Recollections and impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler

by Arthur Jerome Eddy

He once said, “The portrait of my mother was painted in a few hours,” meaning that the work of the last few hours was the work that really counted.

It was interesting to watch a picture grow under the hands of Whistler. With most painters something is finished from day to day, and in the course of ten or twelve sittings the portrait is complete. Not so with him. Nothing, not a detail, not even an infinitesimal section of the background was finished until the last.

He worked with great rapidity and long hours, but he used his colors thin and covered the canvas with innumerable coats of paint. The colors increased in depth and intensity as the work progressed. At first the entire figure was painted in grayish-brown tones, with very little of flesh color, the whole blending perfectly with the grayish-brown of the prepared canvas; then the entire background would be intensified a little; then the figure made a little stronger; then the background, and so on from day to day and week to week, and often from month to month, to the exhaustion of the sitter, but the perfection of the work, if the sitter remained patient and continued in favor.

At no time did he permit the figure to get away from or out of the background; at no time did he permit the background to oppress the figure, but the development of both was even and harmonious, with neither discord nor undue contrast.

And so the portrait would really grow, really develop as an entirety, very much as a negative under the action of the chemicals comes out gradually—lights, shadows, and all from the first faint indications to their full values.

It was as if the portrait were hidden within the canvas and the master by passing his wands day after day over the surface evoked the image.

Most painters can take a canvas and begin at once with the colors of the finished picture, making each stroke count from the very first, often, if the canvas has been prepared, doing little or nothing to the background. Whistler himself would sometimes let the prepared canvas show, all the resources of his art he understood, but if he did, the picture was simply a sketch.

In a very profound sense Whistler’s work from the very beginning was always finished,—finished in the sense that any growing thing is perfect from day to day. The plant may be but a tender shoot just appearing above the ground, or it may be in full leaf, or in gorgeous blossom, but it is finished, it is perfect by day and night. In that sense were Whistler’s paintings finished. If they were sketches, then the slight amount of color used was precisely the amount the sketch required. At no time was the sense of proportion outraged by carrying line or color or likeness beyond the symmetrical development of the three.

One must not be understood as saying that all his pictures are of equal merit,—perfection does not necessarily mean that; nor that he did not do many things he considered failures.

Few painters ever destroyed more work, no painter was ever more critical of his own work. But, in spite of all he could do, things would get out into the world that he wished destroyed. This was due in part to the facility with which he made sketches and the enthusiasm with which he would begin new things, many of which never got on. Now and then some of these unfinished things—unfinished from the first stroke, because never quite satisfactory to him—would escape his studio.