The stories cannot be left out of Whistler's life as a student, for they lived in his memory. The English students brought back the impression that he was an idler, the French thought so too, and the English believe to-day that he was an idler always. And yet he worked in Paris as much as he played. His convictions, his preferences, his prejudices, were formed during those years. His admiration for Poe, a West Point man, was strengthened by the hold Poe had taken of French men of letters. His disdain of nature, his contempt for anecdote in art as a concession to the ignorant public, his translation of the subjects of painting into musical terms, and much else charged against him as deliberate pose, can be traced to Baudelaire. It is incomprehensible how he found time to read while a student, and yet he knew the literature of the day. With artists and their movements he was more familiar. He mastered all that Gleyre could teach on the one hand, Courbet on the other. He came under the influence of Lecocq de Boisbaudran, who was occupied with the study of values, effects of night, and training of memory. It is absurd for anyone to say that Whistler idled away his four full years in Paris.
The younger men in their rebellion against official art were not so foolish as to disdain the Old Masters. They went to the Louvre to learn how to use their eyes and their hands. There they copied the pictures, and there they met each other. To Whistler the Frenchmen were more sympathetic than the English, and he joined them at the Louvre. Respect for the great traditions of art always was his standard: "What is not worthy of the Louvre is not art," he said. Rembrandt, Hals, and Velasquez were the masters by whom he was influenced. There are only a few pictures by Velasquez in the Louvre, and Whistler's early appreciation of him has been a puzzle to some, who, to account for it, have credited him with a journey when a student to Madrid. But that journey was not made in the fifties or ever, though he planned it more than once. A great deal could be learned about Velasquez without going to Spain. Whistler knew the London galleries, and in 1857 he visited the Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester, taking Henri Martin with him. There was a difficulty about the money for their railway fares, and he suggested to T. Armstrong that he might borrow it from a friend of the family who was manager of the North-Western. "But have you paid him the three hundred francs he has already lent you?" Armstrong asked. "Why, no," Whistler answered; "ought that to make any difference?" And he consulted the friend as to whether it would not be the right thing to ask for another loan. From this friend, or somebody, he managed to get the money, and Miss Emily Chapman finds in her diaries, which she has consulted for us, that on September 11, 1857, Rose, her sister, "went to Darwen and found Whistler and Henri Martin staying at Earnsdale" with another sister, Mrs. Potter; "a merry evening," the note finishes. Fourteen fine examples of Velasquez were in the Manchester Exhibition, lent from private collections in England, among them the Venus, Admiral Pulido Pareja, Duke Olivarez on Horseback, Don Balthazar in the Tennis Court, some of them now in the British National Gallery.
Whistler once described himself to us as "a surprising youth, suddenly appearing in the group of French students from no one knew where, with my Mère Gérard and the Piano Picture [At the Piano] for introduction, and making friends with Fantin and Legros, who had already arrived, and Courbet, whom they were all raving about, and who was very kind to me."
The Piano Picture was painted toward the end of his student years in Paris, the Mère Gérard a little earlier, so that this agrees with Fantin's notes. In 1858, Fantin says, "I was copying the Marriage Feast at Cana in the Louvre when I saw passing one day a strange creature—personnage étrange, le Whistler en chapeau bizarre, who, amiable and charming, stopped to talk, and the talk was the beginning of our friendship, strengthened that evening at the Café Molière."
Carolus Duran writes us, from the Académie de France in Rome, that he and Whistler met as students in Paris; after that he lost sight of Whistler until the days of the new Salon, but, though there were a few meetings then, his memories are altogether of the student years. Bracquemond has recalled for us that he was making the preliminary drawing for his etching after Holbein's Erasmus in the Louvre when he first saw Whistler. Their meetings were cordial, but never led to intimacy. With Legros Whistler's friendship did become intimate, and the two, with Fantin, formed at that date what Whistler called their "Society of Three."
Fantin was somewhat older, and had been studying much longer, and had, among students, a reputation for wide and sound knowledge: "a learned painter," Armstrong says. M. Bénédite thinks that the friendship was useful to Fantin, but of the greatest importance to Whistler, on whose art in its development it had a marked influence. Mr. Luke Ionides, on the other hand, insists that "even in those early days, Whistler's influence was very much felt. He had decided views, which were always listened to with respect and regard by many older artists, who seemed to recognise his genius." The truth probably is that Whistler and Fantin influenced each other. They worked in sympathy, and the understanding between them was complete. They not only studied in the Louvre, but joined the group at Bonvin's studio to work from the model under Courbet.
With Courbet, we come to an influence which cannot be doubted, much as Whistler regretted it as time went on. Oulevey remembers Whistler calling on Courbet once, and saying enthusiastically as he left the house, "C'est un grand homme!" and for several years his pictures showed how strong this influence was. M. Duret even sees in Courbet's "Manifestoes" forerunners of Whistler's letters at a later date to the papers. Courbet, whatever mad pranks he might play with the bourgeois, was seriousness itself in his art, and the men who studied under him learned to be serious, Whistler most of all.
The proof of Whistler's industry is in his work—in his pictures and prints, which are amazing in quality and quantity for the student who, Sir Edward Poynter believes, worked in two or three years only as many weeks. It would be nearer the truth to say that he never stopped working. Everything that interested him he made use of. The women he danced with at night were his models by day: Fumette, who, as she crouches, her hair loose on her shoulders, in that early etching, looks the Tigresse who tore up his drawings in a passion; and Finette, the dancer in a famous quadrille, who, when she came to London, was announced as "Madame Finette in the cancan, the national dance of France." His friends had to pose for him: Drouet, in the plate, done, he told us, in two sittings, one of two and a half hours, the other of an hour and a half; Axenfeld, the brother of a famous physician; Becquet, the sculptor-musician, "the greatest man who ever lived" to his friends, to the world unknown; Astruc, painter, sculptor, poet, editor of L'Artiste, of whom his wife said that he was the first man since the Renaissance who combined all the arts, but who is only remembered in Whistler's print; Delâtre, the printer; Riault, the engraver. Bibi Valentin was the son of another engraver. And there is the amusing pencil sketch of Fantin in bed on a winter day, working away in his overcoat, muffler, and top hat, trying to keep warm: one kept among a hundred lost. The streets where Whistler wandered, the restaurants where he dined, became his studios. At the house near the Rue Dauphine he etched Bibi Lalouette. His Soupe à Trois Sous was done in a cabaret kept by Martin, whose portrait is in the print at the extreme left, and who was famous in the Quarter for having won the Cross of the Legion of Honour at an earlier age than any man ever decorated, and then promptly losing it. Mr. Ralph Thomas says: "While Whistler was etching this, at twelve o'clock at night, a gendarme came up to him and wanted to know what he was doing. Whistler gave him the plate upside down, but officialism could make nothing of it."
There is hardly one of these etchings that is not a record of his daily life and of the people among whom he lived, though to make it such a record was the last thing he was thinking of.