Whistler's first set of etchings was published in November 1858. The prints were not the first he made after leaving Washington. On the rare Au Sixième, supposed to be unique, Haden, to whom it had belonged, wrote, "Probably the first of Whistler's etchings," but then Haden wrote these things on others, and knew little about them. A portrait of himself, another of his niece Annie Haden, the Dutchman holding the Glass, are as early, if not earlier. There were twelve plates, some done in Paris, some during the journey to the Rhine, some in London. There was also an etched title with his portrait, for which Ernest, putting on the big hat, sat. Etched above is "Douze Eaux Fortes d'après Nature par James Whistler," and to one side, "Imp. Delâtre, Rue St. Jacques, 171, Paris, Nov. 1858." Whistler dedicated the set to mon vieil ami Seymour Haden, and issued and sold it himself for two guineas. Delâtre printed the plates, and, standing at his side, Drouet said, Whistler learned the art. Delâtre's shop was the room described by the De Goncourts, with the two windows looking on a bare garden, the star wheel, the man in grey blouse pulling it, the old noisy clock in the corner, the sleeping dog, the children peeping in at the door; the room where they waited for their first proof with the emotion they thought nothing else could give. Drouet said that Whistler never printed at this time. But Oulevey remembers a little press in the Rue Campagne-Première, and Whistler pulling the proofs for those who came to buy them. He was already hunting for old paper, loitering at the boxes along the quais, tearing out fly-leaves from old books. Passages in many plates of the series, especially in La Mère Gérard and La Marchande de Moutarde, are, as we have said, like his work in The Coast Survey, No. 1. For the only time, and as a result of his training at Washington, his handling threatened to become mannered. But in the Street at Saverne he overcame his mannerism, while in others, not in the series but done during these years, the Drouet, Soupe à Trois Sous, Bibi Lalouette, he had perfected his early style of drawing, biting, and dry-point. We never asked him how the French plates were bitten, but, no doubt, it was in the traditional way by biting all over and stopping out. They were drawn directly from Nature, as can be seen in his portraits of places which are reversed in the prints. So far as we know, he scarcely ever made a preliminary sketch. We can recall none of his etchings at any period that might have been done from memory or sketches, except the Street at Saverne, the Venetian Nocturnes, the Nocturne, Dance House, Amsterdam, Weary, and Fanny Leyland portraits.
His first commissions in Paris were, he told us, copies made in the Louvre. They were for Captain Williams, a Stonington man, familiarly known as "Stonington Bill," whose portrait he had painted before leaving home. "Stonington Bill" must have liked it, for when he came to Paris shortly afterwards he gave Whistler a commission to paint as many copies at the Louvre as he chose for twenty-five dollars apiece. Whistler said he copied a snow scene with a horse and soldier standing by and another at its feet, and never afterwards could remember who was the painter; the busy picture detective may run it to ground for the edification of posterity. There was a St. Luke with a halo and draperies; a woman holding up a child towards a barred window beyond which, seen dimly, was the face of a man; and an inundation, no doubt The Deluge or The Wreck. He was sure he must have made something interesting out of them, he knew there were wonderful things even then—the beginnings of harmonies and of purple schemes—he supposed it must have been intuitive. Another Stonington man commissioned him to paint Ingres' Andromeda chained to the rock—probably the Angelina of Ingres which he and Tissot are said to have copied side by side, though a copy of an Andromeda by him has been shown in New York, and other alleged copies are now turning up. All, he said, might be still at Stonington, and shown there as marvellous things by Whistler. To these may be added the Diana by Boucher in the London Memorial Exhibition, owned by Mr. Louis Winans, and the group of cavaliers after Velasquez, the one copy Fantin remembered his doing. A study of a nun was sent to the London Exhibition, but not shown, with the name "Wisler" on the back of the canvas, not a bad study of drapery, which may have been, despite the name, another of his copies or done in a sketch class.
The first original picture in Paris was, he assured us, the Mère Gérard, in white cap, holding a flower, which he gave to Swinburne. There is another painting of her, we believe, and from Drouet we heard of a third, which has vanished. Whistler painted a number of portraits; some it would probably be impossible to trace, a few are well known. One—a difficult piece of work, he said—was of his father, after a lithograph sent him for the purpose by his brother George, and he began another of Henry Harrison, whom he had known in Russia. A third was of himself in his big hat. Two were studies of models: the Tête de Paysanne, a woman in a white cap, younger than the Mère Gérard, and the Head of an Old Man Smoking, a pedlar of crockery whom Whistler came across one day in the Halles, a full face with large brown hat, for long the property of Drouet and left by him to the Louvre. But the finest is At the Piano, The Piano Picture as Whistler called it. It is the portrait of his sister and his niece, the "wonderful little Annie" of the etchings, now Mrs. Charles Thynne, who gave him many sittings, and to whom, in return, he gave his pencil sketches made on the journey to Alsace.
Mr. Gallatin, in Portraits of Whistler, and M. Duret, in the second edition of Whistler, have reproduced an oil portrait entitled Whistler Smoking, which was bought from a French family in 1913. The most cursory glance at even the reproduction is enough to show that the portrait is devoid of merit, while the statement that it was hidden from 1860 to 1913 would require considerable further proof. The whole thing is but a clumsy attempt to imitate the Whistler in the Big Hat, as well as the etching of the same subject. Every part of it is stolen from some other work, down to the hand or handkerchief, just indicated, which is taken from the portrait of his mother. It is true that the signature is on the painting, but this no longer proves anything, as a signature is the easiest part of a work of art to forge.
The portraits "smell of the Louvre." The method is acquired from close study of the Old Masters. "Rembrandtish" is the usual criticism passed on these early canvases, with their paint laid thickly on and their heavy shadows. Indeed, it is evident that his own portrait, Whistler in the Big Hat, was suggested by Rembrandt's Young Man in the Louvre. To his choice of subjects, in his pictures as in his etchings, he brought the realism of Courbet, painting people as he saw them, and not in clothes borrowed from the classical and mediæval wardrobes of the fashionable studio. Yet there is the personal note: Whistler does not efface himself in his devotion to the masters. This is felt in the way a head or a figure is placed on the canvas. The arrangement of the pictures on the wall and the mouldings of the dado in At the Piano, the harmonious balance of the black and white in the dresses of the mother and the little girl, show the sense of design, of pattern, which he brought to perfection in the Mother, Carlyle, and Miss Alexander. There was nothing like it in the painting of the other young men, of Degas, Fantin, Legros, Ribot, Manet; nothing like it in the work of the older man, their leader, when painting L'Enterrement à Ornans and Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet. M. Duret says that Whistler's fellow students, who had immediately recognised his etchings, now accepted his paintings, which confirms Whistler's statement to us.
AT THE PIANO
OIL
In the possession of Edmund Davis, Esq.