Owned by Th. R. Way
PASTEL STUDY.
The only medium in which Whistler expressed himself without adding a decided note to individuality of execution, are his water colours. They have an easy flow, but the areas of surface seem too large for the slight treatment. The meaning of the motifs seems to be dissipated. They represent mostly street scenes, country views, the seashore and marines, charmingly translucent, but without suggesting a style, that developed the medium according to its resources. But whatever Whistler did was interesting. It is difficult to imagine a more delightful pastime than to look over a collection of his pastels, lithographs and aquarelles. They are carried out lightly, but with true touches of genius and joyous mystifying excursions into the dreamland of pictorial fancy, quite in the Whistlerian manner. No one, I think, quite so well fulfilled Whistler's own theory that an artist should see nature through the spiritual eye of an individual. Few painters were such frank interpreters of their own intimate moods.
Aside of all these works on record Whistler has scattered through the world countless scraps of drawings, themselves amply sufficient to make an artist's reputation. What a precious document we should have if their author were able to-day to give a list, as certain artists have done, a kind of _Liber veritatis_ of all the studies he has made and disseminated! But he has flung them far and wide, as the plum tree scatters its blossoms in approaching spring.
CHAPTER X
WHISTLER'S ICONOCLASM
It would be difficult to find in the whole history of art writing another case of a pamphleteer who became as famous with a few manuscripts as Whistler. Both the "Gentle Art of Making Enemies," edited by Sheridan Ford, and published in 1890 by William Heineman, London; Frederick Stokes & Co., New York; and Delabrosse & Co., all in the same year, and "The Ten O'clock," delivered in London, February, 1885; in Cambridge, March 24th; and Oxford, April 30th of the following year, and published in 1888, created a sensation. They scarcely embrace five thousand words of reading matter.