Recollections and impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler

by Arthur Jerome Eddy

For instance, no man with any sense of color whatsoever would group Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Raphael together as men who painted “irrespective of color,”—for no great Italian from the days of Giotto to those of Michael Angelo painted regardless of color; on the contrary, color is the one conspicuous, brilliant, and beautiful feature of their work, and the color-sense, as it existed in those days in all its exquisite refinement, is, generally speaking, absolutely wanting in ours.

In all but color Rembrandt forgot more than most of the Italians ever knew; but in the use of color—not imitatively, not after the manner of nature, but decoratively and arbitrarily—the Italians forgot more than Rembrandt ever knew; and, so far as color is concerned, there is absolutely nothing in common between Rembrandt and Leonardo or Raphael, while there is much in common between the two latter.

It was not color, but light, that Ruskin appreciated, as is shown by a hundred passages, but by none more clearly than that quoted wherein he says of the three painters last named,—and the italics are his,—“these painters beginning with lights and going down to blackness; but with Veronese, Titian, and Turner the whole picture is like the rose,—glowing with color in the shadows and rising into paler and more delicate hues, or masses of whiteness, in the lights,—they having begun with the shadows and gone up to whiteness.”

When he held his exhibition in London, in 1892, of “Nocturnes, Marines, and Chevalet Pieces,”—a “small collection kindly lent their owners,”—he once more printed in his dainty brown-paper-covered catalogue, beneath each picture, the early comments of press, critics, and people, and called it all “The Voice of a People.”

And what a collection of bizarre opinions it is, to be sure, from the serious Times to the lightsome Merrie England, which said:

“He paints in soot colors and mud colors, but, far from enjoying the primary hues, has little or no perception of secondary or tertiary color.”

Which goes to show that the budding science of chromatics is not without effect on vocabularies.

Here we have the “kitchen stuff” criticism of Turner in 1842 paraphrased word for word in the mud and soot criticism of Whistler precisely fifty years later.

Is the jargon of criticism at once limited and exhausted? Are we to linger forever about the cook-stove in the depreciation of art? With the introduction of the steel range of mammoth proportions can we not find new terms of opprobrium? Besides, there are the gas and gasoline stoves of explosive habit, which ought to be suggestive of novelty in vituperation. But, alas, the critic is prone to repeat himself, and the language of the fathers is visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate.

And press, critics, and artists are convicted, once more, of incompetency. But what does it matter, save as a warning that will not be heeded? Are we any wiser in our generation? Were Whistler to appear to-day, as he did forty-odd years ago, would he be received with the praise his works command now? Hardly.