CHAPTER XI
WHISTLER AND CECIL LAWSON
Apart from Burne-Jones, whose gathered works, the fruit of many years’ labour, naturally occupied the dominant place in the first exhibitions of the Grosvenor Gallery, there were two painters, Whistler and Cecil Lawson, whose pictures made it in their different ways notable and interesting.
At that time Whistler’s claims as an artist were not seriously entertained beyond the limits of a very narrow circle. I had known him personally for some little time, and had included his work in that series of articles written in 1873 to which reference has already been made. Writing of him then, I had said, “Opinions as to his merits differ widely enough, but there is nothing vague or uncertain about them. He is either blamed or praised heartily, and for the most part he is heartily blamed.
“Persons who do not admire his pictures are rather disposed to regard them in the light of a personal insult, and to behave as though the painter had deliberately intended to cause annoyance. The consequence is that Mr. Whistler receives more abuse than any other painter, and abuse of a kind that implies something also of pity; for when he is not regarded in the light of a wilful wrong-doer, his work is accepted as the expression of a defective intelligence.”
These sentences, I think fairly enough, represent Mr. Whistler’s position at that time, nor had the public estimate of his powers greatly changed when the Grosvenor Gallery was established in 1877.
It is not necessary now to fight over again that battle that was waged by some of us on his behalf. To me it was never difficult to appreciate at their true value the distinguished qualities of his art; and at this time of day his claims are so widely and so loudly announced, that it is sometimes difficult for those who admired him first to keep pace with his later worshippers.
About the year 1876 I had written a notice of the exhibition of his work held in Pall Mall which had greatly pleased him, and when he was decorating the late Mr. Leyland’s house in Prince’s Gate I used often to go down while he was at work, and during the luncheon hour—which was an improvised meal daintily set out under Whistler’s order in the empty house—our talk used to roam widely over things of Art and Life, for Whistler was as acute in his perception of the foibles of character as he was fastidious and exacting in the execution of even the lightest of his designs.
Whistler’s public attitude was one of uncompromising hostility to all critics. For him Art was always a thing exclusively for the expert, and he regarded the intrusion of any comment, unless it proceeded from a brother craftsman, as not only futile but mischievous. This was a very natural attitude in view of the special gifts he possessed, for he was above all things a man of the “métier,” conceiving Art as a thing isolated and detached from thoughts that found expression in other mediums, a thing only to be judged by its own exclusive laws which he deemed could not be fully interpreted save by the artist himself.
But he had even in this respect his little human weaknesses, and the praise which I had bestowed upon his work on more than one occasion brought from him a warm letter of appreciation, the existence of which I think he afterwards forgot; for I remember at a dinner-party, during the later days of our friendship, when he was denouncing, with his accustomed liberty of speech, that hated tribe of which I had been a member, I ventured softly from the other end of the table to interject the remark, “Ah yes, Jimmy, but you didn’t always think so,” and then upon the top of a reiterated expression of his contempt for those who wrote about Art, I reminded him of my possession of a little letter which I had been very happy to receive and was well content to preserve.
And so the incident closed with some graceful and half-jesting reference on his part to my superior claims, which he had always, of course, as he declared, impliedly excepted from his general condemnation of the class.