The Whistler book

The white chrysanthemum is my favourite flower. There are other flowers, I grant, perhaps more beautiful, which I cannot help admiring, but the white chrysanthemum somehow appea...

During Jean François Raffaelli's sojourn in America I had occasion to ask him the rather futile question of how long it took a painter in Paris to become famous. Of course I ref...

The famous butterfly monogram, originally a decorative combination of the letters "J. M. W.," which evolved into a decorative design of a butterfly, enclosed in a circle, as it...

A Blue-black night, broken by sparks of bursting skyrockets and weird forms of light, in which two illuminated towers are vaguely indicated. To the left a cluster of foliage and...

In his "Art in the Netherlands," and his various books on Italian art, H. Taine has maintained that the hand of the mediæval painter was largely guided by optical sensations. An...

William Morris demanded that our entire environment should be beautiful. Only in moments of superior enjoyment do we realize the significance of human life, and by a poem, pictu...

Although remarkably sure, efficient and successful in various branches of art, Whistler has to be ranked primarily as a figure painter. In these efforts centre his greatness. He...

"Artist, thou art king! Art is the true empire! When thy hand has drawn a perfect line, the cherubims themselves descend to delight themselves in it as in a mirror," wrote Mérod...

Grey is the colour of modern life. There is some truth in the statement. Modern civilization shuns the slashed doublet and purple cloak. Beauty of colour, as a Titian and Verone...

It would be difficult to find in the whole history of art writing another case of a pamphleteer who became as famous with a few manuscripts as Whistler. Both the "Gentle Art of...

One afternoon in 1892, walking along the boulevards with Stéphane Mallarmé, during absinthe hours, I met Whistler. The poet and the painter raised their hats and shook hands and...

Who knew the errant life of the highway, of the starlit desert and windy mountain slopes better than the story-teller of old, who wandered from town to village, from camp to sol...