From Boulogne they went to Touraine, stopping at Chartres, most of the time lost to their friends, as they intended to be lost. It was Whistler's first holiday. He was taking it lazily, he wrote to Mrs. William Whistler, in straw hat and white shoes, rejoicing in the grapes and melons, getting the pleasure out of it that France always gave him. But he got more than pleasure. He brought back to London about thirty plates of Tours and Loches and Bourges, and settled down in London to wind up his connection with the British Artists'.

Whistler was devoted to his wife, who henceforth occupied a far more prominent position in his life than could have been imagined. Indeed his life was entirely changed by his marriage. He went less into society and had less time for his art. During months he was a wanderer, and while he wandered his painting stopped. Not that Mrs. Whistler was indifferent to art. She was sympathetic. He liked to have her in the studio; when she could not come he brought the pictures he was painting home for her to see. He consulted her in his difficulties, she shared his troubles, she rejoiced in his triumphs. But it cannot be denied that the period of great schemes came to an end with his marriage. Although later he painted exquisite pictures, there are no canvases like the Mother and Carlyle, the Sarasate and The Yellow Buskin. This was no doubt the result partly of his pleasure in his new domestic conditions, partly of circumstances that prevented him from remaining long enough in one place for continuous work to be possible. An artist must give himself entirely to his work, or else have a very different temperament from Whistler's. After a year or so in London and two or three happy years in Paris which Mrs. Whistler said she did not deserve, her health necessitated wandering again.

Commissions at last came, but Mrs. Whistler's illness left him no chance to carry them out. He said to us one day: "Now, they want these things; why didn't they want them twenty years ago, when I wanted to do them, and could have done them? And they were just as good twenty years ago as they are now."

Few large portraits begun during these years were completed. And after his wife's death he struggled in vain to return to the old conditions of continuous effort to which the world owes his greatest masterpieces. It is true that his work never deteriorated till the last, that, as he said, he brought it ever nearer to the perfection which alone could satisfy him. He never produced anything finer in their way than The Master Smith and The Little Rose of Lyme Regis, painted towards the end of his married life, or the series of children's heads of his latest years. But these were planned on a smaller scale and required less physical effort than the large full-lengths and the decorative designs he longed to execute, but was never able to finish, sometimes not even to begin. Whistler, with advancing years, became more sure of himself, more the master, but circumstances forced him to find his pleasure and exercise his knowledge in smaller work.

CHAPTER XXXII:
THE WORK OF THE YEARS EIGHTEEN EIGHTY TO EIGHTEEN NINETY-TWO.

These years were full, for though few large paintings were completed, there were many small oils, water-colours, pastels, etchings, and lithographs. Whistler, going and coming in England or on the Continent, had trunks and bags with compartments for his colours, plates, and lithographic materials. It is impossible to say, he did not know, the exact number of small works he produced during this period.

He had used water-colour since his schooldays, but, until he went to Venice, not to any extent. Some of the Venetian drawings show that he was then scarcely master of it. But the results he finally got, both in figure and landscape, were admirable. He touched perfection in many a little angry sea at Dieppe, or note in Holland, or impression of Paris. As not many are dated it may never be known when this mastery was reached. He probably would not have been sure of the dates. We have gone through drawers of the cabinet in his studio with him, when he expressed the utmost surprise on finding certain things that he had forgotten, and was unable to say when they were painted or drawn. He suffered from this confusion and realised the importance of making a complete list of his works, with their dates and there were various projects and commencements. After several attempts he found it took too much time. We know that he asked Mr. Freer to trace his pictures in America and Mr. D. Croal Thomson to do the same in England. Miss Birnie Philip finally swore in the Law Courts that what he wanted was for us to prepare a complete catalogue.

Between 1880 and 1892 he made ninety plates in England. They begin with Regent's Quadrant. Then follow little shops in Chelsea, Gray's Inn, Westminster, the Wild West (Earl's Court), Whitechapel, Sandwich, the Jubilee, and many figure subjects. There is also the Swan and Iris, the copy of an unfinished picture by Cecil Lawson for Mr. Edmund Gosse's Memoir of the painter (1883), another unsuccessful attempt at reproduction. It was the only plate, since those published by the Junior Etching Club, made as an illustration Billingsgate was issued in the Portfolio (1878) and Hamerton's Etching and Etchers (1880), Alderney Street in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1881), La Marchande de Moutarde in English Etchings (1888), but these were etched with no idea of their publication in magazine or book.

The English plates are simple in subject, and they have been therefore dismissed as unimportant by unimportant people. But many are delightfully composed and full of observation. Whistler carrying the small plates about with him, sketched on copper, with the knowledge of a lifetime, the subjects he found as other artists sketch on paper. Three etchings were made at the Wild West probably in an afternoon; one at Westminster Abbey during the Jubilee Service of 1887; and ten to thirteen of the Jubilee Naval Review in a day—plates that prove triumphantly his power of giving his impressions with a few lines of his etching-needle.