* * * * *
Whistler found that Mortimer Menpes, once his very dear friend, sketched in Chelsea. "How dare you sketch in my Chelsea?" he indignantly demanded.
A vigorous attack on Mr. Menpes then followed in the press. One of the first articles began in this style, Menpes, of course, being an Australian: "I can only liken him to his native kangaroo—a robber by birth—born with a pocket!" "He is the claimant of lemon yellow"—a color to which Mr. Whistler deemed he had the sole right; and when he thought he had pulverized him in the press (it was soon after the Parnell Commission, when Pigott, the informer, had committed suicide in Spain), Whistler one evening thrust this pleasant note into Mr. Menpes's letter-box, scrawled on a half-sheet of paper, with the well-known butterfly cipher attached:
"You will blow your brains out, of course. Pigott has shown you what to do under the circumstances, and you know the way to Spain. Good-by!"
Speaking at a meeting held to complete the details of a movement for the erection of a memorial to Whistler, Lord Redesdale gave a remarkable account of the artist's methods of work. "One day when he was to begin a portrait of a lady," said Lord Redesdale, "the painter took up his position at one end of the room, with his sitter and canvas at the other. For a long time he stood looking at her, holding in his hand a huge brush as a man would use to whitewash a house. Suddenly he ran forward and smashed the brush full of color upon the canvas. Then he ran back, and forty or fifty times he repeated this. At the end of that time there stood out on the canvas a space which exactly indicated the figure and the expression of his sitter."
This portrait was to have belonged to Lord Redesdale, but through circumstances nothing less than tragic it never came into his possession. There were bailiffs in the house when it was finished. This was no novelty to Whistler. He only laughed, and, laughing, made a circuit of his studio with a palette-knife, deliberately destroying all the pictures exposed there. The portrait of the lady was among them.
* * * * *
Moncure D. Conway in his autobiography relates this:
"At a dinner given to W.J. Stillman, at which Whistler (a Confederate) related with satisfaction his fisticuffs with a Yankee on shipboard, William Rossetti remarked: 'I must say, Whistler, that your conduct was scandalous.' Stillman and myself were silent. Dante Gabriel Rossetti promptly wrote:
"'There is a young artist called Whistler,
Who in every respect is a bristler;
A tube of white lead
Or a punch on the head
Come equally handy to Whistler.'"