ROSE AND GOLD LITTLE LADY SOPHIE OF SOHO
OIL
In the Charles L. Freer Collection, National Gallery of American Art
He intended to paint an Eve, an Odalisque, a Bathsheba, and a Danaë, the designs to be enlarged on canvas by his apprentices, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Addams, but this was never done. Suggestions were in the pastels of figures, for which he found the perfect model in London. When not in the studio, he kept sketching her from memory, and he was in despair when she married and went to some remote colony, but before she went he gave her some beautiful silver. These pastels are many and perfect. They are drawings on brown paper—studies or impressions of the model in infinite poses. In some she stands with her filmy draperies floating about her or falling in long, straight folds to her feet; in others she lies upon a couch, indolent and lovely; she dances across the paper, she bends over a great bowl, she sits with her slim legs crossed and a cup of tea in her hand, she holds a fan or a flower; but whatever she may be doing or however she may rest, she is but another expression of the beauty that haunted Whistler, the beauty that was the inspiration of the Harmonies in White and the Six Projects. Many poses are suggested in lithographs, etchings, and water-colours; none show greater tenderness than when she returned with her child. He put his own tenderness into the encircling hands of the mother holding the baby on her knee, he found the most rhythmic lines when, standing, she balanced herself to clasp the child the more closely to her. Nothing could be slighter than the means by which the effect is produced, the figures drawn in black upon the brown paper, the colour—blue, or rose, or violet—suggested in the gauzy draperies or the cap or handkerchief knotted about the curls. But they have the exquisiteness of Tanagra figures and are as complete.
All this work was done with feverish concern about mediums and materials and methods He usually sat now as he worked, and he wore spectacles, sometimes two pairs, one over the other. He was never so thoughtful in the preparation of his colours and his canvas. At last the knowledge was coming to him, he said again and again. And he was never more successful in obtaining the unity and harmony he had always sought, in hiding the labour by which it was obtained, and in giving to his painting the beauty of surface he prized so highly. Because in painting he tried to carry on the same subject, the same tradition, superficial critics accused him of repeating himself, or mistook his later for earlier works, like the critic of the Times who, in writing of his pictures at the International Society's Exhibition of 1898, referred to "old works ... among which The Little Blue Bonnet is the least known," a remark Whistler printed in the édition de luxe of the catalogue, with the explanation that the painting had come "fresh from the easel to its first exhibition," and that therefore "the 'plain man' is, once more, profoundly right, and we see again the advantage of memory over mere artistic instinct in the critic." The small portraits and marines of the nineties are as fine as anything he ever did. The fact that for all these pictures he used frames of the same size and the same design helped—unintentionally on his part—to confuse critics accustomed to the flamboyant vulgarity, utter inappropriateness, and complete indifference to scale in the frames of most painters. But then there are not half a dozen painters in a generation who have the faintest idea of decoration. Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes, and John La Farge are almost the only decorators whose names may be mentioned among moderns. Though some of Whistler's portraits are more elaborate, not one is more powerful or more masterly as a study of character, and therefore more individual, than The Master Smith of Lyme Regis. When it is contrasted with The Little Rose, the embodiment of simple, sweet, healthy childhood, and The Little Lady Sophie of Soho and Lillie in our Alley, the sickly atmosphere of the slums reflected in their strange beauty, and these again with the exuberant colour and life of Carmen, there can be no question of the variety in Whistler's later work, though a certain manner, that might have grown into mannerism, became more marked. There was a similarity in the general design. Most were heads and half-lengths, and, except in the finest, nose, eyes, and mouth were alike in character, and hands were badly drawn and clumsily put in. The colour was beautiful and he exulted in it, but at the very last he must have known as well as anybody that his power of work was leaving him.