THE FIDDLER (ETCHING).
It was Whistler who taught that painting was a science of colour manipulation. That the first requisite of a painter is to know how to paint. Everybody can learn how to draw and how to handle a brush. To explore the secrets of colour, to discern their influences upon each other, to render them atmospheric and musical, that alone is of vital importance. For painting should be a visual language that speaks directly and distinctly to the cultured mind. How many of the younger American painters (alas, our younger men have all passed the threshold of thirty if not of forty) really know their métier? Henri, Reid, Luks, Tarbell, Hawthorne, Clews, R. E. Miller, Lucas, who else? That is why Whistler's art is so exceptional and masterful. There may be other methods just as good as his; Monticelli, Maris, Mancini, Segantini, Renoir, Cézanne, etc., all have their peculiar way, but I believe that Whistler got nearest to the pulse beat of our age. Resolutely and tranquil, he carried an idea to its utmost logical conclusion, after once accepting its particular point of view. And that is why everything he did bears an unmistakable stamp of his own.
It was Whistler who proved that art was synonymous with hard work. Few painters will follow his example and spend a whole day trying to put in a high-light or to find the right place for a butterfly's wing, and go home at night satisfied with having made a few brush-strokes after altering them a hundred times, but these commercial travellers of art will never know the painter's pure delight, the contemplation of life, the aspiration to perfection, the lifting of beauty out of the dead pigment. Such worship of art, such absolute disinterestedness, such fidelity to painting cannot be too highly esteemed.
And it was Whistler who proclaimed that art cannot be taught but must be an inborn gift, that everything can be acquired by long practice save that one supernatural quality of genius which alone can transform a painter into a great artist. What is there in these pictures produced every year, here and in Paris and everywhere? Portraits, landscapes, ordinary delineations of prosaic scenes that may be painted with considerable skill and that may look pretty enough, but that are absolutely incapable of evoking a fine and subtle emotion. This, the men upon whose shoulders the black mantle of Whistler's muse may fall, must realize, that it is a vain endeavour—as futile as cloud shadows on a summer day—unless they know that they can hold her, "the capricious jade," as they possess the magic wand to call her.
NOCTURNE IN BROWN AND SILVER: OLD BATTERSEA BRIDGE.
This was the spirit in which Whistler conceived art. It had long faded out of European art. It was rapidly deteriorating in the Orient. Why could not a single man, even with the whole world against him, live up to some big ideal! To be an artist simply for one's own gratification. To fashion something beautiful simply because one feels like doing it. To purify one's mind by projecting into life what is accumulated there by some curious grace of nature. Whistler undertook the task, and created a new art form that may be destined to rule art for the next thousand years.