told his apprentice, Mrs. Clifford Addams, if he could see upon the untouched canvas the completed picture, he painted it; if not, he passed another night in looking at the subject. However, it was not two nights' observation alone, but the knowledge of a lifetime that enabled him to paint the Nocturnes. This power to see a finished picture on a bare canvas is possessed by all great artists. But the greater the artist the more he sees and the better he presents it.
Whistler said "Nature put him out," because the arrangement as he found it put him out; Nature is never right. Few painters have understood the art of selection, and here Hiroshige and the other Japanese were of use. He went to Nature for the motive, to the Japanese for the design. This was why he said Nature was at once his master and his servant. The Nocturnes looked so simple to a public trained by Ruskin to believe that signs of labour are the chief merits in a picture, that they seemed unfinished—just knocked off. Yet his letters to Fantin are full of regret for his slowness: "Je suis si lent.... Les choses ne vont pas vite.... Je produis peu parceque j'efface tout!" No one knew the hard work that produced the simplicity. In no other paintings was Whistler as successful in following his own precepts and concealing traces of toil. One touch less and nothing would be left; one touch more and the spell would be broken, and night stripped of mystery. To give the silhouette of bridge or building against the sky; the lines of light trailing through the water or leading to infinite distance; the boats, ghosts fading into the ghostly river; the fall of rockets through shadowy air—to give all these things, and yet to keep them shrouded in the transparency of darkness was the problem he set himself in the Nocturnes painted in the little second-storey back room at Chelsea. It was the night he saw and studied at Cremorne, darker, more mysterious for the sudden flare of the fireworks, for the glow in which little figures danced, for the hint of draperies passing in and out of the shadows—night that toned the tawdry gardens and their vulgar crowd into beauty.
Now everyone can see, and "night is like a Whistler," for Whistler compelled people to look at his pictures, until it has become impossible to look at night without seeing the Nocturnes. He painted the impression that night made on him, and the great artist, like the great author, moves people until they think they see things as he does. Even in that ever-quoted passage from The Ten O'Clock, he does not pretend to see Nature as people see her or as Nature seems to be; his concern is with the impression that Nature at night made on him, and in this he was an impressionist.
The brothers Greaves bought his materials and prepared his canvas and colours. "I know all these things because I passed days and weeks in the place standing by him," Walter Greaves has said to us. Whistler remade his brushes, heating them over a candle, melting the glue and pushing the hair into the shape he wanted. Greaves says that the colours were mixed with linseed oil and turpentine. Whistler told us that he used a medium composed of copal, mastic, and turpentine. The colours were arranged upon a palette, a large oblong board some two feet by three, with the butterfly inlaid in one corner and sunken boxes for brushes and tubes round the edges. This palette was laid upon a table. He had at various periods two or three; and at least one stand, with many tiny drawers, upon which the palette fitted. At the top of the palette the pure colours were placed, though, more frequently, there were no pure colours at all. Large quantities of different tones of the prevailing colour in the picture to be painted were mixed, and so much of the medium was used that he called it "sauce." Greaves says that the Nocturnes were mostly painted on a very absorbent canvas, sometimes on panels, sometimes on bare brown holland, sized. For the blue Nocturnes, the canvas was covered with a red ground, or the panel was of mahogany, which the pupils got from their boat-building yard, the red forcing up the blues laid on it. Others were done on a warm black, and for the fireworks there was a lead ground. Or, if the night was grey, then, Whistler said, "the sky is grey, and the water is grey, and, therefore, the canvas must be grey." Only once within Greaves' memory was the ground white. The ground for his Nocturnes, like the paper for his pastels, was chosen of the prevailing tone of the picture he wanted to paint or of a colour which would give him that tone, not to save work, but to avoid fatiguing the canvas.
When Whistler had arranged his colour-scheme on the palette, the canvas, which the pupils prepared, was stood on an easel, but so much "sauce" was used that frequently it had to be thrown flat on the floor to keep the whole thing from running off. He washed the liquid colour on, lightening and darkening the tones as he worked. In the Nocturnes, the sky and water are rendered with great sweeps of the brush of exactly the right tone. How many times he made and wiped out that sweeping tone is another matter. When it was right, there it stayed. With his life's knowledge of both the effects he wanted to paint and the way to paint them, at times, as he admits himself, he completed a Nocturne in a day. In some he got his effect at once, in others it came only after endless failures. If the tones were right, he took them off his palette and kept them until the next day, in saucers, or gallipots, under water, so that he might carry on his work in the same way with the same tones. Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt tells us that when she lived in Cheyne Walk, she remembers "seeing the Nocturnes set out along the garden wall to bake in the sun." Some were laid aside to dry slowly in the studio, some were put in the garden or on the roof to dry quickly. Sometimes they dried out like body-colour in the most unexpected fashion. It was a time of tireless research. He had to invent everything, though he profited by the technical training he had gained in painting the Six Projects.
Whistler first called his paintings of night Moonlights. Nocturne was Mr. Leyland's suggestion, as we have heard from Mrs. Leyland, and her son-in-law, Val Prinsep, stated in the Art Journal (August 1892), that Whistler wrote to Leyland:
"I can't thank you too much for the name Nocturne as the title for my Moonlights. You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics, and consequent pleasure to me; besides it is really so charming, and does so poetically say all I want to say and no more than I wish."
Whether to mystify, or because he saw something new in his pictures, Whistler repeatedly changed their titles, especially of the Nocturnes, and repeatedly exhibited different pictures with the same title. It is true, as Mr. Bernard Sickert writes: "such alterations made by the artist himself stultify the whole idea, and prove that the analogy with music does not hold consistently. Any musician would tell us that we could not change the title of Symphony in C minor to Sonata in G major without making it an absurdity."
That he should either not have realised this fact, or else have disregarded it deliberately, is the more extraordinary because every Nocturne represents a different effect rendered in a different fashion. Although he altered his titles, nothing offended him more than when others tampered with them or stole them.
The painting of the Nocturnes continued for many years, and in many places. But the greater number were painted when he lived at Lindsey Row, most from his windows, and few took him beyond Battersea and Westminster. He resented it when people suggested literary titles for them, and he put his resentment into words that "make history" in The Red Rag, one of the most interesting documents in The Gentle Art, published originally in the World (May 22, 1878):