We have heard of this decoration from no one else. Probably it was overshadowed by the crimson silk damask and green velvet hangings, the gilded pilasters and furniture, the monumental chimneypiece, of which complaints were heard from every side. The sumptuousness of the background was disastrous to the pictures. Whistler's suffered less than others, but were not liked the more on that account. Before the private view (April 30, 1877), Sir Coutts Lindsay had expressed his disappointment in the Irving and the Nocturnes. At the private view the crowd gathered in front of Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, Millais, Leighton, Poynter, Richmond. The critics sneered at Whistler, or patronised him. The Athenæum grudged meagre lines to this "whimsical, if capable, artist and his vagaries." The Times smiled with condescension at "Mr. Whistler's compartment, musical with strange Nocturnes," wondered how Irving enjoyed "being reduced to a mere arrangement," and deplored the theory that, in practice, covered "an entire absence of details, even details generally considered so important to a full-length portrait as arms and legs. In fact, Mr. Whistler's full-length arrangements suggest to us a choice between materialised spirits and figures in a London fog."
But no criticism was so insolent as the notice of the Grosvenor which Ruskin delivered from his circulating pulpit, Fors Clavigera (July 2, 1877).
Ruskin, though social subjects engrossed him, was still the art critic powerful to the public, to himself infallible. He had made the Pre-Raphaelites, he set to work to unmake Whistler. Already he was attacked by the mental malady, the "morbid excitement" in Mr. Collingwood's words, that obscured the last years of his life; he had been very ill in the winter of 1877. Nothing else could pardon his malice and insolence. He reserved his chief abuse for Whistler's Falling Rocket at Cremorne, with the sudden burst of fire and shower of gold and detail disappearing in the illimitable darkness of night. That fireworks in a place of entertainment could have in them the elements of beauty was a truth Ruskin could not grasp, and with this wonderful canvas before him, he remained blind to the splendour of the subject and the mastery of the painter: "I have seen and heard much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."
Boughton, in his Reminiscences, tells that Whistler first chanced upon this criticism when they were alone together in the smoking-room of the Arts Club. "It is the most debased style of criticism I have had thrown at me yet," Whistler said. "Sounds rather like libel," Boughton suggested. "Well—that I shall try to find out!" Whistler replied.
Till now, his answer to abuse of his work had been the lash of his wit. But if critics had tried him by their stupidity, never, before Ruskin, had they outraged him by their venom. The insult appeared in a widely read print; he sought redress in the most public fashion possible in England, and sued Ruskin for libel.
The immediate result was that he found it harder to sell his pictures. To buy his Nocturnes was to be ridiculed, Mr. Rawlinson, one of the few who risked it, assures us. Whistler laughed away the new anxiety, and devoted more time to black-and-white. He had hoped to go to Venice, but the preparations for the trial kept him in London. And now Howell made himself as useful to Whistler as he had been to Rossetti:
"Well, you, know, it happened one summer evening, in those old days when there was real summer, I was sitting looking out of the window in Lindsey Row, and there was Howell passing, and Rosa Corder was with him. And I called to them and they came in, and Howell said: 'Why, you have etched many plates, haven't you? You must get them out, you must print them, you must let me see to them—there's gold waiting. And you have a press!' And so I had, in a room upstairs, only it was rusty, it hadn't been used for so long. But Howell wouldn't listen to an objection. He said he would fix up the press, he would pull it. And there was no escape. And the next morning, there we all were, Rosa Corder, too, and Howell was pulling at the wheel, and there were basins of water, and paper being damped, and prints being dried, and then Howell was grinding more ink, and, with the plates under my fingers, I felt all the old love of it come back. In the afternoon Howell would go and see Graves, the printseller, and there were orders flying about, and cheques—it was all amazing, you know! Howell profited, of course. But he was so superb. One evening we had left a pile of eleven prints just pulled, and the next morning only five were there. 'It's very strange,' Howell said, 'we must have a search. No one could have taken them but me, and that, you know, is impossible!'" There is a record of this period in the etching, Lady at a Window, with Rosa Corder, or Maud, by the garret window, looking at a print, the press behind her.
It was a period of what he called his "fiendish slavery to the press." There were new plates. In 1878 St. James's Street was reproduced by lithography in the "Season Number" of Vanity Fair. The Athenæum objected to it because it was "not done as Leech or Hogarth would have done it." The World mistook the reproduction for the original, and so invited from Whistler one of the letters following each other fast: "Atlas has the wisdom of ages, and need not grieve himself with mere matters of art." Adam and Eve—Old Chelsea has a special interest, for it marks the transition from his early manner in the Thames Set to the later handling in the Venetian. A plate was made from the Irving as Philip of Spain, the only portrait Whistler reproduced on copper, and it was not a success. His plates of Jo and Maud were never from pictures, though often studies for pictures he proposed to paint. The dry-point of his Mother has no relation to the portrait. He was bored to death with copying himself, he would say, and, twenty years afterwards, when he undertook a lithograph of his Montesquiou and failed, he said that "it was impossible to produce the same masterpiece twice over," that "the inspiration would not come," that when he was not working at a new thing from Nature he was not applying himself, "it was as difficult as for a hen to lay the same egg twice."
In 1878 he made his first experiments in lithography. His attention had been called to it by Mr. Thomas Way, who did more than any other man to revive the art in England. Lithography, appropriated by commerce, was almost forgotten as a means of artistic expression. In France, it was given over for cheaper and quicker methods of illustration; in England it was overweighted by the ponderous performances of Haghe and Nash, hedged about by trade unions, and reduced to the perfection of commonplace. Lithographers here and there preserved its best traditions and regretted the degradation. Mr. Thomas Way determined to interest artists again in a medium that had yielded such splendid results. He prepared stones for them, explained processes, and would not hear of difficulties. Some artists experimented, but lithography did not pay while the anecdote in paint fetched a fortune. Mr. Way appealed to Whistler, who tried the stone, grasped its possibilities, and was delighted. In his first five lithographs he did things never attempted before and found the medium adapted to him. He made nine this year on the stone, though his later work was mostly done on lithographic paper. He proposed to publish this first series as Art Notes, but there was no demand, and the plan fell through. The Toilet and the Broad Bridge were printed in Piccadilly (1878), edited by Mr. Watts-Dunton, and they had hardly appeared when the magazine came to an end. Neither Whistler nor lithography then meant success for any enterprise.
In 1878, the Catalogue of Blue and White Nankin Porcelain Forming the Collection of Sir Henry Thompson was published. Mr. Murray Marks and Mr. W. C. Alexander own delicate little designs of blue and white by Whistler for Mr. Marks, but never used. They were a good preparation for the drawings which, in collaboration with Sir Henry Thompson, he made to illustrate the Catalogue. Some are in brown, some in blue, reproduced by the Autotype Company. Nineteen of the twenty-six are by Whistler, simple and direct, the modelling in the drawing by the brush as the Japanese would have given it. As a rule there are neither shadows nor attempts at relief. The series is a refutation of the assertion that he could not draw. Whenever he attempted drawing of this sort, or etchings like The Wine Glass, he eclipsed Jacquemart and all his contemporaries. Worried, anxious, the libel case hanging over him, his debts increasing, the general distrust in his work growing, Whistler, nevertheless, gave to the catalogue his usual care. We have seen another set of the drawings, which differ slightly from those reproduced, and with which, evidently, he was not satisfied. The book was edited by Mr. Murray Marks, and issued by Messrs. Ellis and White, of 29 New Bond Street, in May, and Mr. Marks exhibited the drawings and the porcelain, with the book, in his shop, 395 Oxford Street. The show was not a success, the book was a loss, though only two hundred and twenty copies were printed. Now it is almost impossible to get.