CHAPTER VIII: THE BEGINNINGS IN LONDON. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN FIFTY-NINE

TO EIGHTEEN SIXTY-THREE.

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. 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 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.

"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."

"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 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_ _'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 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.

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.

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.