The private view (January 29) was a crush, Bond Street blocked with carriages, the sidewalk crowded; nothing like it was ever known at the Fine Art Society's. Millais, showing forgotten machines in the adjoining room, was one of the first to see the pastels. "Magnificent, fine; very cheeky, but fine!" he bellowed, and afterwards said so to Whistler, who was pleased. The crowd did not know what to say, and, had they known, would have been afraid to say it. For Whistler was there, his laugh louder, shriller than ever. He let no one forget the trial. An admirer asked the price of a pastel: "Sixty guineas! That's enormous!" Whistler heard, though he was not meant to; he heard everything. "Ha ha! Enormous! Why, not at all! I can assure you it took me quite half an hour to do it!"
People laughed at Whistler's work, because they thought they were expected to. Because he was the gayest man they refused to see that he was the most serious artist. When they laughed at his art, it hurt; when they laughed at him, they suffered; and he had his revenge in mystifying them:
"Well, you know, they thought it was an amiability to me for them to be amused. One day, when I was on my way to the Fine Art Society's, while the show was going on, I met Sir and Lady —— face to face, at the door, as they were coming out. Both looked very much bored, but they couldn't escape me. So the old man grasped my hand and chuckled, 'We have just been looking at your things, and have been so much amused!' He had an idea that the drawings on the wall were drolleries of some sort, though he could not understand why, and that it was his duty to be amused. I laughed with him. I always did with people of that kind, and then they said I was not serious."
The critics, too, laughed, but there was venom in their laughter. They liked to take themselves, if they couldn't take Whistler, seriously, and they hated work they could not understand. The pastels were sensational, Whistler was clever with a sort of transatlantic impudence. They objected to the brown paper, to the technique, to the frames, to the decorations, to the subjects; they became unexpectedly concerned for the past glory of Venice. Godwin, again, was an exception "No one who has listened, as the writer of these notes has, to Whistler's descriptions of the open-arcaded, winding staircase that lifts its tall stem far into the blue sky, or of the façades, yet unrestored, that speak of the power of the Venetian architect, can doubt that he who can so remember and describe has failed to admire. It is by reason of the strength of this admiration and appreciation that he holds back in reverence, and exercises this reticence of the pencil, the needle, and the brush."
A number of people showed their belief in the pastels by buying them, and the exhibition was a success financially. The prices ranged from twenty to sixty guineas, the total receipts amounted to eighteen hundred pounds. Bacher quotes a letter written to him just after the show opened signed "Maud Whistler": "The best of it is, all the pastels are selling. Four hundred pounds' worth the first day; now over a thousand pounds' worth are sold."
Before the show closed, at the end of January, Whistler was summoned to Hastings. His mother had been there since her illness of 1876-77, from which she never entirely recovered, though there were intervals between the attacks when her family had no cause for anxiety. But her death was sudden. Those who refused to see in Whistler any other good quality could not deny his devotion to his mother; those to whom he revealed the tenderness under the defiant masque with which he faced the world knew what his love for her meant to him. She had lived with him whenever it was possible. His visits and letters to Hastings had been frequent. He never forgot her birthday. He told her of all his success, all his hopes, and made as light as he could of his debts and disappointments. But in the miserable week before the funeral at Hastings he was full of remorse; he should have been kinder and more considerate, he said; he had not written often enough from Venice. Dr. Whistler was with him part of the time, and the Doctor's wife the rest. In the afternoons they wandered on the windy cliffs above the town, and there was one drear afternoon when he broke down: "It would have been better had I been a parson as she wanted!" Yet he had nothing to reproach himself with. The days in Chelsea were for her as happy as for him, and she whose pride had been in his first childish promise at St. Petersburg lived to see the development of his powers. She is buried at Hastings.
It was fortunate that when he got back to town there were events to distract his thoughts. The Society of Painter-Etchers opened their first exhibition in April at the Hanover Gallery. American artists who were just starting etching and had never shown prints in London were invited. Frank Duveneck sent a series of Venetian proofs. This was the occasion of "the storm in an æsthetic teapot," which, had not Whistler thought it important as "history," would be forgotten. We quote, as he did, from The Cuckoo (April 11, 1881):
"Some etchings, exceedingly like Mr. Whistler's in manner, but signed 'Frank Duveneck,' were sent to the Painter-Etchers' Exhibition from Venice. The Painter-Etchers appear to have suspected for a moment that the works were really Mr. Whistler's, and, not desiring to be the victims of an easy hoax on the part of that gentleman, three of their members—Dr Seymour Haden, Dr. Hamilton, and Legros—went to the Fine Art Society's Gallery in Bond Street, and asked one of the assistants there to show them some of Mr. Whistler's Venetian plates. From this assistant they learned that Mr. Whistler was under an arrangement to exhibit and sell his Venetian etchings only at the Fine Art Society's Gallery."
Whistler heard of this. He called on Mr. Cole, "highly incensed with Haden and Legros conspiring to make out he was breaking his contract with the Fine Art Society," and went at once to the Hanover Gallery, Mr. Menpes with him. The three members fortunately were not there. Then Haden wrote to the Fine Art Society that they had found out about Mr. Duveneck and said they were delighted with his etchings, and expressed regret. But it is incredible that Haden and Legros should have mistaken the work of Duveneck for that of Whistler. The story was published by Whistler in The Piker Papers. With its interest a little dulled by time, the correspondence may be read in The Gentle Art.