“I cannot, as I look at my improving self with daily satisfaction, really believe it all; still it has helped to do me good. And it is with almost sorrow that I must beg you, perhaps, to put back into its pigeon-hole, for later on, this present summary, and replace it with something preparatory—which, doubtless, you have also ready.
“This will give you time, moreover, for some correction,—if really it be worth while. But certainly the ‘Little White Girl,’ which was not rejected at the Salon of ’63, was, I am forced to say, not ‘inspired by the following lines of Swinburne,’ for the one simple reason that those lines were only written, in my studio, after the picture was painted. And the writing of them was a rare and graceful tribute from the poet to the painter—a noble recognition of one work by the production of a nobler one.
“Again, of ‘the many tales concerning the hanging, at the Academy, of the well-known portrait of the artist’s mother, now at the Luxembourg,’ one is true—let us trust your gentleman may have time to find it out—that I may correct it. I surely may always hereafter rely on the Morning Post to see that no vulgar Woking joke reach me.
“It is my marvellous privilege, then, to come back, as who should say, while the air is still warm with appreciation, affection, and regret, and to learn in how little I had offended.
“The continuing to wear my own hair and eyebrows, after distinguished confrères and eminent persons had long ceased their habit, has, I gather, clearly given pain. This, I see, is much remarked on. It is even found inconsiderate and unseemly in me, as hinting at affectation.
“I might beg you, sir, to find a pretty place for this, that I would make my ‘apology,’ containing also promise, in years to come, to lose these outer signs of vexing presumption.
“Protesting, with full enjoyment of its unmerited eulogy, against your premature tablet, I ask you again to contradict it, and appeal to your own sense of kind sympathy when I tell you I learn that I have, lurking in London, still ‘a friend’—though for the life of me I cannot remember his name.
“And I have, sir, the honor to be
“J. McNeill Whistler.”
In the spring of 1903, only a few months before his death, three of his pictures were withdrawn from the annual exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York. They had not been sent in by him, but loaned by the owner upon the understanding they would be given the prominence which he thought Whistler’s work deserved.