Recollections and impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler

by Arthur Jerome Eddy

There are but two uses to which a painting can be put with any sense of the fitness of things: it may be used decoratively alone or in connection with one or two others which harmonize and which are distributed to produce a perfect effect; this is the noblest use to which a painting of any kind can be put, the production of an effect in which the painting, however great, is but an element in a perfect whole.

Another and commoner use is the enjoyment of a picture by itself, as one reads a poem or listens to music, more or less oblivious to all surroundings. It is obvious that this sort of enjoyment implies the subordination of all surroundings to the painting, or the poem, or the music, the arrangement of the environment so as to secure the greatest possible freedom from intrusive and distracting sights and sounds,—in short, as regards painting, the reproduction in a sense of the atmosphere of the studio where the picture was created, or of the place, altar, or chapel for which it was intended; and it means most emphatically freedom from sharp contrast with pictures by other men and of other times, schools, and conditions, however good, which will clash precisely as would two orchestras playing different pieces in the same hall.

One can imagine Whistler and Carlyle—painter and philosopher, two masters, each in his vocation—in the studio, and the growing portrait, a thing of beauty there, a bond of union between two men so divergent, and one can imagine how beautiful the portrait would be anywhere if by itself amidst harmonious surroundings, whether used as the chief ornament of a dignified hall or placed in a more neutral atmosphere for study and appreciation. But one cannot imagine more destructive surroundings than those of a public gallery, the walls of which teem with writhing, wriggling things in huge gilt frames and glaring colors.

And the painters, who ought to know better, but who encourage these great collections and exhibitions, who live for them, work for them, slave for them, are more to blame for the existence of these heterogeneous conglomerations than the public, who do not know better, but walk helplessly about amidst endless rows of staring canvases, dimly conscious that all is not right.

Pictures of equal merit do not necessarily hang together. A Velasquez and a Raphael, each supremely beautiful in the place for which it is intended, produce an inharmonious effect if placed side by side.

A rabble, with men or pictures, is a throng composed of more or less incongruous and unsympathetic units.

With the exception of the few instances, as in the Turner room in the National Gallery in London, where the works of one man are grouped for the express purpose of comparison and study, every collection of pictures is a rabble, and as a whole—ugly.

Nor does the grouping of the works of one man in one room produce a beautiful effect, a beautiful room; not at all, for they are grouped for a scientific rather than an æsthetic purpose, for the purpose of study and comparison in a room which is, as it should be, otherwise barren and neutral.

One or, at most, two fine pictures are all any ordinary room will stand, and to produce an effect wherein nothing overwhelmingly predominates, but everything finds its place and remains there, requires genius different from but of the same high order as that of the painter, and that sort of genius has been lacking in the Western world for some centuries.

So low has the once great art of painting fallen that it has helplessly relinquished its original field of great achievement, the adornment of buildings inside and out, and that has become a separate trade so incompetently followed that the phrase “interior decorator” is one of reproach.