THE LAST OF OLD WESTMINSTER
OIL
In the possession of A. A. Pope, Esq
Swinburne's poem and praise could not make The Little White Girl at the Academy better understood than The White Girl had been in Berners Street. The rare few could appreciate its "charm" and "exquisiteness" with Mr. W. M. Rossetti, who found that it was "crucially tested by its proximity to the flashing white in Mr. Millais' Esther," but that it stood the test, "retorting delicious harmony for daring force, and would shame any other contrast." But the general opinion was the other way. The Athenæum distinguished itself by regretting that Whistler should make the "most 'bizarre' of bipeds" out of the women he painted. There was praise for two other pictures. "Subtle beauty of colour" and "almost mystical delicacy of tone" were discovered in The Gold Screen, and "colour such as painters love" in the Old Battersea Bridge, afterwards Brown and Silver. This is the beautiful Battersea, with the touch of red in the roofs of the opposite shore, the link between the early paintings on the river and the Nocturnes that were to follow. The Scarf, a picture we do not recognise, attracted less attention, and Whistler, the year before, declared "one of the most original artists of the day" was now dismissed as one who "might be called half a great artist."
Stranger than this was the change in the attitude of the French critics. In 1863 they overwhelmed him with praise. Two years later they had hardly a good word for him. Levi Legrange, forgotten as he merits, wrote the criticism of the Royal Academy of 1865 for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and all he could see in The Little White Girl was a weak repetition of The White Girl, a wearisome variation of the theme of white; really, he said, it was quite witty of the Academicians, who could have refused it and the two Japanese pictures, to give them good places and so deliver them to judgment. And then he praised Horsley and Prinsep, Leslie and Landseer. The Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine, in the Salon, made no more favourable impression. It seemed a study of costume to Paul Mantz, who, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, decided to forget it and remember merely the mysterious seduction of The White Girl of two years before. Its eccentricity was only possible if taken in small doses like the homœopathist's pills, according to the incredible Jules Claretie, who, in the same article in L'Artiste, laughed at Manet's Olympia. For more than twenty years Whistler was hated in France.
In this Salon, 1865, Fantin showed his Hommage à la Vérité—Le Toast, the second of his two large groups including Whistler's portrait. In it he strayed so far from the real as to introduce an allegorical figure of Truth, and to allow Whistler to array himself in a gorgeous Chinese robe. "Pense à la robe, superbe à faire, et donne la moi!" Whistler urged from London, and Fantin yielded. "Je l'ai encore revu dans l'atelier en 1865, il me posa dans un tableau aujourd'hui détruit, 'Le Toast,' où il était costumé d'une robe japonaise," is Fantin's story of it in the notes to us, but Whistler, writing at the time, speaks of the costume as Chinese. He brought it to Paris for the sittings. Fantin was quick to regret his concessions. An allegorical figure could not be made real, the whole thing was absurd. When he got the canvas back he destroyed it, all but the portraits of Whistler, Vollon, and himself. Whistler's is now in the Freer Collection.
In the spring of 1865 Whistler was joined in London by his younger brother. Dr. Whistler had distinguished himself in the Confederate Army as a surgeon and by bravery in the field. He had served in Richmond Hospitals and in Libby Prison; he had been assistant-surgeon at Drewry's Bluff, and in 1864, when Grant made his move against Richmond, he had been assigned to Orr's Rifles, a celebrated South Carolina regiment. In the early winter of 1865 a few months' furlough was given him, and he was entrusted by the Confederate Government with important despatches to England. Sherman's advance prevented his running the blockade from Charleston, nor was there any passing through the lines from Wilmington by sea. He was obliged to go North through Maryland, which meant making his way round Grant's lines. The difficulties and dangers were endless. He had to get rid of his Confederate uniform, and in the state of Confederate finance the most modest suit of clothes cost fourteen hundred dollars; for a seat in a waggon he had to pay five hundred. The trains were crowded with officials and soldiers, and he could get a ride in them only by stealth. The roads were abominable, for driving or riding or walking. Often he was alone, and his one companion toward the North was a fellow soldier who had lost a leg at Antietam and was trying to get to Philadelphia for repairs to an artificial one. Stanton's expedition filled the country near the Rappahannock with snares and pitfalls; to cross Chesapeake Bay was to take one's life in one's hand; and north of the Bay were the enrolling officers of the Union in search of conscripts. However, Philadelphia was at last reached and a ticket for New York bought at the railroad depot, where two sentries, with bayonets fixed, guarded the ticket-office, and might, for all Dr. Whistler knew, have seen him in Libby Prison. In New York he took passage on the City of Manchester, and from Liverpool he hurried to London. One week later came the news of the fall of Richmond and the Confederacy. The furlough was over. There was no going back. It was probably about this time, from the costume and the technical resemblance to Mr. Luke Ionides' portrait, that Whistler painted a head of Dr. Whistler—Portrait of my Brother—now owned by Mr. Burton Mansfield, though it should and might have been in the National Gallery in Washington.
Early in September 1865, Whistler's mother was suffering from trouble with her eyes, and went with her two sons to Coblentz to consult an oculist, and this gave Whistler the chance to revisit some of the scenes of the French Set of etchings. After that he spent a month or two at Trouville, where he was joined by Courbet. Whistler's work shows how far he had drifted away, though the two were always friends. In Sea and Rain, done at Trouville, there is not a suggestion of Courbet. But we have seen a sea by Courbet, owned by M. Duret, that Whistler might have signed. Jo was there too. The sea-pieces he had begun, including Courbet on the Shore, promised great things, he wrote to Mr. Luke Ionides, and as the autumn went on the place was more quiet for work, and the seas and skies more wonderful. He did not get back to London until November. A few months later, early in 1866, he sailed for Valparaiso.
This journey to Valparaiso is the most unaccountable adventure in his sometimes unaccountable career. Various reasons for it have been given: health, a quarrel, restlessness, a whim. But we tell the story as he told it to us:
"It was a moment when many of the adventurers the war had made of many Southerners were knocking about London hunting for something to do, and, I hardly knew how, but the something resolved itself into an expedition to go and help the Chilians and, I cannot say why, the Peruvians, too. Anyhow, there were South Americans to be helped against the Spaniards. Some of these people came to me, as a West Point man, and asked me to join—and it was all done in an afternoon. I was off at once in a steamer from Southampton to Panama. We crossed the Isthmus, and it was all very awful—earthquakes and things—and I vowed, once I got home, that nothing would ever bring me back again.
"I found myself in Valparaiso and in Santiago, and I called on the President, or whoever the person then in authority was. After that came the bombardment. There was the beautiful bay with its curving shores, the town of Valparaiso on one side, on the other the long line of hills. And there, just at the entrance of the bay, was the Spanish fleet, and, in between, the English fleet, and the French fleet, and the American fleet, and the Russian fleet, and all the other fleets. And when the morning came, with great circles and sweeps, they sailed out into the open sea, until the Spanish fleet alone remained. It drew up right in front of the town, and bang went a shell, and the bombardment began. The Chilians didn't pretend to defend themselves. The people all got out of the way, and I and the officials, rode to the opposite hills, where we could look on. The Spaniards conducted the performance in the most gentlemanly fashion; they just set fire to a few of the houses, and once, with some sense of fun, sent a shell whizzing over toward our hills. And then I knew what a panic was. I and the officials turned and rode as hard as we could, anyhow, anywhere. The riding was splendid, and I, as a West Point man, was head of the procession. By noon the performance was over. The Spanish fleet sailed again into position, the other fleets sailed in, sailors landed to help put out the fires, and I and the officials rode back into Valparaiso. All the little girls of the town had turned out, waiting for us, and as we rode in called us 'Cowards!' The Henriquetta, the ship fitted up in London, did not appear till long after, and then we breakfasted, and that was the end of it."
Mr. Theodore Roussel says Whistler told him that, on another occasion, he got on one of the defending gunboats and had his baptism of fire amid a rain of shot and shell, and that then, as we have said, the white lock appeared, a fact which, fine as it is, Whistler omitted from his story to us.
He made good use of his time in Valparaiso, and painted the three pictures of the harbour which are known and two others which have disappeared. These he gave to the steward or the purser of the ship to bring home, and the purser kept them. Once they were seen in his house in London by someone who recognised Whistler's work. "Why, they must be by Whistler!" he said. "Who's Whistler?" asked the purser. "An artist," said the other. "Oh, no," said the purser, "they were painted by a gentleman." The purser started back for South America, and took them with him. "And then a tidal wave met the ship and swept off the purser, the cabin, and the Whistlers." But we believe that one of these pictures is now in the United States.
The voyage back was vaguer than the voyage out. From this vagueness looms one figure: the Marquis de Marmalade, a black man from Hayti, who made himself obnoxious to Whistler, apparently by his colour and his swagger. One day Whistler kicked him across the deck to the top of the companion way, and there sat a lady who proved an obstacle for the moment. But Whistler just picked up the Marquis de Marmalade, dropped him on the step below her, and finished kicking him downstairs. After that Whistler spent the rest of the journey, not exactly in irons, but chiefly in his cabin.
The final adventure of the journey was in London. Whistler never told us, but everybody else says that when he got out of the train at Euston, or Waterloo, someone besides his friends was waiting: whether the captain of the ship, or relations of the Marquis de Marmalade, or an old enemy makes little difference. Somebody got a thrashing, and this was the end to the most unaccountable episode in Whistler's life.
CHAPTER XII: CHELSEA DAYS CONTINUED.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SIXTY-SIX TO EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-TWO.
It was late in 1866 when Whistler returned from Valparaiso. Soon after he moved into No. 2,[4] at the east end of Lindsey Row, now
No. 96 Cheyne Walk. It was a three-storey house with an attic, part of the old palace remodelled, and, like No. 7, it looked on the river. Here he lived longer than anywhere else; here he painted the Nocturnes and the great portraits; here he gave his Sunday breakfasts. He had a house-warming on February 5 (1867), when the two Rossettis dined with him, and Mr. W. M. Rossetti wrote in his diary:
"There are some fine old fixtures, such as doors, fireplaces, and Whistler has got up the rooms with many delightful Japanesisms. Saw for the first time his pagoda cabinet. He has two or three sea-pieces new to me: one, on which he particularly lays stress, larger than the others, a very grey unbroken sea [probably Sea and Rain], also a clever vivacious portrait of himself begun."
No doubt this is the portrait in round hat, with paint-brushes in his hand.
Mr. Greaves says that the dining-room at No. 2 was blue, with a darker blue dado and doors, and purple Japanese fans tacked on the walls and ceiling; other friends remember "a fluttering of purple fans." One evening Miss Chapman was dining, and Whistler, wanting her to see the view up the river from the other end of the bridge, told her he would show her something "as lovely as a fan!" The studio, again the second-storey back room, was grey, with black dado and doors; from the Mother and the Carlyle one knows that Japanese hangings and his prints were on the walls; and in it was the big screen he painted for Leyland but kept for himself, with Battersea Bridge across the top, Chelsea Church beyond, and a great gold moon in the deep blue sky. The stairs were covered with Dutch metal. He slept in a huge Chinese bed. Beautiful silver was on his table. He ate off blue and white. "Suppose one of these plates was smashed?" Miss Chapman asked Whistler once. "Why, then, you know," he said, "we might as well all take hands and go throw ourselves into the Thames!"
The beauty of the decoration, as at No. 7, was its simplicity. Rossetti's house was a museum, an antiquity shop, in comparison. The simplicity seemed the more bewildering because it was the growth, not of weeks, but of years. The drawing-room was not painted until the day of Whistler's first dinner-party. In the morning he sent for the brothers Greaves to help him. "It will never be dry in time!" they feared. "What matter?" said Whistler, "it will be beautiful!" "We three worked like mad," is Mr. Walter Greaves' account, and by evening the walls were flushed with flesh-colour, pale yellow, and white spread over doors and woodwork, and we have heard gowns and coats too were touched with flesh-colour and yellow before the evening was at an end. One Sunday morning Whistler, after he had taken his mother to Chelsea Church, as he always did, again sent for his pupils and painted a great ship with spreading sails in each of the two panels at the end of the hall; the ships are said to be still on the wall covered up. His mother was not so pleased when, on her return, she saw the blue and white harmony, for she would have had him put away his brushes on Sunday as once she put away his toys. But she had many other trials and revelations: coming into the studio one day, she found the parlour-maid posing for "the all-over!" The ships were in place long before the dado of hall and stairway was covered with gold and sprinkled with rose and white chrysanthemum petals. Miss Alexander (Mrs. Spring-Rice) saw Whistler at work upon it when she came to sit, and he had lived six years at No. 2. Whistler's houses were never completely decorated and furnished; they had a look as if he had just moved in or was just moving out. But what was decorated was beautiful.
Whistler sent to the exhibitions of 1867, in London and Paris. He began the year by showing at the French Gallery, in January, one of the paintings of Valparaiso: Crépuscule in Flesh Colour and Green. It is the long picture of Valparaiso Harbour in the early evening, ships moored with partly furled sails; the first painting of twilight, and one of the first paintings carried out in the liquid manner of the Nocturnes. There were critics to call it a poem "in colour," though Whistler had not taught them to look for the "painter's poetry" in his work. The upright Valparaiso, a perfect Nocturne, was done at the same time, 1866, but not exhibited until later, and there is an unfinished version of the same subject.
In the Salon of 1867, where it had been rejected eight years before, At the Piano was accepted, and also The Thames in Ice—Sur la Tamise: l'Hiver. It was the year of the French Universal Exhibition. M. Duret writes that probably Mr. George Lucas spoke of Whistler to Mr. Avery, the United States Art Commissioner at the Exhibition. The result was that a number of his etchings and four pictures were hung: The White Girl, Wapping or On the Thames, Old Battersea Bridge, Twilight on the Ocean, the title then of the Crépuscule in Flesh Colour and Green. The Hudson River School dominated American art, and Whistler's paintings had to compete with the big machines of Church and Bierstadt. Tuckerman, in his Book of the Artists, quotes an unnamed American critic who, in 1867, found that Whistler's etchings differed from his paintings in meriting the attention they attracted, but he could see in the Marines only "blurred, foggy imperfections," and in The White Girl only "a powerful female with red hair, and a vacant stare in her soulless eyes. She is standing on a wolfskin hearthrug, for what reason is unrecorded. The picture evidently means vastly more than it expresses—albeit expressing too much. Notwithstanding an obvious want of purpose, there is some boldness in the handling, and singularity in the glare of the colours which cannot fail to divert the eye and weary it."
Americans were not treated with respect by the Hanging Committee. Their work was put in corridors and dark corners, and Whistler suffered. French critics, enthusiastic over his pictures four years earlier, were now no more appreciative than the American. Paul Mantz was distressed by the "strange white apparition" upon which, at the Salon des Refusés, he had lavished his praise. Burty thought that either time exaggerated the defects of the prints or else critical eyes had lost their indulgence, for the etchings were photographic and had a dryness and minuteness due to the early training of "Mr. Whystler." Both wrote in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Mr. Avery, however, had the sense to appreciate the etchings, and it was probably at this time he commenced his great collection, now in the New York Public Library.
Whistler and his brother, the Doctor, went to Paris in April. There they heard of the sudden death of Traer, Seymour Haden's assistant, and a member of the British Jury, on which Haden also served. Whistler liked Traer, and the circumstances of his death and burial led to a misunderstanding between the two brothers and the brother-in-law. The three met. The dispute was short and sharp; the result, a summons for the brothers to appear before a juge de paix. Whistler had been in the same court a few days earlier. A workman had dropped plaster on him as he passed through a narrow street in the Latin Quarter, and he had met the offence in the only way possible according to his code. Whistler sent for the American Minister, and the magistrate apologised. When he appeared again, "Connu!" said the judge, and there was no apology, but a fine. Haden said he fell through a plate-glass window, Whistler that he knocked him through. Haden maintained that both brothers were against him, Whistler that he demolished Haden single-handed.
It happened just when London gossip got hold of the story of the Marquis de Marmalade and Whistler's return from Valparaiso. Dr. Moncure Conway, in his Reminiscences, recalls a dinner given by Dante Rossetti to W. J. Stillman, in the winter of 1867, when "Whistler (a Confederate) related with satisfaction his fisticuff with a Yankee [really the black Marquis] on shipboard, William Rossetti remarked: 'I must say, Whistler, that your conduct was scandalous.' (Stillman and myself were silent.) Dante Gabriel promptly wrote:
"There's a combative Artist named Whistler
Who is, like his own hog-hairs, a bristler:
A tube of white lead
And a punch on the head
Offer varied attractions to Whistler.'"
It was at this time, too, that Whistler had a difference with Legros, to which no reference would be made had it not also become a legend. Friends tried to reconcile them and succeeded badly. The rumours spread, and Whistler began to be talked of as quarrelsome. Haden, when he got back to London, resigned his post as Honorary Surgeon to South Kensington Museum, printed a pamphlet to explain, and threatened to resign from the Burlington Fine Arts Club, of which both he and Whistler were members, unless Whistler was expelled. The Burlington Club wrote to Whistler that if he did not resign they would have to consider his expulsion. Both the Rossettis considered this very improper, and when Whistler's expulsion was voted by eighteen against eight, William Michael Rossetti handed in his resignation at once and Dante Rossetti sent in his two or three days later.
Whistler's manner of resenting injury had a great deal to do with the way he was later treated in England. He explained his code to a friend: "If a man gives you the lie to your face, why, naturally you hit him." People who did not know him became afraid of him, and this fear grew and was the reason of the reputation that clung to him for years and clings to his memory.
Before Whistler's pictures went to the Royal Academy, Mr. W. M. Rossetti saw them: "March 31 (1867). To see Whistler's pictures for the R.A. To the R.A. he means to send Symphony in White, No. III. (heretofore named The Two Little White Girls), and a Thames picture; possibly also one of the four sea pictures; and I rather recommend him to select the largest of these, which he regards with predilection, of a grey sea and a very grey sky."
Battersea was the Thames picture; Sea and Rain, painted while Whistler and Courbet worked together at Trouville, the sea picture; and The Two Little White Girls was sent under its new name, Symphony in White, No. III.—the first time one of his pictures was catalogued as a Symphony, his first use of a title borrowed from musical terms to explain his pictorial intention.
Baudelaire had given the hint in prose, Gautier had written Symphonies in verse, Murger's Bohemians had composed a Symphonie sur l'influence de bleu dans les arts. In 1863 Paul Mantz had described The White Girl as a "Symphony in White." There can be no doubt that from these things Whistler got the idea. It was the third variation of white upon white. The difference was in the thin liquid paint. The critic of the Athenæum had the sense to thank the "painter who endeavours by any means to show people what he really aims at." But he was almost alone. Burty, in noticing the Academy of 1867 for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, thought the Academy's hanging Whistler at all a fine piece of irony, and regretted the painter's failure to fulfil his early promise.
Hamerton, in the Saturday Review, June 1, 1867, represented the feeling of the insulted, solemn, bewildered Islanders: "There are many dainty varieties of tint, but it is not precisely a symphony in white. One lady has a yellowish dress and brown hair and a bit of blue ribbon; the other has a red fan, and there are flowers and green leaves. There is a girl in white on a white sofa, but even this girl has reddish hair; and, of course, there is the flesh-colour of the complexions."
Whistler answered in a letter, not printed, however, until it appeared in the Art Journal (April 1887): "Bon Dieu! did this wise person expect white hair and chalked faces? And does he then, in his astounding consequence, believe that a symphony in F contains no other note, but shall be a continued repetition of F F F?... Fool!"
Whistler knew that to carry on tradition was the artist's business. Rembrandt, Hals, Velasquez, Claude, Canaletto, Guardi, Hogarth, Courbet, the Japanese, in turn influenced him. Some see, at this period, the influence of Albert Moore, which, if it existed, was as ephemeral and superficial as Rossetti's. It could be argued with more truth that Whistler influenced Albert Moore, who, in at least two pictures, Harmony of Orange and Pale Yellow, Variation of Blue and Gold, borrowed Whistler's titles. Whistler also knew that the end of all study of the masters should be to evolve something personal, and, in the endeavour to develop his personality, he was passing through experiments and working through difficulties. All this is in his letters to Fantin. A fourth Symphony in White was started: the Three Figures. In the Two Girls, he wrote to Fantin, the harmony was repeated in line and in colour, and he sent a sketch of it. He exulted in the rhythm of line; he despaired because he could not get it right. The picture was scraped out and rubbed down, then repainted, and with each fresh difficulty he deplored the mistakes of his early training. Mr. Eddy writes that Whistler used to call Ingres the "bourgeois Greek." This we never heard him say, nor is there any such want of respect in his letters to Fantin, for there he expresses regret that he "did not study under Ingres," whose work he may have liked moderately, "but from whom I would have learned to draw": which was absurd modesty, for he drew better than Ingres, if not so academically, as his etchings prove. He never execrated Courbet and denounced ce damné Réalisme so violently as in the autumn of 1867. This was not quite fair, for Realism had brought Courbet to the conclusions which Whistler, unaided, was now reaching: that knowledge of art, ancient and modern, has no end save the development of individuality, and that the artist is to go to Nature for inspiration, but to take from her only life and beauty. Whistler, in his impatience, recalled Realism as practised by the young enthusiasts gathered about Courbet, and denied that Courbet influenced him. "Ca ne pouvait pas être autrement, parce que je suis très personnel, et que j'ai été riche en qualités qu'il n'avait pas et qui me suffisaient." The cry of Nature had appealed to his vanity, Whistler said, and so he had mocked at tradition, and in his early work had copied Nature with the self-confidence of "l'écolier débauché." If at one moment he boasted that the race was for Fantin and himself, because in art, as at the Derby, "c'est le pur sang qui gagné," the next he chafed over the time he had lost before discovering that art is not the exact reproduction of Nature, but its interpretation, and that the artist must seek his motives in Nature and weave from them a pattern on his canvas. He praised Fantin's flowers because he saw in them this pattern. Passages in the letters are the basis of The Ten O'Clock. His definition of the relation of drawing to colour—"son amant, mais aussi son maître"—suggests the later definition of the relation of the artist to Nature: "her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her." Whistler used the same ideas in his talk, in his letters, in his pamphlets, perfecting it.
It was the period of transition. Those who saw him know how hard he worked, and how he was discouraged. For a while he lived with Mr. Frederick Jameson. He never spoke to us of this interval away from Lindsey Row. Mr. Jameson says it was 1868 or 1869; most likely the winter of 1867-68, when Mrs. Whistler went home to visit her family, left poor by the war. Mr. Jameson lived at 62 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, in rooms that had first been Burne-Jones', and afterwards Poynter's. Mr. Jameson writes us:
"The seven months Whistler and I lived together were unproductive and uneventful. He was working at some Japanese pictures, one of which, quite unfinished, was hung at the London Memorial Exhibition. I have seen large portions of it apparently finished, but they never satisfied him, and were shaved down to the bed-rock mercilessly. The man, as I knew him, was so different from the descriptions and presentations I have read of him that I would like to speak of the other side of his character. It is impossible to conceive of a more unfailingly courteous, considerate, and delightful companion than Whistler, as I found him. We lived in great intimacy, and the studio was always open to me, whatever he was doing. We had all our meals together, except when elsewhere engaged, and I never heard a complaint of anything in our simple household arrangements from him. Any little failure was treated as a joke. His courtesy to servants and models was particularly charming; indeed, I can't conceive of his quarrelling with anyone without real provocation. His talk about his own work revealed a very different man to me from the self-satisfied man he is usually believed to have been. He knew his powers, of course, but he was painfully aware of his defects—in drawing, for instance. I can remember with verbal accuracy some very striking talks we had on the subject. To my judgment he was the most absolutely truthful man about himself that I ever met. I never knew him to hide an opinion or a thought, nor to try to excuse an action."
