“‘I’ll tell you what I advise you to do,’ Mr. Whistler returned, as he gently pushed him out of the room: ‘you should do as I do, and have “a man” in your own house.’
“Soon after this the man came and said that if he was not paid he would have to put bills up outside the house announcing a sale. And, sure enough, a few days after great posters were stuck up all over the front of the house, announcing so many tables, and so many chairs, and so much old Nankin china for sale on a given day. Mr. Whistler enjoyed the joke hugely, and hastened to send out invitations to all his friends to a luncheon-party, adding, as a postscript, ‘You will know the house by the bills of sale stuck up outside.’ And the bailiff proved an admirable butler, and the party one of the merriest ever known.”[21]
The “White House” was finally sold, and it is said that when he moved out he wrote on the wall, “Except the Lord build the house, their labor is in vain that build it,—E. W. Godwin, R.S.A., built this one.”
Speaking of architects, the story is told that he was once dining, and dining well, at the house of a friend in London. Towards the end of the dinner he was obliged to leave the table and run up-stairs to write a note. In a few moments a great noise was heard in the hall, and Whistler was found to have fallen down the stairs. “Who is your architect?” he asked. His host told him. “I might have known it; the —— teetotaler!”
By the irony of fate the “White House” was afterwards occupied and much altered by the detested critic of the Times,—detested possibly because he occupied and dared to alter the house,—and Whistler asked:
“Shall the birthplace of art become the tomb of its parasite?”
It was this critic who pronounced a water-color drawing of Ruskin by Herkomer the best oil portrait the painter had ever done,—a mistake Whistler never let the unlucky writer forget.
In those days he exhibited quite frequently at the Royal Academy.
Among the earliest pictures exhibited was “At the Piano.” It attracted the attention of the Scotch painter John Phillip, who wished to buy it. Whistler left the price to him, and Phillip sent a check for thirty guineas, which was entirely satisfactory, so far as any one knows.
Thirty thousand dollars has already been paid for one of his very early pictures, and for any one of a