In 1867 Whistler moved to what is now 96 Cheyne Walk, and had a housewarming on the 5th of February at which the two Rossettis were present. Describing the decoration of the walls here, Mr. and Mrs. Pennell say its beauty was its simplicity. “Rossetti’s house was a museum, an antiquity shop, in comparison. The simplicity seemed the more bewildering because it was the growth, not of weeks but of years. The drawing-room was not painted till the day of Whistler’s first dinner-party. In the morning he sent for the brothers Greaves to help him. ‘It will never be dry in time,’ they feared. ‘What matter?’ said Whistler; ‘it will be beautiful!’... and by evening the walls were flushed with flesh-colour, pale yellow and white spread over doors and woodwork, and we have heard that gowns and coats too were touched with flesh-colour and yellow before the evening was at an end. One Sunday morning Whistler, after he had taken his mother to Chelsea Church, as he always did, again sent for his pupils and painted a great ship with spreading sails in each of the two panels at the end of the hall; the ships are said to be still on the wall, covered up. His mother was not so pleased when, on her return, she saw the blue and white harmony, for she would have had him put away his brushes on Sunday as once she put away his toys.”
Solitude was irksome to him, and he welcomed the motley crowd of artists and students who came in at all hours to chat with him whilst he worked. The Pennells tell a capital story of a man named Barthe, of whom Whistler had bought tapestries, and who, not being able to get his account settled, called one evening for the money. He was told that Whistler was not in; but there was a cab waiting at the door, and he could hear his debtor’s voice, so he pushed past the maid and, as he afterwards related, “Upstairs I find him, before a little picture, painting, and behind him ze bruzzers Greaves holding candles. And Vistlaire he say, ‘You ze very man I vant: hold a candle!’ And I hold a candle. And Vistlaire he paint, and he paint, and zen he take ze picture, and he go downstairs, and he get in ze cab, and he drive off, and we hold ze candle, and I see him no more. Mon Dieu, il est terrible, ce Vistlaire!”
His studio here was a back room on the second floor, and up to that studio, on many days of 1873, Carlyle climbed to give sittings for the portrait which ranks now with the greatest of Whistler’s works. The portrait of his mother had already been painted in that same small room, and hung on the wall there whilst Carlyle was coming to life on the canvas. Carlyle was not a patient sitter. Directly he sat down he urged Whistler to “fire away,” and was evidently anxious to get through with his part of the business as quickly as possible. “One day,” says Whistler, “he told me of others who had painted his portrait. There was Mr. Watts, a mon of note. And I went to his studio, and there was much meestification, and screens were drawn, and I was not allowed to see anything. And then, at last, the screens were put aside and there I was. And I looked. And Mr. Watts, a great mon, he said to me, ‘How do you like it?’ And then I turned to Mr. Watts, and I said, ‘Mon, I would have ye know I am in the hobit of wurin’ clean lunen!’” There is a note in Allingham’s Diary, dated July 29, 1873: “Carlyle tells me he is ‘sitting’ to Whistler. If C. makes signs of changing his position W. screams out in an agonised tone, ‘For God’s sake, don’t move!’ C. afterwards said that all W.’s anxiety seemed to be to get the coat painted to ideal perfection; the face went for little. He had begun by asking two or three sittings, but managed to get a great many. At last C. flatly rebelled. He used to define W. as the most absurd creature on the face of the earth.”
WHISTLER. 96 CHEYNE WALK.
Whilst he was at 96 Cheyne Walk, Whistler brought his famous libel action against Ruskin, won it, but was awarded only a farthing damages, and had to pay his own costs. During the progress of the suit he was having the White House built for him in Tite Street, Chelsea, but the payment of his law costs so crippled him that he had to sell it before it was ready for occupation, and to sell off also the furniture and effects of his Cheyne Walk home.
None of these things seem, however, to have affected Whistler with worse than a temporary irritation. He wrote jestingly over his door: “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. E. W. Godwin, F.S.A., built this one;” turned his back upon the scenes of his recent disasters, and went to Venice. After rather more than a year of absence, he returned to London in the winter of 1880, stayed with his brother in Wimpole Street, put up at divers lodgings, had an exhibition in Bond Street, and in May 1881 took a studio at 13 Tite Street, Chelsea, and began to be the most talked-of man of the day. “He filled the papers with letters,” write Mr. and Mrs. Pennell. “London echoed with his laugh. His white lock stood up defiantly above his curls; his cane lengthened; a series of collars sprang from his long overcoat; his hat had a curlier brim, a lower tilt over his eyes; he invented amazing costumes.... He was known to pay calls with the long bamboo stick in his hand and pink bows on his shoes. He allowed no break in the gossip. The carriages brought crowds, but not sitters. Few would sit to him before the trial; after it there were fewer. In the seventies it needed courage to be painted by Whistler; now it was to risk notoriety and ridicule.” When Mr. Pennell first saw him at 13 Tite Street, in July 1884, “he was all in white, his waistcoat had long sleeves, and every minute it seemed as if he must begin to juggle with glasses. For, to be honest, my first impression was of a bar-keeper strayed from a Philadelphia saloon into a Chelsea studio. Never had I seen such thick, black, curling hair. But in the midst was the white lock, and keen, brilliant eyes flashed at me from under the thick, bushy eyebrows.”
From Tite Street, Whistler presently removed to 454 Fulham Road; thence to The Vale, Chelsea, a pleasant quarter which was a year or two ago wiped off the face of the earth; and in 1890 he was back again in Cheyne Walk, at No. 21. “I remember a striking remark of Whistler’s at a garden-party in his Chelsea house,” says M. Gerard Harry, who was one of Whistler’s guests at No. 21. “As he caught me observing some incompletely furnished rooms and questioning within myself whether he had occupied the house more than a fortnight or so: ‘You see,’ he said, with his short laugh, ‘I do not care for definitely settling down anywhere. Where there is no more space for improvement, or dreaming about improvement, where mystery is in perfect shape, it is finis—the end—death. There is no hope nor outlook left.’ I do not vouch for the words, but that was certainly the sense of a remark which struck me as offering a key to much of Whistler’s philosophy, and to one aspect of his original art.”
By 1892, in spite of himself and his fantastic and silly posings and posturings, the world had learned to take his art seriously instead of taking him so, and when he went away that year to live in Paris his greatness as a painter had become pretty generally recognised. In 1894 he came back to London with his wife, who was dying of cancer, and after her death in 1896 he lived with friends or in lodgings, and had no settled home, until in 1902 he once again took a house in Cheyne Walk, this time No. 74, a house which stands below the street level; its front windows overlook the Thames, and it had a large studio at the back. Here Mrs. and Miss Birnie Philip went to share house with him, for his health was breaking, and he was in need of companionship and attention. But there were good intervals, when he was able to work with all his old eagerness and energy. “We knew on seeing him when he was not so well,” say Mr. and Mrs. Pennell, “for his costume of invalid remained original. He clung to a fur-lined overcoat worn into shabbiness. In his younger years he had objected to a dressing-gown as an unmanly concession; apparently he had not outgrown the objection, and on his bad days this shabby, worn-out overcoat was its substitute. Nor did the studio seem the most comfortable place for a man so ill as he was. It was bare, with little furniture, as his studios always were, and he had not used it enough to give it the air of a workshop. The whole house showed that illness was reigning there.” Trays and odds and ends of the sickroom lay about the hall; papers, books, and miscellaneous litter made the drawing-room and dining-room look disorderly. “When we saw Whistler in his big, shabby overcoat shuffling about the huge studio, he struck us as so old, so feeble and fragile, that we could imagine no sadder or more tragic figure. It was the more tragic because he had always been such a dandy, a word he would have been the first to use in reference to himself.... No one would have suspected the dandy in this forlorn little old man, wrapped in a worn overcoat, hardly able to walk.”