Chapter 3
* * * * *
Frederick Wedmore, the patient cataloguer of Whistler's etchings, once appeared in print as saying that he had "no wish to understand Whistler's works." He wrote "understate," but the wretched compositor undid him. Whistler's response to the explanation was: "Yes, the mistake is indeed inexcusable, since not only I, but even the compositor, might have known that with Mr. Wedmore and his like it is always a question of understating and never of understanding anything."
In his _Memories and Impressions_ Ford Madox Hueffer relates that Madox Brown, going to a tea-party at the White House at Chelsea, was met in the hall by Mrs. Whistler, who begged him to go to the poulterer's and purchase a pound of butter. The bread was cut, but there was nothing in the house to put upon it. There was no money in the house, the poulterer had cut off his credit, and Mrs. Whistler said she dared not send her husband, for he would certainly punch the tradesman's head!
"To think of 'Arry [meaning Harry Quilter, the critic, with whom he fiercely quarreled] living in the temple I erected!" he said. "He has no use for it--doesn't know what to do with it. If he had any feeling for the sympathy of things he would come to me and say: 'Here's your house, Whistler; take it; you know its meaning, I don't. Take it and live in it.' But no, he hasn't sense enough to see that. He obstinately stays there in the way, while I am living in this absurd fashion, next door to myself."
* * * * *
After the "secession" from the Royal Society, Whistler strolled into the gallery one evening with some friends. A group of admirers were gushing before a Leighton canvas.
"Quite exquisite!"
"A gem--really a gem!"
"Yes," said Whistler. "Like a diamond in the sty."
When elected president of the Society of British Artists, Whistler naturally felt exultant. "Carr," he said, jokingly, to Conryns Carr, the dramatist, "you haven't congratulated me yet."
"No," was the retort. "I'm waiting till the correspondence begins!"
* * * * *
The Society did not possess a Royal Charter until Mr. Whistler became president. With some help from the Prince of Wales this was procured. When the Prince paid his first visit to the gallery, Whistler was there to welcome him.
"I'm sure," said the Prince at the door, "I never heard of this place, Mr. Whistler, until you brought it to my notice. What is its history?"
"It has none, your Highness," was the neat rejoinder. "Its history dates from to-day!"
When Whistler left the White House, at Chelsea, he put this legend over the door:
"'Unless the Lord build the house, their labor is but vain that build it.' E.W. Godwin, P.S.A., built this one."
* * * * *
Justin McCarthy, the journalist and historian of _Our Own Times_, stayed away from the Whistler dinner at the Criterion because his friend Mortimer Menpes had been slighted. He met Whistler a few evenings later at a dinner to Christie Murray. As they came together Whistler remarked darkly:
"You're a bold man and a philanthropist; but remember, _Damien died_!"
And he had, just before, among the lepers of Molokai! Rather rough on the claimant of Lemon Yellow!
* * * * *
The Fine Art Society once billed Whistler for incidentals to one of his exhibitions, and thoughtfully included a pair of stockings worn by an attendant named Cox.
"I shall pay for nothing of Cox's," said the artist, indignantly. "Neither his socks, nor his 'ose, nor anything that is his."
* * * * *
One of his proofs, sold by Sotheby's in 1888--that of an early etching--brought a good price, not on its merits, but for this line by the artist, written on the margin: "Legs not by me, but a fatuous addition by a general practitioner."
The "legs" were by Dr. Seymour Haden, Whistler's eminent brother-in-law.
* * * * *
The eccentric relationship between Whistler and that self-destroyed genius, Oscar Wilde, has been much portrayed. A characteristic meeting was thus described by a correspondent of the London _Literary World_:
"Whistler and Wilde were to be the lions at a literary reception. Unfortunately, the lions came too early, when the few previous arrivals were altogether too insignificant to be introduced to them. So they had to talk to each other. It was on a very warm Sunday afternoon in the season, and Whistler, by the by, was wearing a white 'duck' waistcoat and trousers, and a fabulously long frock-coat, made, I think, of black alpaca, and carrying a brass-tipped stick about four feet long in his right hand, and a wonderful new paint-box, of which he was proud, under his left arm. Neither of the lions took any notice of what the other said. Finally, Wilde, who had spent the previous summer in America, began: 'Jimmy, this time last year, when I was in New York, all we men were carrying fans. It should be done here.' Instead of replying, Whistler observed that he had just returned from Paris, and that he always came by the Dieppe route, because it gave you so much longer for painting sea effects. Whether Oscar thought he was going to have an opportunity of scoring or what, he was tempted to break through the contempt with which-he had treated Whistler's other remarks. 'And how many did you paint in four hours, Jimmy?' he asked, with his most magnificent air of patronage. 'I'm not sure,' said the irrepressible Jimmy, quite gravely, 'but I think four or five hundred."'
* * * * *
A London visitor at the Lambs Club recounted a new version of the notable enmity which followed the friendship that had existed between Whistler and Wilde. The latter one day asked the artist's opinion upon a poem which he had written, presenting a copy to be read. Whistler read it and was handing it back without comment.
"Well," queried Wilde, "do you perceive any worth?"
"It's worth its weight in gold," replied Whistler.
The poem was written on the very thinnest tissue-paper, weighing practically nothing. The coolness between the two men is said to have dated from that moment.
* * * * *
Walking up to Du Maurier and Wilde at the time the former was portraying the Postlethwaites in _Punch_, Whistler asked, whimsically, "I say, which of you invented the other, eh?"
* * * * *
When Oscar Wilde was married, this Whistler telegram met him at the door of St. James's Church, Sussex Gardens:
"Fear I may not be able to reach you in time for ceremony--don't wait."
* * * * *
"Heaven!" said Oscar once, when the two were together at Forbes-Robertson's and a pert flash fell from the artist's lips. "I wish I had said that!"
"Never mind, dear Oscar--you will," retorted Whistler.
* * * * *
When Lady Archibald Campbell sat for her portrait Lord Archibald was quite uncomfortable at the idea, and made certain that it was a condescension, not a commission. The painting was duly completed, received its due of scathing criticism, and became famous. At this the lady, meeting the artist, remarked:
"I hear my portrait has been exhibited everywhere and become famous."
"Sh-sh-sh!" he said. "So it has, my dear Lady Archibald, but every discretion has been exercised that Lord Archibald could desire. Your name is not mentioned. The portrait is known as 'The Yellow Buckskin.'"
* * * * *
Carlyle told Whistler he liked his portrait because the painter had given him "clean linen." Watts had made his collar green in a previous portrait.
* * * * *
Sitting wearied Carlyle. One day as he left the studio he met little Miss Alexander tripping in for her turn, and asked her name.
"I am Miss Alexander," she said, "and I am going to have my portrait painted."
"Puir lassie, puir lassie," murmured the old philosopher, pityingly.
* * * * *
Whistler's interest was aroused when the Cyclopeans were building the Savoy Hotel. "Hurry!" he said. "Where are my things? I must catch that now, for it will never again be so beautiful."
* * * * *
His model once asked him:
"Where were you born?"
"I never was born, my child; I came from on high."
The model retorted:
"Now that shows how easily we deceive ourselves in this world, for I should say you came from below!"
* * * * *
Invited once to dine with some eminences, the dinner-hour found him busy with his brush and engrossed in his subject. A friend who was to accompany him to the feast urged that it was frightfully late. "Don't you think you had better stop?" he asked.
"Stop?" shrieked Whistler. "Stop when everything is going so beautifully? Go and stuff myself with food when I can paint like this? Never! Never! Besides, they won't do anything until I get there. They never do."
* * * * *
Whistler was in a London shop one day when a customer came in who mistook him for a clerk.
"I say, this 'at doesn't fit!"
"Neither does your coat," observed the painter, after eying him critically.
* * * * *
A young woman student protested under criticism, "Mr. Whistler, is there any reason why I shouldn't paint things as I see them?"
"Well, really, there is no statute against it; but the dreadful moment will be when you see things as you painted them!"
"Britain's Realm," by John Brett, R.A., now in the National Gallery at Millbank, made a stir when first exhibited at the Academy. It shows the sea. Whistler walked into a wave of adulation one day during the exhibition, and, affecting to "knock" with his knuckles, said sardonically: "Ha! Ha! Tin! If you threw a stone on to this it would make a rumbling noise!"
* * * * *
His early price for the use of one of his lithographs by a magazine was ten guineas. Later he charged twenty, either sum being petty enough. To one editor who tendered ten pounds he wrote:
"Guineas, M. le Rédacteur; guineas, not pounds!"
* * * * *
At a reception one evening in Prince's Hall he was introduced to Henrietta Rae, whose painting "Psyche Before the Throne of Venus" had made her notable. She had been described to him in advance as rather weighty in figure.
"I don't think you're a bit too fat," was his encouraging greeting.
* * * * *
"Why have you withered people and stung them all your life?" asked a lady.
"My dear," he said, "I will tell you a secret. Early in life I made the discovery that I was charming; and if one is delightful, one has to thrust the world away to keep from being bored to death."
* * * * *
During the Boxer troubles, when Pekin was under siege to rescue the legations, he remarked:
"Dear! dear! I hope they will save the palace. All the Englishmen in the world are not worth one blue china vase."
One evening at Pennell's Miss Annulet Andrews mentioned attending the Royal Society soirée the evening before.
"Poor thing!" he said. "Poor, misguided child! Did you come all the way to London to consort with such--well, what shall we call them? Why, there isn't a fellow among them who had his h's five years ago!"
* * * * *
"You should be grateful to me," said Whistler to Leyland, after he had painted the Peacock Room in the latter's house. "I have made you famous. My work will live when you are forgotten. Still, perchance in the dim ages to come you may be remembered as the proprietor of the Peacock Room."
* * * * *
Whistler's butterfly was the moth of the silkworm borrowed from Hokusai. Otto H. Bacher thought the addition of a sting to the signature came from this incident at Venice: In 1880 he found a scorpion and impaled it on his etching needle. As the little creature writhed and struck, Whistler exclaimed: "Look at the beggar now! See him strike! Isn't he fine? Look at him! Look at him now! See how hard he hits! That's right--that's the way! Hit hard! And do you see the poison that comes out when he strikes? Isn't he superb?"
* * * * *
Referring long after to his retirement from West Point, where he had been a cadet for three years, the artist explained his fall by saying: "If silicon had been a gas, I should have been a soldier!"
* * * * *
He was always proud of his West Point cadetship. "West Point is America," he would say. Julian Alden Weir, son of Whistler's instructor at the Academy, once dining with him in London, chanced to remark that football had been introduced at the school. "Good God!" cried Whistler. "A West Point cadet to be rolled in the mud by a Harvard junior!"
* * * * *
When a student at the Point he had the habit of combing his long hair in class with his fingers, which brought this frequent command from Lieutenant Caleb Huse:
"Mr. Whistler, go to your room and comb your hair!"
* * * * *
Examined on history at West Point, he failed to recall the date of the battle of Buena Vista. "Suppose," said the exasperated instructor, "you were to go out to dinner and the company began to talk of the Mexican War, and you, a West Point man, were asked the date of the battle; what would you do?"
"Do?" was the reply. "Why, I should refuse to associate with people who could talk of such things at dinner!"
* * * * *
He disliked the work of the riding class at West Point, and one day wished to exchange his heavy horse for a lighter animal. The dragoon in charge called out: "Oh, don't swap, don't you swap! Yours is a war-horse!"
"A war-horse!" exclaimed the little cadet. "That settles it. I certainly don't want him!"
"Yes, you do, sir," insisted the dragoon. "He's a war-horse, I tell you, for he'd rather die than run!"
* * * * *
"Of course you don't know what fear is," observed Mortimer Menpes.
"Ah, yes, I do!" Whistler answered. "I should hate, for example, to be standing opposite a man who was a better shot than I, far away out in the forest, in the bleak, cold, early morning. Fancy me, the master, standing out in the open as a target to be shot at. Pshaw! It would be foolish and inartistic. I never mind calling a man out; but I always have the sense to know he is not likely to come."
* * * * *
Mr. Howard Mansfield relates that while in London in the summer of 1900 with Mr. Whistler, reference was one day made to West Point. He broke at once into enthusiastic praise of that institution, declaring that there was no finer institution in the world, and adding that next to it came the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Then he went on to say: "What was it which really saved you in your late deplorable war with the politest nation of Europe but the bearing of your naval gentlemen? After the affair in that sea--what's its name?--off the island of Cuba, when dear old Admiral Cervera was fished up like a dollop of cotton out of an ink-pot and was received on one of your ships with all the honors due to his rank, the officers all saluting and the crew manning the yards, as it were--only they haven't any yards now--but lined up in quite the proper way--why, it was splendid, just splendid!"
* * * * *
Dining one night at a house where there were a number of his pictures about the room, he could give attention to nothing but his own work. When he left he begged that one painting be sent to his studio to be revarnished. The unsuspecting hostess complied. Once delivered, she could not get it back. Finally she wrote: "I can live no longer without my beautiful picture, and I am sending to have it taken away."
"Isn't it appalling?" he cried to Menpes. "Just think of it! Ten years ago this woman bought my picture for a ridiculously small sum, a mere bagatelle, a few pounds; she has had the privilege of living with this masterpiece for ten whole years, and now she has the presumption to ask for it back again. Pshaw! The thing's unspeakable!"
* * * * *
"What a series of accidents!" was his comment on a row of Turners at the National Gallery.
* * * * *
On another occasion, when he arrived at his host's house two hours after the time set for dining, he found the meal well under way. "How extraordinary!" he exclaimed to the amazed company.
"Really, I should think you could have waited a bit. Why, you're just like a lot of pigs with your eating!"
* * * * *
Sir John E. Millais said to Whistler one day: "Jimmy, why don't you paint more pictures? Put out more canvases!"
"I know better," was the shrewd reply. "The fool!" he muttered, as he entered his studio. "He spreads himself on canvas on every possible occasion, and, do you know, he called me Jimmy! Mind you, I don't know the fellow well at all."
* * * * *
His "Nocturne in Blue and Gold, Valparaiso," was in the Hill collection at Brighton. Whistler made Mr. Hill a visit which he thus described: "I was shown into the galleries, and, of course, took a chair and sat looking at my beautiful 'Nocturne'; then, as there was nothing else to do, I went to sleep."
In this state Mr. Hill found him!
This sleeping habit was common with him when the company or the goings-on failed to interest him. On one occasion his sweet snore alarmed his neighbor, who nudged him and whispered:
"I say, Whistler, you must not sleep here!"
"Leave me alone!" commanded the artist, crossly. "I've said all I wanted to. I've no interest at all in what you and your friends have to say."
* * * * *
He once slumbered through a dinner where Edwin A. Abbey was a fellow-guest. The next morning he blandly asked Mr. Chase:
"What did Abbey have to say last night? Anything worth while?"
When Dan Smith was at the beginning of his career as an illustrator he was employed by an important lithographing house. One day, while making a large picture of Antony and Cleopatra in the barge scene, which was to be used by Kyrle Bellew and Mrs. James Brown Potter as a poster for their joint starring tour, Whistler, accompanied by a friend, visited the studio:
Whistler examined, with evident interest and approval, the canvas upon which the youthful artist was at work, holding his glass to his eyes; then, looking quizzically over it, remarked to his friend, "What a mercantile wretch it is!"
* * * * *
Whistler presented a copy of his edition of _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_ to "Theodore Watts, the Worldling."
Asked why he started the unlucky school in the Latin Quarter, he answered:
"It was for Carmen Rossi [long his model], poor little Carmen, who is a mere child and has no money, and is saddled with the usual Italian burden of a large, disreputable family--banditti brothers, a trifling husband, and all the rest of it."
"Carmen" was then thirty years old; weight, one hundred and ninety pounds. But she once had been his child-model.
* * * * *
A Scotch student in the class had worked out the face of an old peasant woman illuminated by a candle. "How beautifully you have painted the candle!" Whistler commended. "Good morning, gentlemen!"
* * * * *
One day, when the pupils had been sketching from life, he came upon the work of one which, if it contained all of the truth, did not contain all of the beautiful.
After gazing at it for some time Whistler observed to the student:
"Ah, well! You can hardly expect me to teach you morals." And he walked away.
* * * * *
A carelessly kept palette was an abhorrence to the painter. He would inspect those used by his class, and on the discovery of untidiness uttered a reproof like this: "My friends, have you noticed the way in which a musician cares for his violin? How beautiful it is? How well kept? How tenderly handled? Your palette is your instrument, its colors the notes, and upon it you play your symphonies!"
* * * * *
The colloquies with the class were spirited, sarcastic, interesting. Here is a characteristic one:
_Question:_ "Do you know what I mean when I say tone, value, light, shade, quality, movement, construction, etc.?"
_Chorus:_ "Oh, yes, Mr. Whistler!"
_Mr. Whistler:_ "I'm glad, for it's more than I do myself!"
* * * * *
He objected to smoking in the atelier, partly because it obscured the light and partly because of its obfuscating qualities. In Paris a big Englishman clouded the class-room with a copious discharge of smoke. "My dear sir," said Whistler, gently, "I know you do not smoke to show disrespect for my request that students refrain from smoking on the days I come to them, nor would you desire to infringe upon the rules of the atelier, but--er--it seems to me--er--that when you are painting--er--you might possibly become so absorbed in your work as to--er--let your cigar go out!"
Visiting Earl Stetson Crawford in his studio at Paris, he noted on the wall a photographic copy of the Nicholson portrait of himself.
"Is that the best you have of me?" he asked. "Not that it is not very beautiful and artistic and so on--but I say, come now, you don't think it quite does me justice, do you?"
* * * * *
When the class was formed, so runs the tale, Whistler inquired of each pupil with whom he had studied before.
"With Julian," said one.
"Couldn't have done better, sir," Whistler answered.
"With Chase," replied another.
"Couldn't have done better, sir."
"With Mowbray," answered a third.
"Couldn't have done better, sir," and so on.
He approached a student slightly deaf, who stammered in reply, "I beg pardon?"
"Couldn't have done better, sir," responded Whistler, placidly, passing on to the next.
* * * * *
"It suffices not, Messieurs," he once observed to the class, "that a life spent among pictures makes a painter, else the policeman in the National Gallery might assert himself."
* * * * *
A pupil told him proudly she had studied with Bouguereau.
"Bouguereau! Bouguereau! Who is Bouguereau?"
* * * * *
One young lady in the class offended him. She received a polite note, signed with a neat butterfly, requesting her not to attend further. "It was worth being expelled to get the note," she said. Whistler heard of the comment.
"Well, they'll all have a note some day," he observed. His retirement soon followed.
* * * * *
H. Villiers Barnett, editor of the _Continental Weekly_, when in the employ of the _Magazine of Art_ visited the Dowdeswell Gallery at a press view of the Venice pastels. He alone of the critics developed some interest, and soon found himself alone with Whistler.
"I beg your pardon," said the latter, "but do you represent a religious journal?"
"No," Barnett replied, jokingly, "mine is an out-and-out sporting paper!"
"Oh," said Whistler, "that accounts for it."
"Accounts for what?"
"Well, you see," said Whistler, with an exquisite sneer, "I have been watching you gentlemen of the press all morning. You are the only one in the whole lot who seems to find anything here worth looking at, and you have been taking such very serious interest that I was certain you must be representing some church paper."
"Mr. Whistler," retorted Barnett, "make your mind easy. There is nothing ecclesiastical about me nor the publication I have the honor to represent; but all the same, for you this is the day of judgment!"
"I wish you good morning," rejoined the painter, pertly.
* * * * *