One of the greatest and strongest of Germany’s living artists is almost a dwarf; the most virile painter in America to-day is short and slight.
The same critic, referring to the letters in the “Gentle Art,” says, “If Mr. Whistler had the bull-like health of Michael Angelo, Rubens, Hals, the letters would never have been written.” But, as a matter of fact, Angelo was “a man of more than usually nervous temperament.” As any one at all familiar with his career, his many controversies, his voluminous letters, well knows, “his temperament exposed him to sudden outbursts of scorn and anger which brought him now and then into violent collision with his neighbors.” His habit of ridiculing and annoying his fellow-pupils invited the blow from Pietro Torrigiano which gave him his broken nose. He was a weakly child and suffered two illnesses in manhood, but by carefully refraining from all excesses he regained and preserved his health. “His countenance always showed a good and wholesome color. Of stature he is as follows: height middling, broad in the shoulders; the rest of the body somewhat slender in proportion.”
The foregoing scarcely bears out the sweeping generalization that “the greatest painters, I mean the very greatest,—Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rubens,—were gifted by nature with as full a measure of health as of genius. Their physical constitutions resembled more those of bulls than of men.”
As for Velasquez, who can speak authoritatively for him?
While the physical characteristics of geniuses are habitually exaggerated, and the weak, the nervous, the delicate are made well and strong and “like bulls” in the enthusiasm of appreciation or the exigencies of theory, it would not be difficult to point out in history, art, and literature innumerable instances of men whose achievements afford no indications whatsoever of their bodily make up,—in fact, it is common experience that neither poet nor painter ever corresponds with preconceived notions, and to meet the one or the other is to court disenchantment.
If Whistler had been six inches taller he would not have been Angelo, or Rembrandt, or Velasquez, but—in all probability—a soldier.
VII
Supreme as a Colorist—Color and Music—His Susceptibility to Color—Ruskin and Color—Art and Nature.
Supreme as a colorist, Whistler achieved fame as an etcher long before the world acknowledged his greatness as a painter. Even now it is the fashion to exalt his etchings to the depreciation of his paintings,—to say that he was a great artist in the one medium but unsuccessful in the other.
The following is a fair illustration of this sort of comment: