Poets, the younger literary men, came in through the open door. Mr. Edmund Gosse, introduced by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, has described to us his impressions of the bare room with little in it but the easel, and of the small, alert, nervous man with keen eyes and beautiful hands who sat before it, looking at his canvas, never moving but looking steadily for twenty minutes or half an hour, perhaps, and then, of a sudden, dashing at it, giving it one touch, and saying, "There, well, I think that will do for to-day!" an astonishing experience to one used to tapestried studios and painters more industrious with their hands than their brains.
The fashionable world, royalty, crowded through the open door. Lindsey Row was lined with the carriages of Mayfair and Belgravia. Whistler was the fashion, if his pictures were not, and he could say nothing, he could do nothing, that did not go the rounds of drawing-rooms and dinner-tables. "Ha, ha! I have no private life!" he told a man who threatened him with exposure. And, from this time onward, he never had.
He knew what his popularity meant. It was among the numbers who gathered about him because he was the fashion, that he could not afford to have friends.
If the frequent use of the name "Jimmie" by people in speaking and writing of him implies a friendliness on his part with every Tom, Dick, and Harry, nothing could be further from the fact. His friends, who were his contemporaries, called him "Jimmie," but rarely to his face, and the rest who did once had not the courage to a second time. We remember a foolish youth who, meeting him at our table, addressed him in free and easy fashion as "Whistler." He said nothing. He only looked, but the youth did not forget the Mr. after that. Whistler was the last man to allow familiarity or to make friends. He understood how to keep at a distance those he did not know or did not want to know.
NOCTURNE
BLUE AND GOLD, VALPARAISO BAY
OIL
In the Charles L. Freer Collection, National Gallery of American Art