THE SALUTE, VENICE
WATER-COLOUR
In the possession of B. B. MacGeorge, Esq.
Whistler, according to the constitution, held office till December, and till December he retained his post. During this time there were meetings. At one he addressed Bayliss as Baily—to his disgust—but, on this occasion at least, Bayliss had an idea and replied, "Yes, Mr. Whistle!" At a meeting on November 28 Whistler made a statement of his relations with the Society, and his objects and aims concerning it, only referred to in the minutes, and he gave up the chair to Wyke Bayliss. He had been President two years, a member four. After November 28, 1888, his name appears in the official records only twice: first on January 4, 1889, in connection with a dispute over the notice board outside the gallery, and then on July 20, 1903, when Wyke Bayliss stated "that, acting on the feeling that it would be the wish of the Society, he had ordered a wreath to be sent in the name of the Society on the occasion of the funeral of Mr. Whistler."
The newspapers were not so shy of the President as the minute-books. The difference between Whistler and the Society found the publicity which he could never escape. He said to the men who resigned with him, "Come and make history for posterity," and, as usual, he saw that the record was accurate. He had hardly left the Society when the notice board, with the Butterfly and the lion which he had painted, was altered; he immediately wrote a letter to state the fact in the Pall Mall Gazette. Reporters and interviewers gave the British Artists' reasons for their late President's resignation and his successor's qualifications for the post. Whistler lost no time in explaining his position and giving his estimate of the new President. It cannot be said too often that his letters to the Press, criticised as trivial and undignified, were written deliberately that "history might be made." Many pages of The Gentle Art are filled with his relations with the British Artists. The gaiety of his letters was mistaken for flippancy, because the more solemn and ponderous the "enemies" became, the more "joyous" he grew in disposing of them. He did not spare the British Artists. The Pall Mall undertook to describe the disaster of the "Whistlerian policy" in Suffolk Street by statistics and to extol the strength of Wyke Bayliss:
"The sales of the Society during the year 1881 were under five thousand pounds; 1882, under six thousand; 1883, under seven thousand; 1884, under eight thousand; 1885 (the first year of Mr. Whistler's rule), they fell to under four thousand; 1885, under three thousand; 1887, under two thousand; and the present year, 1888, under one thousand.... The new President ... is ... the hero of three Bond Street 'one-man exhibitions,' a board-school chairman, a lecturer, champion chess-player of Surrey, a member of the Rochester Diocesan Council, a Shakespearean student, a Fellow of the Society of Cyclists, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquarians, and public orator of Noviomagus."
Whistler's answer, serious in intention, gay in wording, pointed out "the, for once, not unamusing 'fact' that the disastrous and simple Painter Whistler only took in hand the reins of government at least a year after the former driver had been pitched from his box and half the money-bags had been already lost! From eight thousand to four thousand at one fatal swoop! and the beginning of the end had set in!... 'Four thousand pounds!' down it went; three thousand pounds, two thousand pounds—the figures are Wyke's—and this season, the ignominious 'one thousand pounds or under' is none of my booking! And when last I saw the mad machine it was still cycling down the hill."
Whistler was disappointed, though he did not show it. He was seldom invited to join anything, nor did he rush to accept the rare invitation. He would take no part in the Art Congress started in the eighties, despite an effort to entangle him; he would do no more than "bestow his benison" upon the movement in 1886 to organise a National Art Exhibition, led by Walter Crane, Holman Hunt, and George Clausen. But to the British Artists he had given his time and energy during four years, he had dragged the Society out of the slough in which it was floundering and made its exhibitions the most distinguished and most talked-about in London. Wyke Bayliss, who never understood him, wrote: "Whistler's purpose was to make the British Artists a small, esoteric set; mine was to make it a great guild of the working artists of this country."
Whistler said: "I wanted to make the British Artists an art centre; they wanted to remain a shop."
Wyke Bayliss and his successor were knighted, as Presidents of Royal Societies usually are; Whistler, who obtained the title and charter of the Society, was ignored.
Ten years later, as President of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers, he not only recommended, but carried out his schemes and theories: the decoration of the galleries, the refusal of bad work no matter who sent it, the proper hanging of the pictures accepted, the making of the exhibitions into artistic events, the interesting of the public in them, the insistence that each artist should only support his own Society's exhibitions and should belong to no other Society. He was dictatorial, but without a dictator nothing can be done, and at the British Artists each British Artist wanted to lead. His Presidency began in mistrust and ended in discord. For Whistler it had an advantage, especially abroad, where artists began to regard him with deference.
CHAPTER XXXI: MARRIAGE.
THE YEAR EIGHTEEN EIGHTY-EIGHT.
"I don't marry," Whistler said, "though I tolerate those who do." But before he left the British Artists' he did marry. His wife was Beatrix Godwin, widow of E. W. Godwin, the architect of the White House and for years Whistler's champion in the Press. Godwin died on October 6, 1886, and Whistler married on August 11, 1888.
Mrs. Whistler was the daughter of John Birnie Philip, remembered as one of the sculptors who worked on the awful Albert Memorial. She was large, so that Whistler was dwarfed beside her, dark and handsome, more foreign in appearance, but not in person, than English. Whistler delighted in a tradition that there was gipsy blood in her family. She had studied art in Paris and with him, and he was proud of her as a pupil. Her work included several decorative designs, and a series of etchings made to illustrate the English edition of Van Eeden's Little Johannes. Only a few of the plates were finished, and of these some proofs were shown in the first exhibition of the International Society and in the Paris Memorial Exhibition, while Mr. Heinemann had the intention of publishing a series of illustrations which she and Whistler drew on the wood.
Mr. Labouchere held himself responsible for the marriage, and told the story in Truth (July 23, 1903):
"I believe that I am responsible for his marriage to the widow of Mr. Godwin, the architect. She was a remarkably pretty woman and very agreeable, and both she and he were thorough Bohemians. I was dining with them and some others one evening at Earl's Court. They were obviously greatly attracted to each other, and in a vague sort of way they thought of marrying. So I took the matter in hand to bring things to a practical point. 'Jemmy,' I said, 'will you marry Mrs. Godwin?' 'Certainly,' he replied. 'Mrs. Godwin,' I said, 'will you marry Jemmy?' 'Certainly,' she replied. 'When?' I asked. 'Oh, some day,' said Whistler. 'That won't do,' I said, 'we must have a date.' So they both agreed that I should choose the day, what church to come to for the ceremony, provide the clergyman, and give the bride away. I fixed an early date, and got the then Chaplain of the House of Commons [the Rev. Mr. Byng] to perform the ceremony. It took place a few days later.
"After the ceremony was over, we adjourned to Whistler's studio, where he had prepared a banquet. The banquet was on the table, but there were no chairs. So we sat on packing-cases. The happy pair, when I left, had not quite decided whether they would go that evening to Paris or remain in the studio. How unpractical they were was shown when I happened to meet the bride the day before the marriage in the street:
"'Don't forget to-morrow,' I said. 'No,' she replied, 'I am just going to buy my trousseau.' 'A little late for that, is it not?' I asked. 'No,' she answered, 'for I am only going to buy a new toothbrush and a new sponge, as one ought to have new ones when one marries.'"
The wedding took place at St. Mary Abbott's, Kensington, in the presence of Dr. and Mrs. Whistler, one of Mrs. Godwin's sisters, Mrs. Whibley, and three or four others. Mr. Labouchere gave the bride away and Mr. Jopling-Rowe was best man. Whistler had recently left 454 Fulham Road and the Vale, with its memories of Maud, for the Tower House, Tite Street, and the suddenness of his marriage gave no time to put things in order. There were not only packing-cases in the dining-room—usually one of the first rooms furnished in every house he moved into—but the household was in most respects unprepared for the reception of a bride. The wedding breakfast was ordered from the Café Royal, and the bride's sister hurriedly got a wedding cake from Buszard's.
The rest of the summer and autumn was spent in France, part of the time in Boulogne. Mr. and Mrs. Cole, on
"August 27 (1888). Met Jimmy and his wife on the sands: they came up with us to Rue de la Paix, down to bathe. Jimmy sketching on sands; the W.'s turned up after lunch. With Jimmy to the iron and rag marché near Boulevard Prince Albert [no doubt in search of old paper as well as of subjects]. He sketched (water-colours) a dingy shop. Later we dined with them at the Casino. Pleasant parti à quatre. Jimmy in excellent form. Leaving to-morrow."
From Boulogne they went to Touraine, stopping at Chartres, most of the time lost to their friends, as they intended to be lost. It was Whistler's first holiday. He was taking it lazily, he wrote to Mrs. William Whistler, in straw hat and white shoes, rejoicing in the grapes and melons, getting the pleasure out of it that France always gave him. But he got more than pleasure. He brought back to London about thirty plates of Tours and Loches and Bourges, and settled down in London to wind up his connection with the British Artists'.
Whistler was devoted to his wife, who henceforth occupied a far more prominent position in his life than could have been imagined. Indeed his life was entirely changed by his marriage. He went less into society and had less time for his art. During months he was a wanderer, and while he wandered his painting stopped. Not that Mrs. Whistler was indifferent to art. She was sympathetic. He liked to have her in the studio; when she could not come he brought the pictures he was painting home for her to see. He consulted her in his difficulties, she shared his troubles, she rejoiced in his triumphs. But it cannot be denied that the period of great schemes came to an end with his marriage. Although later he painted exquisite pictures, there are no canvases like the Mother and Carlyle, the Sarasate and The Yellow Buskin. This was no doubt the result partly of his pleasure in his new domestic conditions, partly of circumstances that prevented him from remaining long enough in one place for continuous work to be possible. An artist must give himself entirely to his work, or else have a very different temperament from Whistler's. After a year or so in London and two or three happy years in Paris which Mrs. Whistler said she did not deserve, her health necessitated wandering again.
Commissions at last came, but Mrs. Whistler's illness left him no chance to carry them out. He said to us one day: "Now, they want these things; why didn't they want them twenty years ago, when I wanted to do them, and could have done them? And they were just as good twenty years ago as they are now."
Few large portraits begun during these years were completed. And after his wife's death he struggled in vain to return to the old conditions of continuous effort to which the world owes his greatest masterpieces. It is true that his work never deteriorated till the last, that, as he said, he brought it ever nearer to the perfection which alone could satisfy him. He never produced anything finer in their way than The Master Smith and The Little Rose of Lyme Regis, painted towards the end of his married life, or the series of children's heads of his latest years. But these were planned on a smaller scale and required less physical effort than the large full-lengths and the decorative designs he longed to execute, but was never able to finish, sometimes not even to begin. Whistler, with advancing years, became more sure of himself, more the master, but circumstances forced him to find his pleasure and exercise his knowledge in smaller work.
CHAPTER XXXII:
THE WORK OF THE YEARS EIGHTEEN EIGHTY TO EIGHTEEN NINETY-TWO.
These years were full, for though few large paintings were completed, there were many small oils, water-colours, pastels, etchings, and lithographs. Whistler, going and coming in England or on the Continent, had trunks and bags with compartments for his colours, plates, and lithographic materials. It is impossible to say, he did not know, the exact number of small works he produced during this period.
He had used water-colour since his schooldays, but, until he went to Venice, not to any extent. Some of the Venetian drawings show that he was then scarcely master of it. But the results he finally got, both in figure and landscape, were admirable. He touched perfection in many a little angry sea at Dieppe, or note in Holland, or impression of Paris. As not many are dated it may never be known when this mastery was reached. He probably would not have been sure of the dates. We have gone through drawers of the cabinet in his studio with him, when he expressed the utmost surprise on finding certain things that he had forgotten, and was unable to say when they were painted or drawn. He suffered from this confusion and realised the importance of making a complete list of his works, with their dates and there were various projects and commencements. After several attempts he found it took too much time. We know that he asked Mr. Freer to trace his pictures in America and Mr. D. Croal Thomson to do the same in England. Miss Birnie Philip finally swore in the Law Courts that what he wanted was for us to prepare a complete catalogue.
Between 1880 and 1892 he made ninety plates in England. They begin with Regent's Quadrant. Then follow little shops in Chelsea, Gray's Inn, Westminster, the Wild West (Earl's Court), Whitechapel, Sandwich, the Jubilee, and many figure subjects. There is also the Swan and Iris, the copy of an unfinished picture by Cecil Lawson for Mr. Edmund Gosse's Memoir of the painter (1883), another unsuccessful attempt at reproduction. It was the only plate, since those published by the Junior Etching Club, made as an illustration Billingsgate was issued in the Portfolio (1878) and Hamerton's Etching and Etchers (1880), Alderney Street in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1881), La Marchande de Moutarde in English Etchings (1888), but these were etched with no idea of their publication in magazine or book.
The English plates are simple in subject, and they have been therefore dismissed as unimportant by unimportant people. But many are delightfully composed and full of observation. Whistler carrying the small plates about with him, sketched on copper, with the knowledge of a lifetime, the subjects he found as other artists sketch on paper. Three etchings were made at the Wild West probably in an afternoon; one at Westminster Abbey during the Jubilee Service of 1887; and ten to thirteen of the Jubilee Naval Review in a day—plates that prove triumphantly his power of giving his impressions with a few lines of his etching-needle.
In the autumn of 1887 he went to Belgium with Dr. and Mrs. William Whistler, stopping at Brussels, Ostend, and Bruges. In Brussels he etched the Hôtel de Ville, the Guildhalls, the little shops and streets and courts, intending to issue the prints as a set. M. Octave Maus, who knew him, says "he was enchanted with the picturesque and disreputable quarter of les Marolles in the old town. He was frequently to be met in the alleys which pour a squalid populace into the old High Street, engaged in scratching on the copper his impressions of the swarming life around him. When the inquisitive throng pressed him too hard, the artist merely pointed his graver at the arm, or neck, or cheek of one of the intruders. The threatening weapon, with his sharp spiteful laugh, put them at once to flight."
Sometimes Dr. and Mrs. Whistler found him, safe out of the way of the crowd, in the bandstand of the Grande Place, where several of the plates were made. These are another development in technique. With the fewest, the most delicate, lines he expressed the most complicated and the most picturesque architecture. The plates were probably bitten with little stopping-out, and they are printed with a sharpness that shows their wonderful drawing. M. Duret has said to us that in them Whistler gives "les os de l'architecture." A very few proofs were pulled. The set was never issued.
The etchings described as in Touraine are those done on his wedding journey and at other times. They also have never been published as a set. As in Belgium, great architecture suggested his subjects, and his treatment shows that if, as a rule, he refrained from rendering architecture, it was from no desire to evade difficulties, as ignorant critics suppose. The line is more vital and the biting more powerful than in the Belgian plates.
The year after his marriage (1889) he etched seventeen plates in and around Dordrecht and Amsterdam, including Nocturne—Dance House, The Embroidered Curtain, The Balcony, Zaandam, in which he surpassed Rembrandt in Rembrandt's subject. His success is the more surprising because scarcely anywhere does the artist sketch under such difficulties as in Holland. The little Dutch boys are the worst in the world, and the grown people as bad. In Amsterdam, the women in the houses on one of the canals, where Whistler worked in a boat, emptied buckets of water out of the windows above him. He dodged in time, but had to call on the police, and, he told us, the next interruption was a big row above, and "I looked up, dodging the filthy pails, to see the women vanishing backward being carried off to wherever they carry people in Holland. After that, I had no more trouble, but I always had a policeman whenever I had a boat."
