Whistler’s life is at present a skeleton of dates on which this incident occurred or that, and at which the most notable of his pictures appeared. And this must remain so until an authoritative biography of the painter has appeared. With whom the authority rests was made the subject of a recent Law Case. Till such a work appears we can only deal with his art and with the Whistler legend, the impressions, recorded and otherwise, he left upon those who were brought into contact with him.[1] These are strangely at variance—some having only met him cloaked from head to foot in the species of misunderstanding in which, as he explained, in surroundings of antagonism he had wrapped himself for protection; others remembering him for his kindliness and his old-fashioned courtesy.

Permitting himself sufficient popularity with a few to be called “Jimmy,” Whistler’s full name was James Abbot McNeill Whistler, and the initials gradually twisted themselves into that strange arabesque with a wavy tail which he called a butterfly and with which he signed his pictures and his letters. Born on 11th July 1834 at Lowell, Massachusetts, he was the descendant of an Irish branch of an old English family, and in his seventeenth year he entered the West Point Military Academy, where after making his first etchings on the margins of the map which he should have been engraving, he decided to devote his life to art. He was twenty when he left America and he never returned to it, so that as far as America is concerned infancy can be pleaded. America has since bought more than her share of the fruits of his genius, finding in this open-handed way charming expression for her envy. He went to Paris to study art, where he was gay, and attracted attention to himself by the enjoyable way in which he spent his time. It was not until he was twenty-five that he arrived in London, and a little later moving to Chelsea commenced work in earnest.

A charming picture suggests itself of the painter escorting his aged mother every Sunday morning to the door of Chelsea old church, as was his habit, bowing to her as she enters and hastening back to the studio to be witty with his Sunday friends.

Whistler’s first important picture, “At the Piano,” issued from Chelsea. It was hung in the Academy in 1860 and was bought by a member of the Academy. He followed the next year with “La MÈre Gerard,” which belongs to Mr. Swinburne. He sent a picture called “The White Girl,” to the Salon of 1863. It was, however, rejected. It was then hung at the collection called the “Salon des RefusÉs,” an exhibition held as a protest against the Academic prejudices which still marked the Salon. There it met with an enthusiastic reception which set Whistler off on his career of defiance. In 1865 the painter went to Valparaiso for a visit, from which resulted the beautiful Valparaiso nocturnes. Back again in Chelsea, he devoted himself to the river there. He was then living in a house in Lindsay Row. At this time he was greatly affected by Japanese art, and one or two pictures show curious attempts to adapt scenes of the life of the West to the Eastern conventions. This phase of his art was beautiful, but he passed it on the way to work of greater sincerity, and more clearly the outcome of his own vision. In 1874 the first exhibition of Whistler’s work was held at a Gallery in Pall Mall, containing among other things “The Painter’s Mother,” “Thomas Carlyle,” and “Miss Alexander.” It is interesting that the Piano Picture, painted just as he emerged from his studentship, is of the flower of his art; he did things afterwards of great significance, and did them quite differently, but the Piano Picture does not seem a first work preparing his art for future perfection, it is so perfect in itself. And here perhaps we may observe another fact in connection with Whistler, that in the last days of his life he painted with the same genius for the beautiful as at the beginning; none of that deterioration had set in, which so often comes in the wake of flattery and belated public esteem. He was never betrayed by success into over, or too rapid, production. He never succumbed to the delight of anticipating a cheque by every post instead of bills. He found no difficulty in declining the most tempting offers. Well, work that is held thus sacred by its own creator, should tempt people to search for all that made it seem so valuable to him. Whistler had an intense dislike of parting with his work. When a picture was bought from him he was like a man selling his child. Sometimes he would see somewhere a picture he had painted, he would borrow it to add to or improve it, but he would keep it and live with it and gradually forget all about its possessor. Whatever qualms attacked his conscience for this procrastination, it was no part of his genius to confess, instead he would say “For years, this dear person has had the privilege of living with that masterpiece—what more do they want?” At Whistler’s death, however, it was found that the circumstances under which a picture had at any time been borrowed were methodically entered up, with minute directions as to the return of one or two pictures, borrowed thus, that were in his studio when he died.

In Chelsea, Rossetti and Whistler were good friends, they shared a love of blue china, in fact inventing the modern taste for certain kinds, especially for what they called “Long Elizas,” a specimen upon which slim figures are painted,—“Lange leises”—tall damsels—as they were called by the Dutch. One supposes that it is through Rossetti that he came into contact with Swinburne, who was inspired to write the poem called “Before the Mirror,” by Whistler’s picture “The White Girl,” and of which some of the verses were printed after the title in the catalogue of the Royal Academy Exhibition. The first verse in itself suggests a scheme of white:—

“White rose in red rose-garden
Is not so white;
Snowdrops that plead for pardon
And pine for fright
Because the hard East blows
Over their maiden rows
Grow not as this face grows from pale to bright.”

The poem was printed on gilded paper on the frame; this was however removed on the picture going to the Academy, and in the catalogue the two following verses were printed after the title:—

“Come snow, come wind or thunder
High up in air,
I watch my face, and wonder
At my bright hair;
Nought else exalts or grieves
The rose at heart, that heaves
With love of her own leaves and lips that pair.
“I cannot tell what pleasure
Or what pains were;
What pale new loves and treasures
New years will bear:
What beam will fall, what shower,
What grief or joy for dower;
But one thing knows the flower; the flower is fair.”

Later on, Swinburne did not allow the Ten o’clock lecture to go unchallenged, and he subjects its glittering rhetoric to a not unkind but cold analysis which, however, Whistler has the grace to print with marginal reflections in “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” the book which contains the paradoxes which reflect so well his powers as a thinker. It is doubtful whether Whistler in kinder circumstances would have produced his brilliant theories. The irritation caused by misconception, the necessity of justifying even his limitations to a world which was apparently prepared to consider nothing else about him at one time—these were the wine-press of his eloquence. He disliked the rÔle of teacher and apologised for it at the beginning of his “Ten o’clock,” and when, in later life, following the fashion, he started a school, he relied upon the example of his own methods of setting the palette rather than upon precept, with a little banter to keep good humour in his class-room. A young lady protested “I am sure that I am painting what I see.” “Yes!” answered her master, “but the shock will come when you see what you are painting.” A student at the short-lived AcadÉmie-Whistler has written that merely attempting to initiate them into some purely technical matters of art, he succeeded—almost without his or their volition—in transforming their ways of seeing! “Not alone in a refining of the actual physical sight of things, not only in a quickening of the desire for a choicer, rarer vision of the world about them, but in opening the door to a more intimate sympathy with the masters of the past.”

The thing that strikes one in reading “The Gentle Art” is how badly those who entered into combat with its author came off in the end, some of them in what they consider their witty replies committing suicide so far as their reputation as authorities on art went. Notable is the case of the critic of The Times, replying “I ought to remember your penning, like your painting, belongs to the region of chaff.” We have indicated the source of Whistler’s success as a wit—at that source we find the reason why he always scored when talking about painting. He is playing something more than a game of repartee. His best replies are crystallised from his inner knowledge. In them we get bit by bit the revelation which he had received as a genius in his craft.

It was the force of his personality that obtained for Whistler’s evasive art such recognition in his lifetime as in the natural course only falls to fine painters of the obvious, whom every one delights to honour. He had said that “art is for artists,” and it is true that the perfection of his own art is the pleasure of those who study it. It reached heights of lyrical expression where life in completeness has not yet been represented in painting; reached them perhaps because so lightly freighted with elementary human feeling. His work so often leaves us cold, and we turn seeking for art mixed further with the fire of life and alight with everyday desire.

But nature showed many things to this her appreciator—I write, her intimate friend. As a moth which goes out from the artificial atmosphere of a London room into the blue night, I think of the painter of the nocturnes—yet always as a lover of nature, never more so than when his subject is the sea. For he has a greater consciousness of the salt wet air than any other sea painter, of the veil behind which all ships are sailing and through which the waves break, the atmosphere which descends so mystically and invisibly and yet which if not accounted for in a canvas leaves ships with their sails set in a vacuum and the waves as if they were crested with candle-grease. Is it not absence of this atmosphere which has tortured us on so many occasions when with everything quite real a picture has not brought us pleasure. Pleasure comes to us always with reality in art, and the end of art is realism. All is real even around a mystic, though his thoughts are out of our sight. Whistler was not a mystic but above everything he wished to suggest the atmosphere which is invisible except for its visible effect, and I cannot help thinking his vision essentially abstract.

He did not paint subject pictures. To make our meaning quite clear, let us say such pictures as Frith’s, or better still, as Hogarth’s in which we have the extreme. The art of Hogarth moved upon a plane lower down, but there it had a strength unknown to Whistler, a careless and lavish inspiration of life itself. He had to find speech for all sorts of things in his art, beauty was but one of these, creeping in less as a deliberate aim than as the accident of a nature artistic. Whistler in painting desired to express nothing but his sense of beauty. For the rest of his nature, he found expression altogether outside his art in enthusiasm for life itself, its combats, difficulties, and its opportunities for saying brilliant things at dinner. His dinner conversation, I have been told, was like the abstract methods of his etching, always cryptic, full of suggestion,—wonderful conversation, full of short ejaculations which carried your imagination from one point to another with hints that seemed to throw open doorways into passages of thought leading right behind things.

He had a remarkable regard for purity of speech, as became the painter of such spiritual types of womanhood. It would seem that women liked him, and readily apprehended in his art his sensitive view of life. At table he drank but little and was a slender eater. When alone he would sometimes forget all about his meals, or eat scarcely anything; in later years, feeling the necessity of taking care of himself he would guard against his indifference by always seeking companionship when away from his house. His nervous disposition forced him to content himself with little sleep, his active brain keeping him awake conceiving witticisms and planning the battle for the morrow.

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