And it was his habit to paint when the studio was filled with gloom and lengthening shadows crept across the floor; when it was so dark the dull eye of sitter or chance visitor could scarce distinguish the figure on the canvas.
This “painting in the dark,” as some have called it, was a singular trait. He would paint with increasing force and effect as the room became darker and darker, until it seemed as if the falling of night was an inspiration.
Once a sitter asked him how it was possible to paint when it was so dark.
“As the light fades and the shadows deepen all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great strong masses: the buttons are lost, but the garment remains; the garment is lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that night cannot efface from the painter’s imagination.”
People never could understand his attitude towards nature. When he spoke of the “unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset,” and how “the dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in distinctness, but the joy of the tourist is to recognize the traveller on the top,” he at once puzzled and irritated the lay mind, for is not the sunset beautiful? and the traveller on the highest peak of greater interest than the mountain?
When a lady one day rushed up to him and enthusiastically exclaimed:
“Oh, Mr. Whistler, I have just been up the river, and it reminded me so much of your pictures.”
And he replied:
“Indeed! Then, Nature is looking up,”—people resented it as vanity.
But it was not vanity. It was simply his attitude towards nature and art.