EAGLE WHARF (ETCHING).
Whistler has performed a brave deed. If he had done nothing else but to improve our taste in the arrangement of exhibitions he would be remembered for many years. He has done far more. He has set up the big ideal of simplicity. His eccentricities and harmonies of decoration may not live. There are many men working on the same problem all over the Western hemisphere, and his peculiar style will undergo many modifications and improvements, but we should never forget that he was one of the first who opened our eyes to a practicable and inexpensive way of beautifying our home and everyday life.
CHAPTER VII
VISIONS AND IDENTIFICATIONS
Although remarkably sure, efficient and successful in various branches of art, Whistler has to be ranked primarily as a figure painter. In these efforts centre his greatness. He is, however, only a figure painter in a modified sense. We look in vain for large and elaborate compositions. He achieved his fame as a portrait and single figure painter.
It is strange that a man who had the science of painting at his finger ends should limit himself to single figures. Perhaps he knew his limitations, or, the limitation of his peculiar view-point as to what painting should be and could accomplish. Possibly he went too far in his elimination. Who can say? An artist must be true to his own convictions, and the public and critics must accept, and, in time, learn to appreciate them. Analysis of an artist's work is interesting only as far as it helps one to find the right view-point for contemplation.
Whistler, of course, had no use for ordinary portraiture, as it has been practised for centuries. He felt, no doubt, that the time for idealization as well as realistic interpretation of likenesses had passed. No painter can surpass Van Dyke in the elegant delineation of men and women, or Franz Hals in the representation of instantaneous expression. Whistler wanted a characteristic attitude that expressed in a simple pose or movement an entire personality. But the purely technical problem fascinated him even more, to express himself forcefully in black and dull colours, to paint broadly and yet so delicately that no brushwork became visible, and to create the illusion of atmosphere and space around the human form.
His first picture of importance (started in 1859), "At the Piano," was also the first true Whistler, not only the Whistler we admire and cherish to-day but the Whistler who has exercised an influence on modern painting and who will live as one of the prominent figures in the history of art. I have rarely seen a modern interior treated with more charm and simplicity. A woman, apparently Lady Haden, in a quaint black old-fashioned gown, is seated at the piano, from which she seems to elicit some vague melancholy chords, while a little girl in white, in a pensive attitude, stands opposite her, in the curve of the instrument. The dark silhouette of the mother is beautifully balanced by the white form of the little girl. There is an astonishing number of horizontal lines in the composition, but somehow they are not noticed, at least they do not offend the eye. I believe the diagonal tendency of the figures counteracts all other lines. One peculiarity of Whistler's interiors and backgrounds is that they nearly always represent a straight wall. He rarely indulged in perspective arrangements. His aim was breadth and simplicity, and he avoided all cheap pictorial effect. Technically, it still shows the Stevens' influence—it could almost pass for a genre picture—but in poetical conception and the suggestion of a mystic atmosphere it already predicts all the accomplishments of the artist's prime.