PORTRAIT OF LADY COLIN CAMPBELL
OIL (DESTROYED)
From a photograph lent by Pickford R. Waller, Esq.
No one could know better than Mr. Croal Thomson how complete was this success:
"I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that the exhibition marked a revolution in the public feeling towards Whistler. His artistic powers were hitherto disputed on every hand, but when it was possible for lovers of art to see for themselves what the painter had accomplished the whole position was changed. I will be pardoned, I hope, in stating that whereas up to that time the pictures of Mr. Whistler commanded only a small sum of money, after the exhibition a great number of connoisseurs desired to acquire his works, and therefore their money value immediately increased.
"In the Goupil collection all the pictures were contributed by private owners, and none were offered for sale. I may say in passing that, as a matter of fact, the crowds of visitors were so great that no transaction of any serious kind was carried through in the Gallery between the hanging of the pictures and their dispersal—that is, for nearly five weeks there was practically no record of business.
"But the exhibition altered all this, and it is revealing no secrets to say that within a year after the exhibition was closed I had aided in the transfer of more than one-half of the pictures from their first owners. Mr. Whistler, to whom I always referred before concluding any transaction, came to the conclusion that there was hardly a holder of his pictures in England but who would sell when tempted by a large price. It may be that these owners had become affected by the continual misunderstanding and abuse of Mr. Whistler's works, and that when they were offered double or three times the sum for which they had their pictures insured they thought they had better take advantage of the enthusiasm of the moment. They did not realise that this enthusiasm would continue to enlarge, and that what seemed to them as original purchasers of the pictures to be a great price is only about one-fourth of their present money value.
"It was the artist's wish that a similar exhibition should be held in Paris, but the project fell through, and from more recent experience it would appear as if the London public, sometimes so severely scoffed at by Mr. Whistler, was really more appreciative than the Parisian public, and, therefore, perhaps after all more intelligent."
Whistler sold The Falling Rocket for eight hundred guineas, and wished that Ruskin could know that it had been valued at "four pots of paint." The Leyland sale, May 28, 1892, brought the Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine and smaller works into the auction-room, and, though the Princesse fetched only four hundred and twenty guineas, this was four times as much as Whistler received. What would he have said to the five thousand Mr. Freer paid for it within a year of his death? The sixty or eighty pounds Mr. Leathart paid Whistler for the Lange Leizen increased to six or eight hundred when he sold it. Mr. Ionides had bought Sea and Rain for twenty or thirty pounds, and now asked three hundred. Fifty pounds, the price of the Blue Wave when Mr. Gerald Potter had it from Whistler, multiplied to a thousand when it was his turn to dispose of it. Fourteen hundred pounds was given by Arthur Studd for The Little White Girl and a Nocturne, the two having cost Mr. Potter about one hundred and eighty pounds, and we have been told that Arthur Studd was recently offered six thousand pounds for The Little White Girl alone. Whistler resented it when he found that fortunes were being made "at his expense" by so-called friends, and he complained that they were turning his reputation into pounds, shillings, and pence, travelling over Europe and holiday-making on the profits. The previous sentence was written when our book first appeared. During 1918 and 1919, there has been a fabulous increase in the selling price of Whistler's work. We do not know what amount was paid by Mr. Frick for the Lady Meux, the Rosa Corder, and the Mrs. Leyland which he recently purchased. Some of the reports of prices are greatly exaggerated, no doubt. A few owners of Whistlers do appreciate them. But nearly all collectors in the United States regard art as they do stocks. They buy for a rise, and appreciate only the monetary value of the works they possess. One of the most striking cases is that of Mr. Howard Mansfield, whom Whistler, during many years, furnished with some of his most interesting prints, aided and directed in their collection, hoping, of course, that they would be left to a museum. But Mr. Mansfield sold his collection for an enormous price, altogether out of proportion to what Whistler received. Surprising statements have been circulated about the sale of pictures. The announcement of the price recently paid for the Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine is as incorrect as the title given to the painting, which is simply a small slight sketch and different version of the important subject owned by Mr. Freer. The bigger the lie, the more impressive is such a statement concerning the prices asked and obtained—the merit of the work is of secondary importance. This is a fair specimen of American commercial art criticism.
Whistler, after the trade in his work began, suggested that a work of art, when sold, should still remain the artist's property; that it was only "lent its owner." It was now his frequent demand to owners and condition to purchasers that his pictures should be available for exhibition when and where and as often as he pleased. This is illustrated in the following letter which Mr. H. S. Theobald, K.C., writes us:
"... About 1870 I began to get such of his etchings as I could, and somewhere early in the eighties I became the fortunate possessor of some thirty or forty drawings and pastels through the Dowdeswells. Whistler became aware of my ownership of these, and they sometimes brought him to my house, which was then in Westbourne Square. The pictures, owing to stress of space, hung mostly on the staircase, and Whistler would stand in rapt admiration before them, with occasional ejaculations of 'how lovely,' 'how divine,' and so on. On one of these occasions he asked my wife if she had had her portrait taken. 'But of course not,' he added, 'as I have not painted you.'
"My intercourse with the Master was limited to occasions when he wanted to borrow the pictures. His manner of proceeding was somewhat abrupt. Some morning a person would appear in a four-wheel cab and present Whistler's card, on which was written, 'Please let bearer have fourteen of my pictures.' Sometimes, but not often, there was a preliminary warning from Whistler himself. But though the pictures went easily, it was a labour of Hercules to retrieve them. Once when I went to fetch them at his studio by appointment, after a previous effort, also by appointment, which was not kept, I found the studio locked, but after a search among the neighbours I got the key, and then I found some two or three hundred pictures stacked round the room buried in the dust of ages. Whistler loved his pictures but he certainly took no care of them. On that occasion I remember I took away by mistake in exchange for one of my pictures, a Nocturne that did not belong to me, though it was very like one of mine. You can imagine the Master's winged words when he found this out. I could only cry mea culpa and bow my head before the storm. It was the risk to which I feared the pictures were exposed which made me harden my heart."
Whistler was as anxious to keep his pictures out of exhibitions when for some reason he did not care to have them shown. The large Three Girls (Three Figures, Pink and Grey, in the London Memorial Exhibition) was at Messrs. Dowdeswell's in the summer of 1891. He had before this tried to get possession of it in order that he might destroy it, and he had offered to paint the portrait of the owner and his wife in exchange. His offer was refused, and while the picture was at Messrs. Dowdeswell's, he wrote a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette (July 28, 1891), to explain that it was a painting "thrown aside for destruction." An impudent answer from a critic led to a more explicit statement of his views on the subject:
"All along have I carefully destroyed plates, torn up proofs and burned canvases that the truth of the quoted word shall prevail, and that the future collector shall be spared the mortification of cataloguing his pet mistakes. To destroy, is to remain."
When this picture, with a number of studies for it, was sent to the London Memorial Exhibition, it was found very interesting and it was hung, and we think it fortunate that it was not destroyed. But had the Committee known it was the picture he wished destroyed it never would have been exhibited by the International Society.
In the summer of 1892, Whistler was invited by the Duke of Argyll to contribute to the British Section at the World's Columbian Exposition to be held in Chicago the following year, and the picture mentioned for the purpose was the Carlyle. The portrait had been skied in a corner the previous winter at the Victorian Exhibition in the New Gallery, of which Mr. J. W. Beck was Secretary, as he was now of the Fine Arts Committee for Chicago. Whistler wrote to Mr. Beck, sending his "distinguished consideration to the Duke and the President" (Leighton) with the assurance "that I have an undefined sense of something ominously flattering occurring, but that no previous desire on his part ever to deal with work of mine has prepared me with the proper form of acknowledgment. No, no, Mr. Beck! Once hung, twice shy!"
When the letter was sent to the papers and printers made "sky" of the "shy" Whistler was enchanted. Mr. Smalley told the story of the invitation in the Times, after Whistler's death, under the impression that he had been invited to show at Burlington House. That Whistler never was invited to show anything there we know, and we have the further testimony of Sir Fred Eaton, Secretary of the Academy, that "No such proposal as Mr. Smalley speaks of was ever made to Mr. Whistler, and it is difficult to understand on what grounds he made such a statement."
It is an amusing coincidence that this would seem to be confirmed by the fate of a letter addressed to Whistler, "The Academy, England," which, after having gone to the newspaper of that name, was next sent to Burlington House, and, finally, reached Whistler with "Not known at the R.A.," written on the cover. Here was one of the little incidents that Whistler called "the droll things of this pleasant life," and he sent the cover for reproduction to the Daily Mail with the reflection:
"In these days of doubtful frequentation it is my rare good fortune to be able to send you an unsolicited official and final certificate of character."
Whistler did not depend upon the British Section at the Chicago Exposition. Americans made up for the official blunders of 1889. Professor Halsey C. Ives, chief of the Art Department, wrote letters that Whistler found most courteous, and everything was done to secure his pictures and prints. He was splendidly represented by The Yellow Buskin, the Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine, The Fur Jacket, among paintings, and by etchings of every period. The medal given him was the first official honour from his native land, where never before had so representative a collection of his work been seen.
Towards the end of 1892 the appreciation of America was expressed in another form. The new Boston Library was being built, and Messrs. McKim, Meade, and White were the architects. It was determined that the interior should be decorated by the most distinguished American artists. Mr. Sargent and Mr. Abbey were commissioned to do part of the work, and they joined with Mr. McKim and St. Gaudens in trying to induce Whistler to undertake the large panel at the top of the stairs. He made notes and suggestions for the design, which, he told us, was to be a great peacock ten feet high; but the work was put off, and, in the end, nothing came of the first opportunity given him for mural decoration since The Peacock Room.
CHAPTER XXXVI: PARIS.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN NINETY-TWO AND EIGHTEEN NINETY-THREE.
Whistler went to live in Paris again in 1892. Moving from London was a complicated affair, and, during several months, he and Mrs. Whistler and his sister-in-law, Mrs. Whibley, were continually running backward and forward, before they settled in the Rue du Bac. We saw him whenever he came to London and whenever we were in Paris, and, as we were there often, we saw much of him.
A group of artists and art critics, whose appreciation of Whistler had not waited for the turning of the tide, were in the habit of going together to Paris for the opening of the Salon. In 1892, R. A. M. Stevenson, Aubrey Beardsley, Henry Harland, D. S. McColl, Charles W. Furse, Alexander and Robert Ross, among others, were with us, and to all it was a pleasure to find Whistler triumphing as he had triumphed earlier in the spring in London. His pictures at the Champ-de-Mars were the most talked about and the most distinguished in an unusually good Salon. Many came straight from the Goupil Exhibition. Whistler called it "a stupendous success all along the line," and said that, coming after the Goupil "heroic kick," it made everything complete and perfect. He was pleased also with the fact that he was elected a full Sociétaire, and this year a member of the jury.
In the autumn, J., returning to Paris after a long summer in the South of France, found Whistler in the Hôtel du Bon Lafontaine, a house, Whistler said, full of bishops, cardinals, and monsignori, and altogether most correct, to which he had moved from the Foyot, inhabited by Senators, after a bomb had exploded in the kitchen window. J. says:
"He was not too comfortably established, in one or two small rooms. He was full of the apartment in the Rue de Bac, which I was taken to see, though there was nothing to see but workmen and packing-boxes. In the midst of the moving, he was working, and one day I found him in his bedroom with Mallarmé, whose portrait in lithography he was drawing, and there was scarcely room for three. This portrait is the frontispiece to Mallarmé's Vers et Prose.
"It was the first time I had ever seen Whistler working on a lithograph. He had great trouble with this portrait, which he did more than once, not altogether because, as M. Duret says, he could not get the head right, but because he was trying experiments with paper. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with the mechanical grained paper which he had used for the Albermarle and the Whirlwind prints, and he was then afraid of trusting to the post the paper that Way was sending him. He had found at Belfont's or Lemercier's some thin textureless transfer paper, thin as tissue paper, which delighted him, though it was difficult to work on. When he was doing the Mallarmé, he put the paper down on a roughish book cover. He liked the grain the cover gave him, for it was not mechanical, and, when the grain seemed to repeat itself, he would shift the drawing, and thus get a new surface. I do not know whether he used this thin paper to any extent, but he said he found it delightful, if difficult, to work on. He used that afternoon a tiny bit of lithographic chalk, holding it in his fingers, and not in a crayon-holder as lithographers do.
"The next day, he took me to the printers, Belfont's and Lemercier's, where he introduced me to M. Duchâtel and M. Marty, who was preparing L'Estampe Originale, devoting himself to the revival of artistic lithography in France. As I remember, the talk was technical, when not of the wonders of the apartment in the Rue du Bac—where 'Peace threatens to take up her abode in the garden of our pretty pavilion,' Mr. Starr quotes Whistler as saying—and the studio in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, which I did not see until later on. He was also planning his colour lithographs, and he explained to me his methods, though very few colour-prints were made until the next year. He also told me what he thought of printing etchings in colour—that it was abominable, vulgar, and stupid. Good black or brown ink, on good old paper, had been good enough for Rembrandt, it was good enough for him, and it ought to be good enough in the future for the few people who care about etching. To-day, when the world is swamped with the childish print in colour and the preposterous big copper plate, it may be well to remember Whistler's words. His reason for rejecting the etching in colour is as simple and rational as his reason for making the lithograph in colour. Lithography is a method of surface printing; the colour, rolled on to the surface of the stone, is merely rubbed on to, and scraped off on, the paper. In etching or engraving, the colour is first hammered into the engraved plate with a dabber and then forced out by excessive pressure, fatal to any but the strongest or purest of blacks and browns; and colours, whether printed from one plate or a dozen, must have the freshness, the quality, squeezed out of them."
He was back in London at the end of December (1892) eating his Christmas dinner with his future brother-in-law. He stayed only a few days, but long enough to arrange to show Lady Meux: White and Black in the first exhibition of the Portrait Painters at the Grafton Gallery, early in 1893, and a number of his Venice etchings with the destroyed plates at the Fine Art Society's.
"We were again in Paris for the Salon of 1893, and found Whistler living in the Rue du Bac. Beardsley, MacColl, and 'Bob' Stevenson were with us. MacColl and I went to see Whistler in the new studio. It was at the top of one of the highest buildings in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, No. 86. As the concierge said, in directing visitors, 'On ne peut pas aller plus loin que M. Vistlaire!' The climb always seemed to me endless, and must have done much harm to Whistler's weak heart, though benches were placed on some of the landings where, if he had time, he could rest. When we got to the sixth storey MacColl knocked. There was a rapid movement across the floor, and the door was opened a little. Whistler held his palette and brushes between himself and us, and there were excuses of models and work. But MacColl felt the brushes, and they were dry, and so we got in.
"The studio was a big, bare room, the biggest studio Whistler ever had. A simple tone of rose on the walls, a lounge, a few chairs, a whitewood cabinet for the little drawings and prints and pastels; the blue screen with the river, Chelsea church, and the gold moon; two or three easels, nothing on them; rows and rows of canvases on the floor with their faces to the wall; in the further corner a printing press—rather a printing shop—with inks and papers on shelves; a little gallery above, a room or two opening off; a model's dressing-room under it, and in front, when you turned, the great studio window, with all Paris toward the Pantheon over the Luxembourg gardens. There was another little room or entrance-hall at the top of the stairs, and opposite another, a kitchen. On the front was a balcony with flowers.
