“That writers should destroy writings to the benefit of writing” seemed to him just, but that writers should criticise painting seemed to him altogether illogical.
And he quotes the critic of the Times, who said of Velasquez’s “Las Menimas” that it was “slovenly in execution, poor in color,—being little but a combination of neutral grays and ugly in its forms.”
And he shows how the same great critic praised a Turner that turned out to be no Turner. When this particular critic died, a few years ago, Whistler sorrowfully said, “I have hardly a warm personal enemy left.”
And he showed how one said that Daubigny had neither drawing nor color, and another that the works of Corot to the first impression of an Englishman “are the sketches of an amateur,” and another that everything Courbet touches “becomes unpleasant.”
All these by the most eminent critics in the land,—men whose say-so in days gone by made and unmade, for the time being, the reputations of artists.
And he grouped together a number of Ruskin’s dogmatic utterances, where in his enthusiasm for certain men he condemned others who were infinitely superior,—as, for instance, where he praises without limitations the work of the forgotten Prout, and says that Rembrandt’s colors are wrong from beginning to end, and that “Vulgarity, dulness, or impiety will indeed always express themselves through art in brown and gray, as in Rembrandt;” and again where he places Rubens above Titian and Raphael, and compares an unknown Mulready with Albert Dürer, to the disadvantage of the latter.
These things it pleased Whistler to do, and he has done them with rare piquancy in the “Gentle Art.”
If what is contained therein savors in aught of malice, let it be remembered that public, critics, painters were snapping at his heels during the years that he was doing the very work which public, critics, and painters now worship, and a lesser man would have yielded to the storm of adverse opinion and ridicule.
With the exception of a few friends and admirers, he was absolutely without support during the period when an artist most needs encouragement.
It is everlastingly to his credit that neither the ridicule of others—“the voice of the nation”—nor his own necessities, and they pressed heavily at times, caused him to swerve a hair’s breadth from what he believed to be worth doing in art.