CHAPTER XIV: PORTRAITS. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-ONE TO EIGHTEEN

SEVENTY-FOUR.

While Whistler was painting the Nocturnes, he was working on the large portraits. The _Mother_ was the first. We cannot say when he began it. He wrote of it to Fantin, promising to send a photograph, in 1871, but it was not shown until 1872. How many were the sittings, how often the work was scraped down or wiped out, no one will ever know. We have some interesting technical details from Walter Greaves. The portrait was painted on the back of a canvas, as J. saw when it was sent to the London Memorial Exhibition, as Otto Bacher saw when the picture was in Whistler's studio in 1883:

"I noticed that it was painted on the back of a canvas, on the face of which was the portrait of a child. My remark, 'Why, you have painted your mother on the back of a canvas!' received simply the reply: 'Isn't that a good surface?'"

There was scarcely any paint used, Greaves says, the canvas being simply rubbed over to get the dress, and, as at first the dado had been painted across the canvas, it shows through the skirt. Harper Pennington says that the canvas, being absorbent, was stained all through from the painting on the face. But this does not alter Greaves' statement. That wonderful handkerchief in the tired old hands, Greaves describes as "nothing but a bit of white and oil."

What Whistler wanted was to place upon canvas a beautiful arrangement, a beautiful pattern, of colour and line. No painter since Hals and Velasquez thought so much of placing his figure on the canvas inside the frame. No painter since Velasquez understood so well the value of restrained line and restrained colour. The long, vertical and horizontal lines in the background, the footstool, the matting, the brushwork on the wall, add quietness to the portrait, tranquillity to the pose that could be kept for ever; a contrast to the frenzied squirms preferred by his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Hamerton thought he must have found this pose, or the hint for it, in the Agrippina at the Capitol in Rome, or in Canova's statue of Napoleon's mother at Chatsworth. If Whistler found it anywhere, except in his own studio, it could only have been at Haarlem, where Franz Hals' old ladies sit together with the same serenity and are painted in much the same scheme. Whistler had been to Holland and seen the beautiful group, and he was haunted by it.

Whistler wrote to Fantin that if the _Mother_ marked any progress, it was in the science of colour. What he wanted people to see in it, he explained in _The Red Rag_:

"Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an _Arrangement in Grey and Black_. Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?"

And yet Swinburne was not alone in realising its "intense pathos of significance and tender depth of expression," while to a few Whistler gave a glimpse of the other side, as to Mr. Harper Pennington:

"Did I ever tell you of an occasion when Whistler let me see him with the paint off--with his brave mask down? Once standing by me in his studio--Tite Street--we were looking at the _Mother_. I said some string of words about the beauty of the face and figure, and for some moments Jimmy looked and looked, but he said nothing. His hand was playing with that tuft upon his nether lip. It was, perhaps, two minutes before he spoke. 'Yes,' very slowly, and very softly--'Yes, one does like to make one's mummy just as nice as possible!'"

Whistler told us that Madame Venturi, a friend of Carlyle's, determined that he too should be painted.

"I used to go often to Madame Venturi's--I met Mazzini there, and Mazzini was most charming--and Madame Venturi often visited me, and one day she brought Carlyle. The _Mother_ was there, and Carlyle saw it, and seemed to feel in it a certain fitness of things, as Madame Venturi meant he should--he liked the simplicity of it, the old lady sitting with her hands in her lap--and he said he would be painted. And he came one morning soon, and he sat down, and I had the canvas ready and the brushes and palette, and Carlyle said: 'And now, mon, fire away!' That wasn't my idea how work should be done. Carlyle realised it, for he added: 'If ye're fighting battles or painting pictures, the only thing to do is to fire away!' One day he told me of others who had painted his portrait. 'There was Mr. Watts, a mon of note. And I went to his studio, and there was much meestification, and screens were drawn round the easel, and curtains were drawn, and I was not allowed to see anything. And then, at last, the screens were put aside and there I was. And I looked. And Mr. Watts, a great mon, he said to me, "How do you like it?" And then I turned to Mr. Watts, and I said, "Mon, I would have ye know I am in the hobit of wurin' clean lunen!"'"

Carlyle told people that he sat there talking and talking, and that Whistler went on working and working and paid no attention to him whatever. Whistler found Carlyle a delightful person, and Carlyle found him a workman. And it has been said that they used to take walks together, but of this we have no record.

Before the portrait was finished, Whistler had begun to paint Miss Alexander, and another story is of a meeting at the door between the old man coming out and the little girl going in. "Who is that?" he asked the maid. "Miss Alexander, who is sitting to Mr. Whistler." Carlyle shook his head. "Puir lassie! Puir lassie!" Mrs. Leyland, at whose portrait also Whistler was working, remembered that Carlyle grumbled a good deal. Whistler, in the end, had, it is said, to get Phil Morris to sit for the coat. Walter Greaves' memories are of impatience in the studio, especially when Carlyle saw Whistler working with small brushes, so that Whistler either worked with big brushes or pretended to. William Allingham wrote of the sittings in his diary:

"Carlyle tells me he is sitting to Whistler. If C. makes signs of changing his position, W. screams out in an agonised tone: 'For God's sake, don't move!' C. afterwards said that all W.'s anxiety seemed to be to get the coat painted to ideal perfection; the face went for little. He had begun by asking two or three sittings, but managed to get a great many. At last C. flatly rebelled. He used to define W. as the most absurd creature on the face of the earth."

Around this portrait many legends are gathering. Mr. F. Ernest Jackson has told us that a few years ago, one evening in Hyde Park, he was seated on a bench sketching, and an old man came up to him and, seeing he was an artist, asked if he knew Whistler. Then the old man said that his father had posed for the picture. Whether this was Carlyle revisiting the haunts of his walks or a pure invention we do not know. Another tale is that Whistler never painted the picture, which is the work of an anonymous Academician, done as a bet that he could do a Whistler--it is a pity the Academician never did any more.

If Carlyle liked the portrait of the _Mother_, he must have liked his own. There is the same quiet balance, the same careful spacing. Take away either the circular print or the Butterfly in its circle, and the repose is gone. But with such care has every detail been arranged, one never thinks of the balance, the arabesque, the pattern. It is done, and all traces of the thought and the work are gone. One sees only the result Whistler meant should be seen. It has been criticised for showing a want of invention. But if the background and the arrangement are somewhat the same as in the _Mother_, it was because he was deliberately carrying out the same scheme. It was his _Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. II_. In the London Memorial Exhibition it hung opposite the _Mother_, and as they were seen together, the pose and colour and design belonged as inevitably to the nervous old man as to the old lady in her beautiful tranquillity. Whistler is also said to have made a study of Carlyle's head, owned by Mr. Burton Mansfield, and there is a small study of the pose on the back of a canvas, once owned by Greaves.

The _Harmony in Grey and Green; Portrait of Miss Alexander_, a commission from Mr. W. C. Alexander, was painted at the same time, and proves how little Whistler's invention was at fault. There was no repetition. The little girl, in her white and green frock, holding at her side her grey feathered hat, butterflies hovering about her, the weariness of the pose expressed in the pouting red lips, as she stands by the grey wall with its long lines of black, is as familiar as Velasquez' Infantas. Less known is Whistler's care in every detail to make it a masterpiece. He, or his mother, gave Mrs. Alexander directions as to the quality of the muslin for the gown, where it was to be bought, the width of the frills, the ruffles at the neck, the ribbon bows, the way the gown was to be laundried. And only after repeatedly seeing and studying the picture, does one learn his care in weaving the colour through the design. He called the portrait _Harmony in Grey and Green_, but the colours which bind the arrangement together, which play all through it, are green and gold. So wonderfully are these colours used like threads in tapestry that one does not see them, one feels the result. As always, there was the great simple design; the pose of Velasquez, the decoration of Japan, worked out in his own way. The gold runs along the top of the dado; tiny gold buckles fasten the rosettes of the shoes; there is a gold pin in the hair; the gold of the daisies is repeated in the butterflies which flutter above the head; a note of gold is in the pile of drapery, and the floor has a suggestion of gold in the matting. Green plays the same note. The green sash is carried down by the green feather of the hat, lost in the shadow, which is filled with green and gold. And the green of the daisies is repeated in the green of the drapery. It is not until one has gone all over the picture that these things become evident. The shoes look perfectly black, and so does the dado, and yet there is no pure black anywhere. The whole is bound together by this grey, green, black, and gold scheme running through the composition. It is a perfect harmony. And so subtle is it, that only the result is evident, never the means by which it was obtained.

The story of the sittings we have from Miss Cicely Alexander (Mrs. Spring-Rice):

"My father wanted him to paint us all, I believe, beginning with the eldest (my sister, whom he afterwards began to paint, but whose portrait was never finished). But after coming down to see us, he wrote and said he would like to begin with 'the light arrangement,' meaning me, as my sister was dark. So I was the first victim, and I'm afraid I rather considered that I was a victim all through the sittings, or rather standings, for he never let me change my position, and I believe I sometimes used to stand for hours at a time. I know I used to get very tired and cross, and often finished the days in tears. This was especially when he had promised to release me at a given time to go to a dancing-class, but when the time came I was still standing, and the minutes slipped away, and he was quite absorbed and had quite forgotten all about his promise, and never noticed the tears; he used to stand a good way from his canvas, and then dart at it and then dart back, and he often turned round to look in a looking-glass that hung over the mantelpiece at his back--I suppose, to see the reflection of his painting. Although he was rather inhuman about letting me stand on for hours and hours, as it seemed to me at the time, he was most kind in other ways. If a blessed black fog came up from the river, and I was allowed to get down, he never made any objection to my poking about among his paints, and I even put charcoal eyes to some of his sketches of portraits done in coloured chalks on brown paper, and he also constantly promised to paint my doll, but this promise was never kept. I was painted at the little house in Chelsea, and at the time he was decorating the staircase; it was to have a dado of gold, and it was all done in gold-leaf, and laid on by himself, I believe; he had numberless little books of gold-leaf lying about, and any that weren't exactly of the old-gold shade he wanted, he gave to me.

"Mrs. Whistler was living then, and used to preside at delightful American luncheons, but I don't remember that she ever came into the studio--a servant used to be sent to tell him lunch was ready, and then he went on again as before. He painted, and despair filled my soul, and I believe it was generally teatime before we went to those lunches, at which we had hot biscuits and tinned peaches, and other unwholesome things, and I believe the biscuits came out of a little oven in the chimney, though I can't quite think how that could have been. The studio was at the back of the house, and the drawing-room looked over the river, and we seldom went into it, but I remember that he had matting on the floor, and a large Japanese basin with water and goldfish in it. I never met Mr. Carlyle in the studio, although he was being painted at the same time, but he shook hands with me at the private view at the Grosvenor Gallery, where the two portraits were exhibited for the first time. [This must have been at Whistler's own exhibition in 1874.] I didn't appreciate that honour at the time, any more than I appreciated being painted by Mr. Whistler, and I'm afraid all my memories only show that I was a very grumbling disagreeable little girl. Of course, I was too young to appreciate Mr. Whistler himself, though afterwards we were very good friends when I grew older, and when he used to come to my father's house and make at once for the portrait with his eye-glass up."

It is said that tears were not only the little girl's, but Whistler's, and that there were seventy sittings before he finished. Mrs. Spring-Rice writes nothing about the number of times the picture was rubbed out and recommenced. He was beginning to put in the entire scheme at once, but on such large canvases this was difficult. Walter Greaves says that the picture was painted on an absorbent canvas, and on a distemper ground. There is also a study for the head.

Whistler was as minute in his directions for the portrait of Miss May Alexander. He recommended to Mrs. Alexander a milliner who sold wonderful "picture hats"; he suggested that he should paint the portrait in the house at Campden Hill, so that he could see the effect of the picture in the drawing-room where it was to hang. But it remains a sketch of a girl in riding-habit, drawing on her gloves, at her side a pot of flowers, the one detail carried out. He made a number of other sketches in oils, chalk, pen and ink, of the children, and there is a study for Miss May's head also. But only the _Arrangement in Grey and Green_ was finished.

Frederick Leyland, the wealthy shipowner, who had met Whistler as early as 1867, about this time commissioned Whistler to paint his four children, Mrs. Leyland, and himself. Leyland had not yet bought his London house, but often came up to town, and Whistler made long visits at Speke Hall, Leyland's place near Liverpool. Mrs. Whistler spent months there. The record of his visits is in the etchings and dry-points of _Speke Hall_ and _Speke Shore_, _Shipping at Liverpool_, _The Dam Wood_, and the portraits in many mediums. Speke Hall, Whistler said, put him in better mood for work. The house was not far from the sea, where he found much to do. But the beach was flat, at low tide the sea ran away from him, and at high tide the skies were wrong or the wind blew, and when the sea failed he turned to the portraits. The big canvases travelled with him, backward and forward, from Speke Hall to London, and the sittings were continued in both places. They all sat to him. The children hated posing as much as they delighted in the painter. The son, after three sittings, refused to sit again, which is to be regretted, for the pastel of him, lounging in a chair, with big hat pushed back and long legs stretched out, is full of boyhood. There are pastels of the three little girls, sketches in pen and ink and pencil, one among the few studies for etchings, and the dry-points. Of Florence Leyland, a large, full-length oil was started, the first of his _Blue Girls_ in which he wished to paint blue on blue as he had painted white on white. Another portrait of her was never finished and, we believe, never exhibited until it was purchased, in 1906, for the Brooklyn Museum. The full-length of Leyland was the only one completed. Of this there is a small oil study.

Whistler painted Leyland standing, in evening dress, with the ruffled shirt he always wore, against a dark background, the first arrangement of black on black. Leyland was good about standing, we know from Mrs. Leyland, but he had not much time, and few portraits gave Whistler more trouble. Leyland told Val Prinsep that Whistler nearly cried over the drawing of the legs. Greaves says that "he got into an awful mess over it," painted it out again and again, and finally had in a model to pose for it nude. It was finished in the winter of 1873. In the portrait of Leyland he began to suppress the background, to put the figures into the atmosphere in which they stood, without accessories. The problem was the atmospheric envelope, to make the figures stand in this atmosphere, as far within their frames as he stood from them when he painted, a problem at which he worked as long as he lived.

Mrs. Leyland had more leisure than her husband, and the sittings amused her. She had sat to Rossetti, she was to sit to others. She was beautiful, with wonderful red hair. Whistler made a dry-point of her, _The Velvet Gown_, and in black velvet she wanted to be painted. But he preferred a dress in harmony with her hair, and designed rose draperies falling in sweeping curves, and he placed her against a rose-flushed wall with a spray of rose almond blossoms at her side. In no other portrait did he attempt a scheme of colour at once so sumptuous and so delicate. The pose was natural to her, she said, though he made a number of pastel schemes before he painted it. Her back is turned, her arms fall loosely, her hands clasped behind her, her head in profile. Mrs. Leyland remembered days when, at the end of the pose, the portrait looked as if it needed only a few hours' work. But in the morning she would find it rubbed out and all the work to be done again. Notwithstanding the innumerable sittings, one of Whistler's models, Maud Franklin, whom he so often etched and painted, was called in to pose for the gown. Whistler knew what he wanted, and nothing else would satisfy him. It must be beautiful to be worthy of the weariness it caused her, he told Mrs. Leyland, and he was trying for the little more that meant perfection. The portrait was never finished, and yet it could not be lovelier. It was a problem, not of luminous dark, but of luminous light, and the accessories have not been suppressed. The matting on the floor, the dado, and the spray of almond blossoms are more elaborately carried out than the detail of any other portrait. What worried him, and probably prevented the picture being finished, were the hands, almost untouched. It was not that he could not draw hands, for they are beautifully drawn sometimes, notably in the etchings. But he rarely painted them well. He nearly always left them to the last, and some of his later pictures were unfinished because he could not get the hands right. In the _Sarasate_, _The Little White Girl_, the _Symphony in White, No. III._, the hands are beautifully painted. Some one has said that an artist is known by his painting of hands. These three pictures prove that Whistler could paint hands, but it is as true that he did not paint them when he could help it.

The portrait of Mrs. Louis Huth was not only begun but finished during these years. It is Holbein-like in its dignity, its sobriety, the flat modelling, the exquisite rendering of the lace at the throat and the wrists. Mrs. Huth wears the black velvet Mrs. Leyland wanted to wear, and the background is black of wonderful, luminous, intense depth. She, too, stands with her back turned, and her head in profile. In this portrait, as in the full-length Leyland, Whistler carried out his method of putting in the whole subject at once. The background was as much a part of the design as the figure. If anything went wrong anywhere the whole had to come out and be started again. It was a difficult problem, but the theory taught by Gleyre, and developed in the Nocturnes, was perfected in the portraits of _Frederick Leyland_ and _Mrs. Huth_.

Mrs. Leyland sometimes met Mrs. Huth as they came and went, and this fixes the date of the portrait. Mrs. Huth was not strong, and Whistler exhausted the strongest who posed for him. Almost daily, during one summer, he kept her standing for three hours without rest. At last she rebelled. Watts, she said, who had painted her had not treated her in that way. "And still, you know, you come to me!" was Whistler's comment. He had some mercy, however, and at times a model stood for her dress.

After the Academy of 1874 opened with nothing of his in it, Whistler took matters into his own hands, and, like Courbet in 1855, and Manet in 1867, organised a show of his own--his first "one man" show. The gallery was at No. 48 Pall Mall, and the collection included these large portraits, a few Nocturnes, one or two earlier paintings, and one or two of the _Projects_. Thirteen in all. There were fifty etchings. The walls were grey, the exhibits were well spaced, there were palms and flowers, blue pots and bronzes. He designed the card of invitation, the simple card he always used, and his mother and Greaves wrote the names and addresses, "all making Butterflies as hard as we could," Walter Greaves says, rushing out and posting the cards until the letter-boxes of Chelsea were in a state of congestion. The private view was on June 6. The catalogue is vague.

The exhibition was a shock to London. The decorations seemed an indiscretion, for no one before had suggested to people, whose standard was the Academy, that a show of pictures might be beautiful. The work scandalised a generation blinded by the yearly Academic bazaar; they could not see the beauty of flat modelling and flesh low in tone, they preferred the "foolish sunset" to the poetry of night. But the pictures could have been forgiven more easily than the titles. From the moment he exhibited them as _Arrangements_ and _Nocturnes_, his reputation for eccentricity was established. He wrote in _The Gentle Art_:

"I know that many good people think my nomenclature funny and myself 'eccentric'. Yes, 'eccentric' is the adjective they find for me. The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.... As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour."

Well received at first, his position in public favour had of late hung in the balance. The exhibition weighed in the scales against him, and for almost twenty years to come, ridicule was his portion. The _Athenæum_ and the _Saturday Review_ ignored the show. The _Pall Mall_ saw in it more intellect than imagination. Here and there was a polite murmur of "noble conception" and "Velasquez touch." Of all that was said Whistler singled out for notice then, and preservation afterwards, the comments of a forgotten journal, the _Hour_. It has been wondered why he noticed papers of small importance. When he answered the critics and kept the correspondence, it was "to make history," he said, and he selected what he thought important, though it might come from an unimportant source. The _Hour_ suggested that the best work was not of recent date; Whistler wrote to remove "the melancholy impression"; and notice and letter "make history," for it was about this time that English critics, following the lead of the French, were beginning to say that he did not fulfil his early promise, and it is recorded in _The Gentle Art_.

The pictures of this period that remain may seem few in number. But others were completed or in progress, and disappeared before they were exhibited or seen outside the studio. We have reason to believe, however, that some have been recently discovered and eventually will not be lost to the world.