STUDY OF THE NUDE
PEN DRAWING
In the possession of William Heinemann, Esq.
And there are stories of Whistler's ways of meeting the hordes who tried to force themselves into the studio. Mr. Eddy tells one:
"An acquaintance had brought, without invitation, a friend, 'a distinguished and clever woman,' to the studio in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. They reached the door, both out of breath from their long climb. 'Ah, my dear Whistler,' drawled C——, 'I have taken the liberty of bringing Lady D—— to see you. I knew you would be delighted.' 'Delighted, I'm sure! Quite beyond expression, but'—mysteriously, and holding the door so as to bar their entrance—'my dear Lady D——, I would never forgive our friend for bringing you up six flights of stairs on so hot a day to visit a studio at one of these—eh—pagan moments when'—and he glanced furtively behind him, and still further closed the door—'it is absolutely impossible for a lady to be received. Upon my soul, I should never forgive him.' And Whistler bowed them down from the top of the six flights and returned to the portrait of a very sedate old gentleman who had taken advantage of the interruption to break for a moment the rigour of his pose."
The "Company of the Butterfly" never relieved him of the visitors who were more eager to see him than his work. But this he did not discover until he had devoted to the venture far more time than he had to spare during the crowded years of its existence.
CHAPTER XLII: BETWEEN LONDON AND PARIS.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN NINETY-SEVEN TO NINETEEN HUNDRED.
After his marriage Whistler was unfortunate in his choice of apartments and studios. The Studio in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, on the sixth floor, was the worst for a man with a weak heart to climb to; the apartment in the Rue du Bac, low and damp, was as bad for a man who caught cold easily. He was constantly ill during the winter of 1897-98, which he passed mostly in Paris. Influenza kept him in bed in November, from January to March he was dull and listless as never before, save in Venice after the scirocco; he said, "I am so tired—I who am never tired!"
Whistler's heart, always weak, began to trouble him. He had been ill before, but, nervous as he was about his health, he never realised his condition. We have known him, when too ill to work, get up out of bed in order to accomplish something important. A few years before, confined with quinsy to his brother's house, forced to write what he wished to say on a slate, when someone he did not want to see was announced, he forgot that he could not talk and yelled, "Send him away!" We have known, too, an invitation to dinner from a certain rich American to rout him out of bed and to cure him temporarily. It was this endeavour never to be ill, never to give in, that was one of the causes of his final breakdown. Illness suggested death, and no man ever shrank more from the thought or mention of death than Whistler. There was in life so much for him to do, so little time in which to do it. He would tell his brother it was useless for doctors to know so much if they had not discovered the elixir of life. "Why not try to find it?" he asked the Doctor. "Isn't it in the heart of the unknown? It must be there."
In the studio he worked harder than ever. Illness made him foresee that his time was short, and he was goaded by the thought of the things to finish. When he was in London we were distressed by his fatigue at the end of the day, but he said he was like the old cart-horse that could keep going as long as it was in traces, but must drop the minute it was free. While he was in Paris, his letters were full of the "amazing things" going on in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He said: "Really, you know, I could almost laugh at the extraordinary progress I am making, and the lovely things I am inventing—work beyond anything I have ever done before."
He was only beginning to know and to understand, he told us. All that had gone before was experimental.
There were new portraits. In 1897 he had begun one of Mr. George Vanderbilt—"The Modern Philip"—a full-length in riding habit, whip in hand, standing against a dark background. The canvas was sent from Paris to London, just as Whistler and Vanderbilt happened to be in one place or the other. Not one of his portraits of men interested Whistler so much; certainly not one was finer when we first saw it in London, but it was a wreck in the Paris Memorial Exhibition of 1905. Like others of this period, it had been worked over. He painted Mrs. Vanderbilt, Ivory and Gold, shown in the Salon of 1902, one of the first of the several ovals he was now doing. Carmen, his model, sat. Portraits started a year or so later were of his brother-in-law, Mr. Birnie Philip, and of Mr. Elwell, an American painter whom he had known for some time. In May 1898, in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, he showed us the full-length of himself in long overcoat, called Gold and Brown in the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 and, as we have said, never seen afterward. We own a pen-drawing he made of it. It was far from successful, and before he finished it Miss Marian Draughn, an American, began to pose for him—his "Coon Girl" he called her. She was sent to him by Gibson and Phil May.
He painted many children. He loved children. Ernest G. Brown remembered Whistler's thoughtfulness and consideration when his daughter sat for Pretty Nelly Brown, one of the most beautiful of the series. We have the same story from Mr. Croal Thomson, of whose daughter, Little Evelyn, Whistler made a lithograph. When he went to her father's house at Highgate, Evelyn would run to meet him with outstretched hands, her face lifted to be kissed, and while he worked the other children would come and look on. Mr. Alan S. Cole has told us that once Whistler found his three little daughters decorating the drawing-room and hanging up a big welcome in flowers for their mother, who was to return. He forgot what he had come for and helped, as eager and excited as they, and stayed until Mrs. Cole arrived. He was walking from the Paris studio one day with Mrs. Clifford Addams and saw some children playing; he made her stop, "I must look at the babbies," he said, "you know, I love the babbies!" Later, during his last illness, he liked to have Mrs. Addams' own little girl, Diane, in the studio. And there are portraits of Brandon Thomas' baby and Master Stephen Manuel that show his pleasure in painting his small sitters. The children of the street adored him; the children of Chelsea and Fitzroy Street, who were used to artists, knew him well. There was one he was for ever telling us about, of five or six, who frightened while she fascinated him. "I likes whusky," she confided one day when she was posing, "and I likes Scoatch best!" She described her Christmas at home: "Father 'e was drunk, mother was drunk, sister was drunk, I was drunk, and we made the cat drunk, too!" A still younger child gave him sittings, a baby of not more than three, the model for many of the pastels. She and her mother were resting one afternoon, Whistler watching her every movement. "Really," he said, "you are a beautiful little thing!" She looked up at him, "Yes, I is, Whistler," she lisped. And there is the old story: "Where did you come from, Mr. Whistler?" "I came from on high, my dear." "H'm, never should have thought it," said the child; "shows how we can deceive ourselves." But his popularity with children did not help him one Sunday afternoon, the only time it is possible to sketch with comfort in the City, when he went with J. to make a study of Clerkenwell Church tower, which was about to be restored. They drove to the church, but the light was bad and the colour not right, so they wandered off to Cloth Fair—until a little while ago the most perfect, really the only, bit of old London. Though Whistler had worked there many times, this afternoon the children did not approve of him. After a short encounter in which they, as always, got the better, Whistler and J. retired to another cab, followed by any refuse that came handy. But the children he painted, The Little Rose of Lyme Regis, The Little Lady Sophie of Soho, Lillie in our Alley, the small Italian waifs and strays, were his friends, and no painter ever gave the grace and feeling of childhood, or of girlhood as in Miss Woakes, more sympathetically.
He was as absorbed in a series of nudes. Few of his paintings towards the end satisfied him so entirely as the small Phryne the Superb, Builder of Temples, which he sent to the International in 1901 and to the Salon in 1902. The first time he showed it to us he asked:
"Would she be more superb—more truly the builder of Temples—had I painted her what is called life-size by the foolish critics who bring out their foot-rule? Is it a question of feet and inches when you look at her?"
