After two years of probationship as an ordinary member, in 1886 Whistler became President of the Royal Society of British Artists, an old-established and hitherto staid and conservative institution. His term of office was brilliant and exciting; he himself exhibited such wonderful pictures as the Sarasate, and his reputation attracted the most talented of the younger artists of the day. The correspondence which ensued when Whistler vacated the presidential chair must be sought for in “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.”
In Whistler’s work there is a curious yet indefinable influence of Japanese painting. In company with most of the Impressionists, he was influenced by those Impressionists of another race. This influence is to be observed in all modern painting since 1870, when artists first commenced to collect examples of the Japanese methods.
In his later years Whistler preferred the atmosphere of Paris to that of London, although he continued to visit occasionally the country he described as “humourless and dull.” The artist was thoroughly cosmopolitan, and was equally at home in New York, Paris, or London. His influence upon the art of to-day has been unmistakable, and one has little doubt as to its permanency. Whistler helped to purge art of the vice of subject, and the belief that the mission of the artist is to copy nature.
ALEXANDER HARRISON
Mr. Alexander Harrison is one of those numerous American artists who have settled in France, a natural result of French training and French sympathies. Inspired by Manet, influenced by Besnard, he has painted some of the most successful Impressionist work of the last fifteen years. One cannot agree always with Dr. Muther in his learned and not altogether satisfactory tomes, but his appreciation of Mr. Harrison is so delicate and just that it is worth reproducing. “In Arcady,” he writes, “was one of the finest studies of light which have been painted since Manet. The manner in which the sunlight fell upon the high grass and slender trees, its rays gliding over branch and shrub, touching the green blades like shining gold, and glancing over the nude bodies of fair women—here over a hand, here over a shoulder, and here again over the bosom—was painted with such virtuosity, felt with such poetry, and so free from all the heaviness of earth, that one hardly had the sense of looking at a picture at all.” The luminous painting of Besnard had here reached its final expression, and the summit of classic finish was surmounted. His third picture was called The Wave. To seize such phenomena of Nature in their completeness—things so fickle and so hard to arrest in their mutability—had been the chief study of French painters since Manet. When Harrison exhibited his Wave, sea-pieces by Duez, Roll, and Victor Binet were also in existence; but Harrison’s Wave was the best of them all.
IN ARCADY · ALEXANDER HARRISON
THE WAVE · ALEXANDER HARRISON