The Relation of Art to Nature

by John W. Beatty

At the end of very many years of study and observation, Whistler’s sensitive appreciation and power of selection were extraordinary. The most subtle and harmonious qualities in nature made an irresistible appeal to him. He has described this faculty as the power to pick and choose. By the very choice of many of his subjects he was enabled to eliminate all insignificant details and thereby to render the harmonies of nature as they appeared to him. He described his method or mental attitude with reference to nature when he said: “As the light fades and the shadows deepen all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are, in great strong masses.”

This represents Whistler in the presence of subdued and gentle qualities in nature, but it was the same Whistler, without modification or change in his attitude with respect to nature, who rendered with such startling realism and absolute fidelity to truth in his marvellous etchings the shipping, the city, and the river Thames. Under the blazing light of noonday the masts and rigging of the ships, the forms and details of the hulls, even the tile upon the roofs of the city houses were distinctly seen. He recorded his impressions manifestly without the slightest deviation from the simple truth of form and value. No one who has studied Whistler’s set of the Thames etchings will for an instant dispute this statement. The quality of simple truth is so astonishingly present in every line and form in these works that no argument is needed touching this point. The Whistler who made these etchings, the Whistler who painted the “White Girl” and the “Girl at the Piano,” must be reconciled with the Whistler who painted the evening symphonies representing the river, the “Portrait of Sarasate,” and other works of subdued and gentle qualities. The simple truth is that Whistler was as faithful and scientific in the one case as in the other, and that the result depended upon his choice of subject, and the time, and effect observed. I am told that in his later period he sought after and discovered means of securing the more gentle aspects of nature; that he toned and diffused the light in his studio scientifically by the use of semi-transparent window curtains. However this may be, it is undoubtedly true that he did rely upon the effect actually before him and that he sought to represent the subdued effect in his studio or the gentle light of evening so beautifully described by him in his “Ten O’Clock.” It would be difficult to imagine a more beautiful pen picture than this description by Whistler. It indicates his love for the gentle and harmonious qualities in nature.

“When the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home; the workingman and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master—her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.”

Abbott Thayer

This power to select and represent the beautiful qualities in nature, a power which is the result of repeated efforts, has been defined by Abbott H. Thayer with rare skill and poetic beauty. “It is as though a man were shown a crystal, a perfect thing, gleaming below depths of water—far down beyond reach. He would dive and dive again, driven by his great desire to secure it, until finally, all dripping, he brought it up. But that in the end he could bring it—a perfect thing—to us, was possible solely because he had first seen it, gleaming there. Others might dive and dive, might work and labor with endless patience and endless pain, but unless they had first seen the crystal—unless they had been given this divine gift of seeing—this vision—they would come up empty-handed. The occasional so-called genius does not make the crystal, but he alone sees it, where it lies gleaming below depths of water, and by his effort brings it to us. The whole question is how absolutely, how perfectly, the artist sees this vision.”

“After the artist has lived, for a certain period, in worship of some particular specimen or type of the form of beauty dearest to him, this crystal-like vision forms, clearer and clearer, at the bottom of his mind, which is, so to speak, his sea of consciousness, until at last the vision is plainly visible to him, and the all-strain and danger-facing time has come for putting it into the form in which as one of the world’s treasures it is to live on.”

When asked whether the artist has ever been granted a vision of any beauty which is not based upon the beauty of nature, Thayer exclaimed emphatically, “No, no, no! I don’t see the slightest material for any such conception.”

And when the question was further put—granted that the artist has the gift of seeing beauty in nature to which others are blind, is his picture Art in proportion as he truthfully records the beauty of the nature that he sees? Mr. Thayer answered, “Yes. Everything in art, in poetry, music, sculpture, or painting, however fantastic it looks to people who are not far enough on that road, is nothing but truth-telling, true reporting of one or another of the great facts of nature—of the universe.”

The ability to see, as Thayer suggests, is the very foundation of the artist’s power. It is this power of seeing which enables him to discover truth and beauty, and it is the skill of the trained master which enables him to reproduce these for the delight and inspiration of his fellows.