The vista idea of representing a scene as if viewed through the frame of a doorway, which Whistler so frequently used in his etchings as in "The Lime Burner" and "The Garden," is strictly Japanese. One of his friends said that Whistler never objected to any one trying to copy his way of painting, but looked upon filching of ideas as grand larceny. This proves how ignorant we all are about our conduct of life. If anybody ever plagiarized ideas it was Whistler. The "T" shape of the "Old Battersea Bridge," in his nocturne of blue and gold, is almost an exact copy of a Hiroshige design. The same can be said of the branch of leaves protruding like a silhouette from the margin of his "Ocean," and the composition of several other nocturnes. But Whistler added something which no Japanese print suggests. He added light, atmosphere, distance and mystery.
Tate Gallery, London
NOCTURNE IN BLUE AND GOLD: OLD BATTERSEA BRIDGE.
Hiroshige relied entirely upon design and line, and he was not a good draughtsman at that, at least not in his figures. His human figures frequently look like miniature caricatures or curious little insects. His line lacks purity and sweep, but is more realistic and less conventional than that of his predecessors. His colour is crude in comparison with the older artists. His prints that were executed after the introduction of European aniline colours in 1850, with their streaks of vivid red and blue, are almost offensive to the eye. His earlier ones, when he was content in working in pale colours, in pale blue and black with just a suggestion of pink, are vastly superior. Later on he tried to learn from the Europeans, and strove for atmospheric effects, but always suggested it rather by design than colour. If he used colour for that purpose it went never beyond a simple wash.
Whistler sacrificed line almost entirely. He worked in big masses, shapes and silhouettes and made colour the principal attraction. The simplicity of design he borrowed from the Japanese, but the intimate charm of his colour he got from another art, the art of music. Many paintings of the latter half of the nineteenth century show this musical tendency. Chavannes, Cazin, our American landscape painter Tryon, even the Impressionists, try to produce with colour something similar to the effect of sound. It is either a resemblance of feeling in execution, or the desire to deliver us over to a mood like music. Generally both desires go hand in hand.
The painter, to accomplish this, must go back to the emotional elements of things, to view objects with primitive enthusiasm and to disregard all cumbersome detail. These qualities must dominate his conception, and his treatment must be slightly decorative. He must see things flat, in curious shapes, and then juxtapose and complement his colours in such fashion that they produce instantaneously a pleasant retinal image. In most paintings the subject matter attracts our attention first, and the appreciation of its technique reaches our emotion through a mental process. A Chavannes fresco and a Cazin landscape, on the other hand, appeal directly to our emotions. Henner, Corot, Carrière are musical, Leighton, Dagnan-Bouveret, Böcklin are not. Chavannes and Tryon construct their compositions like a composer his score. By applying parallelism of line and repetition of form and colour shapes with slight variation, they attempt to transpose musical conditions to the sphere of colour.
Cazin goes further than either. He comes nearest to Whistler. He actually tries to make the colour sing, not a composition of diversified interests, but a simple sweet melody that instantaneously produces a distinct lyrical emotion. In his best pictures he reproduces successfully the perfect harmony of a few fugitive tints, such as occur so frequently in nature by a combination of the evening sky and a shimmering surface of water, by a white cottage in moonlight, or desolate marshes against a starlit sky. In this, Whistler excelled. He advanced another step by using the smallest limit of colours possible, without obliterating form and subject matter. Although Whistler accentuated the breadth of vision, divided his space arrangement into as few planes as possible, juxtaposed rarely more than two colours, and made all objects appear shadowy and weird against a glimmering sky, it is astonishing how vibrant he kept his colour; the more so as his colours are laid on rather flatly, and, occasionally, so thinly that the canvas shines through. This, of course, helps the vibrating quality, but the colour tints contain so many subtle variations that they scarcely become discernible to the eye but merely conscious as a vague shimmer, like that of night and atmosphere themselves.
The colour combinations are frequently the same. Blue and silver, and blue and gold appear most frequently. Then there is brown with gold or silver, and a crepuscule in flesh colour and green, which was also the theme of "On the Balcony."
His subjects were chosen with great discretion. Outside of the "Valparaiso Harbour" picture, a "Southampton Water" and a "St. Marks, Venice," most were devoted to London. There is a Chelsea embankment in winter, a Chelsea in snow and ice, the Westminster Bridge, the Trafalgar Square in snow, and the old Battersea reach and bridge in three versions. Whistler never stopped work at a picture until it was as perfect as he could make it. Many of the pictures that are now on the market, mere scraps and fragments at ridiculous prices, he would not have allowed to go out of his studio. He had the conscience of the true artist, but he never went to the extreme. He knew when to stop, a quality which is exceedingly rare. He would never have spoiled a canvas as Maris and Ryder do. He worked very hard on most of his pictures, but they do not show it. The difficulties and deliberate slowness of execution are lost in the final result. "To say of a picture, as it is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view." He followed this maxim out to the letter. Industry was with him a necessity—not a virtue. Were you to ask me to define the charm of his nocturnes, I should say, I fancy that it lies in the delicious purity of their expression. The emotions which Whistler wishes to excite are those of visional pleasure, of subtle speculation and vague emotional joy. In him inspiration always prevailed over caprice. The picture had first to express the arrangement of colour entrusted to it, and was scarcely allowed any dash or extravagance of brushwork or form, unless they would form a part of his original plan and serve as a contrast or dissonance. He never added anything in his repaintings, but cut out one passage after another; he did not graft on, he pruned, for he meant nothing should remain but the most essential. If there was ever a man tormented by the accursed ambition to put the whole world into one picture, the whole picture into one tonality, and the whole tonality into one colour note, it was Whistler. It is difficult to understand why his work was ever criticized as being unfinished. When Burne-Jones, in a spirit hostile to Whistler's work, declared in the witness box at the Ruskin trial: "In my opinion ... a picture ought not to fall short of what has been for ages considered as complete and finished," Whistler retorted effectively: "A picture is completely finished when nothing more can be done to improve it."