Among the students he knew in those days were Degas, Ribot, and Fantin-Latour, whose work every one knows.
Manet was working up to his best; in 1861 he painted the “Child with a Sword,” now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and altogether the atmosphere was charged with the strong sulphur of revolution.
In England the pre-Raphaelites—old and new—were turning the hands of time backward, in France the Impressionists were pressing them forward, in both countries the ferment of change was working.
When only twenty-four years of age, in 1858, Whistler’s first etchings appeared, published by Delâtre, with a dedication to Seymour Haden, his brother-in-law. In those days the relations between the two men were very cordial; unhappily, not so later, as may be seen in “Gentle Art.”
One of Haden’s best plates, “Battersea Beach,” bears in its first state this inscription, “Old Chelsea, Seymour Haden, 1863, out of Whistler’s window,” and another plate of the same year is entitled, “Whistler’s House, old Chelsea.”[9]
Prior to the publication of the “French Set,” Whistler had etched three plates, which were catalogued as[10]
“Early Portrait of Whistler. A young man bare-headed. An impression on which Whistler wrote ‘Early Portrait of Self’ is in the Avery collection in the Lenox Library, New York.
“Annie Haden. On the only impression known, now in Avery collection, Lenox Library, Whistler wrote, ‘Very early; most probably unique.’