NOCTURNE IN GRAY AND GOLD: CHELSEA, SNOW.
And for this finish he tried incessantly. There was never an artist who was more conscientious and more ardently striving for perfection than he. He sometimes tried experiments with different mediums in oil painting. At one time he used benzine to thin the colours, another time kerosene. He would cover a large canvas all over with the latter, in order to bring out the dried tints, before he started to repaint or overpaint. And he said to Clifford Adams, his last apprentice, "In the morning we may not succeed in getting the direct relation of colour, but at noon it may become more harmonious and at sundown we might strike just the right thing." And so he worked, day after day and year after year, on his pictures, until every trace of labour was obliterated and the picture had become a masterpiece. "A masterpiece that would appear "as a flower" to the painter—perfect in its bud as in its bloom—with no reason to explain its presence, no mission to fulfil; a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist—a puzzle to the botanist—an accident of sentiment to the literary man."
This flatly contradicts the general idea rampant among painters that he furnished his paintings au premier coup. His friends endorse the denial. Mr. R. A. Canfield has seen not less than sixteen changes of background to one portrait, "and heaven knows how many more that were not counted." Whenever he was dissatisfied with a painting, he started a new canvas until he finally realized the task he had attempted. In that sense his colleagues are right, his pictures look as if they were painted au premier coup but it was a roundabout way. It is impossible to advance any theory about his technique. All his pictures are painted in varying thicknesses of paint, in varying degrees of liquidity of paint, in varying smoothness and roughness, in few or many sittings, in fact, in the varying technique which alone can correspond to moods of so great a painter and the circumstances of each picture.
The only thing which has any semblance to a constant method is a moderate adherence, in his portraits at least, to the old way of painting from dark to light which, in the final painting, in overlapping pieces of paint, as in the case of most oil paintings until recently, results in the thickening of the paint towards the light.
There are scarcely more than sixteen finished nocturnes on record. Of these, most are masterpieces, or would pass as belonging to the best of his works. And as he worked at them ever since he returned from Valparaiso in 1866 and held the first important exhibition of nocturnes at the Dowdswell Gallery, and in Paris (in the Rue Sèze) not previous to 1883, when quite a number were still unfinished, we are astonished at the small output. But masterpieces are scarce. And if a painter can be credited with two or three every year he is a hero in his profession.
The importance of the nocturne in Whistler's own career, everybody must realize who is familiar with his work. They add to his personality a delicious flavour that even his lithographs and large paintings do not grant in the same manner. It was to him an instrument that obeyed his slightest wishes. It was art, at once aristocratic, delicate, of high finish and moreover imbued with an individual rhythm and the poetry of nature.
