Part 10

In spite of abuse Whistler continued producing portraits--one of Leyland in evening dress standing at full length, an “arrangement in black”; one of Mrs. Leyland, never entirely completed, a very beautiful “symphony in flesh color and pink”; one of Mrs. Huth in black velvet, another “arrangement in black.” They were all realistic enough as regards the likeness but decoratively arranged as regards pattern and color. They were, once more, the blended view of the West and the East, and Whistler never tried to disguise the fact. He sought to place the figure in the canvas as far as he stood from the sitter when painting the picture, but otherwise he adhered to the flattening of the pattern, the simplicity of the arrangement, and the predominance of a tone of color.

In 1876 Whistler was given _carte blanche_ to produce one of his tone effects in a room at the Leyland house. This afterward became known as the Peacock Room. It held the picture of the “Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine” at one end, was decorated elsewhere with peacocks, furnished with cabinets of blue-and-white china, and set off with blue and gold in the walls and ceiling. The idea of the peacocks had probably come to Whistler from some Japanese master, perhaps Okio, and the rest of it was his own arrangement of color. The next year was that of the suit against Ruskin. London laughed and Whistler shortly thereafter went into bankruptcy. Everything was seized and sold, bringing little or nothing. The tide was at its lowest ebb, and the painter was left stranded, but by no means dead or even moribund.

When he had sufficiently recuperated he went off to Venice, where he gathered a little coterie of admirers about him who referred to him as “the master,” and where he talked much, and did some etchings and some pastels on colored paper. The first series of Venetian etchings, twelve in number, were done in the summer of 1880, and possibly he never went beyond such plates as “The Rialto,” “The Bridge”, and “The Traghetto.” They seem the most flawless of his etched work. As for the pastels, they were largely notes of color, line, or movement, and while charming as notes, they were not impeccable in drawing. They were never intended to be realistic in any modern sense; they were, in fact, mere flying autumn leaves that meant nothing aside from form and color and their airy lightness.

In November Whistler returned to London, and the sniping and sharpshooting began again. It was temporarily interrupted by the death of his mother in January, but soon broke out anew. Portraits were being painted--that of Duret in evening clothes with a domino on his arm, and one of Lady Archibald Campbell, called “The Yellow Buskin,” an “arrangement in black,” being the most notable. “The Yellow Buskin,” now in the Fairmount Park Gallery, Philadelphia, appeals to many people as perhaps Whistler’s most spirited and effective portrait, but London criticism viewed it lightly. The _Morning Advertiser_ said “its obvious affectations render the work displeasing,” and another critic stated that “he has placed one of his portraits on an asphalt floor and against a coal-black background, the whole apparently representing a dressy woman in an inferno of the worldly.” The public was equally unconvinced. So in 1884 Whistler mounted the platform at Princes Hall and in his _Ten O’Clock_ set forth not only his philosophy of art but his scorn and contempt for almost everybody and everything excepting art and artists. The lecture created a stir, was repeated at Oxford and Cambridge, and Whistler became famous as one who could write even if he could not paint. Oddly enough, his lecture seemed to command more respect than his pictures, though it had not a tithe of their sincerity.

At any rate, the painter’s fortunes now began to mend. He joined the Society of British Artists, and two years later became its president. In 1888 he was married to Beatrix Godwin, widow of E. B. Godwin, the architect, afterward moving to No. 21 Cheyne Walk, where many orders for portraits came to him. Success and honors came also. France gave him the Legion of Honor, Bavaria made him an academician, he had the Cross of St. Michael, and later on Glasgow University gave him an LL.D. His pictures at auction increased in price five and ten fold; his commission prices were in proportion. He grew so affluent that he could even decline to paint a ceiling for the Boston Public Library. At last the light was beginning to dawn--a trifle late, to be sure, but nevertheless it was welcomed by the painter.

The rest is soon told. In 1892 he moved to Paris and lived in the rue du Bac. A studio was opened for pupils in Paris at which he agreed to give lessons. It was popular at first, but did not last long. He travelled back and forth to London a good deal, and finally returned to England to live. Quarrels had followed him to Paris and the Eden trial had taken place there. It was unfortunate. _Trilby_ had been written and Whistler was parodied in it, which caused another tempest in a teapot. Then Mrs. Whistler died, and that was not only a great shock but a lasting grief. He never quite got over it. He wandered to Paris and Rome, but he cared little for them; he kept at work with feverish energy, but he accomplished little. He was evidently broken, not only in spirit but in body; and his death in July, 1903, was hardly a surprise to his more intimate friends. The overstrung bow at last had snapped.

For many years Whistler had been wrongly estimated alike by friend and foe. That one admired and the other condemned did not change the measure of extravagance. There was exaggeration on both sides. Since his death his critics have held their tongues, but many of his admirers have burst into print with impressions and reminiscences that are quite out of proportion and give a misleading idea of the man and the painter. The best account of him is that of the Pennells. They were devoted to him and wrote enthusiastically about him, as they should; but they did not fail to give the pros and cons in parallel columns. Moreover, they did not make him out a jester with cap and bells, a poseur, a wit, and a fop, but a very sincere and serious artist stung to resentment by the stupidity and studied insults of a perverse generation. That is precisely the right point of view, but unfortunately the Pennells are about the only ones who have consistently held it. The other accounts, for the most part, deal with his personal appearance, his witticisms, his eccentricities, his quarrels, and let his art go with a few rhapsodic generalities.

As for the descriptions of Whistler’s personality, they give a false impression by undue emphasis on certain appearances. My acquaintance with him was after 1890, though I had met him some years before. At no time was I impressed with his “flashing” eye, or his “claw-like” hands, or his “white lock,” or his “dandified” costume. They were not marked features unless one were looking for them. He was slightly built, refined-looking, and carried himself well, even gracefully. The Chase portrait of him is so foolish that even Chase could not show it without apologies and explanations; and as for the Boldini portrait, it is thoroughly Mephistophelian. About the latter, Whistler said: “They say that looks like me; but I hope I don’t look like that.” The portrait is a typical Boldini, with all that that implies of vulgarity and insinuation. But Whistler looked like a gentleman, not like a _boulevardier_.

His manner was courteous and his disposition usually good-natured. I never saw anything of his waspishness, nor heard any of his vitriolic retorts. He talked soberly and very sensibly unless aroused or driven into a corner by argument. Then he would fight back viciously enough and with excellent wit. From some quick answers to foolish people he finally became known for repartee and his name was used as a peg upon which many sharp sayings were hung, and he quite innocent of them. The only bright retort from him that I ever heard was made at my own expense. I recount it as illustrative of his brightness.

One night at the Pennells’, Whistler had been grumbling in an amusing way over art criticism and art critics. No one answered him. He had the floor entirely to himself and the rest of us were content to smile. Near eleven o’clock, as I rose to go, and Whistler and Pennell went with me to the door, I ventured to say that art critics were not very different from other people, that they did the best they could, but were human and often erred. It was good-natured deprecation of his point of view, which he met by putting his hand on my shoulder and saying with equal good nature:

“Oh, my dear Van Dyke, don’t misunderstand. We none of us think of you as an art critic.” Everybody laughed, myself included. There was not a particle of venom in it. I had written about him in praise in the early eighties when others were abusing him and he had thanked me for it; I was in his good books. To be sure, the retort was hardly new. John Brougham had launched it at Lester Wallack many years before. But the cleverness of it lay in its application.

Whistler liked to talk, especially if there was an audience of half a dozen. He was then very willing to fill space in the spot-light and conduct the session, especially if art was up for discussion. Another night, at a Pennell dinner, a very clever man--one of the editors of the _Daily Telegraph_--was present. He had recently returned from the far North--beyond Spitzbergen--and had been telling us about the brilliancy of the Northern color. Whistler, beside whom I sat, was not interested and kept tugging at my arm, telling me that it was mere raw color and not art. To that I finally had to make reply that I cared not a rap whether the color was artistic or not, that I was interested in the mere fact of its brilliancy. With that he flung around in his chair, turning his back on me, much as a child might do, and remained silent until the subject changed.

But it is an error to infer that because he was often witty and occasionally petty, wit and pettishness were his outstanding characteristics. By setting forth unrelieved chapters of his stories and sayings the impression has been produced that he started a new quarrel each morning before breakfast and shot envenomed shafts until sunset. That his witticisms were scattered over a period of forty years is neither stated nor implied. As a matter of fact, he was almost always in a serious mood, and, with his knowledge and gift of language, talked most sensibly and persuasively. I remember many interesting and informing talks with him when there was no jesting and not even smiling. In his own studio, with his own pictures on the easel and he explaining his intention and its development on the canvas, he was at his best. He was then a reasonable, sensible painter, with none of the pose of the _Ten O’Clock_ and none of the vanity of _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_. I have never met a more striking contradiction in an individual, and it always seemed to me that the Whistler of the sharp tongue and pen was not the true Whistler but merely a character assumed for the occasion.

His published writings, as one reads them to-day, are extravagantly brilliant, but hardly sincere, even from a Whistlerian point of view. Take from the _Ten O’Clock_, for instance, the oft-quoted sentence: “There never was an artistic period, there never was an art-loving nation.” A measure of truth lies under that, but Whistler knew that he exaggerated it, overstated it. Again the statement that “Art happens--no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about, and puny efforts to make it universal end in quaint comedy and coarse farce.” Here is another half-truth, but so arbitrarily insisted upon that one infers that art is really an isolated and unrelated phenomenon on the earth. Whistler knew better than that. Nothing “happens” in this world. There is a cause for every effect. Once more the remark about “the unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset.” But he himself never was so foolish as to believe such nonsense. It was merely a rococo way of saying that art could not handle a sunset in a satisfactory manner, and that his art, in particular, preferred a twilight or a midnight. The _Ten O’Clock_ indeed explains Whistler’s art better than any other, and, of course, that was why it was written. His own limitations and necessities could not have been better set forth than by the sentence: “Nature is very rarely right; to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong.” He wanted to put a conventionalized nature into a decorative pattern, and he justified it by saying that a realistic nature is “usually wrong.” It is somewhat of a piece with his remark that “there are too many trees in the country.” There were--for Whistler’s art.

But it is useless to point out the superficial in the Whistler arguments--the falseness of analogy, for instance, in comparing national art with national mathematics. That statement was made to produce a laugh, and it succeeded. It is even stupid to point out the want of logic or historical truth in the _Ten O’Clock_. One might as well try to break Whistler’s own butterfly on a wheel. The lecture was written and delivered to astonish the natives. And it did. It was a charming bit of extravagance, beautifully written for platform delivery, and a delightful piece of literature for fireside reading. Had it been logical, temperate, well-guarded in its utterances, it would have fallen flat. It fitted the occasion, was a work of art in itself, and no more “happened” than Whistler’s pictures and etchings.

That he wrote extremely well makes it all the more unfortunate that he wrote at all. The letters of _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_ are amusing, but leave an impression of flippancy and mere cleverness. These were qualities rightly enough used in a rough-and-tumble newspaper quarrel, but the reader does not leave them there. Unwittingly he looks for the same qualities in Whistler’s portraits and pastels, perhaps reads them into the art itself. Worse yet, he possibly arrives at the conclusion that the art is of less interest than the quarrels, of less moment than the passing gibe of the “foolish sunset,” or the casual irrelevance of “dragging in Velasquez.” Once more, it is a pity that Whistler the painter has to be confused with Whistler the critic-baiter. However well one comes out of a fight, it is generally with rumpled plumage and a lack of dignity. Whistler could well have afforded to go his way in silence. Why did he have to kick at every cur that barked at his heels? Degas said he acted as though he had no talent, and Degas was right.

After these books of bickerings one comes back to Whistler’s pictures with relief, for they at least are serious. That is not, however, to say that they are the greatest this, or the most wonderful that, in all painting. They are far from being impeccable, but they are not the wherewithal to suckle fools and chronicle small beer. No competent person nowadays thinks them other than very sincere art. His brothers of the craft have, indeed, so elevated them and him, so pedestalled and niched them both, that it is very doubtful if they can long hold out in their rarefied atmosphere. Again and again has the world been told that he was a faultless draftsman, that his brush was equal to that of Velasquez, and that his needle outdid Rembrandt. He did not believe so himself, nor, soberly considered, does his art affirm it.

The Pennell book contains photographs of a number of pictures labelled “destroyed,” and there were scores of canvases that never got so far as even to be photographed. Many of the pictures that escaped destruction are faulty in drawing, lacking in construction, out of proportion, or smitten with stiffness in the joints. Connie Gilchrist on the stage skipped the rope delightfully, but in Whistler’s portrait called “The Gold Girl” she is petrified. The “Sarasate” seems pinched in scale, the “Irving as Philip” is unbelievable in construction, the “Leyland” legs had to be redrawn from a model. Whistler glorified the people of Velasquez because “they stand upon their legs.” In his studio, showing his own portraits, his first question about each figure was: “How does it stand?” And then: “Does it stand easily, stand firm, stand in? Is it placed right on the canvas, has it enough body, enough atmospheric setting?” These were questions that had to do with realistic or representative appearance. Again and again he rubbed out the whole day’s work or destroyed the picture entirely. And he could write of himself to his printer in the severest terms, thus: “No, my drawing or sketch or whatever you choose, is damnable and no more like the superb original than if it had been done by the worst and most incompetent enemy.... There must be no record of this abomination.”

This, in measure, is the experience of every artist. He produces with difficulty and has scores of failures. It was not to Whistler’s discredit that he was so severe a judge of himself, but perhaps it dispels the delusion of his being an impeccable craftsman. Besides, there was an unusual reason for his lack of success with many pictures. It has been already suggested that he strove to harmonize the conflicting traditions of the West and the East. He was born and bred to the realism of the third dimension--to the protrusion or recession in space of planes, figures, lights, and colors. Midway in his career he took up with the decorative in Eastern art and strove to show the representative figure of the French with the flattened formula of the Japanese.

Whistler was thus on a seesaw the greater part of his artistic life, trying to maintain a balance between these two formulas. With almost every picture it was too much realism or too much decoration. To make the union more perfect he began the remorseless cutting down of the subject, reaching a limit in his nocturnes which were finally reduced to little more than night-sky effects. He cut out modelling and outline until the portrait of “Mrs. Leyland” became a mere tonal scheme, as flat almost as the wall at the back. Light, too, was dimmed and color lost its brilliancy in a prevailing harmony of low tones. Finally, the brush which had been heavily loaded in his Courbet days and ran freely (as witness the dress patterns even in the later “Lange Leizen”) became thin, watery, absorbent, almost diaphanous in its feathery imperceptible touch. On top of all this, and to further blend the representative into the decorative and draw the picture together, there occasionally came a thin wash of transparent gray or brown, covering the whole canvas and binding the drawing, the light, the color into one tonal envelope. In the final analysis, the canvas was rightly enough called an arrangement, a harmony, a symphony, a nocturne--what you will. Anything else was merely suggestion.

The etchings were not so amenable to Japanese pattern as the paintings, water-colors, and pastels, yet even in them there was the disposition, not so much toward flattening the planes as eliminating details, making suggestion answer for realization, and, later on, the further attempt to produce a tone effect by small scratchings and hatchings on the plate. The inclination is perhaps better shown in his lithotints, such as that of “The Thames” (Lithotint W. 125), than in the etchings.

The decorative arrangement was his view of what art should be and was more or less manifested in everything he did. Even the _Ten O’Clock_ is more decorative than realistic. The arrangement of the sentences and paragraphs is charming, and whether they mean anything or not is of small importance. Of course Whistler would have objected to being thus hung by his own rope, but he deliberately subordinated the sense of his sentences to their rhythm and tone. People who write (even art critics) are aware of what constitutes pattern and color in words and they are well pleased that the _Ten O’Clock_ was not representative but just as it is--that is, decorative and delightful. The painter people, however, seem to regard it as the inspired gospel of art and every word of it true. From which one may infer that the artist, when outside of his _métier_, can look at the wrong thing with that persistence sometimes thought peculiar to the unattached writer.

In the final analysis Whistler’s fame must rest upon his pictures, though a certain amount of notoriety will probably always be given his sayings and a proper admiration accompany his writings. As a painter and an etcher he has a now-unquestioned place and he will hold it. Nothing in nineteenth-century art is quite of a kind with his. It stands alone in its aim and purpose, belongs to no art movement of the time, proclaims the ideals of no race or people. As for the usual motives of painting, Whistler scorned them or denied them. He cared nothing about classicism or romanticism, nothing about sentiment, feeling, passion, or action. The dramatic, the tragic, the domestic, the illustrative were foreign to him. Even nature put him out. The country bored him, and the sea was only so much blue paint in a pattern. He was a maker of beautiful schemes of color and line, with just enough of human interest about them to lend a meaning and occasionally a touch of intimacy.

That seems like reducing his art to a very simple affair, but, on the contrary, within the self-imposed limitations there was room for the greatest variety. He did portraits, figures, genre pieces, sea-pieces, river-views; he worked in oils, water-colors, pastels; he etched many plates that are to-day the joy of connoisseurs, and he vastly improved the almost forgotten art of lithography. The breadth of his accomplishment was wide and the excellence of it high. Nothing that he ever did but has some note of color, some wave of line, some fastidious arrangement or grouping that serves as a mark of distinction. He did hundreds of pastels and water-colors no larger than one’s hand, that contain lovely figures and draperies, as, for example, the “Annabel Lee”; or gave suggestions of the sea or shore akin to “The Blue Wave,” or spread sky patterns comparable to the “Battersea Bridge.” These pictures are now widely scattered, and one does not realize how truly decorative their planning until he meets them to-day, hanging singly or in pairs, in some drawing-room. There they put other modern work out of countenance by the way they do not “break through the wall” but enhance and beautify it. It is household art of a most distinguished character in that it goes in the household and takes its place without quarrelling with everything about it. I have already quoted La Farge to the effect that in using the word “decorative” he was saying the best thing he could about a picture. There he and Whistler were in perfect agreement.