"The Académie was opened in October 1900 by a woman's life-class which was well attended. The school had been moved to an old building in the Boulevard Montparnasse, but shortly after Mr. Whistler was taken very ill and he was forced to leave England on a long voyage. He wrote a letter to the students that never reached them, then, from Corsica, another, with his best wishes for the New Century, and his explanation of the doctor's abrupt orders. The Académie was kept open by the Apprentice until the end of March (1901), but the faith of the students seemed unable to bear further trials, and after great discontent at Mr. Whistler's continued absence and a gradual dwindling away of the students until there were but one or two left, the Apprentice wrote of this to Mr. Whistler."
Whistler wrote from Ajaccio a formal letter of dismissal to the few students left, kissing the tips of their rosy fingers, bidding them Godspeed and stating the case that history might be made. The reading of the letter by the massière in the atelier closed the school, and an experiment to which Whistler brought enthusiasm, only to meet from the average student the distrust the average artist had shown him all his life. One of the last things he did before the close was to make an apprentice also of Mr. Clifford Addams, the one man who remained faithful. And in his case, too, a Deed of Apprenticeship was drawn up and signed.
The story of the Académie is carried on in the following letter from Mr. Frederick MacMonnies, concerning his connection with it:
"... I had always heard so much about his being impossible, but the more I saw of him the more I realised that anyone who could quarrel with him must be written down an ass.
"An instance of his rare straightforwardness and frankness in friendship occurred in the Carmen School. He used to come up to my studio just before breakfast, and we would go off to Lavenue's or the Café du Cardinal.
"One morning he said he had a great affair on hand. Carmen was going to open the school and he had agreed to teach, a thing he had always said was shocking, useless, and encouragement of incapables. He suggested I help him out with teaching the sculptor pupils and the drawing, so I gladly agreed.
"All the schools in Paris were deserted immediately, and the funny little studios of Carmen's place were packed with all kinds of boys and girls, mostly Americans, who had tried all styles of teaching.
"Mr. Whistler, having a full sense of a picturesque grande entrée, did not appear until the school was in full swing about a week after the opening, and until the pupils had passed the palpitating stage and were in a dazed state of expectancy and half collapsed into nervous prostration. The various samples of such awaiting him represented the methods of almost every teacher in Paris.
"He arrived, gloves and cane in hand, and enjoyed every minute of his stay, daintily and gaily touching very weighty matters. A few days after his arrival I went to the school and found the entire crew painting as black as a hat—delicate, rose-coloured pearly models translated into mulattoes, a most astonishing transformation. As time went on the blackness increased. Finally, one day, I suggested to one of the young women who was particularly dreary, to tone her study up. She informed me she saw it so. I took her palette and keyed the figure into something like the delicate and brilliant colouring, much to her disgust. When I had finished, she informed me, 'Mr. Whistler told me to paint it that way.' I told her she had misunderstood, that he had never meant her to paint untrue. Several criticisms among the men of the same sort of thing, and I left.
"Of course, all this was carried to Whistler, and a few days later after breakfast, over his coffee, he waved his cigarette towards me and said, 'Now, my dear MacMonnies, I like you—and I am going to talk to you the way your mother does (he used to play whist in Paris with my mother, and they made a most amusing combination). Now, you see, I have always believed there has been something radically wrong with all this teaching that has been going on in Paris all these years in Julian's and the rest. I decided years ago the principle was false. They give the young things men's food when they require pap. My idea is to give them three or four colours—let them learn to model and paint the form and line first until they are strong enough to use others. If they become so, well and good; if not, let them sink out of sight.' I suggested the doubt that their eyes might in this way be trained to see wrong. No, he did not agree with that. Anyway, I apologised, and said I was a presuming and meddlesome ass, and if I had known he was running his school on a system, I would have remained silent. If you could have seen the charming manner, the frank kindness and friendly spirit with which he undertook to remonstrate, you would understand how much I admired his generous spirit.