When things got more desperate, bills covered the front of the house, announcing the sale. Whistler, begging the bailiffs to be at home, went one night to dine. It was stormy, and, returning late, he found that the rain had washed the bills loose and they were flapping in the wind. He woke up the bailiffs, made them get a ladder, and paste every bill down again. He had allowed them to cover his house with their posters, but, so long as he lived in it, no man should sleep with it in a slovenly condition.
Early in May 1879, Whistler was declared bankrupt. His liabilities were four thousand six hundred and forty-one pounds, nine shillings and three pence, and his assets, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-four pounds, nine shillings and four pence. In his long overcoat, longer than ever, swinging his cane lengthening in defiance, his hat set jauntily on his curls, he appeared in the City:
"Ha ha! Well, you know, here I am in the City! Amazing! You know, on the way, I dropped in to see George Lewis, being in the neighbourhood, and, you know, ha ha, he gave me a paper for you to sign!"
It was a petition in bankruptcy.
The creditors met at the Inns of Court Hotel in June. Sir Thomas Sutherland was in the chair, and Leyland, the chief creditor, and various Chelsea tradesmen attended. The only novelty in the proceedings was a speech by Whistler on plutocrats, men with millions, and what he thought of them, and it was with difficulty he was called to order. A committee of examiners was appointed, composed of Leyland, Howell, and Thomas Way.
Leyland was not let off by Whistler. As Michael Angelo, painting the walls of the Sistine Chapel, plunged the critic who had offended him into hell, so Whistler immortalised the man by whom he thought himself wronged. He painted three pictures. The first was The Loves of the Lobsters—an Arrangement in Rats, the most prominent lobster in the shirt-frills of Leyland. "Whom the gods wish to make ridiculous, they furnish with a frill!" he said, and the saying was repeated until it reached Leyland, as he meant it should. The second was Mount Ararat, Noah's Ark on a hill, with little figures all in frills. The third was the Gold Scab—Eruption in Frilthy Lucre, a creature, breaking out in scabs of golden sovereigns, wearing the frill, seated on the White House playing the piano. The hideousness of the figure is more appalling because of the colour, the design. A malicious joke begun in anger, Mr. Arthur Symons has described it, from which "beauty exudes like the scent of a poisonous flower." Years after, when it was exhibited at the Goupil Gallery, one of the serious new critics regretted that Whistler allowed himself to be influenced by Beardsley. These caricatures alone were in the studio when Leyland and the committee made the inventory. Augustus Hare wrote (May 13, 1879) of a visit in the meantime:
"This morning I went with a very large party to Whistler's studio. We were invited to see the pictures, but there was only one there, The Loves of the Lobsters. It was supposed to represent Niagara, and looked as if the artist had upset the inkstand, and left Providence to work out its own results. In the midst of the black chaos were two lobsters curveting opposite each other, and looking as if they were done with red sealing-wax. 'I wonder you did not paint the lobsters making love before they were boiled,' aptly observed a lady visitor. 'Oh, I never thought of that,' said Whistler. It was a joke, I suppose. The little man, with his plume of white hair ('the Whistler tuft' he calls it) waving on his forehead, frisked about the room, looking most strange and uncanny, and rather diverted himself over our disappointment in coming so far and finding nothing to see. People admire like sheep his pictures in the Grosvenor Gallery, following each other's lead because it is the fashion."
Worried as he was, Whistler sent to the Grosvenor of 1879 the Portrait of Miss Rosa Corder, Portrait of Miss Connie Gilchrist, The Pacific, Nocturne in Blue and Gold, six etchings, two studies in chalk, and three pastels. His etching, Old Putney Bridge, was at the Royal Academy. The critics talked the usual nonsense, and have since repented it. Mr. (now Sir) Frederick Wedmore distinguished himself by an article: Mr. Whistler's Theories and Mr. Whistler's Art, in the Nineteenth Century (August 1879), and afterwards reprinted in Four Masters of Etching (1883). He could appreciate Whistler's work as little as he could understand Art and Art Critics, and from its wit was—and is—still smarting. Whistler he placed as:
"Long ago an artist of high promise. Now he is an artist often of agreeable, though sometimes of incomplete and seemingly wayward performance.... That only the artist should write on art by continued reiteration may convince the middle-class public that has little of the instinct of art. But, sirs, not so easily can you dispense with the services of Diderot and Ruskin."
Wedmore had apparently never heard of Cennini and Dürer, Vasari and Cellini, Da Vinci and Reynolds and Fromentin, who remain, while Diderot and Ruskin and Wedmore himself are discredited or forgotten. He regretted that Whistler's "painted work is somewhat apt to be dependent on the innocent error that confuses the beginning with the end." He condemned the Portrait of Henry Irving as a "murky caricature of Velasquez," the Carlyle as "a doleful canvas." The Nocturnes were "encouraging sketches," with "an effect of harmonious decoration, so that a dozen or so of them on the upper panels of a lofty chamber would afford even to the wallpapers of William Morris a welcome and justifiable alternative.... They suffer cruelly when placed against work not, of course, of petty and mechanical finish, but of patient achievement. But they have a merit of their own, and I do not wish to understate it."