He was only beginning to know and to understand, he told us. All that had gone before was experimental.
There were new portraits. In 1897 he had begun one of Mr. George Vanderbilt—"The Modern Philip"—a full-length in riding habit, whip in hand, standing against a dark background. The canvas was sent from Paris to London, just as Whistler and Vanderbilt happened to be in one place or the other. Not one of his portraits of men interested Whistler so much; certainly not one was finer when we first saw it in London, but it was a wreck in the Paris Memorial Exhibition of 1905. Like others of this period, it had been worked over. He painted Mrs. Vanderbilt, Ivory and Gold, shown in the Salon of 1902, one of the first of the several ovals he was now doing. Carmen, his model, sat. Portraits started a year or so later were of his brother-in-law, Mr. Birnie Philip, and of Mr. Elwell, an American painter whom he had known for some time. In May 1898, in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, he showed us the full-length of himself in long overcoat, called Gold and Brown in the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 and, as we have said, never seen afterward. We own a pen-drawing he made of it. It was far from successful, and before he finished it Miss Marian Draughn, an American, began to pose for him—his "Coon Girl" he called her. She was sent to him by Gibson and Phil May.
He painted many children. He loved children. Ernest G. Brown remembered Whistler's thoughtfulness and consideration when his daughter sat for Pretty Nelly Brown, one of the most beautiful of the series. We have the same story from Mr. Croal Thomson, of whose daughter, Little Evelyn, Whistler made a lithograph. When he went to her father's house at Highgate, Evelyn would run to meet him with outstretched hands, her face lifted to be kissed, and while he worked the other children would come and look on. Mr. Alan S. Cole has told us that once Whistler found his three little daughters decorating the drawing-room and hanging up a big welcome in flowers for their mother, who was to return. He forgot what he had come for and helped, as eager and excited as they, and stayed until Mrs. Cole arrived. He was walking from the Paris studio one day with Mrs. Clifford Addams and saw some children playing; he made her stop, "I must look at the babbies," he said, "you know, I love the babbies!" Later, during his last illness, he liked to have Mrs. Addams' own little girl, Diane, in the studio. And there are portraits of Brandon Thomas' baby and Master Stephen Manuel that show his pleasure in painting his small sitters. The children of the street adored him; the children of Chelsea and Fitzroy Street, who were used to artists, knew him well. There was one he was for ever telling us about, of five or six, who frightened while she fascinated him. "I likes whusky," she confided one day when she was posing, "and I likes Scoatch best!" She described her Christmas at home: "Father 'e was drunk, mother was drunk, sister was drunk, I was drunk, and we made the cat drunk, too!" A still younger child gave him sittings, a baby of not more than three, the model for many of the pastels. She and her mother were resting one afternoon, Whistler watching her every movement. "Really," he said, "you are a beautiful little thing!" She looked up at him, "Yes, I is, Whistler," she lisped. And there is the old story: "Where did you come from, Mr. Whistler?" "I came from on high, my dear." "H'm, never should have thought it," said the child; "shows how we can deceive ourselves." But his popularity with children did not help him one Sunday afternoon, the only time it is possible to sketch with comfort in the City, when he went with J. to make a study of Clerkenwell Church tower, which was about to be restored. They drove to the church, but the light was bad and the colour not right, so they wandered off to Cloth Fair—until a little while ago the most perfect, really the only, bit of old London. Though Whistler had worked there many times, this afternoon the children did not approve of him. After a short encounter in which they, as always, got the better, Whistler and J. retired to another cab, followed by any refuse that came handy. But the children he painted, The Little Rose of Lyme Regis, The Little Lady Sophie of Soho, Lillie in our Alley, the small Italian waifs and strays, were his friends, and no painter ever gave the grace and feeling of childhood, or of girlhood as in Miss Woakes, more sympathetically.
He was as absorbed in a series of nudes. Few of his paintings towards the end satisfied him so entirely as the small Phryne the Superb, Builder of Temples, which he sent to the International in 1901 and to the Salon in 1902. The first time he showed it to us he asked:
"Would she be more superb—more truly the builder of Temples—had I painted her what is called life-size by the foolish critics who bring out their foot-rule? Is it a question of feet and inches when you look at her?"
BLUE AND CORAL THE LITTLE BLUE BONNET
OIL
Formerly in the possession of Wm. Heinemann, Esq.