CHAPTER XXI: VENICE.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-NINE AND EIGHTEEN EIGHTY.
For years Whistler wanted to go to Venice. When he got there he found it a difficult place to work in. It was cold, and he felt the cold. It is almost impossible to hold a copper-plate or a needle with numbed fingers, and Venice in ice made him long for London in fog. He would gladly have exchanged the Square of St. Mark's for Piccadilly, a gondola for a hansom. Even Ruskin says this.
Affairs in London worried him. He wrote for news of the vanished pictures. He knew that his letters had got into second-hand bookshops—even letters to his mother. He was ill and the Doctor was far away.
Venice he thought beautiful, most beautiful after rain when, he wrote his mother, the colour and reflections were gorgeous. The Venetian masters interested him. At the Scuola di San Rocco he is remembered climbing up for a closer look at the Tintorettos. Veronese and Titian were great swells; Canaletto and Guardi, great masters. He went to St. Mark's for Mass at Christmas, though he wrote that the ceiling of The Peacock Room was more splendid than the dome. But, as he told Fantin years before, it was a waste of time to search for new subjects, and all subjects were new to him in Venice. Countess Rucellai (Miss Edith Bronson) writes that "he used to say Venice was an impossible place to sit down and sketch, 'there was something still better round the corner.'"
Mr. Henry Woods says: "He wandered for motives, but no matter how much he wandered, and appeared to loaf, when he found a subject he worked with a determination that no cold and cheerlessness could daunt. I remember his energy—and suffering—when doing those beautiful pastels, nearly all done during the coldest winter I have known in Venice, and mostly towards evening when the cold was bitterest! He soon found out the beautiful quality of colour there is here before sunset in winter. He had a strong constitution. He was only unwell once with a bad cold."
The Fine Art Society asked him to make twelve plates in three months. The plates were not started for weeks, and the Fine Art Society demanded what he was doing. The answer was at first silence and then a request for more money. The Fine Art Society began to doubt and Whistler was furious. Then reports came that he was doing enormous plates they had not ordered. Howell and others said that Whistler would never come back, and Academicians laughed at the idea of the Society getting either plates or their money from such a "charlatan." With each new suggestion of doubt, Whistler's fury grew. "Amazing their letters and mine, but, perhaps, not for the public." The delay was his care. Even Frank Duveneck, most procrastinating of mortals, made his Venetian etchings, and Otto Bacher changed his style and did his Venetian plates, before Whistler found his subjects.
It amused him to tell the American Consul that idleness is the virtue of the artist, but it was a virtue he denied himself. It was "the same old story" he wrote his mother, "I am at my work the first thing at dawn and the last thing at night." He could not stand the Venetian crowd, and he worked as much as possible out of windows. He did little from gondola or sandolo. To the tourist, a gondola is a thing of joy; to the worker, it is a terrible, unstable studio, and even in the old days it cost a hundred francs a month, but then, the gondolier was your slave.
He mostly left the monuments of Venice, as of London, alone. In London he preferred Battersea and Wapping to Westminster and St. Paul's; in Venice little canals and calli, doorways and gardens, beggars and bridges made a stronger appeal to him than churches and palaces. He deliberately avoided the motives of Guardi and Canaletto. To reproduce the masterpieces of the masters is, he said, an impertinence, and he found for himself "a Venice in Venice."
Whistler, Mr. Howard Walker tells us, took a room in the Palazzo Rezzonico, where he would paint the sunset and then swear at the sun for setting. We know of no work done from the palace, though The Palaces which he etched are on the opposite side of the Grand Canal. Mr. Ross Turner remembers that he found Whistler in a small house with a small garden in front near the Frari, no doubt "the quarters" of which Otto Bacher speaks, and Mr. Turner remembers, too, that canvases were hanging on the wall, and a large one, with a big gondolier sketched on it, stood by the door. He was living then in the Rio San Barnaba, and there Maud came to join him. She could tell the whole story, but she will not.