THE CONVALESCENT
WATER-COLOUR
In the possession of Dr. J. W. MacIntyre
"Carmen, his model, was there, and while he showed us some of his work she got breakfast, and we stayed a good part of the day. Mrs. Whistler came up later. I think she breakfasted with us. I have no recollection of what he talked about. But I am sure it was of what they had been saying in London, of what they were saying in Paris, of what he was doing. That is what it always was. We were all asked to lunch the following Sunday at the house.
"The apartment, No. 110 Rue du Bac, was on the right-hand side, just before you reached the Bon Marché, going up the street, from the river. You went through a big porte cochère by the concierge's box, down a long, covered tunnel, then between high walls, until you came to a courtyard with several doors, a bit of an old frieze in one place and a drinking-fountain. Whistler's door was painted blue, with a brass knocker. I do not suppose that then there was another like it in Paris. Inside was a little landing with three or four steps down to the floor a few feet lower than the courtyard. This room contained nothing, or almost nothing, but some trunks (which, as in his other houses, gave the appearance of his having just moved in, or being just about to start on a journey) and a settee, always covered with a profusion of hats and coats. Opposite the entrance a big door opened into a spacious room, decorated in simple, flat tones of blue, with white doors and windows, furnished with a few Empire chairs and a couch, a grand piano, and a table which, like the blue matting-covered floor, was littered with newspapers. Once in a while there was a picture of his on the wall. For some time, the Venus hung or stood about. There were doors to the right and left, and on the far side, a glass door opened on a large garden, a real bit of country in Paris. It stretched away in dense undergrowth to several huge trees. Later, over the door, there was a trellis designed by Mrs. Whistler, and there were flowers everywhere. 'In his roses he buried his troubles,' Mr. Wuerpel writes of the garden, and there were many birds, among them, at one time, an awful mocking-bird, at another a white parrot which finally escaped, and, in a temper, climbed up a tree where no one could get it, and starved itself to death to Whistler's grief. At the bottom of the garden were seats. The dining-room was to the right of the drawing-room. It was equally simple in blue, only there was blue and white china in a cupboard and a big dining-table, round which were more Empire chairs and in the centre a large, low blue and white porcelain stand, on it big bowls of flowers, over it, hanging from the ceiling, a huge Japanese something like a birdcage.
"From Paris, in May, I went down to Caen and Coutances, coming back a few weeks later. Beardsley was still in Paris, or had returned, and we were both stopping at the Hôtel de Portugal et de l'Univers, then known to every art student. Wagner was being played at the Opera, almost for the first time. Paris was disturbed, there were demonstrations against Wagner, really against Germany. We went, Beardsley wild about Wagner and doing, I think, the drawing of The Wagnerites. He had come over to get backgrounds in the rose arbours and the dense alleys of the Luxembourg gardens, where Whistler had made his lithographs. Coming away from the Opera, we went across to the Café de la Paix at midnight. The first person we saw was Whistler. He was with some people, but they left soon, and we joined him. Beardsley also left almost at once, but not before Whistler had asked us to come the next Sunday afternoon to the Rue du Bac. Then, for the first time, I learned what he thought of 'æstheticism' and decadence.'
"'Why do you get mixed up with such things? Look at him! He's just like his drawings, he's all hairs and peacock's plumes—hairs on his head, hairs on his fingers' ends, hairs in his ears, hairs on his toes. And what shoes he wears—hairs growing out of them!'
"I said, 'Why did you ask him to the Rue du Bac?' 'Oh—well—well—well!' And then it was late, or early, and the last thing was, 'Well, you'll come and bring him too.'
"Years later, in Buckingham Street, Whistler met Beardsley, and got to like not only him, as everybody did, but his work. One night when Whistler was with us, Beardsley turned up, as always when he went to see anyone, with his portfolio of his latest work under his arm. This time it held the illustrations for The Rape of the Lock, which he had just made. Whistler, who always saw everything that was being done, had seen the Yellow Book, started in 1894, and he disliked it as much as he then disliked Beardsley, who was the art editor; he had also seen the illustrations to Salomé, disliking them too, probably because of Oscar Wilde; he knew many of the other drawings, one of which, whether intentionally or unintentionally, was more or less a reminiscence of Mrs. Whistler, and he no doubt knew that Beardsley had made a caricature of him which a Follower carefully left in a cab. When Beardsley opened the portfolio and began to show us The Rape of the Lock, Whistler looked at them first indifferently, then with interest, then with delight. And then he said slowly, 'Aubrey, I have made a very great mistake—you are a very great artist.' And the boy burst out crying. All Whistler could say, when he could say anything, was 'I mean it—I mean it—I mean it!'
"On the following Sunday Beardsley and I went to the Rue du Bac, Beardsley in a little straw hat like Whistler's. Whistler was in the garden and there were many Americans, and Arsène Alexandre and Mallarmé, some people from the British Embassy, and presently Mr. Jacomb Hood came, bringing an Honourable Amateur, who asked the Whistlers, Beardsley, and myself to dinner at one of the cafés in the Champs-Elysees. As we left the Rue du Bac, Whistler whispered to me, 'Those hairs—hairs everywhere!' I said to him, 'But you were very nice and, of course, you'll come to dinner.' And, of course, he did not.
"I was working in Paris, making drawings and etchings of Notre-Dame. I was in one of the high old houses of lodgings and studios, with cabmen's cafés and restaurants under them, on the Quai des Grands Augustins. I had gone there because of the view of the Cathedral. Most of the time I was at work up among the Devils of Notre-Dame, using one of the towers as a studio by permission of the Government and the Cardinal-Archbishop. One morning—it was in June—I heard the puffing and groaning of someone climbing slowly the endless winding staircase, and the next thing I saw was Whistler's head on the stairs. When he got his breath and I had got over my astonishment, I began to ask why he had come, or he began to explain the reason. He had learned where I was staying, and he said he had been to the hotel, which, was, well! I think it reminded him of his days au sixième, for that was the floor I was on. He left a note written on the buvette paper, in which he said, 'Jolly the place seems to be!' After he had climbed up to my rooms, the patron told him where he possibly would find me, and then the people at the foot of the tower said I was up above.
"He told me why he had come up. He was working on a series of etchings of Paris. Some were just begun, others ready to bite, but a number ought to be printed, and would I help him? I was pleased, and I said I would. I took him about among the strange creatures that haunt the place, introduced him to the old keeper with his grisly tales of suicides and of sticking to the tower through the Commune, even when the church was on fire, and showed him the awful bell that, at noon, suddenly crashed in our ears, the uncanny cat that perched on crockets and gargoyles, tried to catch sparrows with nothing below her, and made from one parapet to another flying cuts over space when visitors came up. But he did not like it, and was not happy until we were seated in the back room of a restaurant across the street. He talked about the printing, saying that I could help him, and he could teach me.
"Next morning I was at the Rue du Bac at nine. After I had waited for what seemed hours, and had breakfasted with him and Mrs. Whistler and we had a cigarette in the garden, where there was an American rocking-chair for him—well, after this it was too late to go to the studio. He brought out some of the plates which he had been working on—the plates of little shops in the near streets—and we looked at them, and that was all. So it went on the next day, and the next, until on the third or fourth things came to a head, and I told him that charming as this life was, either we must print or I must go back to my drawing. In five minutes we were in a cab on our way to the studio. He understood that, much as I admired his work and appreciated him, I could not afford to pay for this appreciation and admiration with my time. From the moment this was plain between us, there was no interruption to our friendship for the rest of his life.
"We set to work. He peeled down to his undershirt with short sleeves, and I saw in his muscles one reason why he was never tired. He put on an apron. The plates, only slightly heated, if heated at all, were inked and wiped, sometimes with his hand, at others with a rag, till nearly clean, though a good tone was left. He painted the proofs on the plate with his hand. I got the paper ready on the press and pulled the proof, he inking and I pulling all the afternoon. As each proof came off the press, he looked at it, not satisfied, for they were all weak, and saying 'we'll keep it as the first proof and it will be worth something some day.' Then he put the prints between sheets of blotting-paper, and that night or the next, after dinner, trimmed them with scissors and put them back between the folded sheets of blotting-paper which were thrown on the table and on the floor. Between the sheets the proofs dried naturally and were not squashed flat.
"The printing went on for several days, he getting more and more dissatisfied, until I found an old man, Lamour, at the top of an old house in the Rue de la Harpe, who could reground the plates. But Whistler did not rebite them and never touched them until long after in England.
"A number of plates had not been bitten and one hot Sunday afternoon he brought them into the garden at the Rue du Bac. A chair was placed under the trees and on it a wash-basin into which each plate was put. Instead of pouring the diluted acid all over the plate in the usual fashion drops were taken from the bottle on a feather, and the plate painted with acid. The acid was coaxed, or rather used as one would use water-colour, dragged and washed about. Depth and strength were got by leaving a drop of acid on the lines where they were needed. There was a little stopping-out of passages where greater delicacy was required; when there was any, the stopping-out varnish was thinned with turpentine, and Whistler, with a camel's-hair brush, painted over the parts that did not need further biting. To me, it was a revelation. Sometimes he drew on the plate. Instead of the huge crowbar used by most etchers he worked with a perfectly balanced, beautifully designed little needle three or four inches long, made for him by an instrument-maker in Paris. He always carried several in a little silver box. The ground on all the plates was bad and came off, and the proofs he pulled afterwards in the studio were not at all what he wanted. These were almost the last plates he etched.
"He was not painting very much, few people came to the studio, and he went out little. No one was in the Rue du Bac but Mrs. Whistler for a while, and there were complications with the servants and others—how people who kept such hours, or no hours, could keep servants would have been a mystery had not servants worshipped him. Almost daily the petit bleu asking me to dinner would come to me. Or Whistler would appear in the morning, if I had not been to him the day before. In those early June days I seldom met anyone at the house and we never dressed for dinner, possibly because I had no dress clothes with me; he would insist on my coming, telling me not to mind the stains or the inkspots! One evening in the garden with them I found a little man, a thorough Englishman in big spectacles, with a curious sniff, who was holding a hose and watering the plants. He was introduced to me as Mr. Webb, Whistler's solicitor, though in the process we came near being drenched by the wobbling hose. It was that evening I first heard the chant of the missionary brothers from over the great wall. A bell sounded, and as the notes died away a wailing chant arose, went on for a little, then died away as mysteriously as it came. Always, when it did come, it hushed us. At dinner we should be cosy and jolly, Whistler had said in asking me, and we were, and it was arranged that we should go the next day to Fontainebleau.
"They called for me at the hotel in the morning. We drove to the Lyons station, Whistler, his wife, Mr. Webb, and I. And Whistler had the little paint-box which always went with him, though on these occasions it was the rarest thing that he ever did anything, and we got to Fountainebleau. We lunched in a garden. We didn't go to the palace, but drove to Barbizon, stopping at Siron's, through the forest. I don't think the views or the trees interested him at all. He was quiet all the way, but no sooner were we back than we must hunt for 'old things': 'here was a palace and great people had lived here, there might be silver, there might be blue and white, though really, now, you know, you can find better blue and white, and cheaper silver, under the noses of the Britons in Wardour Street than anywhere.' We did not find any blue and white, or silver. But there were three folio volumes of old paper, containing a collection of dried leaves, which we bought and shared, and they were to him more valuable than the palace and the Millet studio, which we never saw.
"It was late when we got back. The servants had gone to bed, and Marguery's and the places where he liked to dine were shut. So we bought what we could in the near shops and sat down in the Rue du Bac to eat the supper we had collected. After we had finished I witnessed his and Mrs. Whistler's wills, which Mr. Webb had brought with him from London, and for this the long day had been a preparation.
"If I did not always accept Whistler's invitations he would reproach me as an awful disappointment and a bad man. If I did not go to the dinner, to which I was bidden at an hour's notice, he would tell me afterwards of the much cool drink and encouraging refreshment he had prepared for me. He always asked me to bring my friends. Mr. J. Fulleylove had come over to 'do' Paris and I took him to the Rue du Bac; 'les Pleins d'Amour,' Whistler called him and Mrs. Fulleylove, whose eyes he was always praising. They were working at St. Denis and so was I, and one day Whistler and Mrs. Whistler came in the primitive steam tram that starts from the Madeleine to see the place. We lunched—badly—and he was bored with the church, though he had brought lithograph paper and colours to make a sketch of it.
"One Sunday Mr. E. G. Kennedy posed in the garden for his portrait on a small canvas or panel, and all the world was kept out. I had never before seen Whistler paint. He worked away all afternoon, hissing to himself, which, Mrs. Whistler said, he did only when things were going well. If Kennedy shifted—there were no rests—Whistler would scream, and he worked on and on, and the sun went down, and Kennedy stood and Whistler painted, and the monks began their chant, and darkness was coming on. The hissing stopped, a paint-rag came out, and, with one fierce dash, it was all rubbed off. 'Oh, well,' was all he said. Kennedy was limbered up and we went to dinner.
"After that, almost every night we dined together through that lovely June, either with him in the Rue du Bac, or he came with Kennedy or me to Marguery's or La Pérouse—once to St. Germain—or somewhere that was delightful.
"The summer was famous in Paris for the 'Sarah Brown Students' Revolution,' the row that grew out of the Quat'z Arts Ball. Whistler did not take the slightest interest in the demonstrations, in fact, did not believe they were taking place, though I used to bring him reports of the doings which culminated on July 4, my birthday, when he was to have given me a dinner at Marguery's. I told him the streets of the Quarter were barricaded and full of soldiers, but though he ridiculed the whole affair, he decided to dine at home and to put off by telegram the dinner he had ordered. I went round to the Boulevard St. Germain to send the wire and found it barred with soldiers and police, and the entire boulevard, as far as one could see, littered with hats and caps, sticks and umbrellas. There had been a cavalry charge and this was the result. We dined merrily, but Kennedy and I left early. There was a great deal of rioting through the night, but that was the end of it.
"Mrs. Whistler had not been well, and they suddenly made up their minds to go to Brittany, or Normandy, or somewhere on the coast. It was not altogether a successful journey. Nature had gone back on him, he wrote me, probably because of his exposure of her 'foolish sunsets'; the weather was for tourists, the sea for goldfish in a bowl—the studio was better than staring at a sea of tin. And the terrible things they had eaten in Brittany made them ill. But the lithographs at Vitré were made, also the Yellow House, Lannion, and the Red House, Paimpol—his first elaborate essays in colour.
"Only a few impressions of the Yellow House were ever pulled owing to some accident to the stone. One of these I wanted to buy. Whistler heard of it 'Well, you know, very flattering, but altogether absurd,' he told me, and the print came with an inscription and the Butterfly."
CHAPTER XXXVII: PARIS CONTINUED.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN NINETY-THREE AND EIGHTEEN NINETY-FOUR.
After this summer, we both saw still more of Whistler whenever we were in Paris. At the Rue du Bac we were struck by the few French artists at his Sunday afternoons and the predominance of Americans and English. It seemed to us that French artists might have been more cordial and the French nation more sensible of the fact that a distinguished foreign artist had come to France. During his life at least one or two Americans, one a rich amateur, were made Commanders of the Legion of Honour, while he remained an Officer. Others were made foreign Members of the Academy of Fine Arts, but this, the highest honour for artists in France, was never offered to him, nor was he elected to International Juries.
With a few French and foreign artists his relations were friendly: Boldini, Helleu, Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin, Alfred Stevens, Aman-Jean; but the greater number were content to express their appreciation at a distance. Mrs. Whistler spoke little French, and few French artists speak any English. The men whom Whistler saw most were not painters. Viélé-Griffin, Octave Mirbeau, Arsène Alexandre, the Comte de Montesquiou, Rodenbach came to the Rue du Bac. Old friends, Drouet and Duret, were sometimes there, though not often—his intimacy with them and Oulevey was not really renewed until after Mrs. Whistler's death. But of all who came, none endeared himself so much to Whistler as Stéphane Mallarmé, poet, critic, friend, admirer. Once, at Whistler's suggestion, he visited us in London, and, looking from our windows to the Thames, declared he could understand Whistler better. Official people strayed in from the Embassies, mostly English. American authors and American collectors appeared on Sundays. Mr. Howells, once or twice, came with his son and his daughter, of whom Whistler made a lithograph. Journalists, English and American, wandered in. And English and American artists came, or tried to come, in crowds. The younger men of the Glasgow School, James Guthrie and John Lavery, were welcomed. Then there were the Americans living in Paris: Walter Gay, Alexander Harrison, Frederick MacMonnies, Edmund H. Wuerpel, John W. Alexander, Humphreys Johnston, while Sargent and Abbey rarely missed an opportunity of calling at the Rue du Bac.
Whistler was hardly less cordial to students. Milcendeau has told us how he took his work—and his courage—with him and went to Whistler, but, reaching the door, stood trembling at the thought of meeting the Master and showing his drawings. As soon as Whistler saw the drawings his manner was so charming—as if they were just two artists together—that fear was forgotten, and Whistler proved his interest by inviting Milcendeau to send the drawings to the International. Whistler met American and English students not only at home, but at the American Art Association in Montparnasse, then a bit of old Paris—a little white house with green shutters, which the street had long since left on a lower level, and at the back a garden where, under the great trees, the cloth was laid in summer; just the house to please Whistler. He sometimes went to the club's dinners and celebrations. At one dinner on Washington's Birthday, after professional professors and popular politicians had delivered themselves, he was finally and rather patronisingly asked to speak by the President, who was either an ambassador or a dry-goods storekeeper, the usual patron of American art and supporter of American art institutions. Whistler said: "Now, as to teaching. In England it is all a matter of taste, but in France at least they tell you which end of the brush to stick in your mouth."
Mr. MacMonnies remembers another evening: "A millionaire friend of Whistler's and mine spoke to me of giving a dinner to the American artists in Paris, or rather to Whistler, and inviting the Paris American artists. I dissuaded him, by saying they all hated one another and would pass the evening more cheerfully by sticking forks into one another under the table if they could. Better to invite all the young fry—the American students. He gladly went into it. You can imagine the wild joy of the small fry, who had, of course, never met Whistler. Some got foolishly drunk, others got bloated with freshness, but they all had a rare time, and Whistler, who sat at the head, more than any, and he was delightfully funny. The millionaire was enchanted, and also a distinguished American painter, who sat opposite to Whistler and who was much respected by the youth. At one pause Whistler said, 'I went to the Louvre this morning'—pause, all the youths' faces wide open, expecting pearls of wisdom and points—'and I was amazed'—pause; everybody open-eared—'to see the amazing way they keep the floors waxed!'"
There is a story that one day at lunch-time he went into the courtyard of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and walked slowly round, only to be followed in a few minutes by a single line of students, each carrying a mahlstick as he carried his cane, and as many as had them wearing two sous pieces for eye-glasses. He stopped and looked at the statues he wanted to see and they stopped and looked, and they followed him, until the circuit of the court was made, when they bowed each other out, and it was not till long after that they learned who he was. American students, if not so filled with their own sense of humour, are said to have mobbed him on one occasion when he went to a crémerie, upsetting tables and chairs to see him.
Mr. Walter Gay, who was much with Whistler during these years, gives us his impressions:
"I first knew Whistler in the winter of '94, when he was established in Paris, with the recently married Mrs. Whistler, in his apartment of the Rue du Bac. The marriage was a happy one; she appreciated fully his talent, he adored her, and when she died a few years later was crushed at her loss. In spite of the great influence exercised by Whistler on contemporary art, he was never lionised in Paris as he had been in London; Paris is not a place for lions, there are already too many local celebrities. Perhaps one of the reasons why the French artists held aloof from Whistler was Mrs. Whistler's very British attitude towards the nation. Once at a dinner of French artists given at our house in honour of Whistler, Mrs. Whistler expressed the most Gallophobe sentiments, complaining loudly of the inhospitality of the French towards her husband. Although sixty years when I knew him, he had the enthusiasm and energy of early years. His handsome grey-blue eyes sparkled with the fire of youth—they were young eyes in an old face. I think it strange that no one ever seems to emphasise his singular beauty. Not only were his features finely cut, but the symmetry of his figure, hands, and feet, retained until late in life, was remarkable; in youth he must have been a pocket Apollo. His conversational powers were extraordinary—he had a Celtic richness of vocabulary.... He was supersensitive to criticism. Those who were either indifferent or antipathetic to him, his imagination instantly transformed into hidden enemies. That weakness of the artistic temperament, la folie de la persécution, was deeply rooted in his nature....
"No one can realise, who has not watched Whistler paint, the agony his work gave him. I have seen him after a day's struggle with a picture, when things did not go, completely collapse as from an illness. His drawing cost him infinite trouble. I have known him work two weeks on a hand, and then give it up discouraged.... My last interview with Whistler took place in the spring of 1903, in London, about two months before his death. Hearing that he was far from well, I went to see him, and found that the rumour was only too well grounded. I spent the afternoon with him; he was singularly gentle and affectionate, and clung to me pathetically as though he too realised that it was to be our last meeting in this world.
"Whatever his detractors may charge against him, it seems to me that Whistler's faults and weaknesses sprang from an unbalanced mentality; he was a déséquilibré, the common defect of great painters. The unusual combination of artistic genius, literary gifts, and social attractions which made up Whistler's personality was unique; there was never anybody like him. And there is another quality of his which must not be forgotten in the summing up of his character; underneath all his vagaries and eccentricities one felt that indefinable yet unmistakable being—a gentleman."
Mr. Alexander Harrison shows a different side of Whistler: "My meetings with him were frequent and friendly. On one occasion, in a moment of excitement, I had the audacity to tell him that I felt he ought to have acted differently vis-à-vis a jury of reception. His eyes flamed like a rattlesnake's and I apologised, but insisted, and then dodged a little. I afterwards realised that my naïve frankness had not lowered me in his esteem, as to the last he was nice to me, having understood that my admiration for his work was no greater than my affectionate regard for him. I have never known a man of more sincere and genuine impulse in ordinary human relations."
Now that Whistler was established for life, as he hoped, in a fine studio, he was making up for the first unsettled years after his marriage. He began a number of large portraits in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. In 1893, Mr. A. J. Eddy, known, we believe, to fame and Chicago as "the man Whistler painted," asked Whistler to paint his portrait. He could stay in Paris only a few weeks, and Whistler liked his American frankness in saying that his portrait must be done by a certain date, and, though unaccustomed to be tied to time, Whistler agreed. His description of Mr. Eddy was, "Well, you know, he is the only man who ever did get a picture out of me on time, while I worked and he waited!" Mr. Eddy writes of a sitter, no doubt himself, who was with Whistler "every day for nearly six weeks and never heard him utter an impatient word; on the contrary, he was all kindness." And Mr. Eddy describes Whistler painting on in the twilight until it was impossible to distinguish between the living man and the figure on the canvas. He recalls the memory of those "glorious" days spent in the studio, of the pleasant hour at noon when painter and sitter breakfasted there together, of the long sittings, and the dinner after at the Rue du Bac, or in one of the little restaurants where no Parisian was more at home than Whistler. But steadily as the work went on, the picture was not sent to Chicago until the following year. Mr. J. J. Cowan, whose portrait dates from this time, tells us that for The Grey Man, a small full-length, he gave sixty sittings, averaging each three to four hours. He, like Whistler, was not in a hurry, but, unlike Whistler, he eventually got tired, and a model was called in and posed in Mr. Cowan's clothes. The last sittings were in London, three years after. Even then Whistler wrote Mr. Cowan that the head needed just the one touch, with the sitter there, so that perfection might be assured. Another portrait was of Dr. Davenport of Paris.
The portraits of women were more numerous, and they promised to be as fine as those done in the seventies and eighties. The work was interrupted by the tragedy of Whistler's last years, and the more important were never completed. For one, Miss Charlotte Williams, of Baltimore, sat, but the painting disappeared, and only the rare lithograph of her remains. Another lost portrait was a large full-length of Miss Peck, of Chicago, now Mrs. W. R. Farquhar, which we saw in many stages, and at last, as it seemed to us, finished. She was painted standing, in evening dress, with her long white, green-lined cloak thrown back a little, as he had painted Lady Meux. It was full of the charm of youth, and the colour was a harmony in silver and green. Miss Kinsella, a third American girl who posed in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and in Fitzroy Street, secured her portrait after Whistler's death. We remember it in the Fitzroy Street studio, when it was so perfect that one more day's work would ruin it. In no other did he ever paint flesh with such perfection. Face and neck had the golden tone of Titian, with a subtlety of modelling beyond the Venetian's powers, for in his later years it was to surpass the Venetians he was trying. One day when E. went to the studio he had just scraped down neck and bust, for no reason except that he could not get the hand to come right with the rest. It was to be lovelier than ever, he said. It was never repainted. It remains but a shadow of its loveliness. When M. Rodin saw it at the London Memorial Exhibition, he praised neck and bust to J. as "a beautiful suggestion of lace," so beautiful in tone and modelling it still is. That posing for Whistler was difficult we know from these ladies and many of his other sitters, as well as from our experience. Over and over, when he wanted to work on their portraits, he would telegraph to the last address he happened to have, though sometimes the telegrams did not reach them till weeks after in some distant part of the world. The fact that his sitters were not always waiting for him not only upset him temporarily, but sometimes stopped the subject altogether. One incident in connection with the portrait of Miss Kinsella amused him. She holds an iris in her hand. A real flower was got, but the flower would fade, and irises were not easy to obtain. So he went to Liberty's to get some stuff of the purple-violet tone he wanted out of which to make a flower. He explained what he needed to the shopman, who solemnly informed him that Messrs. Liberty only kept "art colours."
Portraits of Mrs. Charles Whibley were in progress about the same time: L'Andalouse, Mother of Pearl and Silver, the unfinished Tulip, Rose and Gold, and Red and Black, The Fan. Two others of this period are of Mrs. Walter Sickert, Green and Violet, the second for which she sat, and Lady Eden, Brown and Gold. He was also painting his own portrait in the white jacket, which was changed into a black coat after Mrs. Whistler's death, and a full-length in a long brown overcoat shown in 1900 and not since.
The large canvases had to be left when he shut up the studio, but he could carry his little portfolio of lithographic paper and box of chalks everywhere, and during those two or three years he developed the art of lithography as no one had before, he and Fantin-Latour being the two chief factors in the revival of lithography in the nineties. He was determined, he said, to make "a roaring success of it." In the streets and at home he was constantly at work, and the result is the series of lithographs of the shops and gardens and galleries of Paris and many portraits. His interest in technique was tireless. He experimented on transfer-paper and on stone. He hunted old paper as strenuous people hunt lions. Drawings and proofs were for ever in the post between Paris and London, where the Ways were transferring and printing for him, and friends were for ever bringing paper from London or carrying drawings tremblingly back from Paris. He was deep in experiments with colour, and a few of the lithographs for Songs on Stone, already announced by Mr. Heinemann, were at last ready. They were proved in Paris by Belfont, but his shop closed in 1894, printer and stones vanished, and this was the end of the proposed publication. Since Whistler's death mysterious prints in black-and-white from the key stones have turned up in Germany, but only a few prints in colour remain, no two alike, trials in colour. He had looked for great things: "You know, I mean them to wipe up the place before I get done," he said, and their loss was a severe disappointment. Other lithographs, made then or later, were published in the Studio, the Art Journal, L'Estampe Originale, L'Imagier, the Pagenat, and one in our Lithography and Lithographers. He never wanted to keep his work, no matter in what medium, from the public. With commissions and experiments keeping him busy in Paris, Whistler was, as he wrote to us in London, working from morning to night, and in a condition for it he wouldn't change for anything. He was compelled to change it only too soon.
CHAPTER XXXVIII: TRIALS AND GRIEFS.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN NINETY-FOUR TO EIGHTEEN NINETY-SIX.
In 1894 interruptions came, some slight, but one so serious that life and work were never the same again.
A tedious annoyance was caused by Du Maurier's Trilby in Harper's Magazine. Du Maurier represented the English students at Carrel's (Gleyre's) as veritable Crichtons, while Whistler, under the name of Joe Sibley, was ridiculed. Du Maurier's drawings left no doubt as to the identity, for in one Whistler wears the chapeau bizarre over his curls. Another shows him running away from a studio fight, and the text is more offensive. Joe Sibley is "'the Idle Apprentice,' the King of Bohemia, le roi des truands, to whom everything was forgiven, as to François Villon, à cause de ses gentillesses.... Always in debt ... vain, witty, and a most exquisite and original artist ... with an unimpeachable moral tone.... Also eccentric in his attire ... the most irresistible friend in the world as long as his friendship lasted, but that was not for ever.... His enmity would take the simple and straightforward form of trying to punch his ex-friend's head; and when the ex-friend was too big he would get some new friend to help him.... His bark was worse than his bite ... he was better with his tongue than his fists.... But when he met another joker he would just collapse like a pricked bladder. He is now perched on such a topping pinnacle (of fame and notoriety combined) that people can stare at him from two hemispheres at once."
Du Maurier had posed as a friend for years, and in the Pall Mall Gazette Whistler protested against the insult. Du Maurier, to an interviewer, expressed surprise; he thought the description of Joe Sibley would recall the good times in Paris, and he pretended to be amazed that Whistler did not agree. He claimed that he was one of Whistler's victims, and quoted Sheridan Ford's pirated edition of The Gentle Art:
"It was rather droll. Listen: 'Mr. Du Maurier and Mr. Wilde happening to meet in the rooms where Mr. Whistler was holding his first exhibition of Venice etchings, the latter brought the two face to face, and, taking each by the arm, inquired, "I say, which one of you two invented the other, eh?"' The obvious retort to that, on my part, would have been that, if he did not take care, I would invent him, but he had slipped away before either of us could get a word out.... I did what I did in a playful spirit of retaliation for this little jibe about me in his book."
The editor of Harper's had not understood the offensive nature of the passages. Whistler called his attention to them, and an apology was published in the magazine (January 1895), the number was suppressed, and Du Maurier was compelled to omit them, and to change Joe Sibley to Bald Anthony in the book. Whistler, when the changes were submitted to him, was satisfied. But he said:
"Well, you know, what would have happened to the new Thackeray if I hadn't been willing? But I was gracious, and I gave my approval to the sudden appearance in the story of an Anthony, tall and stout and slightly bald. The dangerous resemblance was gone. And I wired—well, you know, ha ha!—I wired to them over in America compliments and complete approval of author's new and obscure friend, Bald Anthony!"
Trilby was burlesqued at the Gaiety, and Whistler was dragged in as The Stranger. His hat, overcoat, eye-glass, curls, and cane were copied, but no one paid the slightest attention, and The Stranger vanished after the first night.
Sometimes Whistler found insult where none was intended, as in the case of a Bibliography compiled in 1895 for the Library Bulletin of the University of the State of New York—all the copies burnt, we hear, in the fire at the State Capitol, Albany. It was an appreciation, but it contained inaccuracies and quoted as authorities critics he objected to, and he was more vexed by it than there was need. Another annoyance was an anonymous article in McClure's Magazine; Whistler, Painter and Comedian (September 1896). He demanded an apology and the suppression of the article, and both were granted. And so it went on to the end; he was continually coming upon references to himself, disfigured by misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and malice.
