mentally invented a colour scheme and then set out to find the incident? He might have said to himself, "I want to paint a night scene, in blue and gold, and I want such a silhouette to dominate the scene," but, after all, the incident had to furnish, or rather suggest, the possibilities of the mental vision. He, more than most painters, saw poetry in nature. His wonderful description of a river scene at night in the "Ten O'clock" vouches for that. Read these lines that are worthy of any poet:

"When the evening mist clothes the riverside with 'poetry' as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky and the tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and the fairy land is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home, the workman and the cultured one, the wise and the one of pleasures cease to understand as they have ceased to see, and nature, who for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master; her son in that he loves her, and her master in that he knows her."

A man who wrote like that surely received his inspirations from nature, and was dependent on the incident as much as anybody else. No, the true significance of his nocturne, as remarked before, lies in the original intention, not in the final effect of the subject he wished to produce. For conventionalist and impressionist alike, nature is the source of symbols for their mood. With them the standpoint is remarkably different from that of the superficial realists, who imagine that the mere copy of a scene must give the emotion that the scene itself arouses; who forget that the artist's emotion is as much a selective factor as his vision of the objective signs needful for the communication of his feeling to his public.

He probably wished to remain under cover, and not come out boldly and say: "This is the Japanese way of doing things. I disengage the poetical significance from an object or fact in Eastern fashion. I have learned this from the Hiroshige prints."

Few artists are willing to lay bare the mechanism of their individual way of interpretation. They would be misunderstood anyhow. Painters would have rejoiced to call him a downright imitator. And that is just the point where he differed from the average artist who followed the Eastern trail of art. He succeeded in combining the two great art elements of the world, those of the East and the West. In the sixties he was interested merely in a phase of Japanese art, that of colour. Hiroshige prints were hung on the wall or scattered on the floor of his studio, as can be noted in several of his earlier paintings. The Japanese artists were virtuosos of colour. They combined the most contradictory colours into a harmony, nuances which for centuries had escaped the appreciation of the European eye. After many experiments Whistler realized that this refined sense of colour was only one of the external accomplishments of Japanese art, that its true soul was revealed in its suggestive quality.

The Japanese artists work without perspective, shadows and reflections, and even when they apply them they do so in a purely decorative way. They rely entirely on design, on line and the juxtaposition of flat colour shapes. They do not care to produce an illusion, as if the frame afforded a view on a scene of actual life. They are satisfied with making a mere delineation, a suggestion of a beautiful gown or mountain view.

In literature, or even in such a simple matter as the naming of things, the Japanese invariably give play to the exercise of their imagination to bring out a suggestive effect. The same tendency extends into their fine arts. In treating objects of nature, however insignificant, the Japanese artist strives to suggest or indicate some sentiment beyond what is conveyed by the facts represented, just as the poet strives to store up a mine of thought in the thirty-one syllables of an ordinary verse, the Tanka, or in the still shorter Haikai of seventeen syllables. In short, the Japanese artist exerts himself to produce more than beauty of form or colour. This quality is less apparent in the coloured wood print so popular with Westerners. An Outomaro is really lacking suggestiveness. It runs too much into technical detail, and just for that reason perhaps we more readily understand the European artists.

Take for instant a simple representation of summer plants, merely a few stalks. The artist is not satisfied to show us the actual facts but endeavours to indicate something beyond what is actually represented, the delight of a flowery field in summer or the cool refreshing breeze under which the plants are bending and swaying.

The Western artists hitherto entertained a different ideal and though there were many schools, each advocating a different ideal, they all agreed on one point: that they had to create an illusion, with modelling, rotundity of form, light, shade and distance. Suggesting a fact is subtler than actually representing a fact. A sketch has something, a virility and freshness that a finished painting rarely has. We prefer Courbet to Ingres, Israels to Leighton. There must be something left to imagination, to our emotions and Æsthetic consciousness. The Japanese leave most to imagination. Their method lacks strength but is capable of conveying finer poetic sentiments. Their vision is clearer, more rapid and less disturbed by intellectual preoccupations than ours. They are perhaps more perceptual than conceptual. Not that they lack deep poignant expression, but that they are deficient in intensity and depth of representation. The grandiose unity of effect of a Titian, Tintoretto or Rubens is beyond the kakemono and colour print. They succeeded in some instances in adumbrating in lines of conventional severity and precision strange and mystical intimations of spiritual existence. But we find it difficult to discern these qualities as we need more than suggestion to arrive at such conclusions.

Whistler tried and succeeded in translating this suggestiveness in such a manner that the Western mind could understand and appreciate it. How did he accomplish this task! He realized that he could not abandon atmosphere, light and distance. He had to apply the Eastern principle without deteriorating the Western technique. To proceed like the Japanese would have resulted in a failure. His "Princess of the Porcelain Land" must have taught him this. He strove for something else than a mere resemblance. He adopted certain ideas of space arrangement, certain forms of design and the elimination of detail. The underlying composition reminds of the Japanese, but not the finish.

Hiroshige was the first designer of Japanese colour prints who devoted himself largely to landscapes with figures, and with Eastern ingenuity almost exhausted the subject. His "Hundred Views of Fusi-yama" contain the most startling designs and problems of composition that have ever been attempted, and they are treated with incomparable boldness, and solved with astounding skill. The rarest aspects of nature are treated with perfect balance. It is a play of curves and geometrical shapes that bewilders the Western mind that has been content with comparatively few formulÆ.

The vista idea of representing a scene as if viewed through the frame of a doorway, which Whistler so frequently used in his etchings as in "The Lime Burner" and "The Garden," is strictly Japanese. One of his friends said that Whistler never objected to any one trying to copy his way of painting, but looked upon filching of ideas as grand larceny. This proves how ignorant we all are about our conduct of life. If anybody ever plagiarized ideas it was Whistler. The "T" shape of the "Old Battersea Bridge," in his nocturne of blue and gold, is almost an exact copy of a Hiroshige design. The same can be said of the branch of leaves protruding like a silhouette from the margin of his "Ocean," and the composition of several other nocturnes. But Whistler added something which no Japanese print suggests. He added light, atmosphere, distance and mystery.

Tate Gallery, London
NOCTURNE IN BLUE AND GOLD: OLD BATTERSEA BRIDGE.

Hiroshige relied entirely upon design and line, and he was not a good draughtsman at that, at least not in his figures. His human figures frequently look like miniature caricatures or curious little insects. His line lacks purity and sweep, but is more realistic and less conventional than that of his predecessors. His colour is crude in comparison with the older artists. His prints that were executed after the introduction of European aniline colours in 1850, with their streaks of vivid red and blue, are almost offensive to the eye. His earlier ones, when he was content in working in pale colours, in pale blue and black with just a suggestion of pink, are vastly superior. Later on he tried to learn from the Europeans, and strove for atmospheric effects, but always suggested it rather by design than colour. If he used colour for that purpose it went never beyond a simple wash.

Whistler sacrificed line almost entirely. He worked in big masses, shapes and silhouettes and made colour the principal attraction. The simplicity of design he borrowed from the Japanese, but the intimate charm of his colour he got from another art, the art of music. Many paintings of the latter half of the nineteenth century show this musical tendency. Chavannes, Cazin, our American landscape painter Tryon, even the Impressionists, try to produce with colour something similar to the effect of sound. It is either a resemblance of feeling in execution, or the desire to deliver us over to a mood like music. Generally both desires go hand in hand.

The painter, to accomplish this, must go back to the emotional elements of things, to view objects with primitive enthusiasm and to disregard all cumbersome detail. These qualities must dominate his conception, and his treatment must be slightly decorative. He must see things flat, in curious shapes, and then juxtapose and complement his colours in such fashion that they produce instantaneously a pleasant retinal image. In most paintings the subject matter attracts our attention first, and the appreciation of its technique reaches our emotion through a mental process. A Chavannes fresco and a Cazin landscape, on the other hand, appeal directly to our emotions. Henner, Corot, CarriÈre are musical, Leighton, Dagnan-Bouveret, BÖcklin are not. Chavannes and Tryon construct their compositions like a composer his score. By applying parallelism of line and repetition of form and colour shapes with slight variation, they attempt to transpose musical conditions to the sphere of colour.

Cazin goes further than either. He comes nearest to Whistler. He actually tries to make the colour sing, not a composition of diversified interests, but a simple sweet melody that instantaneously produces a distinct lyrical emotion. In his best pictures he reproduces successfully the perfect harmony of a few fugitive tints, such as occur so frequently in nature by a combination of the evening sky and a shimmering surface of water, by a white cottage in moonlight, or desolate marshes against a starlit sky. In this, Whistler excelled. He advanced another step by using the smallest limit of colours possible, without obliterating form and subject matter. Although Whistler accentuated the breadth of vision, divided his space arrangement into as few planes as possible, juxtaposed rarely more than two colours, and made all objects appear shadowy and weird against a glimmering sky, it is astonishing how vibrant he kept his colour; the more so as his colours are laid on rather flatly, and, occasionally, so thinly that the canvas shines through. This, of course, helps the vibrating quality, but the colour tints contain so many subtle variations that they scarcely become discernible to the eye but merely conscious as a vague shimmer, like that of night and atmosphere themselves.

The colour combinations are frequently the same. Blue and silver, and blue and gold appear most frequently. Then there is brown with gold or silver, and a crepuscule in flesh colour and green, which was also the theme of "On the Balcony."

His subjects were chosen with great discretion. Outside of the "Valparaiso Harbour" picture, a "Southampton Water" and a "St. Marks, Venice," most were devoted to London. There is a Chelsea embankment in winter, a Chelsea in snow and ice, the Westminster Bridge, the Trafalgar Square in snow, and the old Battersea reach and bridge in three versions. Whistler never stopped work at a picture until it was as perfect as he could make it. Many of the pictures that are now on the market, mere scraps and fragments at ridiculous prices, he would not have allowed to go out of his studio. He had the conscience of the true artist, but he never went to the extreme. He knew when to stop, a quality which is exceedingly rare. He would never have spoiled a canvas as Maris and Ryder do. He worked very hard on most of his pictures, but they do not show it. The difficulties and deliberate slowness of execution are lost in the final result. "To say of a picture, as it is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view." He followed this maxim out to the letter. Industry was with him a necessity—not a virtue. Were you to ask me to define the charm of his nocturnes, I should say, I fancy that it lies in the delicious purity of their expression. The emotions which Whistler wishes to excite are those of visional pleasure, of subtle speculation and vague emotional joy. In him inspiration always prevailed over caprice. The picture had first to express the arrangement of colour entrusted to it, and was scarcely allowed any dash or extravagance of brushwork or form, unless they would form a part of his original plan and serve as a contrast or dissonance. He never added anything in his repaintings, but cut out one passage after another; he did not graft on, he pruned, for he meant nothing should remain but the most essential. If there was ever a man tormented by the accursed ambition to put the whole world into one picture, the whole picture into one tonality, and the whole tonality into one colour note, it was Whistler. It is difficult to understand why his work was ever criticized as being unfinished. When Burne-Jones, in a spirit hostile to Whistler's work, declared in the witness box at the Ruskin trial: "In my opinion ... a picture ought not to fall short of what has been for ages considered as complete and finished," Whistler retorted effectively: "A picture is completely finished when nothing more can be done to improve it."

NOCTURNE IN GRAY AND GOLD: CHELSEA, SNOW.

And for this finish he tried incessantly. There was never an artist who was more conscientious and more ardently striving for perfection than he. He sometimes tried experiments with different mediums in oil painting. At one time he used benzine to thin the colours, another time kerosene. He would cover a large canvas all over with the latter, in order to bring out the dried tints, before he started to repaint or overpaint. And he said to Clifford Adams, his last apprentice, "In the morning we may not succeed in getting the direct relation of colour, but at noon it may become more harmonious and at sundown we might strike just the right thing." And so he worked, day after day and year after year, on his pictures, until every trace of labour was obliterated and the picture had become a masterpiece. "A masterpiece that would appear "as a flower" to the painter—perfect in its bud as in its bloom—with no reason to explain its presence, no mission to fulfil; a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist—a puzzle to the botanist—an accident of sentiment to the literary man."

This flatly contradicts the general idea rampant among painters that he furnished his paintings au premier coup. His friends endorse the denial. Mr. R. A. Canfield has seen not less than sixteen changes of background to one portrait, "and heaven knows how many more that were not counted." Whenever he was dissatisfied with a painting, he started a new canvas until he finally realized the task he had attempted. In that sense his colleagues are right, his pictures look as if they were painted au premier coup but it was a roundabout way. It is impossible to advance any theory about his technique. All his pictures are painted in varying thicknesses of paint, in varying degrees of liquidity of paint, in varying smoothness and roughness, in few or many sittings, in fact, in the varying technique which alone can correspond to moods of so great a painter and the circumstances of each picture.

The only thing which has any semblance to a constant method is a moderate adherence, in his portraits at least, to the old way of painting from dark to light which, in the final painting, in overlapping pieces of paint, as in the case of most oil paintings until recently, results in the thickening of the paint towards the light.

There are scarcely more than sixteen finished nocturnes on record. Of these, most are masterpieces, or would pass as belonging to the best of his works. And as he worked at them ever since he returned from Valparaiso in 1866 and held the first important exhibition of nocturnes at the Dowdswell Gallery, and in Paris (in the Rue SÈze) not previous to 1883, when quite a number were still unfinished, we are astonished at the small output. But masterpieces are scarce. And if a painter can be credited with two or three every year he is a hero in his profession.

The importance of the nocturne in Whistler's own career, everybody must realize who is familiar with his work. They add to his personality a delicious flavour that even his lithographs and large paintings do not grant in the same manner. It was to him an instrument that obeyed his slightest wishes. It was art, at once aristocratic, delicate, of high finish and moreover imbued with an individual rhythm and the poetry of nature.

NOCTURNE IN BLUE AND SILVER.

What wonderful rain and snow this man has painted! What vast expanses of water as mystic as the night! And those vagrant mists, that envelop everything and blot out the very existence of things! There has not been anything in art since Turner that could be compared with it. There are no banal sunsets, no glaring moonlights, only the more intricate moods of nature, snowfall, mist, late evening and night. Also in the choice of his subject he added a new note.

The art of a landscape painter is determined by a thousand influences upon his mind other than those of nature. The essence of Monet's art is one of an hour, but with such a painter as Daubigny or Rousseau it is one of a place. There is the sense of the atmosphere of the moment given by one school of landscape painters, of locality by another, poetry by a third and of the historic associations of a place by yet another school. These things are, of course, determined by temperament, and schools of painting may be classified in this way more adequately than they are. Human association creeps into landscapes in various degrees, and also in other ways than the historical way which we feel,—as in F. E. Church's pictures, for instance,—but landscape, generally subordinate to the human interest, now sometimes tries to free itself from this influence entirely. It has become like poetry, simply the record of an emotion or mood remembered in colour. This is Whistler's peculiar innovation.

And yet the final significance of the nocturne in the world of art is still an open question. Time alone can decide its value. The rest is mere hypothesis. Many—and I only talk of people who understand—argue that despite its perfection, the nocturne represents a minor phase of art. Of course, a nocturne, no matter how beautiful, cannot compete in importance with the "Portrait of Carlyle," or "The Artist's Mother." Size does not mean much, but it means something. A small painting can be as exquisite in workmanship as a large one, but it can never rise to the same dignity of expression. A frescoe by Chavannes would lose much if executed in the size of the average easel picture.

But the nocturne stands for something in modern art which lends it special importance, aside of all workmanship and beauty of pictorial treatment. It represents a return to the art of painting for painting's sake. Every art, may it be music, poetry, dancing, sculpture or painting, has its own peculiar technique, which the technically ignorant person cannot appreciate. Poetry which has no formal conventions is inconceivable. And, in a similar manner, painting has the charm of texture and brushwork, the charm of how the paint is actually put on and displayed on the canvas. The Æsthetic satisfaction derived from an art is in exact proportion to one's knowledge of the art's technique.

This largely explains the general public's indifference to art. And the everlasting fight between the artist and the public has been on these lines. The plea of the modern experimentist that all poetry of painting should be in the paint, which also Whistler advanced, is a just one if not carried to extremes. Absolute paucity of idea is as unfavourable as story-telling. The intrinsic beauty of a painting lies in the method of painting, and the only guide for the painter is colour and the general arrangement—not a method learned by rote, not an arrangement garroted by a thousand rules which others have invented, but that personal style or rhythm which is inveterately the painter's own. So Whistler's style is beautiful because it is personal. His revolt was against story-telling, against the genre pictures, which adulterated painting with the skill of the novel writer. It is for future Æsthetics to decide whether the introduction of musical ideals is not just as dangerous as the intermixture of any other art. There is no doubt, however, that the new combination grants a higher pleasure to the connoisseur at present. Music is the most fashionable and, perhaps, most widely understood art to-day.

This be as it may, Whistler did a great service to modern art. By realizing its limitations he bestowed upon it a new vitality and glow. His art, far from being lawless, is the expression of a new law. Make any kind of pictures you like, dear painters, provided they are beautiful. For each age there is a different beauty. Old forms and old perfections wither.

There has been too much story-telling. The David school, with its pompous historical, allegorical and mythological representations, has become intolerable to us. David, Vernet, etc., up to Ingres and Delaroche all seem lifeless. Also the Romanticists, who were the interpreters of poets, appear highstrung to more recent art ideas. The reaction was inevitable. The Impressionists—and their merit lies principally in that their work represents a technical reaction—went too far, inasmuch as it allows scarcely any scope to intellectual expansion. It is based on immediate vision, and occupies itself only with the consideration of light and colour, and keen observation of modern life. All the great painters met the public half way. The great painters, we need only to recall Rembrandt, Velasquez or Leonardo, were painters as much as they were poets, but each in equal measure. The qualities balanced each other, and they did not, like the modern painters, sacrifice one for the other.

Whistler has to be classified as an Impressionist, but he remained true to the old tradition. He was as much a reactionist against classic and romantic painting as any of them; but he had no use for the new technique. Like Monet, he went back to Velasquez and Goya, Franz Hals, Van Dyke and all the Old Masters who could paint. Like Courbet, he reduced a scene to three or four broad tones, but he was more exact in the grade of tones, and invariably endeavoured to explain the sentiment inspired by them. His work was never anti intellectual. On the contrary he was a true visionary.

He protested against literary elements, but emphasized the psychological and symbolical qualities of painting. Nobody was further remote from gross superficial realism. Like Flaubert and the Goncourts, he proved that realism can go hand in hand with refined form and delicate psychology. He was sane throughout. And that is why the Æsthetic revolution, produced by him, is not yet at an end.

The first principle for the painter is to acquire a personal mode of feeling and thinking, and the second that he should find an adequate and personal method of expressing himself. The painter must choose his method. If he has only the old themes to paint the old forms will suit him well enough—portraits and single figures, landscapes and marines, cattle pictures and still life—but if he has anything special to say, he must find for himself a special and unique form of expression. The only criterion is beauty.