The newspapers were not so shy of the President as the minute-books. The difference between Whistler and the Society found the publicity which he could never escape. He said to the men who resigned with him, "Come and make history for posterity," and, as usual, he saw that the record was accurate. He had hardly left the Society when the notice board, with the Butterfly and the lion which he had painted, was altered; he immediately wrote a letter to state the fact in the Pall Mall Gazette. Reporters and interviewers gave the British Artists' reasons for their late President's resignation and his successor's qualifications for the post. Whistler lost no time in explaining his position and giving his estimate of the new President. It cannot be said too often that his letters to the Press, criticised as trivial and undignified, were written deliberately that "history might be made." Many pages of The Gentle Art are filled with his relations with the British Artists. The gaiety of his letters was mistaken for flippancy, because the more solemn and ponderous the "enemies" became, the more "joyous" he grew in disposing of them. He did not spare the British Artists. The Pall Mall undertook to describe the disaster of the "Whistlerian policy" in Suffolk Street by statistics and to extol the strength of Wyke Bayliss:
"The sales of the Society during the year 1881 were under five thousand pounds; 1882, under six thousand; 1883, under seven thousand; 1884, under eight thousand; 1885 (the first year of Mr. Whistler's rule), they fell to under four thousand; 1885, under three thousand; 1887, under two thousand; and the present year, 1888, under one thousand.... The new President ... is ... the hero of three Bond Street 'one-man exhibitions,' a board-school chairman, a lecturer, champion chess-player of Surrey, a member of the Rochester Diocesan Council, a Shakespearean student, a Fellow of the Society of Cyclists, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquarians, and public orator of Noviomagus."
Whistler's answer, serious in intention, gay in wording, pointed out "the, for once, not unamusing 'fact' that the disastrous and simple Painter Whistler only took in hand the reins of government at least a year after the former driver had been pitched from his box and half the money-bags had been already lost! From eight thousand to four thousand at one fatal swoop! and the beginning of the end had set in!... 'Four thousand pounds!' down it went; three thousand pounds, two thousand pounds—the figures are Wyke's—and this season, the ignominious 'one thousand pounds or under' is none of my booking! And when last I saw the mad machine it was still cycling down the hill."
Whistler was disappointed, though he did not show it. He was seldom invited to join anything, nor did he rush to accept the rare invitation. He would take no part in the Art Congress started in the eighties, despite an effort to entangle him; he would do no more than "bestow his benison" upon the movement in 1886 to organise a National Art Exhibition, led by Walter Crane, Holman Hunt, and George Clausen. But to the British Artists he had given his time and energy during four years, he had dragged the Society out of the slough in which it was floundering and made its exhibitions the most distinguished and most talked-about in London. Wyke Bayliss, who never understood him, wrote: "Whistler's purpose was to make the British Artists a small, esoteric set; mine was to make it a great guild of the working artists of this country."
Whistler said: "I wanted to make the British Artists an art centre; they wanted to remain a shop."
Wyke Bayliss and his successor were knighted, as Presidents of Royal Societies usually are; Whistler, who obtained the title and charter of the Society, was ignored.
Ten years later, as President of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers, he not only recommended, but carried out his schemes and theories: the decoration of the galleries, the refusal of bad work no matter who sent it, the proper hanging of the pictures accepted, the making of the exhibitions into artistic events, the interesting of the public in them, the insistence that each artist should only support his own Society's exhibitions and should belong to no other Society. He was dictatorial, but without a dictator nothing can be done, and at the British Artists each British Artist wanted to lead. His Presidency began in mistrust and ended in discord. For Whistler it had an advantage, especially abroad, where artists began to regard him with deference.