CHAPTER XI: CHELSEA DAYS. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SIXTY-THREE TO EIGHTEEN

SIXTY-SIX CONTINUED.

In Whistler's correspondence with Fantin between 1860 and 1865, published in part by M. Bénédite in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ (1905), it can be seen that he was outgrowing the influence of Courbet, and that his reaction against realism was bitter. In his revolt he deliberately built up subjects that had nothing to do with life as he knew it, and he borrowed the motives from Japan.

It was in the studio at No. 7 Lindsey Row--no huge, gorgeous, tapestry-hung, _bric-à-brac_ crowded hall, but a little second storey, or English first floor, back room--that the Japanese pictures were painted. The method was a development of his earlier work. The difference was in the subjects. He did not conceal his "machinery." _The Lange Leizen_, _The Gold Screen_, _The Balcony_, the _Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine_ were endeavours to render a beauty he had discovered which was unknown in Western life. There was no attempt at the "learning" of Tadema or the "morality" of Holman Hunt. Whistler's models were not Japanese. The lady of _The Lange Leizen_ sits on a chair as she never would have sat in the land from which her costume came, and the pots and trays and flowers around her are in a profusion never seen in the houses of Tokio or Canton. In _The Gold Screen_ pose and arrangement are equally inappropriate. The _Princesse_, in her trailing robes, is as little Japanese. When he left the studio and took his canvas to the front of the house and painted _The Balcony_, though he clothed the English models in Eastern dress and gave them Eastern instruments to play upon, and placed them before Japanese screens and Anglo-Japanese railings, their background was the Thames with the chimneys of Battersea. We have heard of a Chinese bamboo rack he used for these railings, though some remember it as a studio property made from his design. Nothing save the beauty of the detail mattered to Whistler. It was not the real Japan he wanted to paint, but his idea of it, just as Rembrandt painted his idea of the Holy Land.

The titles he afterwards found for these pictures are _Purple and Rose_, _Caprice in Purple and Gold_, _Harmony in Flesh Colour and Green_, _Rose and Silver_. Harmony was what he sought, though no Dutchman surpassed their delicacy of detail, truth of texture, intricacy of pattern. And yet we are conscious in them of artificial structure as in none of his other work; the models do not live in their Japanese draperies; Eastern detail is out of place on the banks of the Thames; the device is too obvious.

The _Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine_ is the portrait of Miss Christine Spartali, daughter of the Greek Consul-General in London, whom Whistler met at Ionides', and to whose dinners and parties he often went. There were two daughters, Christine (Countess Edmond de Cahen) and Marie (Mrs. W. J. Stillman), both beautiful. Whistler and Rossetti were struck by their beauty, and Whistler asked the younger sister, Christine, to sit to him. Mrs. Stillman, who always accompanied her, has told us the story of the picture. Before they came to the studio Whistler had his scheme prepared. The Japanese robe was ready, the rug and screen were in place, and he posed her at once. There are a number of small studies and sketches in oil and pastel that show he knew what he wanted. She sat twice a week during the winter of 1863-64. At first the work went quickly, then it began to drag. Whistler often rubbed it out just as she thought it finished, and day after day she returned to find that everything was to be done over again. The parents got tired, but not the two girls. Mrs. Stillman remembers that Whistler partly closed the shutters so as to shut out the direct light; that her sister stood at one end of the room, the canvas beside her; that Whistler would look at the picture from a distance, then dash at it, give one stroke, then dash away again. As a rule, they arrived about half-past ten or a quarter to eleven; he painted steadily, forgetting everything else, and it was often long after two before they lunched. When lunch was served, it was brought into the studio, placed on a low table, and they sat on stools. There were no such lunches anywhere. Mrs. Whistler provided American dishes, strange in London; among other things, raw tomatoes, a surprise to the Greek girls, who had never eaten tomatoes except over-cooked as the Greeks liked them, and canned apricots and cream, which they had never eaten at all. One _menu_ was roast pheasants, followed by tomato salad, and the apricots and cream, usually with champagne. One cannot wonder that there were occasional deficits in the bank account at Lindsey Row. But it was not only the things to eat and drink that made the hour a delight. Whistler, silent when he worked, was gay at lunch. Perhaps better than his charm, Mrs. Stillman remembers his devotion to his mother, who was calm and dignified, with something of the sweet peacefulness of the Friends. After lunch work was renewed, and it was four and later before they were released.

The sittings went on until the sitter fell ill. Whistler was pitiless with his models. The head in the _Princesse_ gave him most trouble. He kept Miss Spartali standing while he worked at it, never letting her rest; she must keep the entire pose, and she would not admit her fatigue as long as she could help it. During her illness a model stood for the gown, and when she was getting better he came one day and made a pencil drawing of her head, though what became of it Mrs. Stillman never knew. There were a few sittings after this, and at last the picture was finished. The two girls wanted their father to buy it, but Mr. Spartali did not like it. He objected to it as a portrait of his daughter. Appreciation of art was not among the virtues of the London Greeks. Alexander Ionides and his sons were almost alone in preferring a good thing.

Rossetti, glad to be of service, tried to sell the picture. Whistler agreed to take a hundred pounds, and Rossetti placed the canvas in his studio, where it would be seen by a collector who was coming to look at his work. The collector came, saw the _Princesse_, liked it, wanted it. There was one objection: Whistler's signature in big letters across the canvas. If Whistler would change the signature he would take the picture. Rossetti, enchanted, hurried to tell Whistler. Whistler was indignant. The request showed what manner of man the patron was, one in whose possession he did not care to have any work of his. However, Rossetti sold the _Princesse_ to another collector, who died shortly afterwards, and then it was bought by Frederick Leyland, and so led to the decoration of The Peacock Room.

It is possible that this objection helped Whistler to realise the inharmonious effect of a large signature on a picture. It is sure that, about this time, he began to arrange his initials somewhat after the Japanese fashion. They were first interlaced in an oblong or circular frame like the signatures of Japanese artists. He signed his name to the earliest pictures, even to some of the Japanese. But with the Nocturnes and the large portraits the Butterfly appeared, made from working the letters J. M. W. into a design, which became more fantastic until it evolved into the Butterfly in silhouette, and continued in various forms. In the _Carlyle_ the Butterfly is enclosed in a round frame, like a cut-out silhouette, behind the figure, and repeats the prints on the wall. In the _Miss Alexander_ it is in a large semicircle and is far more distinctly a butterfly. Then it grew like a stencil, though in no sense was it one, as may be seen in M. Duret's portrait, where the Butterfly is made simply in silhouette, on the background, by a few touches of the rose of the opera cloak and the fan. It was introduced as a note of colour, as important in the picture as any other detail, and at times it was put in almost at the first painting to judge the effect, scraped out with the whole thing, put in again somewhere else, this repeated until he got it right. We have seen many an unfinished picture with a wonderfully finished Butterfly, because it was just where Whistler wanted it.

The same development can be traced in his etchings, in which it began to appear as a bit of decoration. He originally signed the prints, and signed the plates with his name and date bitten in. But later the prints were signed with the Butterfly, followed by "_imp_," while the Butterfly alone was etched on the copper or drawn on the stone. Then he added the Butterfly to his signature to letters and his dedication on prints. And the Butterfly found its way to his invitation cards, and at last his correspondence, public and private, was usually signed with the Butterfly alone. This was elaborated ingeniously in The _Gentle Art of Making Enemies_, the Butterfly not only decorating, but punctuating the paragraphs. Rumour says that Whistler went so far as to sign his cheques with the Butterfly, and that once, having signed a cheque for thirty-two francs in this manner, the man to whom it was paid demanded a more conventional signature. Whistler, provoked by the suggestion of doubt, wrote his name, knowing the bank would not then accept it, and was more provoked when he found the rare autograph had been sold within a day for eleven hundred and fifty francs. But rumour is probably wrong: on all the formal letters and documents we have seen, his name, and not the Butterfly, is used.

On the frames of early pictures Japanese patterns were painted in red or blue on the flat gold, and a Butterfly placed on them, in relation to the picture. He designed the frames, and they were carried out by the Greaves, who also copied his designs at Streatham Town Hall, which they decorated thirty years later. Shortly before his death, a few were done by his stepson, E. Godwin. The _Sarasate_, in Pittsburg, is an excellent example, and so is the _Battersea Bridge_ at the Tate Gallery. Whistler applied a similar scheme to his etchings, water-colours, and pastels, reddish or bluish lines, and at times the Butterfly, appearing on the white or gold of their frames. Certain people want to make out that Whistler got the idea from Rossetti. It might as well be said that Rossetti got it from the beginning of the world. There is nothing new in the idea. Artists always have decorated special frames for special pictures, and Whistler only carried on tradition when he designed frames in harmony with his work and varied them according to the pictures for which they were used. In after years he gave up almost entirely these painted frames, and for his paintings substituted a simple gold frame, with parallel reeded lines, now universally known as "the Whistler frame." For his etchings and lithographs he chose a plain white frame in two planes. His canvases and his panels were always of the same sizes; consequently they always fitted his frames. And in his studio, as in few, if any others, frequently there might be half a hundred canvases with their faces to the wall, and only half a dozen frames. But they all fitted, and Whistler never showed his work unframed. This was the outcome of Japanese influence, and of his knowledge of the way the Japanese display their art. His deference to Japanese convention went so far that he put a branch of a tree or a reed into the foreground of his seas and rivers as decoration, in early work, with no reference to the picture, sometimes the only Japanese suggestion in the design.

_The Lange Leizen--of the Six Marks_ went to the Academy of 1864, with _Wapping_. The critic of the _Athenæum_, to whom the Japanese subject seemed "quaint" and the drawing "preposterously incorrect," could not deny the "superb colouring" and the "beautiful harmonies," nor fail to see in Wapping an "incomparable view of the Lower Pool of London." "Never before was that familiar scene so triumphantly well painted," Mr. W. M. Rossetti wrote.

Whistler did not send to the _Salon_ of 1864, in which Fantin showed his now famous _Hommage à Delacroix_, who had died in 1863. Whistler was among the several admirers whom Fantin painted round the portrait of the dead master. Whistler wanted Fantin to find a place for Rossetti, who would be proud to pose, and Fantin was willing, but Rossetti could not get to Paris. There was also talk of including Swinburne. Unfortunately for both, they were left out of one of the most celebrated portrait groups of modern times, now in the Moreau-Nélaton Collection in the Louvre. The distinguished artists and men of letters were there nominally out of respect to Delacroix, but really to enable Fantin to justify his belief in the beauty of life as it is, and his protest against the classical dictionary and studio properties. Most of them were, or have since become, famous: Whistler, Manet, Legros, Bracquemond, Fantin, Baudelaire, Duranty, Champfleury, Cordier, De Balleroy. Fantin painted them in the costume of the time, as Rembrandt and Hals and Van der Helst, from whom he is said to have taken the idea, painted the regents and archers of seventeenth-century Holland. Fantin's white shirt is the one concession to picturesqueness, and the one relief to the severity of detail are the flowers held by Whistler, a lithe, erect, youthful figure, with fine, keen face and abundant hair. That the young American should be the centre of the group was a distinction. When Rossetti saw the picture, he wrote to his brother that it had "a great deal of very able painting in parts, but it is a great slovenly scrawl after all, like the rest of this incredible new school."

Whistler was already working out of the artificial scheme of the Japanese pictures into a phase in which he was more himself than he had ever been. The next year, 1865, he sent to the Academy the most complete, the most perfect picture he ever painted, _The Little White Girl_, which will always be recognised as one of the few great pictures of the world. It was dated 1864, and there are reproductions showing the date. But about 1900 he painted it out. He had been working on the picture, he told us, and "did not see the use of those great figures sprawling there." Jo was the model. Now, there was no masquerading in foreign finery. Whistler painted her as he must often have seen her, in her simple white gown, leaning against the mantel, her beautiful face reflected in the mirror. The room was not littered with his purchases from the little shops in the Strand and the Rue de Rivoli. Japan is in the detail of blue and white on the mantel; the girl holds a Japanese fan; a spray of azalea trails across her dress. But these were part of Whistler's house, part of the reality he had created for himself, and he made them no more beautiful than the mantel, the grate, the reflection in the mirror. There was no building up, he painted what he saw. And there was in the handling an advance. The paint is thinner on the canvas, the brush flows more freely.

Swinburne saw the picture and wrote _Before the Mirror: Verses under a Picture_. The poem was printed on gold paper, pasted on the frame, which has disappeared, but we have a contemporary photograph showing the arrangement, and two verses were inserted in the Academy catalogue as sub-title. What Swinburne thought of the picture may be read in a letter he wrote to Ruskin in the summer of 1865 (_Library Edition of the Works of Ruskin_), in which he says that many, especially Dante Rossetti, told him his verses were better than the painting, and that Whistler ranked them far above it. But a closer examination of the picture only convinced him of its greater beauty, and he would stand up for Whistler against Whistler and everybody else.

Swinburne's poem and praise could not make _The Little White Girl_ at the Academy better understood than _The White Girl_ had been in Berners Street. The rare few could appreciate its "charm" and "exquisiteness" with Mr. W. M. Rossetti, who found that it was "crucially tested by its proximity to the flashing white in Mr. Millais' _Esther_," but that it stood the test, "retorting delicious harmony for daring force, and would shame any other contrast." But the general opinion was the other way. The _Athenæum_ distinguished itself by regretting that Whistler should make the "most 'bizarre' of bipeds" out of the women he painted. There was praise for two other pictures. "Subtle beauty of colour" and "almost mystical delicacy of tone" were discovered in _The Gold Screen_, and "colour such as painters love" in the _Old Battersea Bridge_, afterwards _Brown and Silver_. This is the beautiful Battersea, with the touch of red in the roofs of the opposite shore, the link between the early paintings on the river and the Nocturnes that were to follow. _The Scarf_, a picture we do not recognise, attracted less attention, and Whistler, the year before, declared "one of the most original artists of the day" was now dismissed as one who "might be called half a great artist."

Stranger than this was the change in the attitude of the French critics. In 1863 they overwhelmed him with praise. Two years later they had hardly a good word for him. Levi Legrange, forgotten as he merits, wrote the criticism of the Royal Academy of 1865 for the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_, and all he could see in _The Little White Girl_ was a weak repetition of _The White Girl_, a wearisome variation of the theme of white; really, he said, it was quite witty of the Academicians, who could have refused it and the two Japanese pictures, to give them good places and so deliver them to judgment. And then he praised Horsley and Prinsep, Leslie and Landseer. The _Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine_, in the _Salon_, made no more favourable impression. It seemed a study of costume to Paul Mantz, who, in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_, decided to forget it and remember merely the mysterious seduction of _The White Girl_ of two years before. Its eccentricity was only possible if taken in small doses like the hom[oe]opathist's pills, according to the incredible Jules Claretie, who, in the same article in _L'Artiste_, laughed at Manet's _Olympia_. For more than twenty years Whistler was hated in France.

In this _Salon_, 1865, Fantin showed his _Hommage à la Vérité--Le Toast_, the second of his two large groups including Whistler's portrait. In it he strayed so far from the real as to introduce an allegorical figure of Truth, and to allow Whistler to array himself in a gorgeous Chinese robe. "_Pense à la robe, superbe à faire, et donne la moi!_" Whistler urged from London, and Fantin yielded. "_Je l'ai encore revu dans l'atelier en 1865, il me posa dans un tableau aujourd'hui détruit, 'Le Toast,' où il était costumé d'une robe japonaise_," is Fantin's story of it in the notes to us, but Whistler, writing at the time, speaks of the costume as Chinese. He brought it to Paris for the sittings. Fantin was quick to regret his concessions. An allegorical figure could not be made real, the whole thing was absurd. When he got the canvas back he destroyed it, all but the portraits of Whistler, Vollon, and himself. Whistler's is now in the Freer Collection.

In the spring of 1865 Whistler was joined in London by his younger brother. Dr. Whistler had distinguished himself in the Confederate Army as a surgeon and by bravery in the field. He had served in Richmond Hospitals and in Libby Prison; he had been assistant-surgeon at Drewry's Bluff, and in 1864, when Grant made his move against Richmond, he had been assigned to Orr's Rifles, a celebrated South Carolina regiment. In the early winter of 1865 a few months' furlough was given him, and he was entrusted by the Confederate Government with important despatches to England. Sherman's advance prevented his running the blockade from Charleston, nor was there any passing through the lines from Wilmington by sea. He was obliged to go North through Maryland, which meant making his way round Grant's lines. The difficulties and dangers were endless. He had to get rid of his Confederate uniform, and in the state of Confederate finance the most modest suit of clothes cost fourteen hundred dollars; for a seat in a waggon he had to pay five hundred. The trains were crowded with officials and soldiers, and he could get a ride in them only by stealth. The roads were abominable, for driving or riding or walking. Often he was alone, and his one companion toward the North was a fellow soldier who had lost a leg at Antietam and was trying to get to Philadelphia for repairs to an artificial one. Stanton's expedition filled the country near the Rappahannock with snares and pitfalls; to cross Chesapeake Bay was to take one's life in one's hand; and north of the Bay were the enrolling officers of the Union in search of conscripts. However, Philadelphia was at last reached and a ticket for New York bought at the railroad depot, where two sentries, with bayonets fixed, guarded the ticket-office, and might, for all Dr. Whistler knew, have seen him in Libby Prison. In New York he took passage on the _City of Manchester_, and from Liverpool he hurried to London. One week later came the news of the fall of Richmond and the Confederacy. The furlough was over. There was no going back. It was probably about this time, from the costume and the technical resemblance to Mr. Luke Ionides' portrait, that Whistler painted a head of Dr. Whistler--_Portrait of my Brother_--now owned by Mr. Burton Mansfield, though it should and might have been in the National Gallery in Washington.

Early in September 1865, Whistler's mother was suffering from trouble with her eyes, and went with her two sons to Coblentz to consult an oculist, and this gave Whistler the chance to revisit some of the scenes of the French Set of etchings. After that he spent a month or two at Trouville, where he was joined by Courbet. Whistler's work shows how far he had drifted away, though the two were always friends. In _Sea and Rain_, done at Trouville, there is not a suggestion of Courbet. But we have seen a sea by Courbet, owned by M. Duret, that Whistler might have signed. Jo was there too. The sea-pieces he had begun, including _Courbet on the Shore_, promised great things, he wrote to Mr. Luke Ionides, and as the autumn went on the place was more quiet for work, and the seas and skies more wonderful. He did not get back to London until November. A few months later, early in 1866, he sailed for Valparaiso.

This journey to Valparaiso is the most unaccountable adventure in his sometimes unaccountable career. Various reasons for it have been given: health, a quarrel, restlessness, a whim. But we tell the story as he told it to us:

"It was a moment when many of the adventurers the war had made of many Southerners were knocking about London hunting for something to do, and, I hardly knew how, but the something resolved itself into an expedition to go and help the Chilians and, I cannot say why, the Peruvians, too. Anyhow, there were South Americans to be helped against the Spaniards. Some of these people came to me, as a West Point man, and asked me to join--and it was all done in an afternoon. I was off at once in a steamer from Southampton to Panama. We crossed the Isthmus, and it was all very awful--earthquakes and things--and I vowed, once I got home, that nothing would ever bring me back again.

"I found myself in Valparaiso and in Santiago, and I called on the President, or whoever the person then in authority was. After that came the bombardment. There was the beautiful bay with its curving shores, the town of Valparaiso on one side, on the other the long line of hills. And there, just at the entrance of the bay, was the Spanish fleet, and, in between, the English fleet, and the French fleet, and the American fleet, and the Russian fleet, and all the other fleets. And when the morning came, with great circles and sweeps, they sailed out into the open sea, until the Spanish fleet alone remained. It drew up right in front of the town, and bang went a shell, and the bombardment began. The Chilians didn't pretend to defend themselves. The people all got out of the way, and I and the officials, rode to the opposite hills, where we could look on. The Spaniards conducted the performance in the most gentlemanly fashion; they just set fire to a few of the houses, and once, with some sense of fun, sent a shell whizzing over toward our hills. And then I knew what a panic was. I and the officials turned and rode as hard as we could, anyhow, anywhere. The riding was splendid, and I, as a West Point man, was head of the procession. By noon the performance was over. The Spanish fleet sailed again into position, the other fleets sailed in, sailors landed to help put out the fires, and I and the officials rode back into Valparaiso. All the little girls of the town had turned out, waiting for us, and as we rode in called us 'Cowards!' The _Henriquetta_, the ship fitted up in London, did not appear till long after, and then we breakfasted, and that was the end of it."

Mr. Theodore Roussel says Whistler told him that, on another occasion, he got on one of the defending gunboats and had his baptism of fire amid a rain of shot and shell, and that then, as we have said, the white lock appeared, a fact which, fine as it is, Whistler omitted from his story to us.

He made good use of his time in Valparaiso, and painted the three pictures of the harbour which are known and two others which have disappeared. These he gave to the steward or the purser of the ship to bring home, and the purser kept them. Once they were seen in his house in London by someone who recognised Whistler's work. "Why, they must be by Whistler!" he said. "Who's Whistler?" asked the purser. "An artist," said the other. "Oh, no," said the purser, "they were painted by a gentleman." The purser started back for South America, and took them with him. "And then a tidal wave met the ship and swept off the purser, the cabin, and the Whistlers." But we believe that one of these pictures is now in the United States.

The voyage back was vaguer than the voyage out. From this vagueness looms one figure: the Marquis de Marmalade, a black man from Hayti, who made himself obnoxious to Whistler, apparently by his colour and his swagger. One day Whistler kicked him across the deck to the top of the companion way, and there sat a lady who proved an obstacle for the moment. But Whistler just picked up the Marquis de Marmalade, dropped him on the step below her, and finished kicking him downstairs. After that Whistler spent the rest of the journey, not exactly in irons, but chiefly in his cabin.

The final adventure of the journey was in London. Whistler never told us, but everybody else says that when he got out of the train at Euston, or Waterloo, someone besides his friends was waiting: whether the captain of the ship, or relations of the Marquis de Marmalade, or an old enemy makes little difference. Somebody got a thrashing, and this was the end to the most unaccountable episode in Whistler's life.