A man may know all about color and have no feeling for it. On the other hand, a man may be singularly susceptible to color-effects without being able to name correctly a dozen shades.
Nothing educates the color-sense so much as steady contemplation of color-harmonies in nature and art. But unless a man possesses an instinctive feeling for color he will never select the best examples; whereas if his eye is exceedingly susceptible he will intuitively cling to the best the world affords.
Whistler was gifted with susceptibility to color in an extraordinary degree. Where, by way of illustration, the untrained eye can distinguish one or two hundred shades of color in the spectrum and the highly-trained eye a thousand, Whistler could probably distinguish two thousand, and possibly feel as many more.
In fact, so keen was his susceptibility to color that intervals—to use, very legitimately, the musical term—quite imperceptible to others affected him greatly.
The neck-tie of a sitter once caused him no end of trouble.
The suit the sitter was wearing was of a light-brown tone; the ulster was of a darker Scotch plaid,—all softened in tone by time and wear. In so many shades of brown it certainly seemed to the casual eye that the shade of the brown silk tie the sitter had on found a place. But, no; to Whistler it was a discordant note, though half hidden by the garments. All available ties were exhausted,—even those of friends and neighboring artists were levied upon. Others could see nothing inharmonious in many of the ties that were tried; but they made Whistler positively uncomfortable,—just as uncomfortable as the leader of an orchestra is when an instrument plays a discord; and it was not until the “Bon Marché” had been ransacked—for, not ties, but simply fabrics in shades of brown—that a piece was found that would answer.
Then, mark you, the brown of the tie was by no means reproduced in the portrait, but the brown as modified by all the browns and notes of the entire costume, and as still further modified by all the browns and all the notes and shades and lights of the studio.
During this search for a note of brown—a search which seemed to the sitter, and even to artist friends, finical in the extreme—the great painter one afternoon justified himself by showing some little pastel sketches of a model with bits of transparent drapery floating about her. The sketches were on coarse brown board, and about ten or twelve inches high by five or six wide, and there were just a few strokes of almost imperceptible color to indicate the flesh tones and the draperies, all so slight as to scarce attract notice; and yet each of the filmy bits of drapery had been dyed by the painter with as much care to secure the desired notes as he would take in painting a portrait.
No one who has not seen him at work can form any adequate notion of his extreme susceptibility to infinitesimal variations of color; it exceeded that of any painter of whom the Western world has sufficient record for comparison.
A Frenchman has said: