THE PEACOCK ROOM
Photograph of the room at Prince's Gate, showing the Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine in place
"In the autumn of 1881 I was asked by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to receive pictures by American artists, and have them forwarded for exhibition, and especially they entreated me to persuade Mr. Whistler to send a picture. He had never been represented in any American exhibition. I obtained a chance when meeting him at a dinner of pressing the subject more vigorously than I could have done by writing, and he promised to send his mother's portrait. It was collected in due course and deposited in my studio, then in the Avenue. Mr. Whistler came immediately after, and as the canvas was breaking away from the stretcher, he directed the packing agents, who were skilful frame-makers, to restrain it, and then left me. As soon as the canvas was made tight, spots of crushed varnish appeared on the surface. The varnish, in fact, broke or crumbled and I feared the canvas might have broken. I flew down the street, overtook him, and brought him back, dreading that he would blame us and even that some injury had been done. To my surprise, he took the misfortune with perfect composure and kindness, and stippled the spots with some solvent varnish that soon restored the even surface. And there was never a word of suggestion that we had done any harm. Of course, I knew the fault was not in anything that had been done, and it was by his own order, but from all I had heard about him I trembled. The greatest difficulty in connection with that exhibition was to persuade him to journey to the American Consulate in St. Helen's Place and make his affidavit for the invoice. It had to be done by himself; and it was not pleasant, as we know, to waste a day, the very middle of the day, in this dull declaration of American citizen sojourning in England. After the cases were ready for shipment there was still delay to get his task accomplished, and I think the Pennsylvania Academy hardly guess how much persuading it took. What a pity they did not secure the beautiful picture for his own country! Now that it hangs in the Luxembourg, they envy it."
The Mother was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1881, and, on the suggestion of Mr. Alden Weir, at the Society of American Artists in New York in 1882, and it could have been bought for a thousand dollars. Although nobody wanted it, it made him known in his own country as a painter. He was elected a member of the Society of American Artists that year.
At this time, owing to the visit of Seymour Haden to the United States, American artists became interested in etching, and societies were formed and exhibitions held all over the country. There was a show in the Boston Museum in 1881. Another, the first of a series, was given by the New York Etching Club in 1882. And the Philadelphia Society of Etchers organised in the same year an International Exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts. Articles in Scribner's on Whistler and Haden and American Etchers added to the interest. Messrs. Cassell and others issued portfolios of prints, and every painter became an etcher. The result was a boom, then a slump, out of which Whistler and Haden almost alone emerged, for the reason that their work was not done to please the public or the publishers. We remember the excitement made by Haden's lectures which prepared America for Whistler, whose prints were in both the New York and Philadelphia Exhibitions. Mr. James L. Claghorn, almost the only Philadelphian who then cared for etchings, had already many Whistlers. Mr. Avery, in New York, had some years before begun his collection and secured for it many of the rarest proofs, and he was followed by Mr. Howard Mansfield, who later on interested Mr. Charles L. Freer. But in America more had been heard of Whistler's eccentricities than his work. It could no longer remain unknown, once his etchings and the portrait of the Mother were seen and The White Girl was lent to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where it hung for some time. And the young men who had been with him in Venice, coming back, spread his fame at home, and when Americans got to know his work they became the keenest to possess it. Even at this time Avery owned the Whistler in the Big Hat, Mr. Whittemore The White Girl, and Mrs. Hutton the Wapping. That an American artist's works should be bought at all by Americans at that date was extraordinary. Tadema, Bouguereau, Meyer von Bremen were the standard, soon, however, to be exchanged for Whistler, the Impressionists, and the Dutch and Barbizon Schools.
CHAPTER XXIV: THE JOY OF LIFE.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN EIGHTY-ONE TO EIGHTEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.
On May 26, 1881, Mr. Cole "met Jimmie, who is taking a new studio in Tite Street, where he is going to paint all the fashionables; views of crowds competing for sittings; carriages along the streets."