[T. R. Annan and Sons, photo
"THE THAMES IN ICE."
Later, too, visitors to the winter exhibitions of oil pictures at the Dudley Gallery were surprised by certain "Nocturnes," visions of the Thames in misty twilight with shadowy bridges and ghostly figures and gliding barges, illuminated by twinkling golden lights; these were set in moulded frames of unusual refinement, in green and other tones of gold to suit the key of colour in the picture, and painted on the flat with decorative patterns of a Japanese character in dull blue, including a mysterious unit of pattern or mark, afterwards known as "The Butterfly," and used as a signature upon all Whistler's works.
Then there was a "one man show" in a gallery in Pall Mall (No. 48), opposite Marlborough House, in which "Old Battersea Bridge, Nocturne in blue and gold" loomed large, I remember, and the town was surprised by something fresh in the decorative arrangement of the exhibition, yellow and gray predominating, if I remember rightly, relieved with blue pots and palms. This is mentioned in the Life at p. 179. Then came the famous "Peacock Room" in Prince's Gate, which chiefly sustains Whistler's repute as what one may call a practical decorator. It is to be deplored that the room itself was not more beautiful in structure and arrangement, cut up as it was with fidgetty details, with pendants from the ceiling and shelves for china. Still, of course, the business of a decorator is to adapt his scheme to the place decorated, and certainly this was done quite thoroughly by Whistler, and the blue and gold scheme was worked out very consistently and ingeniously upon the theme of the peacock.
It seems rather pitiful to read of the miserable squabbles over the money, and the personalities and petty spite, however seasoned with the wit of the artist, which seemed to raise a cloud of dust around every transaction in which Whistler was concerned.
A little later, at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, he is in the limelight again, and this time is fallen foul of by John Ruskin.
Much as one may owe to that great writer, and while, however biassed or occasionally mistaken, the wholesome and ennobling influence of his work on the whole must be acknowledged, there could be no justification for his very injudicious and uncritical pronouncement upon that nocturne of Whistler's, but it only meant that Ruskin, as might be supposed, was utterly out of sympathy with that form of art, and did not understand it.
Yet great as was the provocation, it would surely have been more dignified for the artist attacked to have let the words recoil upon the writer, and to have confidently awaited the verdict of time, rather than to have dragged the matter into a law-court to be made game of by counsel, judge, and jury, an utterly incompetent tribunal to form any serious opinion upon a question of art.
