Besides etchings and pastels Whistler made water-colours in Venice, but as they were never shown together it is impossible to say how many. There were also a few oils. The most important is Nocturne, Blue and Gold, St. Mark's. Bacher speaks of one from the windows of the Casa Jankovitz, "the Salute and a great deal of sky and water, with the buildings very small," and of a scene at night from a café near the Royal Gardens. Then there is the upright sunset from the Riva referred to by Mr. Pennington, and two others painted from Mr. Ross Turner's terrace, one looking down the Riva to San Biagio, the other up to San Marco, both full of little figures, and with boats and a suggestion of the Lagoon, in the background; studies left hanging in sunlight after he had done one day's work until he came to do the next. Mr. Forbes recalls a Nocturne of the Giudecca, with shipping, on a panel, which Whistler gave to Jobbins, who, as he told us, thought so little of it that he painted a sketch on the back and then sold it to Forbes, who still has it. Canfield was said to have another of S. Giorgio. Doubtless there are more, but we know of none that were exhibited.
CHAPTER XXIII: BACK IN LONDON.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN EIGHTY AND EIGHTEEN EIGHTY-ONE.
At the end of November 1880 Whistler was back in London. "Years of battle," M. Duret calls the period that followed, and Whistler was ready to fight.
He arrived when the Fine Art Society had a show of "Twelve Great Etchers," a press was in the gallery, Goulding was printing, etching was upon the town.
"Well, you know, I was just home; nobody had seen me, and I drove up in a hansom. Nobody expected me. In one hand I held my long cane; with the other I led by a ribbon a beautiful little white Pomeranian dog; it too had turned up suddenly. As I walked in I spoke to no one, but putting up my glass I looked at the prints on the wall. 'Dear me! dear me!' I said, 'still the same old sad work! Dear me!' And Haden was there, talking hard to Brown, and laying down the law, and as he said 'Rembrandt,' I said 'Ha ha!' and he vanished, and then——!"
He was without house or studio, and stopped in Wimpole Street with his brother until he took lodgings in Langham Street and then in Alderney Street. (The record of this is in the etching published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, April 1881.) He set to work printing the plates, for few had been pulled in Venice. The Fine Art Society moved Goulding's press upstairs and friends came to see him, and here Mr. Mortimer Menpes says he first met Whistler, and, dropping Poynter, South Kensington, and his ambition, threw himself at the feet of "the Master" and called himself pupil. It was not an ideal workshop, and the Fine Art Society took two rooms for Whistler in Air Street, Regent Street, on the first floor, with a bow window under the colonnade, now the Piccadilly Hotel: the window from which he etched the plate of the Quadrant.
T. Way and his son came to Air Street to help Whistler print. The press was in the front room, and T. R. Way made a sketch of it in colour, his father damping paper, Whistler inking a plate, the press between them: an interesting document. The work was interrupted by excitement. One day Whistler placed on the heater a bottle of acid tightly stopped up. The stopper blew out, steaming acid fumes filled the room, and they ran for their lives. Another time, they took caustic potash, or something as deadly, to get the dried ink out of the lines of the plates, and they dropped the bottle on the floor, and there was not much left of the carpet. Why anything was left of the floor or of them is a mystery. Then, Mr. Menpes says:
"Whistler drifted into a room in my house, which I had fitted up with printing materials, and it was in this little printing-room of mine that most of the series of Venetian etchings were printed."