CHAPTER XXXVII: PARIS CONTINUED. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN NINETY-THREE AND

EIGHTEEN NINETY-FOUR.

After this summer, we both saw still more of Whistler whenever we were in Paris. At the Rue du Bac we were struck by the few French artists at his Sunday afternoons and the predominance of Americans and English. It seemed to us that French artists might have been more cordial and the French nation more sensible of the fact that a distinguished foreign artist had come to France. During his life at least one or two Americans, one a rich amateur, were made Commanders of the Legion of Honour, while he remained an Officer. Others were made foreign Members of the Academy of Fine Arts, but this, the highest honour for artists in France, was never offered to him, nor was he elected to International Juries.

With a few French and foreign artists his relations were friendly: Boldini, Helleu, Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin, Alfred Stevens, Aman-Jean; but the greater number were content to express their appreciation at a distance. Mrs. Whistler spoke little French, and few French artists speak any English. The men whom Whistler saw most were not painters. Viélé-Griffin, Octave Mirbeau, Arsène Alexandre, the Comte de Montesquiou, Rodenbach came to the Rue du Bac. Old friends, Drouet and Duret, were sometimes there, though not often--his intimacy with them and Oulevey was not really renewed until after Mrs. Whistler's death. But of all who came, none endeared himself so much to Whistler as Stéphane Mallarmé, poet, critic, friend, admirer. Once, at Whistler's suggestion, he visited us in London, and, looking from our windows to the Thames, declared he could understand Whistler better. Official people strayed in from the Embassies, mostly English. American authors and American collectors appeared on Sundays. Mr. Howells, once or twice, came with his son and his daughter, of whom Whistler made a lithograph. Journalists, English and American, wandered in. And English and American artists came, or tried to come, in crowds. The younger men of the Glasgow School, James Guthrie and John Lavery, were welcomed. Then there were the Americans living in Paris: Walter Gay, Alexander Harrison, Frederick MacMonnies, Edmund H. Wuerpel, John W. Alexander, Humphreys Johnston, while Sargent and Abbey rarely missed an opportunity of calling at the Rue du Bac.

Whistler was hardly less cordial to students. Milcendeau has told us how he took his work--and his courage--with him and went to Whistler, but, reaching the door, stood trembling at the thought of meeting the Master and showing his drawings. As soon as Whistler saw the drawings his manner was so charming--as if they were just two artists together--that fear was forgotten, and Whistler proved his interest by inviting Milcendeau to send the drawings to the International. Whistler met American and English students not only at home, but at the American Art Association in Montparnasse, then a bit of old Paris--a little white house with green shutters, which the street had long since left on a lower level, and at the back a garden where, under the great trees, the cloth was laid in summer; just the house to please Whistler. He sometimes went to the club's dinners and celebrations. At one dinner on Washington's Birthday, after professional professors and popular politicians had delivered themselves, he was finally and rather patronisingly asked to speak by the President, who was either an ambassador or a dry-goods storekeeper, the usual patron of American art and supporter of American art institutions. Whistler said: "Now, as to teaching. In England it is all a matter of taste, but in France at least they tell you which end of the brush to stick in your mouth."

Mr. MacMonnies remembers another evening: "A millionaire friend of Whistler's and mine spoke to me of giving a dinner to the American artists in Paris, or rather to Whistler, and inviting the Paris American artists. I dissuaded him, by saying they all hated one another and would pass the evening more cheerfully by sticking forks into one another under the table if they could. Better to invite all the young fry--the American students. He gladly went into it. You can imagine the wild joy of the small fry, who had, of course, never met Whistler. Some got foolishly drunk, others got bloated with freshness, but they all had a rare time, and Whistler, who sat at the head, more than any, and he was delightfully funny. The millionaire was enchanted, and also a distinguished American painter, who sat opposite to Whistler and who was much respected by the youth. At one pause Whistler said, 'I went to the Louvre this morning'--pause, all the youths' faces wide open, expecting pearls of wisdom and points--'and I was amazed'--pause; everybody open-eared--'to see the amazing way they keep the floors waxed!'"

There is a story that one day at lunch-time he went into the courtyard of the _Ecole des Beaux-Arts_ and walked slowly round, only to be followed in a few minutes by a single line of students, each carrying a mahlstick as he carried his cane, and as many as had them wearing two _sous_ pieces for eye-glasses. He stopped and looked at the statues he wanted to see and they stopped and looked, and they followed him, until the circuit of the court was made, when they bowed each other out, and it was not till long after that they learned who he was. American students, if not so filled with their own sense of humour, are said to have mobbed him on one occasion when he went to a _crémerie_, upsetting tables and chairs to see him.

Mr. Walter Gay, who was much with Whistler during these years, gives us his impressions:

"I first knew Whistler in the winter of '94, when he was established in Paris, with the recently married Mrs. Whistler, in his apartment of the Rue du Bac. The marriage was a happy one; she appreciated fully his talent, he adored her, and when she died a few years later was crushed at her loss. In spite of the great influence exercised by Whistler on contemporary art, he was never lionised in Paris as he had been in London; Paris is not a place for lions, there are already too many local celebrities. Perhaps one of the reasons why the French artists held aloof from Whistler was Mrs. Whistler's very British attitude towards the nation. Once at a dinner of French artists given at our house in honour of Whistler, Mrs. Whistler expressed the most Gallophobe sentiments, complaining loudly of the inhospitality of the French towards her husband. Although sixty years when I knew him, he had the enthusiasm and energy of early years. His handsome grey-blue eyes sparkled with the fire of youth--they were young eyes in an old face. I think it strange that no one ever seems to emphasise his singular beauty. Not only were his features finely cut, but the symmetry of his figure, hands, and feet, retained until late in life, was remarkable; in youth he must have been a pocket Apollo. His conversational powers were extraordinary--he had a Celtic richness of vocabulary.... He was supersensitive to criticism. Those who were either indifferent or antipathetic to him, his imagination instantly transformed into hidden enemies. That weakness of the artistic temperament, _la folie de la persécution_, was deeply rooted in his nature....

"No one can realise, who has not watched Whistler paint, the agony his work gave him. I have seen him after a day's struggle with a picture, when things did not go, completely collapse as from an illness. His drawing cost him infinite trouble. I have known him work two weeks on a hand, and then give it up discouraged.... My last interview with Whistler took place in the spring of 1903, in London, about two months before his death. Hearing that he was far from well, I went to see him, and found that the rumour was only too well grounded. I spent the afternoon with him; he was singularly gentle and affectionate, and clung to me pathetically as though he too realised that it was to be our last meeting in this world.

"Whatever his detractors may charge against him, it seems to me that Whistler's faults and weaknesses sprang from an unbalanced mentality; he was a _déséquilibré_, the common defect of great painters. The unusual combination of artistic genius, literary gifts, and social attractions which made up Whistler's personality was unique; there was never anybody like him. And there is another quality of his which must not be forgotten in the summing up of his character; underneath all his vagaries and eccentricities one felt that indefinable yet unmistakable being--a gentleman."

Mr. Alexander Harrison shows a different side of Whistler: "My meetings with him were frequent and friendly. On one occasion, in a moment of excitement, I had the audacity to tell him that I felt he ought to have acted differently _vis-à-vis_ a jury of reception. His eyes flamed like a rattlesnake's and I apologised, but insisted, and then dodged a _little_. I afterwards realised that my naïve frankness had not lowered me in his esteem, as to the last he was nice to me, having understood that my admiration for his work was no greater than my affectionate regard for him. I have never known a man of more sincere and genuine impulse in ordinary human relations."

Now that Whistler was established for life, as he hoped, in a fine studio, he was making up for the first unsettled years after his marriage. He began a number of large portraits in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. In 1893, Mr. A. J. Eddy, known, we believe, to fame and Chicago as "the man Whistler painted," asked Whistler to paint his portrait. He could stay in Paris only a few weeks, and Whistler liked his American frankness in saying that his portrait must be done by a certain date, and, though unaccustomed to be tied to time, Whistler agreed. His description of Mr. Eddy was, "Well, you know, he is the only man who ever did get a picture out of me on time, while I worked and he waited!" Mr. Eddy writes of a sitter, no doubt himself, who was with Whistler "every day for nearly six weeks and never heard him utter an impatient word; on the contrary, he was all kindness." And Mr. Eddy describes Whistler painting on in the twilight until it was impossible to distinguish between the living man and the figure on the canvas. He recalls the memory of those "glorious" days spent in the studio, of the pleasant hour at noon when painter and sitter breakfasted there together, of the long sittings, and the dinner after at the Rue du Bac, or in one of the little restaurants where no Parisian was more at home than Whistler. But steadily as the work went on, the picture was not sent to Chicago until the following year. Mr. J. J. Cowan, whose portrait dates from this time, tells us that for _The Grey Man_, a small full-length, he gave sixty sittings, averaging each three to four hours. He, like Whistler, was not in a hurry, but, unlike Whistler, he eventually got tired, and a model was called in and posed in Mr. Cowan's clothes. The last sittings were in London, three years after. Even then Whistler wrote Mr. Cowan that the head needed just the one touch, with the sitter there, so that perfection might be assured. Another portrait was of Dr. Davenport of Paris.

The portraits of women were more numerous, and they promised to be as fine as those done in the seventies and eighties. The work was interrupted by the tragedy of Whistler's last years, and the more important were never completed. For one, Miss Charlotte Williams, of Baltimore, sat, but the painting disappeared, and only the rare lithograph of her remains. Another lost portrait was a large full-length of Miss Peck, of Chicago, now Mrs. W. R. Farquhar, which we saw in many stages, and at last, as it seemed to us, finished. She was painted standing, in evening dress, with her long white, green-lined cloak thrown back a little, as he had painted Lady Meux. It was full of the charm of youth, and the colour was a harmony in silver and green. Miss Kinsella, a third American girl who posed in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and in Fitzroy Street, secured her portrait after Whistler's death. We remember it in the Fitzroy Street studio, when it was so perfect that one more day's work would ruin it. In no other did he ever paint flesh with such perfection. Face and neck had the golden tone of Titian, with a subtlety of modelling beyond the Venetian's powers, for in his later years it was to surpass the Venetians he was trying. One day when E. went to the studio he had just scraped down neck and bust, for no reason except that he could not get the hand to come right with the rest. It was to be lovelier than ever, he said. It was never repainted. It remains but a shadow of its loveliness. When M. Rodin saw it at the London Memorial Exhibition, he praised neck and bust to J. as "a beautiful suggestion of lace," so beautiful in tone and modelling it still is. That posing for Whistler was difficult we know from these ladies and many of his other sitters, as well as from our experience. Over and over, when he wanted to work on their portraits, he would telegraph to the last address he happened to have, though sometimes the telegrams did not reach them till weeks after in some distant part of the world. The fact that his sitters were not always waiting for him not only upset him temporarily, but sometimes stopped the subject altogether. One incident in connection with the portrait of Miss Kinsella amused him. She holds an iris in her hand. A real flower was got, but the flower would fade, and irises were not easy to obtain. So he went to Liberty's to get some stuff of the purple-violet tone he wanted out of which to make a flower. He explained what he needed to the shopman, who solemnly informed him that Messrs. Liberty only kept "art colours."

Portraits of Mrs. Charles Whibley were in progress about the same time: _L'Andalouse, Mother of Pearl and Silver_, the unfinished _Tulip, Rose and Gold_, and _Red and Black, The Fan_. Two others of this period are of Mrs. Walter Sickert, _Green and Violet_, the second for which she sat, and Lady Eden, _Brown and Gold_. He was also painting his own portrait in the white jacket, which was changed into a black coat after Mrs. Whistler's death, and a full-length in a long brown overcoat shown in 1900 and not since.

The large canvases had to be left when he shut up the studio, but he could carry his little portfolio of lithographic paper and box of chalks everywhere, and during those two or three years he developed the art of lithography as no one had before, he and Fantin-Latour being the two chief factors in the revival of lithography in the nineties. He was determined, he said, to make "a roaring success of it." In the streets and at home he was constantly at work, and the result is the series of lithographs of the shops and gardens and galleries of Paris and many portraits. His interest in technique was tireless. He experimented on transfer-paper and on stone. He hunted old paper as strenuous people hunt lions. Drawings and proofs were for ever in the post between Paris and London, where the Ways were transferring and printing for him, and friends were for ever bringing paper from London or carrying drawings tremblingly back from Paris. He was deep in experiments with colour, and a few of the lithographs for _Songs on Stone_, already announced by Mr. Heinemann, were at last ready. They were proved in Paris by Belfont, but his shop closed in 1894, printer and stones vanished, and this was the end of the proposed publication. Since Whistler's death mysterious prints in black-and-white from the key stones have turned up in Germany, but only a few prints in colour remain, no two alike, trials in colour. He had looked for great things: "You know, I mean them to wipe up the place before I get done," he said, and their loss was a severe disappointment. Other lithographs, made then or later, were published in the _Studio_, the _Art Journal_, _L'Estampe Originale_, _L'Imagier_, the _Pagenat_, and one in our _Lithography and Lithographers_. He never wanted to keep his work, no matter in what medium, from the public. With commissions and experiments keeping him busy in Paris, Whistler was, as he wrote to us in London, working from morning to night, and in a condition for it he wouldn't change for anything. He was compelled to change it only too soon.