He sailed for England the second time in October, 1881, and I joined him in London early in the next July. On the “glorious Fourth” we visited Mr. Whistler’s studio, where Homer had occasionally painted. I think it must have been there that he painted, late in the previous autumn, a delightful Newport landscape which was bought at the Artist Fund sale of that season by Mr. Lanthier for Mr. Charles de Kay. Whistler’s beautiful portrait of his mother—which I afterward saw in Paris at the Salon—was on the easel, and it is the only one of his pictures which I distinctly recollect. There were some “nocturnes” on the walls, and they were doubtless worth remembering. But I never went there again, and on this occasion my attention was riveted by the artist and his surroundings, alike spectacular and bizarre, the man grotesque as a caricature in attitude and aspect, the rooms all pale blue and lemon-yellow, even to the many vases and the flowers therein contained. He said a good many things, not one of which was I able to recall, so lost was I in contemplation of the general oddity of him and his chosen environment. “What did you think of him?” asked Homer after we came away. “Why didn’t you talk? You never said a thing.” “I was afraid to open my lips,” said I, “lest I should involuntarily tell him to shake that feather out of his hair. He must have had his head buried in a pillow before we went in.” “I wish you had!” said he with a laugh. “That is Jimmy’s feather. He delights in having it noticed.” I had observed that he bowed profoundly on our introduction and so brought it into staring evidence; but I could scarcely believe, even on testimony, that the premeditated effect was produced by a quite unpremeditated lock of gray hair.
BLOSSOMING TREES
Reproduced from the original painting through the courtesy of Mrs. Charles O. Gates
The especial occasion for this second visit to England was the making of some drawings illustrative of places mentioned in the novels of Thackeray and George Eliot. He had been there for some months and they were hardly more than begun, but after I came he worked at them pretty steadily. It was an undertaking which he did not at all enjoy, but which circumstances had made imperative. When he first told me of it in the previous summer, he made it evident that he thought such a commission derogatory to his dignity as a painter. Whether it was that his pictures were selling less readily, or because the painting mood came with less imperative frequency, I do not know, but he was unusually despondent. The idea of the voyage was pleasant in itself. One of his never fulfilled longings was to cross the ocean in a sailing vessel. His Artist Fund picture was nearly due and could be painted on the other side; he thought the price of the drawings would pay all his other expenses. And when an unexpected stroke of good fortune made it possible for me to join him, his sky cleared up. I do not remember whether the English drawings were successful; I do know that they were tardy in reaching the New York office of The Century Company, for whose magazine they had been destined, and that when, in the ensuing year, he sent the same publishers a set of Villerville drawings, accompanied by a sketch he had suggested my writing about that delightful haunt of painters, Mr. Gilder wrote me, after some delay, that they had been much interested in my article, but that their art department was not satisfied with the drawings. It was subsequently published in the “Catholic World,” unaccompanied by the illustrations, that magazine not then having begun to produce any.
In October of that year, the completion of the last drawing coincided with the arrival in London of an old New York friend, the late Mr. Bryant Godwin, and an invitation to spend some weeks in Normandy with the family of another, W. J. Hennessy, the well-known artist and illustrator. There was no further reason for delay in England, and the three of us crossed the Channel one night by the Southampton boat. I have never forgotten my first sight of the French shore next morning. “I don’t wonder now at Rousseau’s color,” I said to Homer; “how could he help it?”
It had been our intention to return to New York after a brief visit with the Hennessys, who had been living for years in a picturesque and pleasant way at Pennedepie, an agricultural hamlet on the road between Honfleur and Trouville, where they occupied a roomy and quaintly furnished old manor just opposite the village church. But we found the place, the people, and the neighboring views alike delightful, and when news arrived, early in our stay, of a considerable sum to his credit which had been lying for some months uncalled for at the American Exchange, London, where it had been sent to his first address by Mr. James Stillman, Homer decided on remaining in Normandy. To have returned to New York just then would have been a distinct loss to both of us in many ways. I look back on the time we spent in Villerville as the most tranquil and satisfactory period of our life together.
That little fishing village, dominated by the tower of a church erected when the eleventh century was young, in thanksgiving because the foreboded end of the world had not come in the year 1000, lies about midway between Honfleur and Trouville, at an easy walk from Pennedepie. Equidistant from either place stands the ivy-grown church of Criquebœuf, beloved of artists, and made by Homer the theme of one of his best pictures. In the same grassy enclosure on the right of the pond into which this old church dips its foot, he found two more delightful subjects. One of them is embodied on one of his last canvases, the “Normandy Farm,” now owned, I believe, by Mr. Bloomingdale of New York. It was bought in the first place by Mr. W. T. Evans, a week or so before my husband’s death. The other, a view of a deserted manor, showing dimly through a veil of ghostly trees, which Mrs. Hennessy declared ought to be called “The Haunted House,” was finished in New York after his return for an early friend, Dr. D. M. Stimson, to whom for many years he had been greatly attached. I think it was exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair.
THE HAUNTED HOUSE