"My picture of a Harmony in Grey and Gold is an illustration of my meaning—a snow scene with a single black figure and a lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. All that I know is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture. Now this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp. They say, 'Why not call it "Trotty Veck," and sell it for a round harmony of golden guineas?'"

Lord Redesdale told us that it was he who suggested this title, gaily. Whistler assured another of his friends that he had only to write "Father, dear Father, come home with me now" on the painting for it to become the "picture of the year." Subject, sentiment, meaning were for him in the night itself—the night in its loveliness and mystery. There is no doubt that he carried tradition further and made greater advance in the Nocturnes than in any of his paintings. The subjects are the simplest—factories, bridges, boats and barges, shops, gardens—but in his hands they became things of beauty that will live for ever. The Nocturnes are not all moonlights; we remember only a few in which the moon appears, some are illumined only by flickering lamplight. They are not invariably pictures of night, but at times of dawn or of twilight. Nocturnes, however, is the name Whistler chose for all, and by it they will always be known.

Footnotes

[6] See Chapter XXII.

CHAPTER XIV: PORTRAITS.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-ONE TO EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-FOUR.

While Whistler was painting the Nocturnes, he was working on the large portraits. The Mother was the first. We cannot say when he began it. He wrote of it to Fantin, promising to send a photograph, in 1871, but it was not shown until 1872. How many were the sittings, how often the work was scraped down or wiped out, no one will ever know. We have some interesting technical details from Walter Greaves. The portrait was painted on the back of a canvas, as J. saw when it was sent to the London Memorial Exhibition, as Otto Bacher saw when the picture was in Whistler's studio in 1883:

"I noticed that it was painted on the back of a canvas, on the face of which was the portrait of a child. My remark, 'Why, you have painted your mother on the back of a canvas!' received simply the reply: 'Isn't that a good surface?'"

There was scarcely any paint used, Greaves says, the canvas being simply rubbed over to get the dress, and, as at first the dado had been painted across the canvas, it shows through the skirt. Harper Pennington says that the canvas, being absorbent, was stained all through from the painting on the face. But this does not alter Greaves' statement. That wonderful handkerchief in the tired old hands, Greaves describes as "nothing but a bit of white and oil."

What Whistler wanted was to place upon canvas a beautiful arrangement, a beautiful pattern, of colour and line. No painter since Hals and Velasquez thought so much of placing his figure on the canvas inside the frame. No painter since Velasquez understood so well the value of restrained line and restrained colour. The long, vertical and horizontal lines in the background, the footstool, the matting, the brushwork on the wall, add quietness to the portrait, tranquillity to the pose that could be kept for ever; a contrast to the frenzied squirms preferred by his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Hamerton thought he must have found this pose, or the hint for it, in the Agrippina at the Capitol in Rome, or in Canova's statue of Napoleon's mother at Chatsworth. If Whistler found it anywhere, except in his own studio, it could only have been at Haarlem, where Franz Hals' old ladies sit together with the same serenity and are painted in much the same scheme. Whistler had been to Holland and seen the beautiful group, and he was haunted by it.