"I first knew Jimmie Whistler in the month of August 1855. My younger brother was with a tutor, and had made friends with Jimmie. He was just twenty-one years old, full of life and go, always ready for fun, good-natured and good-tempered. He wore a peculiar straw hat, slightly on the side of his head—it had a low crown and a broad brim."
Whistler etched himself in this hat, which startled even artists and students, and became a legend in the Latin Quarter.
Mr. Rowley wrote us: "It was in 1857-8 that I knew Whistler, and a most amusing and eccentric fellow he was, with his long, black, thick, curly hair, and large felt hat with a broad black ribbon round it. I remember on the wall of the atelier was a representation of him, I believe done by Du Maurier, a sketch of him, then a fainter one, and then merely a note of interrogation—very clever it was and very like the original. In those days he did not work hard, and I have a faint recollection of seeing a head painted by him in deep Rembrandtish tones which was thought very good indeed. He was always smoking cigarettes, which he made himself, and his droll sayings caused us no end of fun. I don't think he stayed long in any rooms. One day he told us he had taken a new one, and he was fitting it up peu à peu and he had already got a tabouret and a chair. He told me tales of being invited to a reception at the American Minister's, but, as he had no dress suit to go in, he had to borrow Poynter's, who fitted him out, all except his boots. So he waited until the guests at the hotel had retired, when he went round the corridors, found what he wanted, and left them at the door on his return. It was more his manner and the clever way he told the tale that amused us.... I have his first twelve etchings, which he did in 1858. I never saw him after I left Paris that year. He was never a friend of mine, and it was only occasionally he came to see us at the atelier in Notre-Dame-des-Champs."
Whistler was intimate for awhile with Sir Edward J. Poynter, who scarcely seems to have understood him. To Poynter Whistler was the "Idle Apprentice." In his speech at the first Royal Academy Banquet (April 30, 1904) after Whistler's death, Poynter said: "Thrown very intimately in Whistler's company in early days, I knew him well when he was a student in Paris—that is, if he could be called a student, who, to my knowledge, during the two or three years when I was associated with him, devoted hardly as many weeks to study. His genius, however, found its way in spite of an excess of the natural indolence of disposition and love of pleasure of which a certain share has been the hereditary attribute of the art student." And this bit of insolence was the final tribute to his memory paid by British Official Art.
"Whistler was never wholly one of us," Armstrong told us. Whistler laughed at the Englishmen and their ways, above all at the boxing and sparring matches in their studios; "he could not see why they didn't hire the concierges to do their fighting for them." But he understood the French, and they understood him. He could speak their language, he knew Murger by heart before he came to Paris, and there got to know him personally. Mr. Ionides says that once, on the rive gauche, they met Murger, and Whistler introduced him. Whistler delighted in the humour and picturesqueness of it, and was always quoting Murger. The Englishmen at Gleyre's were puzzled by him and his "no shirt friends" as he called one group of students. Every now and then they palled, even on him, and he would then tell the Englishmen that he "must give up the 'no shirt' set and begin to live cleanly." The end came when, during an absence from Paris, he lent them his room, luxurious from the student standpoint, with a tin bath and blue china. The "no shirt friends" could not change their habits with their surroundings. They made grogs in the bath; they never washed a plate, but when one side was dirty, ate off the other, and Whistler had not bargained to make his room the background for a new chapter in the Vie de Bohèm. But this was later, after his adventures with them had been the gossip of the Quarter, and had confirmed the diligent English in their impressions of his idleness.
Among the French he made friends: Aubert, the first man he knew in Paris, a clerk in the Crédit Fonder; Fantin; Legros; Becquet, a musician; Henri Martin, son of the historian; Drouet, the sculptor; Henry Oulevey and Ernest Delannoy, painters. From Fantin we have notes made just before his death. Legros prefers to remember nothing, the friendship in his case ending many years ago. Drouet and Oulevey have told us almost as much as Whistler did of those days. When Oulevey first knew him, Whistler lived in a little hotel in the Rue St. Sulpice; then he moved to No. 1 Rue Bourbon-le-Château, near St. Germain-des-Prés; and then to No. 3 Rue Campagne-Première, where Drouet had a studio. When remittances ran out, he climbed six flights and shared a garret with Delannoy, the Ernest of the stories Whistler liked best to tell.
Mr. Miles writes us that he came to Paris in May 1857, with letters from Whistler's family and a draft for him: "At the Beaux-Arts he was not to be found, but I got his address. He had gone from that. I was in despair, but went to the Luxembourg, hoping to find some trace of him. In looking at a picture, I backed into an easel, heard a muttered damn behind me—and there was Whistler painting busily. He took me to his quarters in a little back street, up ten flights of stairs—a tiny room with a brick floor, a cot bed, a chair on which were a basin and pitcher—and that was all! We sat on the cot and talked as cheerfully as if in a palace—and he got the draft. 'Now,' said he, 'I shall move downstairs, and begin all over again—furnish my room comfortably. You see, I have just eaten my washstand and borrowed a little, hoping the draft would arrive. Have been living for some time on my wardrobe. You are just in time; don't know what I should have done, but it often happens this way! I first eat a wardrobe, and then move upstairs a flight or two, but seldom get so high as this before the draft comes!' How true this is I can't say, but it sounds probable and very like Whistler at that age—he was then about twenty-three or just twenty-four at most—May 1857. Then Whistler showed me Paris: I met some of his painter friends. I remember only Lambert (French) and Poynter (English)—now a great swell. Whistler didn't care much for Poynter at that time, but was witty and amusing, as usual. He dined with me at the best restaurant in Paris, which he had not done for a long time, and dined me, the next day, at a little crémerie to show what his usual fare had been, and, indeed, usually was when the time was approaching for the arrival of his allowance."
The restaurant to which Whistler and his friends usually went was Lalouette's, famous for a wonderful Burgundy at one franc the bottle, le cachet vert, ordered on great occasions, and more famous now for Bibi Lalouette, the subject of the etching, the child of the patron. Lalouette, like Siron at Barbizon, understood artists, and gave credit. Whistler, when he left Paris, owed Lalouette three thousand francs, every sou of which was paid, though it took a long time. To-day, unfortunately, such debts are not always discharged, and the charming system of other days exists no longer. They also dined at Madame Bachimont's in the Place de la Sorbonne, a crémerie, where Whistler once gave a dinner to the American Consul, and invited "Canichon," the daughter of the house, and bought her a new hat for the occasion—a tremendous sensation through the Quarter.
Drouet did not think that Whistler worked much. "He was every evening at the students' balls, and never got up until eleven or twelve in the morning, so where was the time for work?" Oulevey cannot remember his doing much at Gleyre's, or in the Luxembourg, or at the Louvre, but he was always drawing the people and the scenes of the Quarter. In the memory of both his work is overshadowed by his gaiety and his wit, his blague, his charm: "tout à fait un homme à part," is Oulevey's phrase, with "un cœur de femme et une volonté d'homme." Anything might be expected of him, and Drouet added that he was quick to resent an insult, always "un petit rageur." George Boughton, of a younger generation, when he came to the Quarter, found that all stories of larks were put down to Whistler. Mr. Luke Ionides writes: