"And I have, Sir,
"The honour to be
"Your most humble obedient servant,
"J. McNeill Whistler."
After 1895 Whistler ceased to hold exhibitions. The death of his wife brought about a long silence, and little was heard of Whistler. He had laid aside his jester's bells and cap and ceased pamphleteering and posing in public. He had become a kind of recognized institution in the art world, occupying a place apart from the masses of his contemporaries. Men of very dissimilar æsthetic convictions agreed in regarding him as a painter of exceptional ability, and he had a solid and appreciative following.
We in America wondered what had become of him. Occasionally a newspaper notice informed us that he had taken up teaching, or false reports crossed the ocean that he had become a symbolist. He himself was inactive, as far as the public was concerned.
I suppose he was at last tired of notoriety and the cares of public life. He had played his part and had played it well. Intimate friends tell us that he worked as hard as ever. He still had many problems to solve, if for nobody else but himself, and was satisfied that he could afford to devote his time to them. Financially he was fairly well situated; but he spent money extravagantly, and the two residences and various studios he kept up in Paris and London proved at all times a heavy drain on his income, which was derived entirely from his art products. He left about ten thousand pounds, a rather small sum, considering the prices he received for some of his paintings.
His school in the Passage Stanislaw, opposite Carolus Duran's home, was neither a necessity nor a particular pleasure to him. He opened it for the sole benefit of one of his favourite models, Mme. Carmen Rossi, who, as a child, had posed for the painter. She received the entire profits and it is said that during the three years that the school existed she made enough to retire in comfort. The school was opened in the autumn of 1898 and closed in 1901. He was too impatient to be a good teacher; he simply came there and painted and the pupils saw him paint and learned what they could, just as did the apprentices of the Old Masters. He taught solely the science of painting, neither colour nor composition. He had an abhorrence of talking art, and one of the anecdotes he liked to relate was that he had known Rossetti for years and "had talked art many, many times but painting only once."
He even refused to discuss technicalities. There was no talk of pigments, mediums, varnish or methods of applying them. He worked with his pupils, that was all. Like the apprentices of old they had to pick up their knowledge themselves, and if he found something that he liked his usual praise consisted of "Go right on," or "Continuez, continuez." On the wall was tacked his second series of propositions which endorsed his constant advice to pupils: "If you possess superior faculties, so much the better, allons, develop them; but should you lack them, so much the worse, for despite all efforts you will never produce anything of interest." Good common sense, but, after all, a slight return for the tuition fee. It should have induced most pupils to pack up their paint boxes and return home.
As Leon Dabo, in his lecture on "Whistler's Technique" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has so well observed: "Nothing is more absurd than the notion, so widely promulgated by elderly maiden ladies who misspend their energies writing about paintings and painters from Cimabue to Whistler, that a work of art is produced as the logical result of an apprenticeship served in an art school. There probably is much juxtaposition of this belief—we all know the painters whose only reason for lowering intensely blue sky is because it is too blue; the painters who labour, heaping up chunks of paint until it looks 'right;' but with Whistler a canvas advanced in an entirely different manner. He knew scientifically that he could use only so much of a given tone if he wished to produce colour, and he knew what other tone to place in juxtaposition, what parts of the canvas must hold the spectator's eye, in varying degrees of interest, in order to obtain the effect he desired to give and its use in the butterfly, the exact spot of a sail on the ocean, a light on the horizon, all these, to many insignificant objects and spots, nevertheless do their work, either to re-vivify an otherwise large surface or to hold the eye momentarily interested, until the ambience was obtained. And this science—the effect of line and colour on the eye,—is practically unknown to painters, is untaught in our art schools. This mastery over his means and material Whistler possessed in a higher degree than any other modern painter."
In 1902 he once more took a house in London and selected Cheyne Walk, an old mansion covered with ivy, near the Thames in the Chelsea district, where he had spent so many years during the beginning of his career. Friends could not imagine why he came back from Paris to London, as he disliked the place, its climate and its art. They simply forgot that he was a lover of atmospheric effects, and that London fogs and the Thames were, after all, nearest to his heart. In the summer of 1902 he contemplated a short trip to Holland in the company of Mr. Ch. W. Freer, but was taken sick in Flushing. After consulting some doctors in The Hague, he recovered sufficiently to return to London and set to work, but only one year in the old haunts was granted him.
He had just entered upon his seventieth year when he died suddenly on July 17, 1903. He suffered from some internal complaint, the exact nature of which is unknown. He had felt ill for several days, but on the seventeenth his condition had so improved that he ordered a cab for a drive. On leaving the house he was seized with a fit, but recovered; a short while later he had another spasm, which killed him. He was interred (on the 22nd) in the family burial plot in the churchyard of the old church at Chelsea (which his mother had regularly attended), near the grave of Hogarth. The coffin, covered with purple pall, was carried to the church followed by the honorary pall-bearers and relatives on foot. The pall-bearers were: Sir James Guthrie (president of the Royal Scottish Academy); Charles W. Freer, George W. Vanderbilt, Edwin A. Abbey, John Lavery (of the R. S. Academy) and the art critic, Theodore Duret; all personal friends of Whistler's.