Recollections and impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler

by Arthur Jerome Eddy

The Ruskin Suit—His Attitude towards the World and towards Art—“The Gentle Art of Making Enemies”—Critics and Criticism.

In 1877 Ruskin, passing through the Grosvenor Gallery, caught sight of something the like of which he had never seen in the world of art. It was the “Nocturne, Black and Gold. The Falling Rocket,” a faithful transcript of the painter’s impression of a night-scene in Cremorne Gardens. But Ruskin cared less for the subtle glories of night than for the more garish beauties of the day, and still less for the sights and sounds of Cremorne Gardens, and neither he nor any one else in either modern or ancient world knew anything at all about the painting of night as Whistler painted it. It is not surprising, therefore, that he was startled, for the picture seemed to violate all those canons of art which he had laid down in English the beauty of which more than condones his every error, and in the impulse of the moment he wrote in a number of Fors Clavigera:

“For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly

approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen and heard much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”

By way of extenuation, it must be borne in mind that this was written off-hand, at a time when Ruskin was saying so many extravagant things, though with them so many profoundly true things, that no one quite understood him, and many thought him not quite sound mentally. The habit of sweeping generalizations, of extravagant appreciations and depreciations had grown apace since the publication of the first volume of “Modern Painters,” nearly forty years before, and he invariably yielded to the impression or the prejudice of the moment.

If Ruskin, in estimating Whistler, had paused but a moment and recalled just a paragraph from the preface to the second edition of the first volume of “Modern Painters” he would have been more tolerant, for he there said:

“All that is highest in art, all that is creative and imaginative, is formed and created by every great master for himself, and cannot be repeated or imitated by others. We judge of the excellence of a rising writer, not so much by the resemblance of his works to what has been done before as by their difference from it; and while we advise him, in the first trials of strength, to set certain models before him, with respect to inferior points,—one for versification, another for arrangement, another for treatment,—we yet admit not his greatness until he has broken away from all his models and struck forth versification, arrangement, and treatment of his own.”

And was not Ruskin himself the life-long apologist for a most original and extraordinary genius,—a man who to his last days was as little understood as Whistler?