Owned by Richard A. Canfield
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK AND BROWN: MISS ROSE CORDER.
The "Florence Leyland" portrait, painted in 1873—at The Brooklyn Museum of Art and Sciences,—is also much liked by painters. It always seemed to me a trifle dismal in tone. The greys have a muddy look and the background is too black and opaque. It is a study in greys and blacks. The dress, the floor, and the feather of the hat are grey. The hat itself, the gloves and the bow are black. Even the handkerchief and the white ruffles that fall over the gloves are grey. The design is elegant and visible, but swallowed up in the colour. Its success or failure depends upon your psychological appreciation of colours. If you like that particular combination you will admire the picture, and otherwise you will not, and no argument will persuade you to accept it as a masterpiece.
Whistler's unusually low key in the majority of his portraits strikes us as peculiar, even to this day. There are no gold, rose and mauve flesh tints of a Titian to be found on his canvases. "There is no bloom of flesh which emulates the gleam of a pearl or the luminous grain of a camelia." But the fault-finding is largely the effect of our being accustomed to high-keyed portraiture. Whistler explained this, in his drastic manner, in an article in the London World, July, 1886, which we quote in full:
"The notion that I paint flesh lower in tone than it is in nature is entirely based upon the popular superstition as to what flesh really is—when seen on canvas; for the people never look at nature with any sense of pictorial appearance—for which reason—by the way—they also never look at a picture with any sense of nature, but unconsciously from habit, with reference to what they see in other pictures.
"Now in the usual 'picture of the year' there is but one flesh that should do service under all circumstances, whether the person painted be in the soft light of the room or in the glare of the open. The one aim of this unsuspecting painter is to make his man stand out from the frame—never doubting that on the contrary, he should really, and in truth absolutely does, stand within the frame—and at a depth behind it equal to the distance at which the painter sees his model, and nothing could be more offensively inartistic than this brutal attempt to thrust the model on the hitherside of this window. Lights have been heightened, until the white of the tube alone remains—shadows have been deepened until black alone is left. Scarcely a feature stays in its place, so fierce is its intention of 'firmly' coming forth; and in the midst of this unseemly struggle for prominence, the gentle truth has but a sorry chance, falling flat and flavourless and without force. Whereas, could the people be induced to turn their eyes but for a moment, with the fresh power of comparison, upon their fellow creatures as they pass in the gallery, they might be made dimly to perceive, though I doubt it, so blind is their belief in the bad, how little they resemble the impudent images on the wall! how 'quiet' in colour they are, how grey and low in tone. And then it might be explained to their riveted intelligence how they had mistaken meretriciousness for mastery and by what methods the imposture had been practised upon them."
People on the whole prefer brightness to æsthetic gloom, and refuse to accept the unadulterated truth. "A beautiful picture! But I would not like to see my wife or mother painted that way," is the general verdict at a Whistler exhibition. And it includes people who should know better. Do not even learned critics excuse the low-keyed, ash grey tints of Velasquez faces by asserting that he wished to symbolize the doom of Spanish feudalism by their paleness? Ridiculous! A proud Spanish cavalier himself, such a thought would never have entered his head. He painted them with a bloodless enervated complexion, because they had that kind of complexion and because he, as a realistic painter, objected to any idealizing process.
It can, however, be safely stated that Whistler frequently went too far in his search for dark tonalities. But there was a reason for it. No primary colour is agreeable with black. If black is the favourite colour he must exclude yellow, red, and blue or paint them exceedingly low as Tissot has done in his "Prodigal Son" series. Yellow is the easiest colour to manage, as black impoverishes its tone. The secondary colours, like orange, green, and violet, lend themselves more readily to any scheme where black furnishes the prominent note, but they must be dull, obscure and possess no brilliancy. White, on the other hand, as Whistler so fully realized in his "Lady Meux, No. 1," will always produce by its extreme difference a harmony of contrast.
