In 1885 Whistler’s lecture on art was given in London, Oxford, and Cambridge; to suit the convenience of Londoners who liked to linger over dinner, he fixed the hour of delivery rather later than usual. This was the famous “Ten o’clock lecture”—so vague and shadowy in its facts at the beginning, so brilliant at the end, and dispelling the Æsthetic fog in which the Æsthetes elected to dwell. It is significant of the slight heed given to Whistler’s real beliefs that characteristics of his appearance were at one time satirised in W. S. Gilbert’s “Bunthorne,” confusing him as was common with the Æsthetic craze. In “The Ten o’clock” his scorn is eloquent enough of the weird cult “in which,” as he says, “all instinct for attractiveness—all freshness and sparkle—all woman’s winsomeness—is to give way to a strange vocation for the unlovely—and this desecration in the name of the Graces!” But for all that the principles which governed in L’art nouveau which followed and may be said to be a part of the movement, are prominent in those two “arrangements” of his own, the portrait of Carlyle and the portrait of his Mother.
(In the Corporation Art Galleries, Glasgow)
This portrait is in the possession of the Glasgow Corporation, the only public body in these islands whose appreciation of the painter was not belated. In spite of protests, to their credit the purchase was made, and direct from the artist for £1000. The picture was first seen at the artist’s exhibition in 1874, and was painted in the same period as the “Portrait of My Mother.”
PLATE VII.—PORTRAIT OF THOMAS CARLYLE
No doubt the fame of an objet d’art can last for ever with connoisseurs, if rare enough in itself and rare in the skill displayed, and many a painting is destined to live on these same grounds. But there is a destiny too for the spirit of a picture of which all this valuable perfection is but the outward shrine. Where human experience rises to intensity of expression in art it is born into life anew and less perishably. It is thus that the picture of Whistler’s Mother is by common consent enthroned above the level of criticism, what we say for and against it being only as water lapping at the foot of a cliff. Incorporate with the traditions of a race it is acknowledged a classic, and of a classic one may speak as one does of life, with freedom as to how it affects oneself. I have challenged the effect of this picture upon myself. The trail of the age seems over it, the self-consciousness which is like a blight upon modern arts and crafts. Instead of its figure being painted in some such accidental contact with its environment as would naturally occur, we have an arrangement. In rearranging things thus for itself, art is at least one remove farther away from things as they are, and as things as they are reflect the influences that brought them together, art must come closer to life by the interpretation of this reflection than by its alteration. There must be an arrangement in every picture, but the improbability of this one, outside of a studio, spoils the picture for me. The figure is placed in position as we should place a piano. It is not very likely that a lady would sit at right angles to the wall with no fire in front of her, no work-table, no books. These thoughts rise unbidden when I look at the picture—but Whistler begs us in a printed letter to consider it as an arrangement. Incidentally, he says it is interesting to him as a portrait of his mother. Yet he misunderstood when he thought the artist’s rights extended beyond his creations to the attitude in which one should approach them, and the picture is famous for the beautiful rendering of the lady and to us only incidentally interesting as an arrangement. One does not escape the music of the outline of the figure in the picture, the balance of all parts of the design, the refreshing convention in comparison with other conventions. Only conventions perhaps are best left for portraits where the traditional environment connected with the high social status or office of the sitter, supplants in our imagination the more everyday aspect of their life. The unnaturalness of the photographer’s art may require concessions from every one; though even here as in painting, the art which conceals art must save the situation; and Whistler managed this gracefully enough in all his other portraits.
It was Gainsborough who was haunted by the smile of a woman. It is Whistler who represents her movement as she turns into the room, his art seeming to show a consciousness that the body that turns thus, the grace of the clothes, are but a temporary habitation of swiftly passing spirit.
In his early piano picture the trembling white dress of the child surprises him into the representation of stuff itself; later his art passes to an almost ecstatic obliviousness to the quality of things themselves and he surrenders the representation of their surface qualities for a fluid, musical, all-embracing quality of paint in which the artist can render his theme as a virtuoso, ever striving to overtake some almost impossible inflection of tone. And as his art becomes thus abstract, as it assumes such a mission as music, he finds musical terms for the names of his pictures to give the public the clue.
His water-colours are executed with an extremely pleasant touch of brush to paper in which he himself delighted, and here, as also in the case of etching, he made the most of the particular qualities of the medium and as ever was careful not to out-step the limitations which an appreciation of those qualities imposed. They do not do much more than register the incident of colour which interested him in any particular scene. It was to register his pleasure in that, rather than to make a full record of surrounding country that he made his water-colours, and the spectator will understand them only by the responsiveness of his imagination to artistic suggestion.
By the process of what is termed in the language of art “suggestion” (that is, interpretation by thoughtful, economical, and expressive touches instead of a photographic imitation) all merely mechanical labour is eliminated and there is a consequent spiritualising of the whole method by which the artist makes his communication to our imagination. He infers that we have advanced beyond an understanding merely of the capital letters of art, and that this autographic handling of the brush or etching needle is as intelligible to us as the characteristic penmanship of our friends and as charming.
