A group of artists and art critics, whose appreciation of Whistler had not waited for the turning of the tide, were in the habit of going together to Paris for the opening of the Salon. In 1892, R. A. M. Stevenson, Aubrey Beardsley, Henry Harland, D. S. McColl, Charles W. Furse, Alexander and Robert Ross, among others, were with us, and to all it was a pleasure to find Whistler triumphing as he had triumphed earlier in the spring in London. His pictures at the Champ-de-Mars were the most talked about and the most distinguished in an unusually good Salon. Many came straight from the Goupil Exhibition. Whistler called it "a stupendous success all along the line," and said that, coming after the Goupil "heroic kick," it made everything complete and perfect. He was pleased also with the fact that he was elected a full Sociétaire, and this year a member of the jury.
In the autumn, J., returning to Paris after a long summer in the South of France, found Whistler in the Hôtel du Bon Lafontaine, a house, Whistler said, full of bishops, cardinals, and monsignori, and altogether most correct, to which he had moved from the Foyot, inhabited by Senators, after a bomb had exploded in the kitchen window. J. says:
"He was not too comfortably established, in one or two small rooms. He was full of the apartment in the Rue de Bac, which I was taken to see, though there was nothing to see but workmen and packing-boxes. In the midst of the moving, he was working, and one day I found him in his bedroom with Mallarmé, whose portrait in lithography he was drawing, and there was scarcely room for three. This portrait is the frontispiece to Mallarmé's Vers et Prose.
"It was the first time I had ever seen Whistler working on a lithograph. He had great trouble with this portrait, which he did more than once, not altogether because, as M. Duret says, he could not get the head right, but because he was trying experiments with paper. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with the mechanical grained paper which he had used for the Albermarle and the Whirlwind prints, and he was then afraid of trusting to the post the paper that Way was sending him. He had found at Belfont's or Lemercier's some thin textureless transfer paper, thin as tissue paper, which delighted him, though it was difficult to work on. When he was doing the Mallarmé, he put the paper down on a roughish book cover. He liked the grain the cover gave him, for it was not mechanical, and, when the grain seemed to repeat itself, he would shift the drawing, and thus get a new surface. I do not know whether he used this thin paper to any extent, but he said he found it delightful, if difficult, to work on. He used that afternoon a tiny bit of lithographic chalk, holding it in his fingers, and not in a crayon-holder as lithographers do.
"The next day, he took me to the printers, Belfont's and Lemercier's, where he introduced me to M. Duchâtel and M. Marty, who was preparing L'Estampe Originale, devoting himself to the revival of artistic lithography in France. As I remember, the talk was technical, when not of the wonders of the apartment in the Rue du Bac—where 'Peace threatens to take up her abode in the garden of our pretty pavilion,' Mr. Starr quotes Whistler as saying—and the studio in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, which I did not see until later on. He was also planning his colour lithographs, and he explained to me his methods, though very few colour-prints were made until the next year. He also told me what he thought of printing etchings in colour—that it was abominable, vulgar, and stupid. Good black or brown ink, on good old paper, had been good enough for Rembrandt, it was good enough for him, and it ought to be good enough in the future for the few people who care about etching. To-day, when the world is swamped with the childish print in colour and the preposterous big copper plate, it may be well to remember Whistler's words. His reason for rejecting the etching in colour is as simple and rational as his reason for making the lithograph in colour. Lithography is a method of surface printing; the colour, rolled on to the surface of the stone, is merely rubbed on to, and scraped off on, the paper. In etching or engraving, the colour is first hammered into the engraved plate with a dabber and then forced out by excessive pressure, fatal to any but the strongest or purest of blacks and browns; and colours, whether printed from one plate or a dozen, must have the freshness, the quality, squeezed out of them."
He was back in London at the end of December (1892) eating his Christmas dinner with his future brother-in-law. He stayed only a few days, but long enough to arrange to show Lady Meux: White and Black in the first exhibition of the Portrait Painters at the Grafton Gallery, early in 1893, and a number of his Venice etchings with the destroyed plates at the Fine Art Society's.
"We were again in Paris for the Salon of 1893, and found Whistler living in the Rue du Bac. Beardsley, MacColl, and 'Bob' Stevenson were with us. MacColl and I went to see Whistler in the new studio. It was at the top of one of the highest buildings in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, No. 86. As the concierge said, in directing visitors, 'On ne peut pas aller plus loin que M. Vistlaire!' The climb always seemed to me endless, and must have done much harm to Whistler's weak heart, though benches were placed on some of the landings where, if he had time, he could rest. When we got to the sixth storey MacColl knocked. There was a rapid movement across the floor, and the door was opened a little. Whistler held his palette and brushes between himself and us, and there were excuses of models and work. But MacColl felt the brushes, and they were dry, and so we got in.
"The studio was a big, bare room, the biggest studio Whistler ever had. A simple tone of rose on the walls, a lounge, a few chairs, a whitewood cabinet for the little drawings and prints and pastels; the blue screen with the river, Chelsea church, and the gold moon; two or three easels, nothing on them; rows and rows of canvases on the floor with their faces to the wall; in the further corner a printing press—rather a printing shop—with inks and papers on shelves; a little gallery above, a room or two opening off; a model's dressing-room under it, and in front, when you turned, the great studio window, with all Paris toward the Pantheon over the Luxembourg gardens. There was another little room or entrance-hall at the top of the stairs, and opposite another, a kitchen. On the front was a balcony with flowers.
