"First you see me at work on the Thames. Now, there you see the crude and hard detail of the beginner. So far, so good. There, you see, all is sacrificed to exactitude of outline. Presently and almost unconsciously I begin to criticise myself and to feel the craving of the artist for form and colour. The result was the second stage, which my enemies call inchoate and I call Impressionism. The third state I have shown you. In that I have endeavoured to combine stages one and two. You have the elaboration of the first stage and the quality of the second."
Though we hesitate to accept the words as his, this is an interesting statement and a suggestive description. In some of the Dutch plates there is more detail than in the Venetian, and yet form is expressed not by the detail of the Thames series but by line. No etcher had got such fullness of colour without a mass of cross-hatching that takes away from the freshness. It is interesting to contrast his distant views of the town of Amsterdam and the windmills of Zaandam with Rembrandt's etchings of the same subjects, and to note the greater feeling of space and distance that Whistler gives. The work is more elaborate and delicate than in previous plates, so delicate sometimes that it seems underbitten. But his method necessitated this. He drew with such minuteness that hardly any of the ground, the varnish, was left on the plates, and when he bit them, he could only bite slightly to prevent the modelling from being lost. He never had been so successful in applying his scientific theories to etching, and rarely more satisfied with the results. His first idea was to publish the prints in a set, through the Fine Art Society, but the Fine Art Society were so foolish as to refuse. A few were bought at once for the South Kensington and Windsor Collections, and several were shown in the spring of 1890 at Mr. Dunthorne's gallery. About this time we returned to London, and J. commenced to write occasionally in the London Press, succeeding Mr. George Bernard Shaw as art critic on the Star. This is his impression, written when he saw them (April 8):
"I stepped in at Dunthorne's the other afternoon to have a look at the etchings of Amsterdam by Mr. Whistler. There are only eight of them, I think, but they are eight of the most exquisite renderings by the most independent man of the century. With two exceptions they are only studies of very undesirable lodgings and tenements on canal banks, old crumbling brick houses reflected in sluggish canals, balconies with figures leaning over them, clothes hanging in decorative lines, a marvellously graceful figure carelessly standing in the great water-door of an overhanging house, every figure filled with life and movement, and all its character expressed in half a dozen lines. The same houses, or others, at night, their windows illuminated and casting long trailing reflections in the water, seemed to be singularly unsuccessful, the plate being apparently underbitten or played out. At any rate that was the impression produced on me. [We know now and have explained the reason for this.] Another there was, of a stretch of country looking across a canal, windmills beyond drawn as no one since Rembrandt could have done it, and in his plate the greatest of modern etchers has pitted himself against the greatest of the ancients, and has come through only too successfully for Rembrandt. There are three or four others, I understand, not yet published, but this certainly is the gem so far. The last is a great drawbridge, with a suggestion of trees and houses, figures and boats, and a tower in the distance, done, I believe, from a canal in Amsterdam. This is the fourth distinct series of etchings which Mr. Whistler has in the last thirty or thirty-five years given the world: the early miscellaneous French and English plates; the Thames series, valued by artists more than by collectors, though even to the latter they are worth more than their weight in gold; the Venetian plates; and now these; and between while, portraits as full of character as Rembrandt's, studies of London and Brussels, and I know not what else besides have come from his ever busy needle. Had Mr. Whistler never put brush to canvas, he has done enough in these plates to be able to say that he will not altogether die."
That was J.'s opinion then, and he has not had to change it. During 1890 Whistler made a large number of lithographs, excellently catalogued by T. R. Way, who printed most of them and was, consequently, qualified for the task. Three, The Winged Hat, The Tyresmith, and Maunder's Fish Shop, Chelsea, were published this year in the short-lived occasional weekly The Whirlwind, edited by Herbert Vivian and Stuart Erskine "in the Legitimist cause" and to their own great amusement. Drawings by Sidney Starr after three of Whistler's pictures appeared, and the editors boasted in their own pages within a few weeks that the lithographs, issued for a penny, could be had only for five shillings. Five guineas would now be nearer the price.
Another lithograph, Chelsea Rags, came out in the January number (1892) of the Albemarle, a monthly edited by Hubert Crackanthorpe and W. H. Wilkins, one of those gay experiments in periodical literature no longer made in this sad land. The four were called Songs on Stone, the later title for a proposed portfolio of lithographs in colour which Mr. Heinemann announced but never issued.
CHAPTER XXXIII: HONOURS. EXHIBITIONS. NEW INTERESTS.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN EIGHTY-NINE TO EIGHTEEN NINETY-ONE.
Official recognition of Whistler in England was followed by official honours abroad. While President of the British Artists he was asked for the first time to show in the International Exhibition at Munich (1888). He sent The Yellow Buskin and was awarded a second-class medal. The best comment was Whistler's letter of acknowledgment to the Secretary, whom he prayed to convey to the Committee his "sentiments of tempered and respectable joy" and "complete appreciation of the second-hand compliment." But soon after he was elected an Honorary Member of the Bavarian Royal Academy, and, a year later, was given a first-class medal and the Cross of St. Michael. In 1889 he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and received a first-class medal at the Paris Universal Exhibition. Another gold medal was awarded to him at Amsterdam, where he was showing the Mother, The Fur Jacket, and Effie Deans—Arrangement in Yellow and Grey. We have heard that Israels and Mesdag, who were little in sympathy with Whistler, objected to giving him a medal, but James Maris insisted. The year before Mr. E. J. Van Wisselingh had bought from Messrs. Dowdeswell Effie Deans, which he had seen in the Edinburgh International Exhibition of 1886, though it was skied. He sold it within a short time to Baron Van Lynden, of The Hague, then making his collection, bequeathed by the Baroness Van Lynden in 1900 to the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam. The picture is almost the only one to which Whistler gave a literary title, except the pastel Annabel Lee. Effie Deans is apparently a portrait of Maud, and it belongs to the period of The Fur Jacket and Rosa Corder. The Butterfly was added later. The painting was not signed when bought by Baron Van Lynden, who, hearing from Van Wisselingh that Whistler was in Holland, asked him to sign it. Whistler not only did so, but we believe then added the quotation from the Heart of Midlothian written at the bottom of the canvas: "She sunk her head upon her hand and remained seemingly unconscious as a statue," the only inscription on any of his paintings that we have seen. Walter Sickert says that it was added by some one else, but as Whistler saw the picture in 1902 and made no objection to it, Mr. Sickert's statement scarcely seems correct.
Few things pleased Whistler more than the honours from Amsterdam, Munich, and Paris. To celebrate the Bavarian medal and decoration his friends gave him a dinner at the Criterion, May 1, 1889. Mr. E. M. Underdown, Q.C., was in the chair, and Mr. W. C. Symons hon. secretary. Two Royal Academicians, Sir W. Q. Orchardson and Mr. Alfred Gilbert, were present, and also Sir Coutts Lindsay, Stuart Wortley, Edmund Yates—Atlas, who never failed him—and many others. Whistler was moved, and not ashamed to show it. Stuart Wortley, in a speech, said that Whistler had influenced every artist in England; Orchardson described him as "a true artist"; and this time Atlas spoke, not only with the weight of the World on his shoulders, but with praise and affection. Whistler began his speech with a laugh at this "age of rapid results when remedies insist upon their diseases." But his voice is said to have been full of emotion before the end: