From the collection of Colonel Frank J. Hecker.
THE MUSIC ROOM.
By James A. McNeill Whistler.
the eye and touch of cynicism on the lip not enough to disguise an underlying sweetness and freshness of mind. The other, in its half-truth, is a travesty; this one, very expressive of the mingled qualities of this remarkable man.
For none but a man of peculiar sweetness of mind could have conceived that masterpiece in the Luxembourg, “The Portrait of My Mother.” Garbed in black, as you will remember, she sits in profile, with her feet upon a footstool and her hands laid peacefully and elegantly on her lap; the lawn and lace of her cap delicately silhouetted against the gray wall. She gazes with tranquil intensity beyond the limit of our comprehension along the vista of memories, leading back through maternity to a beautiful youth. Nor is there any cynicism in “The White Girl,” that symphony in white, rejected at the Salon of 1863, when the artist was twenty-nine years old, but conspicuous in the Salon des Refusés. The girl stands mysteriously aloof from all contact with, or suggestion of, the world, her dark eyes staring with a troubled, wistful look, as if she had been surprised in her maiden meditation and were apprehensive of something she cannot fathom, and is too reliant upon herself to wholly fear. The picture is no brilliant epitome of shallowness, but an almost reverential conception, in exquisitely idealized degree, of the poetry of maidenhood, maturing normally. In both these pictures, which come as near as anything which Whistler has done to the generally accepted idea of a subject, it is the significance, in the one case of motherhood, in the other of maidenhood, that he has dwelt upon, and in both with the fullest reliance upon the æsthetic suggestion to the sense, respectively, of black and gray, and of white, elaborated to an extreme of subtlety. It would be impossible, I mean, that the colour schemes, for example, could be reversed; each is so intentionally and conclusively the language fitted to the idea, that one might as well try to put the words of Juliet into the mouth of Volumnia.
In pictures like “The Music Room,” there is a further step toward abstraction. So far as it represents the interior of a room with walls of ivory-white set off with dainty rose-sprigged curtains, in which a lady in black riding-habit stands by a marble mantelpiece, while a child in white frock sits a little farther back reading, it is a genre picture of that sort that Alfred Stevens painted, done not for any particular significance in the figures, but for the opportunity which it yields of a delicate scheme of colour and exquisite adjustment of values, and for the pure enjoyment of representing the æsthetic significance of these qualities. But it is at once more subtle and more daring than Stevens could have wrought. It involves a problem, the very difficulty of which no doubt keyed the artist to enthusiasm, to keep the child in white behind the figure in black, and to make the latter a distinguished ornament in the picture, while still preserving its pliant relation to its light surroundings—a problem not improbably suggested, in part at least, by one of Outamaro’s prints, at any rate in its Caucasian transposition worthy to be compared with the work of the Japanese master. Nor is it only a problem in skill. Jet is beautiful in tone and texture, and so is ivory, and the combination of the two, set off with delicate accents of rose, creates a beauty of its own.
“Variations in Flesh and Green—The Balcony” may be selected as a still further advance toward abstract sensation and expression. These girls in kimonas, standing, sitting, and reclining on the edge of a river with a glimpse of factory chimneys across the water, mean nothing in a “subject” sense, and lack even the reasonableness of the figures in the previous picture. They are parts of a fantasy, pure and simple, to which they contribute impersonally; an artist’s dream of atmosphere and colour, which you will enjoy or not, according as you can enter into the abstract