The position in France was different. French officialism respected tradition. The art of the academic painters might be frigid, conventional, dull, but it was never petty and trivial, never strove to please by escape from drawing and colour. Gleyre, Ary Scheffer, Couture were the masters Whistler found in Paris. Their successors—Gérôme, Jean-Paul Laurens, Bouguereau, Bonnat—did not altogether throw their dignity as artists to the winds of popularity, or sacrifice it to social ambition. The rebels in France were not actuated by moral or literary motives, but broke away from conservatism. Rebellion sent Holman Hunt to Palestine, Rossetti to mediævalism, Burne-Jones to legend; it kept Courbet at home, for the true was the beautiful and truth was to be found in the life and the people about him. Moreover, the painter was to see these things through, not a microscope, but his eyes. No man who looks upon a broad landscape can count the blades of grass in a field, or the leaves of ivy on a wall, or the stars in the heavens; the eye can take in only the whole, enveloped in atmosphere, bathed in light, shrouded in darkness, all things keeping their places in their planes. While in England the artist was searching the Scriptures and the Encyclopædia for subject, in France he was training his eye to see things as they are and his hand to render them. This preoccupation with Nature, and the study of tone, gave artists new pictorial and technical problems, and subject counted for nothing except as an aid to their right solution. It is curious to contrast the work of the men in France and England of the same generation as Whistler. Fantin-Latour grouped his friends about the portrait of Delacroix, Leighton rearranged a procession of early Florentines carrying the Madonna of Cimabue through his idea of the streets. Manet noted the play of light and colour in the bull-rings of Spain, Tadema rebuilt on his canvas what he thought were the arenas of ancient Rome. Degas chose his models among the washerwomen and ballet-girls of modern Paris, Rossetti borrowing his subjects from Dante.
Whistler, from his first picture, was as preoccupied with the beauty in the "familiar" as his French fellow students. What might have happened had he remained in France, it is idle to discuss. Coming to England he developed in his own way, and this was a way with which English painters had no sympathy. He was so isolated that nothing has been more difficult for the historian of modern art than to place, to classify him. Some authorities have included him among the Realists. His work eventually differed from that of Courbet and Courbet's disciples, but he was always as much a realist as they in his preference for the world in which he lived, and in his study of the relations of the things he found in it. He never wavered, except when he painted the Japanese pictures, and then he was not led astray by anecdote or sentiment, but by the beauty that had drifted from Japan into his house and studio. London, dirty, gloomy, despised by most artists, with its little shops and taverns in the fog-bound streets; the Thames, with its ugly warehouses and gaunt factories in the mist-laden night; the crinolines of the sixties; the clinging, tight draperies of the seventies, became beautiful as he saw them. He made no effort to reform Nature, only reserving his right to select the elements that were beautiful and could be brought together, as notes in music, to create harmony, putting into practice his teaching of The Ten O'Clock. He sought colour, mass, not detail. The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to leave out less than a camera, he wanted to put in no more than came within his vision. He turned his back on history and archæology, and filled his canvas with beauty of line and form. And he struggled to perfect his technical methods, to make of them a perfect medium by which to express this beauty, to reconcile what he could see in Nature with what his brush could render. The Pre-Raphaelites laboured over their canvas, inch by inch; he painted his whole picture at once that unity might result. The Academicians lost their way in literary labyrinths; he lingered on the river, learning its secrets, he watched the movement, the pose of people about him. The modern exhibition forced most painters into violent colour and exaggerated action, he made no concession, though he was ready to submit his pictures to the same tests as theirs.
It was inevitable that his English contemporaries could make nothing of him and his work. The Academician saw but emptiness in his paintings. To the Pre-Raphaelites they were slovenly and superficial. Holman Hunt said of him that he knew where to leave off, and was careful in the avoidance of difficulties; Millais thought him "a great power of mischief among young men, a man who had never learnt the grammar of his art." The critics took their cue from the painters, the more willingly because art criticism then meant analysis of the subject of a picture, and there was no subject in Whistler's work to analyse. Yet he never objected to subject. It was only the blind critics and the blind painters of the day who said he did, and their stupidity is still aped. The great pictures for him were Velasquez's Meniñas Franz Hals' Family, Tintoretto's Milky Way: the greatest subject-pictures in the world. All he objected to was the cheap drivel or sentiment of the painter whose mind or whose audience never rose above Mummie's Darling or the Mustard Pot, the real British school trampled on by Hogarth. The public, following their leaders, were convinced that Whistler's work was empty, slight, trivial, an insult to their intelligence, unless they took it as a jest. Nothing explains the popular conception of him better than the readiness to see eccentricity even in methods which he, "heir to all the ages," had inherited. His long-handled brushes and his manner of placing sitter and canvas were eccentric, though they had been Gainsborough's a century before. To say that a picture was finished from the beginning was no less eccentric, though it was Baudelaire's axiom that the author foresees the last line of his work when he writes the first. It is easier to make than to lose the reputation for eccentricity, fatal to success in a land of conservatism. Whistler saw the Englishmen who had studied in Paris with him laden with honours; Poynter a prosperous painter, Leighton a perfect President, Du Maurier the popular idol of Punch, Armstrong a State functionary at South Kensington, while he remained, officially, on the outside, at fifty less honoured than at twenty-five, because, it was said, that he had not realised the promise of his youth.
In one respect his position had changed. His contemporaries did not alter their opinion, but younger artists accepted him and his teaching unquestioningly for a time. Though doubted and mistrusted, he had never been without influence. To look over old reviews and notices of exhibitions is to find references to the effect of his example. In the Art Journal (June 1887), Sir Walter Armstrong traced the growing influence of French on English art to the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867 and to Whistler. But artists of the new generation went further than the admission of his influence; with the enthusiasm of youth, they proclaimed his greatness. He was their master—the one master in England. After his return from Venice, when his fortunes were at their lowest and the public held him in most contempt, this enthusiasm began to make itself heard and felt in the studios and the schools.
The British Artists, uncertain of their future, took desperate remedies. The Society was old, with distinguished chapters in its history. It was formed by one of the first groups who realised the necessity for an association in self-defence against the monopoly of the Academy. It dated back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. With the old Water Colour Society, it was considered only second in rank to the Academy. Its gallery was in Suffolk Street, near enough to the Academy to profit by any overflow of visitors, until the Academy moved from Trafalgar Square to Piccadilly. The old Water Colour Society was more independent, because it is devoted to a branch of art never acknowledged by the Academy, though every Academician tries to sneak in. But the British Artists suffered from this removal, and found a formidable rival in the Grosvenor Gallery. In Whistler, with his following, they seemed to see the man to drag them from the mire into which they had sunk. The older members hesitated—afraid of Whistler, afraid of the Academy, afraid of themselves. But the younger members carried the day.
Whistler worked hard for the Society from his election till his resignation. He attended his first meeting on December 1, 1884, and interested himself immediately in the affairs of the Society, though, according to Mr. Ludovici, this was the last thing the Society expected of him. He promptly invited his President and fellow members to breakfast in Tite Street, and, as promptly, was put on a committee for a smoking concert, a dull and ponderous function. He sent to the Winter Exhibition (1884-85) two pictures, Arrangement in Black, No. II., the portrait of Mrs. Louis Huth, not exhibited in London since 1874, and a water-colour, A Little Red Note, Dordrecht; in the Summer Exhibition (1885) he showed the Sarasate for the first time. Mr. Cole wrote in his diary:
"October 19th (1884). M. and I went to tea with Whistler to see his fine full-length of Sarasate, the violinist, for next year's Academy."
But whatever his original intention may have been, the Sarasate went to Suffolk Street with several small Notes and Harmonies. If, in electing him, the British Artists hoped to attract attention to their exhibition, they were not disappointed. "The eccentric Mr. Whistler has gone to a neglected little gallery, the British Artists, which he will probably bring into fashion," Mr. (now Sir) Claude Phillips wrote in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (July 1885), and this is what happened. The distinction of the Sarasate could not be denied. But in his other work he was pronounced "vastly amusing," the Pall Mall Gazette seizing this occasion to remind him of "Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes' virtuous determination never to be as funny as he could. It is so bad for the young." Soon Whistler proposed that Sunday receptions should be given in the gallery, and that medals should be awarded. He got Mr. Menpes in as a water-colourist, thus establishing distinct sections in the Society, a scheme he carried out in the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers, and he suggested that photographs of pictures shown should be sold in the gallery, an idea copied all over the world. For the Winter Exhibition of 1885-86 he had another interesting group, including the Portrait of Mrs. Cassatt and a Note in Green and Violet. The Mrs. Cassatt has not been exhibited in England since, and is one of the least known of his portraits. Mr. Cassatt, who was among the few believers in Whistler at this period, came from Paris to London in April 1883, especially to have it painted, and was with Mrs. Cassatt during the sittings at 13 Tite Street. She has vivid memories of the brilliant talk between the two men. It is amusing that Whistler, after having told them the story of The Peacock Room, should have himself arranged for them to see it, and that then they heard Leyland's story. Mrs. Cassatt wanted to be painted in an evening gown. Mr. Cassatt preferred her riding habit. "The very thing," said Whistler, and so in her riding habit and tall hat she stands on the canvas. Perhaps it was because of her disappointment that she could not see a likeness in the portrait. Whistler realised this, but, he told her, "After all, it's a Whistler." Mr. Cassatt, punctilious in these matters, paid Whistler for the painting before he returned to America. Two years passed, and still no portrait. Whistler had probably kept it back for the British Artists. Mr. Cassatt at last wrote. They had their reward for the delay. A letter of apologies came from Whistler and was followed by a case, with not only the portrait in it, but The Chelsea Girl, a painting as little known, and now reproduced for the first time as far as we have record.
At the British Artists the Note in Green and Violet, a small pastel of a nude, created a far greater sensation than the portrait. About a month before the show opened, the late J. C. Horsley, R.A., had read, during a Church Congress, a paper no one would have given a thought to had not Whistler immortalised it. Horsley said:
"If those who talk and write so glibly as to the desirability of artists devoting themselves to the representation of the naked human form, only knew a tithe of the degradation enacted before the model is sufficiently hardened to her shameful calling, they would for ever hold their tongues and pens in supporting the practice. Is not clothedness a distinct type and feature of our Christian faith? All art representations of nakedness are out of harmony with it."