"Whistler's usual breakfast, which he often had after we arrived at the studio, was two eggs in a tumbler, beaten up with pepper, salt, and vinegar, bread and coffee....
"Whistler stood yards away from the picture with his brush, and would move it as though he were painting; he would then jump across the room, and put a dab of paint on the canvas; he also used to wet his finger and gently rub portions of his picture. I have often seen him take a sponge with soap and water and wash the Blue Girl's face (on the canvas, I mean)."
Lady Archibald Campbell, also posing for Whistler, said: "He was a great friend of ours. I think I sat to him during a year or so, off and on, for a great many studies in different costumes and poses. His first idea was to paint me in court dress. The dress was black velvet, the train was silver satin with the Argyll arms embroidered in appliqué in their proper colours. He made a sketch of me in the dress. The fatigue of standing with the train was too great, and he abandoned the idea. In all these studies he called my attention to his method of placing his subject well within the frame, explaining that a portrait must be more than a portrait, must be of value decoratively. He never patched up defects, but, if dissatisfied with any portion of his work, covered the canvas afresh with his first impression freshly recorded. The first impression thrown on the canvas he often put away, often destroyed. Among others, he made in oils an impression of me as Orlando, in the forest scene of As You Like It, at Coombe. He considered this successful. A picture he called The Grey Lady was a harmony in silver greys. I remember thinking it a masterpiece of drawing, giving the impression of movement. I was descending a stair, the canvas was of a great height, and the general effect striking. It was almost completed when my absence from town prevented a continuance of the sittings. When I returned he asked to make a study of me in the dress in which I called upon him. This is the picture which he exhibited under the name of The Brodequin Jaune, or The Yellow Buskin. As far as I remember it was painted in a few sittings. When I saw him shortly before his death I asked after The Grey Lady. He laughed and said he had destroyed her."
Mr. Walter Sickert has recorded a number of interesting details about these pictures, though his statements are vague. He says that the canvases had a grey ground "made with black and white mixed with turpentine," and that Whistler used a medium of oil and turpentine, and "covered thinly the whole canvas with his prepared tones, using house-painters' brushes for the surfaces, and drawing lines with round hogshair brushes nearly a yard long.... His object was to cover the whole canvas at one painting—either the first or the hundredth." Lady Archibald asked him if he was going to touch up her portrait at the last sitting. Whistler said, "Not touch it up, give it another beautiful skin." Mr. Sickert also very aptly suggests the reason why some of the portraits were never completed. Whistler did them all over, again and again, till they were "finished—or wrecked, as often happened, from the sitter getting tired, or growing up, or growing old." Almost the only new fact in Mr. Frank Rutter's Whistler is given him by Mr. Sickert, who says he remembers once Whistler standing on a chair with a candle at the end of a sitting from Lady Archibald Campbell, looking at his work, but undecided whether he should take it out or leave it. They started to dinner, and in the street he decided, saying, "You go back. I shall only be nervous and begin to doubt again. Go back and take it all out." This, Mr. Sickert says he did, with a rag and benzoline.
M. Duret suggests that the ridicule of her friends had an effect on Lady Archibald Campbell, or perhaps her beauty made her critical; anyhow, she suggested changes to Whistler, who, though he seldom accepted suggestions from his sitters, did his best to meet her, until it seemed as if, to please her, he must repaint the picture, and he was discouraged. We have heard of a scene outside the studio: Lady Archibald in a hansom on the point of driving away never to return; M. Duret springing on the step and representing the loss to the world of the masterpiece, and arguing so well that she came back, and The Yellow Buskin was saved from the fate of The Grey Lady and The Lady in Court Dress. Some think the portrait that was finished is Whistler's greatest. It has distinction and character. It is another Arrangement in Black in which critics could then discover but dinginess and dirt. One wit described it as a portrait of a lady pursuing the last train through the smoke of the Underground. People have learned to see, or at least to think they should see, beauty, and to-day they hardly dare deny it is a masterpiece. Whistler called it first the Portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell, but afterwards The Yellow Buskin, the title in the Wilstach Collection, Philadelphia, where it now hangs.
Mr. Walter Sickert tells an amusing story of Whistler's way sometimes of meeting the suggestions of sitters:
"I remember an occasion when Whistler, yielding to persuasion, allowed himself to introduce, step by step, certain modifications in the scheme of a portrait that he was painting. As time went on he saw his own conception overlaid with an image that he had never intended. At last he stopped and put his brushes slowly down. Taking off his spectacles, he said, 'Very well, that will do. This is your portrait. We will put it aside and finish it another day.' 'Now, if you please,' he added, dragging out a new grey canvas, 'we will begin mine.'"
M. Duret posed to Whistler at the same time as Lady Archibald Campbell. When she could not come Whistler would telegraph him, and day by day he watched the progress of her portrait while his was growing. Business brought M. Duret to London. He had always been much with artists in Paris, had been intimate with Courbet, was still with Fantin, Manet, and Bracquemond. He recognised the genius of men at whom the world scoffed, and it was he who by an article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (April 1881) made the French realise their mistake of years, and again give Whistler the place so long denied him.
