In the autumn of 1887 he went to Belgium with Dr. and Mrs. William Whistler, stopping at Brussels, Ostend, and Bruges. In Brussels he etched the Hôtel de Ville, the Guildhalls, the little shops and streets and courts, intending to issue the prints as a set. M. Octave Maus, who knew him, says "he was enchanted with the picturesque and disreputable quarter of les Marolles in the old town. He was frequently to be met in the alleys which pour a squalid populace into the old High Street, engaged in scratching on the copper his impressions of the swarming life around him. When the inquisitive throng pressed him too hard, the artist merely pointed his graver at the arm, or neck, or cheek of one of the intruders. The threatening weapon, with his sharp spiteful laugh, put them at once to flight."
Sometimes Dr. and Mrs. Whistler found him, safe out of the way of the crowd, in the bandstand of the Grande Place, where several of the plates were made. These are another development in technique. With the fewest, the most delicate, lines he expressed the most complicated and the most picturesque architecture. The plates were probably bitten with little stopping-out, and they are printed with a sharpness that shows their wonderful drawing. M. Duret has said to us that in them Whistler gives "les os de l'architecture." A very few proofs were pulled. The set was never issued.
The etchings described as in Touraine are those done on his wedding journey and at other times. They also have never been published as a set. As in Belgium, great architecture suggested his subjects, and his treatment shows that if, as a rule, he refrained from rendering architecture, it was from no desire to evade difficulties, as ignorant critics suppose. The line is more vital and the biting more powerful than in the Belgian plates.
The year after his marriage (1889) he etched seventeen plates in and around Dordrecht and Amsterdam, including Nocturne—Dance House, The Embroidered Curtain, The Balcony, Zaandam, in which he surpassed Rembrandt in Rembrandt's subject. His success is the more surprising because scarcely anywhere does the artist sketch under such difficulties as in Holland. The little Dutch boys are the worst in the world, and the grown people as bad. In Amsterdam, the women in the houses on one of the canals, where Whistler worked in a boat, emptied buckets of water out of the windows above him. He dodged in time, but had to call on the police, and, he told us, the next interruption was a big row above, and "I looked up, dodging the filthy pails, to see the women vanishing backward being carried off to wherever they carry people in Holland. After that, I had no more trouble, but I always had a policeman whenever I had a boat."
THE YELLOW BUSKIN
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK
In the Wilstach Collection, Memorial Hall, Philadelphia