PORTRAIT OF DR. WHISTLER
OIL
In the possession of Burton Mansfield, Esq.
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.
CHAPTER XV: THE OPEN DOOR.
THE YEAR EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-FOUR AND AFTER.
"Whistler laughed all his troubles away," it has been said. When the Academy rejected him, and the critics sneered at his pictures hung in other galleries, and the public took the critics seriously, he laughed the louder, and felt the more. English ears shrank from his laugh—"his strident peacock laugh," Sir Sidney Colvin called it.
"He was a man who could never bear to be alone," Mr. Percy Thomas remembers. "The door in Lindsey Row was always open," and Whistler liked to think that his friends' doors were open to him. Lord Redesdale, who came to live in the Row in 1875, said that Whistler was always running in and out. Through his own open door strange people drifted. If they amused him he forgave them however they presumed, and they usually did presume. There was a man who, he told us, came to dine one evening, and, asking to stay overnight, remained three years:
"Well, you know, there he was; and that was the way he had always lived—the prince of parasites! He was a genius, a musician, the first of the 'Æsthetes,' before the silly name was invented. He hadn't anything to do; he didn't do anything but decorate the dinner-table, arrange the flowers, and then play the piano and talk. He hadn't any enthusiasm; that's why he was so restful. He was always ready to go to Cremorne with me. At moments my mother objected to such a loafer about the house. And I would say to her, 'Well, but, my dear mummy, who else is there to whom we could say, "Play," and he would play, and "Stop playing," and he would stop right away!' Then I was ill. He couldn't be trusted with a message to the doctor or the druggist, and he was only in the way. But he had the good sense to see it, and to suggest it was time to be going; so he left for somebody else! It never occurred to him there was any reason he shouldn't live like that."
We have heard of many others. One, to whom Whistler entrusted the money for the weekly bills, gave lunches to his friends and sent flowers and chocolates right and left, while Whistler's debt multiplied.
Artists and art students came in through the open door to see and to learn, and were welcomed. If they came to loaf and to play, they paid for it. They ran errands, posted letters, sat in the corner, interviewed greater bores than themselves. They had to give up their time, and then the end came, and out they went.
One story in Chelsea is of Barthe, who not only taught art but sold tapestry. Whistler bought a number of things from him. "But vill he pay, zis Vistlaire, vill he pay?" Barthe asked, and at last one evening he went to Lindsey Row. A cab was at the door. The maid said Whistler was not in, but Barthe heard his voice and pushed past, and said afterwards:
"Upstairs, I find him, before a little picture painting, and behind him ze bruzzers Greaves holding candle. And Vistlaire he say, 'You ze very man I vant; hold a candle!' And I hold a candle. And Vistlaire he paint, and he paint, and zen he take ze picture, and he go downstair, and he get in ze cab, and he drive off, and we hold ze candle, and I see him no more. Mon Dieu, il est terrible, ce Vistlaire!" But he was paid the next day.
Few men depended more on companionship than Whistler, and to few was the companionship women alone can give more essential. All his life he retained his cœur de femme, and most of his friends were women. For years, until her health broke down, his mother was with him. Many wondered, with Val Prinsep, who thought Whistler "always acting a part," whether "behind the poseur, there was not quite a different Whistler. Those who saw him with his mother were conscious of the fact that the irrepressible Jimmy was very human. No one could have been a better son, or more attentive to his mother's wishes. Sometimes old Mrs. Whistler, who was a stern Presbyterian in her religion, must have been very trying to her son. Yet Jimmy, though he used to give a queer smile when he mentioned them, never in any way complained of the old lady's strict Sabbatarian notions, to which he bowed without remonstrance."
The models drifting in and out of the open door were mostly women. He liked to have them with him, and felt it necessary to see them about the studio, for, as he watched their movements, they would take the pose he wanted, or suggest a group, an arrangement. An admirable example is the Whistler in his Studio, done in the first house in Lindsey Row. It was a beautiful study, he wrote to Fantin, for a big picture like the Hommage à Delacroix, with Fantin, Albert Moore, and himself, the "White Girl" on a couch, and la Japonaise walking about, grouped together in his studio: all that would shock the Academicians. The colour was to be dainty; he in pale grey, Jo in white, la Japonaise in flesh-colour, Albert Moore and Fantin to give the black note. The canvas was to be ten feet by six. If he ever did more than the study of the two girls and himself, it has disappeared. The painting was owned by Mr. Douglas Freshfield, and now belongs to the Chicago Art Institute, and is as dainty as Whistler described it. He holds the small palette he sometimes used with raised edges to keep the liquid colour from running off, he wears the long-sleeved white waistcoat in which he worked, and he painted from the reflection in the mirror, for his brush is in his left hand. The two women most likely are the two models for Symphony in White, No. III., who have stopped posing. Another version of this studio interior is in the City of Dublin Art Gallery, but Whistler repudiated it. Mr. Gallatin says that Sir Hugh Lane, who presented the picture to the Dublin Gallery, gave it a very different record, holding that it was well known in Chelsea, that Whistler liked it, and eventually painted for Mr. Freshfield the version now in the Chicago Art Institute. The truth of the matter, however, is that not only did Whistler repudiate the Dublin picture, but, when it was shown as the original in the Whistler Memorial Exhibition in London, Mr. Freshfield demanded that this description be at once withdrawn or he would remove the picture and sue the International Society, who organised the Exhibition, for false statements and damages. Sir Hugh Lane did not produce during his lifetime one scrap of proof in corroboration of statements denied by Whistler, nor has any proof been produced since his death. Another reason to doubt Lane's description is that Whistler never copied one of his pictures, and the Dublin Gallery's version is a slavish copy, save in the colour scheme. Whistler never painted it. There is nothing else of the kind so complete as Whistler in his Studio, but there are innumerable studies of figures, reading or sewing, not posing, though the minute he started to draw them they had to pose. Everybody who was with him, and somebody always was, had to sit and be painted, etched, or drawn.
Refugees from France in 1870 drifted through the open door, artists whose work was stopped by the Commune and who came to England to take it up again. There were Dalou, Professor Lantéri, and Tissot who, at Lindsey Row, found the inspiration for his pictures on the river. Fantin stayed in Paris, but later told stories of the siege which Whistler repeated to us. He asked Fantin what he did. "Me?" replied Fantin, "I hid in the cellar. Je suis poltron, moi." One of Fantin's many letters to Edwin Edwards shows Whistler's hold over those who were drawn to him for a better reason than curiosity. It was long since Fantin had heard from Whistler, for whom, however, he wrote, his affection was that of a man for a mistress still loved despite the trouble she might give. He did not understand women, they frightened him, "mais au fond, tout au fond, je sens que si j'étais aimé, je serais l'esclave le plus soumis et serais peut-être capable de toutes les plus grandes folies. Je sens que c'est la même chose pour Whistler: s'il savait comme il pourrait avoir un ami dévoué et aimant en moi. Malgré tout, il est séduisant."
And yet they saw less of each other as the years went on, perhaps because Fantin became more of a hermit, while Whistler's door opened wider.
Journalists and critics hurried to Lindsey Row once they knew the door was open. Mr. Walter Greaves, who sometimes showed the studio, remembers doing the honours for Tom Taylor. Whistler told Mr. Sidney Starr that, while the Miss Alexander was in the studio, Tom Taylor came:
"There were other visitors. Taylor said, 'Ah, yes, um,' then remarked that the upright line in the panelling of the wall was wrong, and the picture would be better without it, adding, 'Of course, it's a matter of taste.' To which Whistler replied, 'I thought that perhaps for once you were going to get away without having said anything foolish; but remember, so that you may not make the mistake again, it's not a matter of taste at all, it is a matter of knowledge. Good-bye.'"
Journalists and critics filled columns with praise of forgotten masterpieces by unknown Academicians, but seldom spared space for the work in Whistler's studio. Their gossip after the visit was about the man, not his pictures.
Poets, the younger literary men, came in through the open door. Mr. Edmund Gosse, introduced by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, has described to us his impressions of the bare room with little in it but the easel, and of the small, alert, nervous man with keen eyes and beautiful hands who sat before it, looking at his canvas, never moving but looking steadily for twenty minutes or half an hour, perhaps, and then, of a sudden, dashing at it, giving it one touch, and saying, "There, well, I think that will do for to-day!" an astonishing experience to one used to tapestried studios and painters more industrious with their hands than their brains.
The fashionable world, royalty, crowded through the open door. Lindsey Row was lined with the carriages of Mayfair and Belgravia. Whistler was the fashion, if his pictures were not, and he could say nothing, he could do nothing, that did not go the rounds of drawing-rooms and dinner-tables. "Ha, ha! I have no private life!" he told a man who threatened him with exposure. And, from this time onward, he never had.
He knew what his popularity meant. It was among the numbers who gathered about him because he was the fashion, that he could not afford to have friends.
If the frequent use of the name "Jimmie" by people in speaking and writing of him implies a friendliness on his part with every Tom, Dick, and Harry, nothing could be further from the fact. His friends, who were his contemporaries, called him "Jimmie," but rarely to his face, and the rest who did once had not the courage to a second time. We remember a foolish youth who, meeting him at our table, addressed him in free and easy fashion as "Whistler." He said nothing. He only looked, but the youth did not forget the Mr. after that. Whistler was the last man to allow familiarity or to make friends. He understood how to keep at a distance those he did not know or did not want to know.
