“Well, where is he?”
“Dear me, I discharged him to-day. How unlucky.”
“Then, we must seize the stove by the horns and take our chances on the consequences.” And throwing the damper wide open, there was soon a blazing fire.
For work outside, Whistler used a very small palette of the usual form; in his studio he carried no palette whatsoever, but used in lieu thereof a rectangular table that resembled a writing-desk. The top sloped slightly; at the left were tubes of colors, at the right one or two bowls containing oil and turpentine, with which the colors when mixed were reduced so thin that they would run on the sloping top of the table.
He relied upon innumerable coats of thin color to secure the desired effect rather than upon one or two coats of greater consistency. This made the work long and tedious as compared with the modern mode of taking the pigments as they squirm from the tubes and pasting them while yet alive on the canvas; but it has undoubtedly given his pictures a permanency and durability far beyond that of others.
He seldom began to arrange his palette until the model or sitter was in pose; and ten or fifteen minutes were not infrequently spent in getting palette and brushes to suit him. To a model paid by the hour this delay was of no concern, but to the unpractised sitter, whose limit of endurance and patience did not exceed an hour, the time spent in setting the palette seemed unduly long and altogether wasted. But all that was a part of the refinement of Whistler’s art.
So susceptible was his color-sense that he could not mix colors to suit him unless canvas and sitter were before him precisely as they would be when he began to paint. The arrangement of the colors on the palette was but preliminary to placing those same colors on the canvas, therefore the sitter was as essential to the one process as the other.
Once inside his studio, Whistler seemed to lose all the eccentricities of manner by which he was known to the world. He doffed his coat, substituted for his monocle a pair of servicable spectacles, and was ready for work.
If it were a full-length portrait, he placed the canvas near his palette and his sitter in pose about four feet to the other side of the easel. For observation he stood about twelve feet back towards the doorway,—very close, in fact, to the refractory stove. The light fell slanting on the right of the portrait and sitter, over the painter’s left shoulder, and this light he would modify each day according to the amount of sunshine and the effect he desired.
He then selected two or three small brushes with handles about three feet in length, stood back about twelve feet, took a good look at both sitter and canvas, then stepping quickly forward, and, standing as far from the canvas as the long handles and his arms permitted, he began to rapidly sketch in the figure with long, firm strokes of the brush. The advantage of long handles was obvious,—they enabled him to stand back quite a distance and sketch directly from his sitter. Except for this first sketch, he used ordinary brushes with ordinary handles.