I PASS from the brief mention of a dignified artist, high of soul—whose work is charged with reverie, grandeur, admonishment—to the consideration of an artist little concerned, in emotional or reflective or didactic way at least, with Humanit fortunes, but the most skilled wielder of the etching-needle whom the world has seen since Rembrandt.
Mr. Whistle scarcely sympathetic attitude towards his kind may be occasioned in part by the conviction that it is his kin most urgent business to be concerned with his prints, and his knowledge that this conviction of his own—if thus I dare to call it—has not, until the last few years, been largely shared by other people. Popular he could not be; or scarcely in his own time. A Sarasate, with his music, attracts the world; but in pictorial art of every sort the virtuoso appeals only to his brethren. His “brethren”—his real brethren—are quite as likely indeed to be connoisseurs as fellow-workmen. But “brethren” shall be the word. And it is such who—some of them for more than thirty years, and some of them since yesterday—have recognized the genius of Whistler.
Our admirable comedian, Mr. Toole, is—if I may recall the saying of one of his fellow artists—commonly supposed to have been born in every town of the English provinces, in which the receipts, when he visits it, do their part to justify that town in claiming him as a native. Not quite for the same reason there are towns which dispute with Baltimore the honour of having given birth to the artist of the “French Set,” the “Thames Set,” and the “Twenty-Six Etchings.” Mr. Whistler was born, anyhow, of American parents—I like Baltimore so much, that I hope it is only Baltimore that can fairly claim him—and it is stated to have been in July, 1834, that he came into the world.[2] American then by birth, or family association, he is to a great extent French by education, and his first dated etchings, of the year 1857, were wrought when he was a student in Paris. Along with a popular English draughtsman of Society, he was in the studio of Gleyre, and to Gleyre, for all that I know, he may owe something; but no debt is apparent in his work. A few etchings wrought in Paris, and a few during a journey in Alsace and Lorraine, and then in 1859 we find Whistler settled in London and busy with the laborious series of etchings of the Thames.
He was himself almost from the beginning, though it is possible to trace the influence of even minor Dutch etchers, or Dutch painters at all events, in such a tentative little work as “The Dutchman Holding the Glass,” and though in the nobler plates known as the “Rag-Gatherers,” “La Vieille aux Loques,” “La Marchande de Moutarde,” and “The Kitchen,” it is clear that Whistler in his conception of a subject was scarcely without reverent thought of the great masters of pathetic suggestion and poetic chiaroscuro—Rembrandt, De Hooch, and Nicholas Maes. But by the time he executed the most justly famous etchings of the Thames set—the most famous of the “Sixteen Etchings,” such as “Black Lion Wharf,” “The Pool,” and “Thames Police”—he was himself, wholly. He was in full possession of what may be called his earlier manner. Nay, in December, 1859—not many months after these things had been wrought with a minuteness of detail which the art of Van der Heyden or of Hollar could not have
J. McNEIL WHISTLER. “THAMES POLICE.”
excelled—we find in one unfinished plate of extreme interest and extraordinary rarity (“Paris: Isle de la Cité”) some union of his earlier realization with his later suggestiveness.
The early detail of Whistler, in the Thames etchings, is never for a moment dull. He puts down for us on the copper endless results of endless and interesting observation. The life of the River, “below bridge,” and the life of riverside London is all there—barge and bargee, crane and warehouse, wharf and chimney, clipper and wherry, and the sluggish stream, the flat horizon, the distant river-curve, the tower of Rotherhithe Church, rising perhaps from out of the remote and low-lying roofs. And, elaborate as the work is, it is never for a moment either fatigued or mechanical: it preserves inviolate the freshness and vivacity which it is the province of the etching to retain. Nor does the work of Whistler, either at this period or later, ever lose sight of that which, again, it is the etche special business to cultivate—the value of pure “line.” By “pure,” I do not mean Classic (Classic line has other functions): I mean the line that is expressive—that is set with a purpose; that, being laid, is not interfered with—the line that lives and that tells its story.
By 1863—as is shown by the exquisite “Chelsea Wharf,” with its quiet of the suburban afternoon, and by the admirable “Amsterdam,” with its houses, its shipping, its thin line of long flat coast under a wildish sky[3]—Whistler had thoroughly entered upon the work of his middle period. A manner more suggestive to the expert, and more economical to the artist, though received less readily by the first-comer, was by this time clearly upon him; and, with certain modifications, it has continued to this day. Perhaps it is most distinctly marked in that Leyland period—a period of the rare dry-points of the Leyland family—which, after a little interval, succeeded the period of the “Chelsea Wharf” and the “Amsterdam.” It is in its perfection in “The Model Resting” (1870), in “Fanny Leyland” (1873), and in “Dam Wood” (1875)—all of them rare, desirable, notable plates of the true Leyland period, in most of which, as in some of his later work, Mr. Whistler would seem—if I may put it so—to have painted upon the plate as much as drawn: to have sought, that is, painte as well as draughtsma qualities.
I endeavour to note the distinctions, but after some fourteen years of close study of Mr. Whistle works—and of fruitful enjoyment of their possession—I must still guard myself against expressing any marked preference for one period over another. The work of each period has its own qualities, and, since all Art is concession and compromise, the work of each period may have likewise its own deficiencies. Practically there has been no “bad time;” but at more times than one there have been—even from this gifted hand—unsatisfactory, unworthy prints.