HARMONY IN FLESH-COLOUR AND GREEN
THE BALCONY
OIL
In the Charles L. Freer Collection, National Gallery of American Art
Often Sir Richard went to the studio; often Whistler sent to Windsor prints he thought should be there. The Venetian series was bought. Finally, after Sir Richard's retirement, they were sold "to improve the collection" at what was supposed the height of the "Whistler boom," and after they had been praised in the Memorial Exhibitions of London and Paris. As King Edward VII. on his visit to the London Memorial Exhibition expressed surprise at the few he looked at, it is certain that his Majesty was unaware that the collection was at Windsor. Even the portfolio, presented by Whistler to Queen Victoria with his autograph letter asking her acceptance, was first lost, and, when found, sold in 1906, the few prints in Princess Victoria's apartments only being kept. The disposal of the etchings was so badly managed that the Jubilee series brought more, when re-sold a few weeks after the King parted with them, than his Majesty got for the whole collection. During Whistler's lifetime important collections of his etchings were acquired also by the Museums of Dresden, Venice, and Melbourne, and the New York Public Library.
The success of Whistler's plates during the following years is a contrast to the fate of his pictures, which for a long period were neglected. He had nothing in the Academy of 1868. Mr. Jameson has told us of his despair because the Three Girls was not finished in time, and of their wandering together about town, in and out of galleries and museums, until at last, before Velasquez in the National Gallery, Whistler took heart again. And he delighted in the admiration of Swinburne in Notes on Some Pictures of 1868. The paintings which had not been submitted "to the loose and slippery judgment of an academy," but had been seen by Swinburne in the studio and seemed to him "to have grown as a flower grows," were evidently the Projects. A special quality of Whistler's genius, Swinburne said, is "a freshness and fullness of the loveliest life of things, with a high, clear power upon them which seems to educe a picture as the sun does a blossom or a fruit."
In 1869 the Academy moved to Burlington House, and there in 1870 Whistler showed The Balcony. From 1867 to 1870 he did not show in the Salon. Whistler, like Rossetti, was never without his public, though many years passed before he received Rossetti's rewards. He could rely on the Ionides, Leathart, Frederick Leyland, Huth, Alexander, Rawlinson, Anderson Rose, Jameson, Chapman, Potter. But, unlike Rossetti, he wanted to show his work and receive for it rewards. As far back as 1864 Fantin wrote to Edwin Edwards of Whistler's perseverance, his determination to get into the Salon, a phase of his character Fantin said he had not known. Whistler's absence from exhibitions was not his fault. It was his hatred of rejection and fear of being badly hung that drove him from them.
The tyranny of the Academy was no new thing. The opening of the exhibition was every year the occasion of scandal and of protest against an institution that rejected and still rejects distinguished artists. One gallery after another took up the outsiders. After the Berners Street Gallery came the Dudley, which, in 1867, added to its show of water-colours a show of oils; in 1868, the Corinthian Gallery in Argyll Street; in 1869, the Select Supplementary Exhibition in Bond Street—these last two poor affairs more apt to justify than expose the Academy. Dealers came to the rescue: the French Gallery in Pall Mall, and the Society of French Artists, where Durand-Ruel brought his collection in 1870, and, under the management of M. Charles Deschamps, gave exhibitions until 1877. In the French Gallery and with M. Deschamps Whistler showed many times. He contributed often to the Dudley from 1871, and there the next year, 1872, exhibited for the first time a Nocturne. His use of titles to explain his intention was now so well established that in 1872, when The White Girl and the Princesse were in the International Exhibition at South Kensington, they were catalogued as Symphony in White, No. 1., and Variations in Flesh Colour, Blue, and Grey, later changed to Grey and Rose; and he supplied the explanation, printed in the "Programme of Reception." They were "the complete results of harmonies obtained by employing the infinite tones and variations of a limited number of colours."
His portrait of his mother was sent to the Academy of 1872—Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother. It was refused. Madox Brown wrote to George Rae: "I hear that Whistler has had the portrait of his mother turned out. If so, it is a shame, because I saw the picture, and know it to be good and beautiful, though, I suppose, not to the taste of Messrs. Ansdell and Dobson."
Sir William Boxall threatened to resign from the Council if the portrait was not hung, for he would not have it said that a committee to which he belonged had rejected it. Similar threats have been heard in recent years, and the rejected work has stayed out, and the Academicians have stayed in. Boxall would not yield, and the picture was hung, not well, yet not out of sight; groups, it is said, were always gathered before it to laugh. Still, there it was, the last picture by Whistler at the Academy, where nothing of his was again seen, save one etching in 1879: Putney Bridge, published by the Fine Art Society and probably sent by them.
The whole affair made talk. But 1872 is interesting, above all, as the year when Whistler first exhibited a portrait as an Arrangement and an impression of night as a Nocturne.
As it was the last year he showed a picture in the Academy, it may be as well to complete here our account of his relations with this institution. It is said that he put his name down, or allowed it to be put down, for election. He was never elected. Other Americans were, for the Royal Academy is so broad in its constitution that an artist need not be an Englishman, need not be resident in Great Britain, need not have shown on its walls to become a member or honorary member. But though during all these years and until the day of his death Whistler would have accepted election, we have never heard that he obtained a single vote. George Boughton, an American artist and a member of the Royal Academy, explained the Academic attitude when he said that if Whistler had "behaved himself" he would have been President. Even this concession Boughton qualified: "Now, if anyone knowing Whistler and me should go about thinking me serious in imagining that he would make a good President—even of an East End boxing club—such persons live in dense error."
The only comment to make is that Boughton did not understand Whistler, and, in company with the Academy, had not the least artistic sense, or even business appreciation in this matter.
Whistler would have accepted election for one reason only—because of the official rank it would have given him in England. Other Americans hustled to get it; he expected it as an honour which he deserved. He knew himself to be more distinguished than any member of the Royal Academy. Though recognition was withheld during his lifetime, several Academicians attempted to secure for the Academy a posthumous glory by endeavouring to get together an exhibition of his works the winter after his death. It would, indeed, have been irony if the Academy had, in return for its neglect of Whistler, got the kudos and cash as their reward. Another instance of what Americans call "graft" is in the absence from the Chantrey Collection of a picture by Whistler, and the presence of the work of the Academicians who administer the Fund. The Trustees, although they have bought their own work, paying as much as one thousand pounds to Sir Edward J. Poynter, three thousand to Sir Hubert von Herkomer, three thousand and fifty to Lord Leighton, two thousand to Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., over two thousand to Mr. Frank Dicksee, two thousand to Sir W. Q. Orchardson, two thousand to Vicat Cole, who are or were members of the Council of the Academy, never even offered the sixty pounds for which they might have bought Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, since purchased for two thousand by public subscription and given to the Tate Gallery. Is it any wonder that Whistler, disgusted with such conduct, especially on the part of his fellow countrymen, members of the Academy, and others, who might have elected him, left as his only written request relative to his pictures we have seen, the wish that none should ever find a place in any English Gallery? Death did not spare him Academical jealousy. Not content with ignoring him during his lifetime, officially insulting his memory after his death, Sir Edward Poynter, then Director, when he hung Old Battersea Bridge in the National Gallery, affixed to it, or allowed to be affixed, a label on which Whistler's name was misspelt, Whistler described as of the British School, the title of the picture incorrectly given, while Whistler's decorated frame was hung upside down. The picture has since, by the irony of fate, been placed in the Gallery of Modern British Art!
Footnotes
[4]He never lived at No. 3, as Walter Greaves has wrongly stated.
[5]See Chapter XXXV.
CHAPTER XIII: NOCTURNES.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-TWO TO EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-EIGHT.
Whistler was the first to paint the night. The blue mystery that veils the world from dusk to dawn is in the colour-prints of Hiroshige. But the wood-block cannot give the depth of darkness, the method makes a convention of colour. Hiroshige saw and felt the beauty and invented a scheme by which to suggest it on the block, but he could not render the night as Whistler rendered it on canvas.
Though colour-prints suggested the Nocturnes, they were only the suggestion. Whistler never copied Japanese technique. But Japanese composition impressed him—the arrangement, the pattern, and at times the detail. The high or low horizon, the line of a bridge over a river, the spray of foliage in the foreground, the golden curve of a falling rocket, the placing of a figure on the shore, the signature in the oblong panel, show how much he learned. He abandoned the Japanese convention in a few years, but he never gave up, he developed rather, what he always spoke of as the Japanese method of drawing.[6] He translated Japanese art—translate is the word—though he said that he "carried on tradition." His idea was not to go to the Japanese as greater than himself, but to learn what he could from them and make another work of art; a work founded on tradition no less than theirs, and yet as Western as theirs was Eastern.
