Nothing in Whistler's life is more astonishing than the praise and blame raised by the Venetian pastels on their exhibition in London. Artists fought over them. To some, they were original, they gave the character of Venice; to others, they were cheap, anybody could do them. Both were wrong, as both always were. "Anybody" cannot do them; he had been making pastels: the subject, not the method, was new. Had some of the combatants visited the Academy at Venice, they might have discovered his inspiration in the drawings of the Old Masters, where he had found it years before at the Louvre. He was only carrying on tradition.
Whistler used coloured paper for the pastels because it gave him, without any work, the foundation of his colour-scheme in the simplest manner, and because he could work straight away on it, and not ruin the surface and tire himself getting the tone. Bacher describes him in his gondola laden with pastels. But his materials were so few that he could wander on foot in the narrow streets, the best way to work as everyone who has worked in Venice knows. For it is difficult to find again a place, and impossible to see again the effect, that fascinated you. He carried only a little portfolio or drawing-board, some sheets of tinted paper, black chalk, half a dozen pastels, and varnished or silver-coated paper to cover the drawing when finished. Once he found what he wanted, he made a sketch in black chalk and then with pastel hinted the colour of the walls, the shutters, the spots of the women's dresses, putting in the colour as in mosaic or stained glass between the black lines, never painting, but noting the right touch in the right place, keeping the colour pure. It looked so easy, "only the doing it was the difficulty," he would say. When he finished the drawings he showed them. Mr. Scott recalls that "the latest pastels used to be brought out for inspection. Whistler would always show his sketches in his own way or not at all. In the absence of a proper easel and a proper light, they were usually laid on the floor."
WHISTLER IN HIS STUDIO
OIL
In the Chicago Art Institute
