Bacher says Whistler wore a "large, wide-brimmed, soft, brown hat tilted far back, suggesting a brown halo. It was a background for his curly black hair and singular white lock.... A dark sack-coat almost covered an extremely low turned-down collar, while a narrow black ribbon did service as a tie, the long, pennant-like ends of which, flapping about, now and then hit his single eye-glass."
Bacher describes him in evening dress without a tie, and Mr. Forbes recalls his coming without one to the Bronson's, and Bronson saying it was sad to see artists so poor that they could not afford a necktie. Bacher also quotes Whistler as always substituting "Whistler" for "I" in his talk, which we never knew him to do and it seems little like him.
Several of Duveneck's pupils followed on from Florence in 1880, and they lived in the Casa Jankovitz, the house that juts out squarely at the lower end of the Riva degli Schiavoni, all Venice in front of it. Whistler was enchanted with the place when he went to see them, and moved there. He had one room, the windows looking over the Lagoon, and from them the etchings and pastels of the Riva and the Lagoon were made. Many things are told of this room, of plates bitten on the top of the bureau, the acid running down, and the scramble to save his shirts in the drawers beneath. Other stories are of the printing-press on which Canaletto's plates may have been pulled and many of Duveneck's and Bacher's were; the press which used to work up to a certain point and then go with such a rush that it had to be stopped, for fear the bed would come out on the floor.
There was a large colony of foreign artists and art lovers and a club, English in name, really cosmopolitan, in Venice, where Whistler met Rico, Wolkoff, Van Haanen, Tito, Blaas, if he had not already met them on the Piazza. Alexander, Rolshoven, De Camp, and Bacher were with Duveneck. Harper Pennington came in the autumn, and Scott, Ross Turner, Blum, Woods, Bunney, Jobbins, and Logsdail were amongst the other men he knew. The American Consul Grist, and the Vice-Consul Graham, were persons of importance, and the United States Consulate a meeting-place. Mrs. Bronson lived in Casa Alvisi, the Brownings and the Curtises had houses in Venice, and with all three families Whistler became intimate. Londoners turned up. Harry Quilter told of one encounter:
"In the spring of 1880 I spent a few weeks in Venice. I had been drawing for about five days, in one of the back canals, a specially beautiful doorway, when one morning I heard a sort of war-whoop, and there was Whistler, in a gondola, close by, shouting out as nearly as I can remember: 'Hi, hi! What! What! Here, I say, you've got my doorway!' 'Your doorway? Confound your doorway!' I replied. 'It's my doorway, I've been here for the last week.' 'I don't care a straw, I found it out first. I got that grating put up.' 'Very much obliged to you, I'm sure; it's very nice. It was very good of you.' And so for a few minutes we wrangled, but seeing that the canal was very narrow, and that there was no room for two gondolas to be moored in front of the chosen spot, mine being already tied up exactly opposite, I asked him if he would not come and work in my gondola. He did so, and, I am bound to say, turned the tables on me cleverly. For, pretending not to know who I was, he described me to myself, and recounted the iniquities of the art critic of the Times, one ''Arry Quilter.'"
Everybody says Whistler was penniless in Venice, always borrowing, why, we do not know, unless the money went to pay for things in London. But there were dinners and Sunday breakfasts. Many were given in a little open-air trattoria, near the Via Garibaldi. The Panada, the noisiest of noisy restaurants, was one of his haunts, and there was another opposite the old post-office. The food, "nothing but fowl," he wrote, tired him so that he surprised himself by spending a fortune on tea, and carrying home strange pieces of fat, which he tried to fry into resemblance of the slices of bacon served by Mrs. Cossens, his Chelsea housekeeper. Mr. Scott says:
"If Whistler could not lay a table, he knew how to turn out tasty little dishes over a spirit-lamp; and it was not long before the inevitable Sunday breakfasts were instituted in that little room. Polenta à l' Américaine, which he had induced the landlady to prepare under his direction, we used to eat with such sort of treacle, alias golden syrup, as could be obtained. Fish was cheaper and more plentiful then than now in the Water City, and the lanky serving-women could fry with the best of the famous Ciozzotte. The 'thin red wine' of the country, in large flasks at about sixpence a quart, was plentiful, and these simple things, with the accompanying 'flow of soul' made a feast for the gods. There was no room for many guests at one time, but Henry Woods, Ruben, W. Graham, Butler, and Roussoff were often with us."
Days were spent on the Lido, and, doubtless he went to Chioggia, Murano, Burano, and Torcello. These little journeys were more costly and difficult then than now, and there are no plates except of the Lido and the Murano Glass-Furnace, and no pastels except one or two on the Lido.
Whistler loved the nights at the never-closed clubs in the Piazza, Florian's and the Quadri, or the Orientale on the Riva, where the coffee was just as good and two centessimi cheaper. Around these nights endless legends are growing, and like all the legends, they are such a part of Whistler they cannot be ignored. No one delighted in them more than he, no one ever told them so well. They became the favourite yarns of Duveneck's boys, to which we listened many an evening when we came to Venice four years later. It was then we first heard of Wolkoff, or Roussoff as he is known in Bond Street, and his boast that he could make pastels like Whistler's and the Americans' bet of a champagne dinner that he couldn't, and the evening in the Casa Jankovitz, when Rico, Duveneck, Curtis, Bacher, Woods, and Van Haanen recognised Wolkoff's work and every time one of his pastels was produced cried: "Take it away!" The Russian said to Whistler after dinner: "You know, you scratch a Russian, and you find a Tartar!" "Ha ha!" said Whistler, "I've scratched an artist and found an ama-Tartah!" Another story was of the tiny glass figure, or maybe a little black baby from the shrine of St. Anthony at Padua, dropped into Whistler's glass of water at the café, where it looked like a little devil bobbing up and down, so that Whistler, when he saw it, thought something was wrong with his eyes, and sipped the water and shook the glass, and the more he sipped and shook the more the little devil danced, and finally he upset the glass over everybody, and the little demon fell in his lap. And there was another of the night when a barca, with a transparency showing Nocturnes and a band playing "Yankee-Doodle," moved up and down the Grand Canal and along the Riva, never stopping until it was greeted with a loud "Ha ha!" from the darkness. And we heard of the day when Whistler, seeing Bunney on a scaffold struggling with St. Mark's, his life-work for Ruskin, fastened a card, "I am totally blind," to his coat-tail. And we were told of the hot noon when Whistler, leaning out of his window, discovering a bowl of goldfish below on the window-ledge of his landlady, against whom he had a grudge, let down a fishing-line, caught the fish, fried them, dropped them back into the bowl, and watched the return of their owner, who was sure her fish had been fried by the sun. And the story of Blum and Whistler, without a schei, crossing the Academy Bridge, Blum sticking in his eye a little watch with a split second-hand that went round so fast the keeper thought he had the evil eye, and they got over without paying; or of the boys' farewell fête to Whistler in August when it was rumoured he was going, and in a coal barge, which Bacher transforms into a "fairy-like floating bower festooned with the wealth of autumn," a feast of melons and salads and Chianti was spread and eaten as they drifted up the Grand Canal with the tide, the lights of their lanterns bringing everyone to stare, until the rain drove them under the Rialto, where they spent the rest of the night, and then Whistler didn't go after all. When Whistler left they say he asked the authors of these adventures up to his room and showed them a number of prints, and said, "Now, you boys have been very good to me all this time and I want to do something for you," and he turned over his prints carefully, and said, "I have thought it out," and he took one, a spoiled one, and he counted their heads, and he cut it into as many pieces as there were people, and presented a fragment to each, and as they marched downstairs all they heard was "Ha ha!" These, and hundreds like them, are the legends you hear on the Piazza.