JUBILEE MEMORIAL
ILLUMINATION
In the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle
In the place of the luncheon, Whistler suggested a Sunday breakfast when members should pay for themselves and their guests. But members were horrified; his motion was lost.
In April 1886, Mr. William Graham's collection came up for auction at Christie's. The sale brought to it the buyers and admirers of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, many of whose pictures Graham had bought. Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Silver (Blue and Gold), Old Battersea Bridge belonged to him. When it appeared "there was a slight attempt at an ironical cheer, which being mistaken for serious applause, was instantly suppressed by an angry hiss all round," and it was sold for sixty pounds to Mr. R. H. C. Harrison. Whistler acknowledged through the Observer (April 11, 1886), "the distinguished, though I fear unconscious, compliment so publicly paid." Such recognition rarely, he said, came to the painter during his lifetime, and to his friends he spoke of it as an unheard-of success, the first time such a thing had happened. The hisses in their ears, the British Artists were dismayed by his one contribution to the Summer Exhibition of 1886. This was a Harmony in Blue and Gold, a full-length of a girl in draperies of blue and green, leaning against a railing and holding a parasol, an arrangement, like the Six Projects, uniting classic design with Japanese detail. The draperies were transparent, and to defy Horsley and the British Matron was no part of the British Artists' policy. They were doubtless the more shocked when they read the comments in the Press. The most amusing revelation of British prudery, worth preserving as typical, appeared in the Court and Society Review (June 24, 1886) in a letter, signed "A Country Collector," protesting against the praise of Mr. Malcolm Salaman, who was the art critic of that paper:
"I am invited to gaze at an unfinished, rubbishy sketch of a young woman, who, if she is not naked, ought to be, for she would then be more decent.... The figure is more naked than nude: the colour what there is of it, is distinctly unpleasant. For my part, sir, I will not believe in Mr. Whistler; my daughters have commanded me to admire him—I will not admire him. How they can quietly stare at the ill-painted, sooty-faced young woman in 'blue and gold' passes me. But things are altered now, and my girls gaze with critical calmness and carefully balanced pince-nez on that which would have sent their grandmothers shrieking from the gallery."
And Whistler, he declared, was a "poseur" and the picture "a colossal piece of pyramidal impudence."