ART ATMOSPHERE
My cousin Angelica was one of the advance-guard. She bowed down and worshipped Whistler six months or so before the rest of humanity reached the adoration stage; and when she heard that he had opened a studio for “lady students” available to any one who would pay the entrance-fee—“just like one of the second-raters who teach at Carlorossi’s”—she lost no time in making tracks for the Passage Stanislas, where, if I remember rightly, the Whistler studio was situated.
It was, just as rumor had said, like all other studio-classes of that sort, except that the fee was many times larger; but that was legitimate, Whistler being the thing that winter, and the thing always commanding a high price in the open market.
It was a large, grimly dirty, barn-like room, with a big sky-light towards the north. In it sat some twenty or thirty more-or-less-young ladies, most of them Americans (the fee was really very large) enveloped in voluminous, paint-stained aprons. They sat, as always in such studio-classes, in a circle around a platform, on which stood the model.
Once a week (or was it once a fortnight?) “the Master” drove up in a cab, made his way into the room amid palpable emanations of awe, and going from canvas to canvas shed upon the bowed head of each acolyte a little of the sacred fire of his genius.
My cousin Angelica, like the others, found this a more than satisfactory arrangement and considered that she received full value for her money. We heard little from her that winter but enthusiasm over the Whistler atmosphere and scorn of everything else. In any exhibition she was to be found in ecstasy before some barely visible human visage sunk in the gloom of a dusky corner at twilight, or a floating, whitish blur or two on a dark-blue canvas, which, she told us, represented the new artistic tradition, worth all the other artistic traditions produced since they carried the Cimabue Madonna through the streets—or was that a Giotto?
I was studying philology that year and had no quarrel with Angelica about that sort of thing. For all I cared, she could give her adherence to whichever artistic tradition took her fancy for the moment. But it was occasionally inconvenient to have her so slavishly tied to the studio-class on the days when they expected a criticism. Nothing could have tempted her away from one of those marvelous opportunities to profit by first-hand personal instruction from a first-rate living genius. Even when our one prosperous relative, Uncle Frederick, came through Paris and invited us over to the Right Bank to go to lunch with him at a fearfully expensive restaurant, and to sit in a fearfully expensive loge at the Français afterwards, Angelica had to go first to the studio.
I went with her, so that I could carry her off directly afterwards. This is what I saw and heard in the hour I spent there.