THE WHISTLER BOOK

WORKS OF SADAKICHI HARTMANN
Shakespeare in Art		$2.00
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L. C. PAGE & COMPANY 53 BEACON ST., BOSTON, MASS.

James McNeill Whistler
From the painting by Boldini

The
Whistler Book

A Monograph of the Life and Position in
Art of James McNeill Whistler, together with
a Careful Study of his more Important Works

BY
SADAKICHI HARTMANN

Author of "A History of American Art," "Japanese Art," etc.

With fifty-seven reproductions of Mr. Whistler's most important works

L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
BOSTON * * * MDCCCCX

Copyright, 1910,

By L. C. Page & Company.
(INCORPORATED)

Entered at Stationer's Hall, London

All rights reserved

First Impression, October, 1910

Electrotyped and Printed by
THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. Simonds & Co., Boston, U.S.A.

TO
THOSE PAINTERS
UPON WHOSE SHOULDERS
THE BLACK MANTLE OF
WHISTLER'S MUSE
MAY FALL

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Whistler Book

CHAPTER I.—INTRODUCTORY
WHITE CHRYSANTHEMUMS[1]

The white chrysanthemum is my favourite flower. There are other flowers, I grant, perhaps more beautiful, which I cannot help admiring, but the white chrysanthemum somehow appeals to me more than any other flower. Why? That is more than I can tell. The unconscious movements of our soul activity cannot be turned into sodden prose. What would be the use of having a favourite flower if one could give any reason for liking it? It merely reveals that part of our personality, not to be logically explained, which rises within us like the reminiscences of some former soul existence. There are colours and certain sounds and odours which effect me similarly. Whenever I gaze at a white chrysanthemum, my mind becomes conscious of something which concerns my life alone; something which I would like to express in my art, but which I shall never be able to realize, at least not in the vague and, at the same time, convincing manner the flower conveys it to me. I am also fond of displaying it occasionally in my buttonhole; not for effect, however, but simply because I want other people to know who I am; for those human beings who are sensitive to the charms of the chrysanthemum, must hail from the same country in which my soul abides, and I should like to meet them. I should not have much to say to them—souls are not talkative—but we should make curtsies, and hand white chrysanthemums to one another.

Whistler was busy all his life painting just such white chrysanthemums. You smile? Well, I think I can persuade you to accept my point of view.

You are probably aware that Whistler was opposed to realism. The realists endorse every faithful reproduction of facts. Also, Whistler believed all objects beautiful, but only under certain conditions, at certain favoured moments. It is at long intervals and on rare occasions that nature and human life reveal their highest beauty. It was Whistler's life-long endeavour to fix such supreme and happy moments, the white chrysanthemums of his æsthetic creed, upon his canvases. Have you never seen a country lass and thought she should be dressed up as a page—her limbs have such a lyrical twist, as George Meredith would say—she should stand on the steps of a throne, and the hall should be illuminated with a thousand candles? Have you never met a New England girl, and thought that she was ill-suited to her present surroundings, that she would look well only standing on the porch of some old Colonial mansion, in the evening, when odours of the pelargoniums and gladioli begin to fill the garden? Have you not noticed that a bunch of cut flowers which looks beautiful in one vase may become ugly in another? And how often has it not happened to all of us that we were startled by a sudden revelation of beauty in a person whom we have known for years and who has looked rather commonplace to us? Suddenly, through some expression of grief or joy, or merely through a passing light or shadow, all the hidden beauty bursts to the surface and surprises us with its fugitive charms. Whistler's "At the Piano," "The Yellow Buskin," "Old Battersea Bridge," "Chelsea: Snow," are painted in that way. Could you imagine his "Yellow Buskin Lady" in any other way than buttoning her gloves, and glancing back, for a last time, over her shoulder, as she is walking away from you into grey distances! That peculiar turn of her body reveals the quintessence of her beauty. And that is the reason why Whistler has painted her in that attitude. Thus every object has its moment of supreme beauty. In life these moments are as fugitive as the fractions of a second. Through art they can become a permanent and lasting enjoyment.

The ancient Greek believed in an ideal standard of beauty to which the whole universe had to conform. The modern artist, on the other hand, sees beauty only in such moments as are entirely individual to the forms and conditions of life he desires to portray. And as it pains him that his conception of beauty will die with him, he becomes an artist through the very endeavour of preserving at least a few fragments of it for his fellow-men. With Whistler, this conception was largely a sense for tone, a realization of some dream in black and silvery grey, in pale gold or greenish blues. A vague flare of colour in some dark tonality was, to him, the island in the desert which he had to seek, unable to rest until he had found it. He saw life in visions, and his subjects were merely means to express them. In his "Lady Archibald Campbell" he cared more for black and grey gradations and the yellow note of the buskin than for the fair sitter. The figure is, so to speak, invented in the character of the colour arrangement. Whistler once said he would like best to paint for an audience that could dispense with the representation of objects and figures, with all pictorial actualities, and be satisfied solely with the music of colour.

And why should we not profit by his lesson, and learn to look at pictures as we look at the flush of the evening sky, at a passing cloud, at the vision of a beautiful woman, or at a white chrysanthemum!

[1] Published originally in "Camera Work," 1903.

CHAPTER II
QUARTIER LATIN AND CHELSEA

During Jean François Raffaelli's sojourn in America I had occasion to ask him the rather futile question of how long it took a painter in Paris to become famous. Of course I referred to a man of superior abilities, and meant by fame an international reputation. He answered twenty years at least, and I replied that about twenty years more would be needed in America.

Whistler had a long time to wait before fame knocked at his door, although he had a local reputation in London and Paris at forty. He was known as a man of curious ways, and an excellent etcher; but, with the exception of two medals, he had received no honours whatever for his paintings. His work still impressed by its novelty; but he had not yet captivated the public. He still had to fight for recognition, and, as long as a man has to do that, he is neither a popular nor a successful man.

Toward the middle of the seventies recognition appeared to come more readily. He seemed to know everybody of note, and everybody seemed to know him. His writings and controversies attracted considerable attention, his supremacy as an etcher had been admitted, and his pictures became more widely known. He had gathered around him a number of wealthy patrons, who were connoisseurs and keen appreciators of his talents. He was so successful financially in the latter part of his life that he had residences and studios in Paris as well as in London. At Paris his headquarters were in the rue du Bac. In London he had various quarters,—on Fulham Road, Tite Street, Langham Street, Alderney Street, St. Regents Street, The Vale, etc. Going from one place to the other as his moods dictated to him, with an occasional sketching trip to Venice, to Holland or the northern parts of France, he lived the true life of the artist, quarrelled with his friends, delighted his admirers with the products of his fancies, and astounded the intelligent public on two continents with the caprices of his temper. Strange to say, even at that time, his best work had already left his easel. He was busy with minor, but not less interesting, problems and devoted most of his time to etchings, pastels and lithographs. But it was at this time that his "Ten O'clock" and "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" were published; and when his "Carlyle" found its way to the Glasgow City Gallery, and "The Portrait of the Artist's Mother" was purchased by the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris.

Comparatively little is known of Whistler's private life. I wonder how many of his admirers, excepting his personal friends, were acquainted during his life-time with the fact that he was married, and could tell whom he had married. He remained a bachelor until his fifty-fourth year, when he married the widow of his friend E. W. Godwin, the architect of the "White House." She was the daughter of John Bernie Philip, a sculptor, and was herself an etcher. They were married on Aug. 11, 1888. Eight years later his wife died, May 10th, 1896.

How this man of moods and capricious tastes got along in married life the general public has never found out. His friends assure us that it was a happy union and that he was deeply devoted to his wife. He has painted her repeatedly, but the pictures do not betray any domestic secrets to the public. Although Whistler was fond of notoriety, and managed to keep himself continually before the public,—in the fullest limelight, so to speak,—he never allowed personal news and the details of his everyday life to claim the attention of the public. All his innumerable feuds and press displays were related to his work,—to his completed pictures and theories of art. He liked to play upon his personality, but only as far as the artist was concerned. He was peculiarly free from the taint of exploiting his own domestic affairs. He hated biographies and all references to his family life. Even in his feuds with his old friends, F. R. Leyland, and his brother-in-law, Seymour Haden, when he brutally dragged apparent private matters into the glare of publicity, the discriminating observer will notice that his controversies, sarcasms and interpretations refer solely to "art situations" and never descend to the low depths of personal abuse.

THE SELF PORTRAIT OF 1859.

James McNeill Whistler was born on July 10th (some say July 11th), 1834, at Lowell, Mass. One of his ancestors, a Dr. Whistler, is frequently mentioned in Pepys' delicious diary. He was baptized James Abbott Whistler in the Church of St. Anne, at Lowell. His father, Major George Washington Whistler, was a civil engineer and, during the first eight years of James' life, moved from Lowell to Stonington, Connecticut, thence to Springfield, Massachusetts, and, finally, in 1842, went to Russia to superintend the construction of the railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow. The following year the family sailed from Boston to make their home in St. Petersburg.

This was the first impression the boy Whistler received from the outside world, and no doubt the trip across the Atlantic and the sojourn in a foreign country made a lasting impression upon him. Russia, with its quaint old civilization and touches of barbaric splendour, was the country to excite the imagination of any boy, and the change from a New England village life to the metropolitan turmoil of St. Petersburg would have left imperishable traces in any receptive mind. The father was paid lavishly and the boy was brought up in luxury.

The first report of any art talent in the boy can be found in the reference, mentioned by several biographers, to his taking lessons at the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg. It had probably no particular bearing on his career, since art teaching in Russia was traditional, and probably consisted of nothing but drawing from wooden models and plaster casts. It informs us, however, of the fact that he became familiar with the rudiments of drawing at an early age. Of by far greater importance to his development were his visits to the Hermitage. There he saw for the first time Velasquez and he learnt to differentiate between painters who could paint and such who could only tell a story in line and colour.

PEN AND INK SKETCH, MADE AT WEST POINT.

On the death of the father, April 7th, 1849, the family returned to the United States and settled in Stonington, Conn., and young Whistler attended school at Pomfret, Conn. In 1851, seventeen years old, he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point and was enrolled as James McNeill Whistler, taking his mother's maiden name as a middle name. Like Poe, he does not seem to have been over-fond of a routine military career. No doubt something of the artist's temperament had awakened in him, and, like all young talents, he objected to regulated study, and tried to satisfy the vague aspirations of his unsettled consciousness with work that was more congenial to him.

He left West Point in July, 1854. The technical discharge was "deficiency in chemistry," but it was probably general unfitness for a career of discipline and exactness. Through some influence he received an appointment in the drawing division of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey at Washington, D. C., at the salary of $1.50 a day, but he resigned two months later. The government records show that he worked only six and a half days in January and five and three-quarter days in February. He apparently had no taste for map designing and bird's-eye views. It is said he paid more attention to the deliberate drawing of little trees and detail than to the typographic facts.

DRAWING MADE FOR THE UNITED STATES COAST AND GEODETIC SURVEY.

His military career had come to an end; he had to do something else, and he felt that he had to become an artist at any price. Money was not over abundant in the Whistler family, but there was sufficient to allow him a few years' leisure to study art wherever he chose, and so he went to Paris, and joined the youthful band of artists, who fought for modernism and a new technique, and the glory of the métier, with an enthusiasm, a bravery and devotion that has rarely been encountered. There he lived the regular student life for four years. He entered the atelier of Charles Gleyre, but only stayed for a short while. He preferred to look about for himself. At one time he and young Tissot made a copy of Ingres' "Angelique."

Whistler arrived in France shortly after the coup d'état. Paris was not then what she is to-day. None of the chain of boulevards around the centre of the town, not even the boulevard of St. Michael, which became the great thoroughfare for artists, were in existence in their present condition. But Whistler had come at the time when Paris was being reconstructed into one of the most beautiful cities of the world, and, when the Imperial régime unfolded its full splendour. Paris became intoxicated with its own beauty, and the social life blossomed forth in all its elegance and frivolity.

During 1857-58 Whistler had a studio in the rue Compagne Première, boarding in Madame Lalouette's pension in the rue Dauphine. For some time he also shared quarters with Fantin-Latour, who, with Legros, was his most intimate friend during his student years. They saw each other daily, and it was on one of these occasions that he made the humourous sketch of Latour, depicting him on a cold winter morning seated in bed, drawing, all dressed, with a top hat on his head.

PORTRAIT SKETCH OF FANTIN-LATOUR.

They were the days of Henri Murger's "La Vie Bohême," of bon camaraderie, eccentric days when every man sought to make his mark by peculiarities of dress, soft felt Rubens' hats, velvet cloaks with the ends thrown over the shoulders, and other exotic garments. In one exhibition, in sheer audacity of youth, Whistler appeared dressed in a Japanese kimono. Think of a man in a kimono in 1855! Whistler at that time was a true Bohemian. His little studio was his workshop, his temple, his parlour, his playhouse and his dormitory. He frequented the queer, interesting quarters that students seek,—quaint old cafés where food was good as well as cheap, and character abundant.

What is there so fascinating about the Bohemian's life? The Philistine, I fear, generally considers him an eccentric, indolent man, with no thought for the morrow, no notion of economy, no home save the place which affords him temporary shelter. He never stops to think that the Bohemians are the men who make our songs, who paint our pictures, chisel marvellous creations out of wood and stone, compose our sweetest poems and write our newspapers. It is a grievous mistake to assume that they are merely a lot of idle, luckless fellows. They are men with brains of good quality, and hearts in the right place. All classes and trades of men have burdened the world with their wants and woes. Not so the Bohemian. He, too, has his heartaches and bitter disappointments, but who ever hears of them? The humourous tale over which you laugh so heartily, recounting the adventures of a poet in search of a publisher, had the author's personal experience for a basis. He could not sell his poems, but needed bread; so, out of his misfortune, he had good cheer. The ordinary man, rebuffed by fortune, would sit down and mourn himself into illness. The Bohemian utilizes these very reverses, and both he and the world are the merrier eventually for them. He lives in a world distinct from that of common men. Talent, love of comradeship, a sunny disposition—these are the magnets that will draw one toward it. It has its obligations, its trials, its code of honour, rigid as the most unbending militarism; but there is charm of companionship and an absence of jealousies and pettiness within it that makes you powerless to rid yourself of its enchantments. The Bohemian's life is apart from yours, but why chide him for it? He builds on the ruins of no other man's life, he feeds on no man's scandals, he exults in no man's misfortunes, but goes on his way, imbibing the sweetness of life from every flower, and, in his own way, scattering the perfume broadcast. He does half our thinking and originates two-third of all the movements for the social reclamation of the world. He is no hypocrite before the mighty, nor heartless in the face of the unfortunate. He covets no man's goods, but lives his own quiet, interesting, exquisite life. He asks only a share of the sunlight of life. In du Maurier's "Trilby" we find a sympathetic description of the art life of that period, but also a rather despicable type of a man, "Joe Sibley," by name, who always pretends but never does a thing and who was meant for a ludicrous satire on young Whistler (a character which was eliminated on Whistler's request from the second edition).

It is easy to draw a mental picture of him as he looked at that time. I see him studying in the Louvre, in a loose black blouse with low turned down collar and a soft black hat on his long, slightly curled hair, lost in wonder before a painting by Leonardo; or strolling along the Boulevards, cane in hand, ogling the beautiful women, and dreaming of designing some dress for the Empress Eugenie, passing by in an open phaeton. And how enthusiastic he got, no doubt, over some Japanese print or Chinese vase in some curio shop.

A certain trigness, smartness, acquired very likely at West Point where the cadets change their white duck trousers several times a day, induced him, even at this time, to take special care over the fit of his coat.

"HOMMAGE À DELACROIX," BY FANTIN-LATOUR.

In 1859 he went with several fellow students, Fantin-Latour, Legros, and Ribot, to Bonvin's studio to work from the model, under the direction of Courbet. At that time he was interested in types. He painted a "Fumette," a little grisette of the Quartier Latin, and the "Mother Gerard," who in her younger days had been a maker of pretty verses, but, reduced in circumstances, had become a flower vender at the Bal Bullier. Among his friends and associates we find the names of Legros, Cordier, Duranty, the etcher Bracquemond, inventor of the "pen and ink" process, de Balleroy, Champfleury, Manet and Baudelaire. They were all young men of talent, plein d'avenir. Fantin-Latour made a group-portrait of them, including Whistler and himself, seated and standing, assembled about a portrait of Delacroix. The canvas was exhibited at the Salon of 1864 as an "Hommage à Delacroix."

Whistler's step-sister had married Seymour Haden, the etcher, and Whistler, paying them a visit in 1859, stayed in London. The four years in Paris had matured him, and he knew how to accomplish something beyond the routine studio work. In 1862 he exhibited for the Royal Academy. It was his "At the Piano," which, if not a masterpiece, is already a true and individual work of art.

Courbet still had a strong hold on him. He spent two summers with him in Trouville and may have derived his first lessons as a mystificateur, which part he played so successfully during life, from the French painter, for Courbet was a poseur throughout, who assumed a particular kind of dress, and who was not satisfied merely with painting pictures that offended the Academy and conventional taste, but made a special effort and took special pleasure in shocking the bourgeoisie.

Whistler also made his first trip to Holland during these years, and became enchanted with Rembrandt and Vermeer, but took a great dislike to Van der Helst. In 1859-60 youthful efforts of his had been refused at the Paris Salon; the same happened again in 1863, but he was one of the men who scored a success at the Salon des Refusées. A number of talented painters, and among them men of genius like Manet, Cazin, Degas, Harpignies, Vollon, Pissaro, Jongkind and Bracquemond, tired of the cliquism and jury of the regular Salon,—a story which repeats itself everywhere,—decided to arrange their own exhibition. Napoleon III, in his nonchalant way a true patron of art, issued an order to arrange the exhibition of "revolt" in the same building as the official exhibition. The exhibition was a success, and even the Empress Eugenie and the court came to see it. This is really of no significance, as nobody bought anything; but it sounds well, and biographers should never neglect to mention such incidents.

Owned by John H. Whittemore
THE WOMAN IN WHITE.

One thing is certain: Whistler's picture, "The White Girl," even with Manet's "Dejeuner sur l'Herbe" in the same room, attracted an unusual share of attention. Zola, in "L'Œuvre," says that the crowd laughed in front of "La Dame en Blanc." Desnoyers thought it "the most remarkable picture, at once simple and fantastic with a beauty so peculiar that the public did not know whether to think it beautiful or ugly." Paul Mantz wrote in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts that it was the most important picture in the exhibition and called the picture a "Symphonie du Blanc" some years before Whistler adopted that title.

The exhibition of this picture represents, in a way, the turning point in Whistler's career. It was a steady ascent ever after. Before this he was unknown, and exposed to the manifold privations and vicissitudes of an artist's career. Many a day he had gone hungry and frequently could not paint for lack of material. Now things began to run a trifle smoother, although sales were still rare and money scarce. His lodgings in 7 Linsey Row (now 101 Cheyne Walk) were extremely simple and his studio consisted of a second-story back room.

During the next three years he worked hard, and finished a number of pictures that since then have made history. They are all in a lighter key and of brilliant colouring. The problem he seemed to be most interested in was to reproduce in relief the charm of diversified colour patches as seen in Japanese prints.

He continued to see things in this way until he made a trip to South America in 1866. Feeling, perhaps, slightly discouraged, or in need of some recreation, he and his brother set out for Chili, under the pretence of joining the insurgents à la Poe and Byron, although I hardly believe that a man of thirty-two really capable of such a wild goose chase. At all events, when they reached Valparaiso the rebellion had ceased and instead of handling a musket "our Jimmie" opened his paint box instead.

The result was startling. Impressed by the new sights of southern scenery, and in particular of the translucency and subdued brilliancy of the sky at night, he painted one of his finest nocturnes, the "Valparaiso Harbour," now at the National Gallery of Art. The darkness of night to a large extent bars colour, and furnishes a kind of tonal veil over all objects; but in southern countries the nights are clearer and brighter and, although forms and colours are indistinct, they remain more plainly discernible than in the blackness of our Northern nights.

After his return to London he worked hard at solving the problem of creating tone which would suggest atmosphere with as little subject matter as possible. Four years passed before he held the first exhibition of a "Variation" and "Harmony." He now began to feel his own strength. He felt that he had done something new and had the courage to coin his own titles. The method of classifying his pictures as Harmonies and Symphonies, Arrangements, Nocturnes, Notes, and Caprices, was entirely his own invention and in his earlier career did much to attract attention to his work. One year later, in 1872, exhibiting several symphonies, he included for the first time an impression of night under the title of "Nocturne." The years 1870-77 were probably the busiest and the most important ones of his whole career. They produced not only the "Nocturne," but also the "Peacock Room" and the painting which is generally conceded to be his masterpiece, the "Portrait of the Artist's Mother."

Success and fame at last knocked at his door. Mr. F. R. Leyland, the rich ship-owner of Liverpool, proved a generous patron. Between 1872 and 1874 he ordered portraits of himself, Mrs. Leyland and the four children. Whistler made long visits at Speke Hall, Leyland's home near Liverpool. His paintings began to sell more readily than heretofore and several orders for interior decoration had come in, among them the decoration of the music room of the famous violinist Sarasate's home in Paris. He was willing to work at anything as long as he could carry out his own ideas. He invented schemes for interior decoration and also once tried himself as an illustrator, when he made exquisite drawings of the vases, plates, cups of blue and white Nankin for the catalogue of Sir H. Thompson's collection of porcelain. (Ellis and Elvey, London, 1878.)

National Gallery, Washington
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK: F. R. LEYLAND.

After leaving 7 Linsey Row, during the years 1866-1878, Whistler lived in several other houses situated in the Chelsea district, for like so many of us that have got used to a certain part of the city, he could never get away from it. The most pretentious of these abodes was the "White House" which became one of the centres of attraction in the art life of London.

There he gave his famous Sunday morning breakfasts, which Mr. Harper Pennington describes so amusingly: "They were always late in being served, outrageously delayed without apparent cause. It was no uncommon thing for us to wait an hour, or even two, for the eggs, fish, cutlets, and a sweet dish of which the meal consisted. A bottle of very ordinary white wine was our only drink." The whole thing, in fact, was an "arrangement"—just a colour scheme in yellow to match his "blue and white" porcelain and his "yellow and blue" dining room. The room itself was unique in its effective and independent style of decoration. It was entirely carried out after his own designs, even to the painting of the exterior. And the environment, the Thames, the old church of Chelsea with its square tower, the peculiar shaped bridge of Battersea, the lights of Cremorne in the distance, all furnished interesting pictorial topics and played an important part in the painter's mise en scène.

His neighbours added to the lustre of this period. In the same district at that time lived Rossetti, Swinburne, George Meredith and Carlyle, and Whistler was on friendly footing with all of them.

Exhibitions of his work were now a regular occurrence. In 1874 he held his first "one man's show" of thirteen paintings and fifty prints at number 48 Pall Mall, London. In 1877 he arranged an exhibition in the Grosvenor Gallery. Among the exhibits were "The Falling Rocket" (Nocturne in black and gold) which brought about the Ruskin attacks, and consequently the famous libel suit, Whistler v. Ruskin. One can hardly imagine, to-day, why the picture should have created so much commotion; but it was a decided innovation at that time, an event in a way ushering in a new era of art. Now this particular style of representation has any number of disciples, and we have accepted it as one of the principal assertions of modern art.

Strange, that history always repeats itself. We should know by this time that our tastes and the tastes of time are not absolute, and that our sense of beauty is likely to be affected by circumstances to an extent which we cannot realize. There was a time, and not so long ago, when Gothic buildings were regarded by the man of culture much as dandelions are regarded by the gardener. For years the very name Nocturne was a reproach. It was supposed to be the product of idiosyncrasy and nonchalant audacity, the work of a decadent period in art, which, because it was decadent, could not be good, for everything that looked like a Whistler was regarded as a note of decadence. It was an argument in a circle, no doubt; but such arguments seem most convincing when once a prejudice exists in the art world. Only gradually did people begin to see more than cleverness in his products.

Oscar Wilde was a constant friend of Whistler's at this time. The friendship was still young and, for a while, the two were inseparable. The author of "Dorian Gray" spent hours in Whistler's studio, came repeatedly to the Sunday breakfasts, and presided at Whistler's private views. Whistler went out and about with him everywhere. But Whistler gradually came to feel that Wilde, in spite of his brilliancy and wit, lacked fundamental purpose. Wilde talked constantly about art, but, in the end, Whistler concluded that Wilde, like most modern authors, knew very little about it.

The days of the Renaissance, of versatility, of talent and appreciation seem to have passed. Whistler easily tired of his friends and, although this friendship had lasted for years, he finally dropped Wilde without much ado. A critic of "The London Times" has summed up the difference between the two in the following words:

"With a mind not a jot less keen than Whistler's, Oscar Wilde had none of the convictions, the high faith for which Whistler found it worth while to defy the crowd. Wilde had posed to attract the crowd. And the difference was this, that, while Whistler was a prophet who liked to play Pierrot, Wilde grew into Pierrot who liked to play the prophet."

Like most artists who have suddenly sprung into fame, Whistler had lived beyond his means. He was fond of comfort and elegance, and allowed himself the fulfilment of any whim as long as it granted him genuine pleasure, as "art and joy should go together."

The auction sale of the contents of his home in 1879, and the sale of his paintings at Sotheby's in February, 1880, were perhaps not entirely caused by financial difficulties. They may have been prompted in an equal degree by a desire to make a change and break the routine of the studio life. He told, however, to his friends in his inimitable way how the sheriff's officer called upon him with a writ, and the last bottle of champagne was brought out of the cellar for that worthy's delectation. In Venice, where he went in September, 1879, he seems to have been in straitened circumstances for quite a while. He lived in modest quarters and dined in cheap, dingy places. These were his "polenta and macaroni days," and, in a way, a repetition of his Paris student's life, only much harder to bear as he was older (forty-five) and used to luxury.

No matter what his reason may have been for breaking up his bachelor establishment it was the second turning point in his career.

Painting did not play quite as important a part in Whistler's life after his Venetian sojourn. He still painted a number of portraits, among them the "Sarasate" and "Comte Montesquiou," but he was more active as an etcher, lithographer, pamphleteer, lecturer and teacher. Orders were scarce at all times. The only regular portrait orders he had in the first half of the eighties were those of Lady Archibald Campbell, wife of the Duke of Argyll; and of Lady Meux, who liked her first portrait, in a black evening gown with a white opera cloak against a black background, so well that she had herself painted three times in succession. Whistler's sense of beauty was a strong feature in his work. Maybe it was not the sense of beauty an Englishman would like. He looked for a pictorial aspect, rather than the "lady" in his sitter; and in England the "lady" is the thing to secure in a portrait of a woman.

He returned to London in 1880, but stayed only a short while. During the next ten years he had no permanent home; like a nomad he flitted from city to city, from studio to studio through England, France and Belgium. Finally he found some sort of a resting place in the rue du Bac 110, for many years his Paris home. It was a two-story house with a garden enclosed by a wall, as secluded a spot as one could find in the gay and noisy city. He was always fond of gardens of flowers. "In the roses of his garden he buried his sorrows," one of his most talented pupils, E. H. Wuerpel, tells us, in his little brochure "My Friend Whistler."

In the meanwhile his London Exhibitions became more and more numerous. During the next fifteen years the following eight exhibitions are on record.

1881—Jan.—An exhibition of fifty-three pastels at the Fine Art Society in Bond St., London.

1883—Feb.—Fifty-one etchings and dry points exhibited in Bond St. Gallery, London.

1884—May—Harmonies—Notes—Nocturnes—shown at the Dowdswell Gallery, London. At the same time an exhibition took place in Paris and Dublin. They were arranged according to his own idea of exhibiting.

JO (ETCHING).

1884—Nov.—Twenty-five works sent to the exhibition of the Dublin Sketching Club.

1886—May—A second series of Notes—Harmonies—Nocturnes shown at the Dowdswell Gallery.

1889—The most representative exhibition of his works, since that of 1874, at the College for Working Women, Queen Sq., London.

1892—Mar.—An exhibition of forty-four nocturnes, marines and chevalet pieces for which Whistler prepared the catalogue. At the Goupil Galleries, Bond Street, London.

1895—Dec.—Exhibitions of seventy lithographs, London.

In the years following his death, as is usually the case, 1904-05, occurred the most important assemblage of his works—the memorial exhibition of Glasgow, Boston, Paris and London.

Of special interest are Whistler's first American exhibits. At the first exhibition of the Society of American Artists at the Kurtz Gallery, New York, 1878, he was represented by a "Coast of Brittany." In the autumn of 1881 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts he exhibited the portrait of his mother, which was also seen the following spring at the Society of American Artists in New York. Sheridan Ford once asked him why he did not exhibit more frequently in America. Whistler answered: "I don't know, they will not allow me to take them across the ocean. You see, I don't own my pictures. I sold most of them long ago to people who think more of them than they do of me. I wrote and asked for two or three of them to take over, and the answers I received were to the effect that I could have them to exhibit here, but not to exhibit in America. Why? Because the owners are afraid of the ocean. I said I would insure the pictures, at which of course they laughed. I may go and I may not. A good many people in America don't like me, and I am not there to fight them as I can fight my enemies here. I don't mind having enemies where I can get at them. I like the pleasure of whipping them; but these fellows in America have it all their own way. There is no record, and I am at a constant disadvantage."

In 1884 he was elected President of the Royal Society of British Artists, but soon quarrelled with the old-fashioned element among its members, and the whole affair degenerated into one of those disputes upon which such copious light has been shed in "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies."

The enforcement of the Whistlerian policy of elimination and arrangement brought disaster upon the Society. The annual sales fell from £8,000 in 1885 to under 1,000 in 1888. It was time for the ideal exhibitor and manager of mise en scènes to retire. And so he did, if not accompanied by a cavalcade of buglers blowing a blast with, at least, as much noise and controversy as he could conjure up in these art-forsaken and colourless days.

It is not until towards the close of his life, in 1898, that we find him again at the head of an artistic corporation, when the International Society was proud to acknowledge his leadership. In 1880 Whistler made his début in Germany at the International Art Exhibition of Munich. The result was not a flattering one. The jury officiating on that occasion established a peculiar claim to the affectionate recollection of posterity by awarding a Second Class medal to the "Portrait of the Artist's Mother," now in the Luxembourg. Of course a jury has perfect rights to make awards as it pleases as long as the verdict is a competent and impartial one, but Whistler by this time was too well-known, and one can hardly blame him that he wrote the following sarcastic but unusually dignified letter to the Secretary of the Central Committee.

"Sir: I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter, officially informing me that the committee awards me a second class gold medal. Pray convey my sentiments of tempered and respectable joy to the gentlemen of the committee, and my complete appreciation of the second-hand compliment paid me.

"And I have, Sir,
"The honour to be
"Your most humble obedient servant,
"J. McNeill Whistler."

After 1895 Whistler ceased to hold exhibitions. The death of his wife brought about a long silence, and little was heard of Whistler. He had laid aside his jester's bells and cap and ceased pamphleteering and posing in public. He had become a kind of recognized institution in the art world, occupying a place apart from the masses of his contemporaries. Men of very dissimilar æsthetic convictions agreed in regarding him as a painter of exceptional ability, and he had a solid and appreciative following.

We in America wondered what had become of him. Occasionally a newspaper notice informed us that he had taken up teaching, or false reports crossed the ocean that he had become a symbolist. He himself was inactive, as far as the public was concerned.

I suppose he was at last tired of notoriety and the cares of public life. He had played his part and had played it well. Intimate friends tell us that he worked as hard as ever. He still had many problems to solve, if for nobody else but himself, and was satisfied that he could afford to devote his time to them. Financially he was fairly well situated; but he spent money extravagantly, and the two residences and various studios he kept up in Paris and London proved at all times a heavy drain on his income, which was derived entirely from his art products. He left about ten thousand pounds, a rather small sum, considering the prices he received for some of his paintings.

His school in the Passage Stanislaw, opposite Carolus Duran's home, was neither a necessity nor a particular pleasure to him. He opened it for the sole benefit of one of his favourite models, Mme. Carmen Rossi, who, as a child, had posed for the painter. She received the entire profits and it is said that during the three years that the school existed she made enough to retire in comfort. The school was opened in the autumn of 1898 and closed in 1901. He was too impatient to be a good teacher; he simply came there and painted and the pupils saw him paint and learned what they could, just as did the apprentices of the Old Masters. He taught solely the science of painting, neither colour nor composition. He had an abhorrence of talking art, and one of the anecdotes he liked to relate was that he had known Rossetti for years and "had talked art many, many times but painting only once."

He even refused to discuss technicalities. There was no talk of pigments, mediums, varnish or methods of applying them. He worked with his pupils, that was all. Like the apprentices of old they had to pick up their knowledge themselves, and if he found something that he liked his usual praise consisted of "Go right on," or "Continuez, continuez." On the wall was tacked his second series of propositions which endorsed his constant advice to pupils: "If you possess superior faculties, so much the better, allons, develop them; but should you lack them, so much the worse, for despite all efforts you will never produce anything of interest." Good common sense, but, after all, a slight return for the tuition fee. It should have induced most pupils to pack up their paint boxes and return home.

As Leon Dabo, in his lecture on "Whistler's Technique" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has so well observed: "Nothing is more absurd than the notion, so widely promulgated by elderly maiden ladies who misspend their energies writing about paintings and painters from Cimabue to Whistler, that a work of art is produced as the logical result of an apprenticeship served in an art school. There probably is much juxtaposition of this belief—we all know the painters whose only reason for lowering intensely blue sky is because it is too blue; the painters who labour, heaping up chunks of paint until it looks 'right;' but with Whistler a canvas advanced in an entirely different manner. He knew scientifically that he could use only so much of a given tone if he wished to produce colour, and he knew what other tone to place in juxtaposition, what parts of the canvas must hold the spectator's eye, in varying degrees of interest, in order to obtain the effect he desired to give and its use in the butterfly, the exact spot of a sail on the ocean, a light on the horizon, all these, to many insignificant objects and spots, nevertheless do their work, either to re-vivify an otherwise large surface or to hold the eye momentarily interested, until the ambience was obtained. And this science—the effect of line and colour on the eye,—is practically unknown to painters, is untaught in our art schools. This mastery over his means and material Whistler possessed in a higher degree than any other modern painter."

In 1902 he once more took a house in London and selected Cheyne Walk, an old mansion covered with ivy, near the Thames in the Chelsea district, where he had spent so many years during the beginning of his career. Friends could not imagine why he came back from Paris to London, as he disliked the place, its climate and its art. They simply forgot that he was a lover of atmospheric effects, and that London fogs and the Thames were, after all, nearest to his heart. In the summer of 1902 he contemplated a short trip to Holland in the company of Mr. Ch. W. Freer, but was taken sick in Flushing. After consulting some doctors in The Hague, he recovered sufficiently to return to London and set to work, but only one year in the old haunts was granted him.

He had just entered upon his seventieth year when he died suddenly on July 17, 1903. He suffered from some internal complaint, the exact nature of which is unknown. He had felt ill for several days, but on the seventeenth his condition had so improved that he ordered a cab for a drive. On leaving the house he was seized with a fit, but recovered; a short while later he had another spasm, which killed him. He was interred (on the 22nd) in the family burial plot in the churchyard of the old church at Chelsea (which his mother had regularly attended), near the grave of Hogarth. The coffin, covered with purple pall, was carried to the church followed by the honorary pall-bearers and relatives on foot. The pall-bearers were: Sir James Guthrie (president of the Royal Scottish Academy); Charles W. Freer, George W. Vanderbilt, Edwin A. Abbey, John Lavery (of the R. S. Academy) and the art critic, Theodore Duret; all personal friends of Whistler's.

WAPPING WHARF (ETCHING).

The relatives present included the Misses Philip and F. L. Philip, Mr. and Mrs. Cecil Lawson, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Whibley and Edwin W. Godwin. Although no announcement of the funeral was made in London papers many distinguished friends and acquaintances crowded the church. Beautiful wreaths were sent by Vanderbilt, Lawrence, Alma Tadema and various federations and societies. Those present were: George W. Vanderbilt, Mr. Joseph Pennell, Rev. H. C. Leserve of Boston, Johnson Sturges, R. F. Knoedler and I. M. B. MacNary of New York City; M. Dumont of the International Society of Painters; Marcus Bourne Huish, editor of the "Art Journal;" Thomas Armstrong; and Alfred East (A. R. A.).

When a reporter called at the house July 18th he was informed that the artist had left stringent instructions that no information whatever regarding his illness or death should be given either to his friends or the newspapers. He remained true to his eccentricities, or rather to his peculiar personality. Even in his exit from this life to the thrones of glory beyond, he endeavoured to make it as odd and picturesque as possible. He played his part to the last. And it was one of the noblest parts ever played by man.

CHAPTER III
THE BUTTERFLY

The famous butterfly monogram, originally a decorative combination of the letters "J. M. W.," which evolved into a decorative design of a butterfly, enclosed in a circle, as it appeared in his "Sarasate" and "Carlyle," and, frequently, a mere stencil-like silhouette as seen in his correspondence, began to appear in Whistler's pictures in the late sixties. The "Symphony in Gray and Green—The Ocean" (painted in 1866) was probably the first important canvas in which it was introduced. In his earlier pictures he had made use of an ordinary written signature as most painters use. It is strange that it took an artist of Whistler's sensitiveness so long to realize the incongruities of these crude calligraphic displays. They disfigure many a good picture and smack of the materialism of this age. Every picture should have a signature, if for no other reason than to prove the authenticity at some future time. But surely it can be treated with more discretion than it is to-day. The Old Masters frequently handled it with ingenuity and some degree of modesty. It was the Japanese artist who gave it a decorative significance. The red cartouches of Hiroshige are known to every print collector. He considered it a part of the picture, a colour note or vehicle of balance in an empty space, as important a detail of composition as any other.

Whistler treated his monogram in the same conscientious and picturesque fashion. He used it with preference in his symphonies, nocturnes and large portraits, but, at times, also in white, as on a rail post in the lower right corner of his "Bognor." He handled it with more than ordinary reverence, as everything that pertained to the exploiting of his own personality. He often introduced it at the first painting to judge the effect, and, of course, he wiped or scraped it out over and over again until he procured the desired effect. He continually made slight changes in the design, he toyed with it as with some curio, elaborated it in many ways, and, eventually, even bestowed a sting upon the insect, as it appears in his "Gentle Art of Making Enemies."

The butterfly teaches a lesson. It proves that an artist can be self-assertive, arrogant and yet refined. Whistler thus introduced a method of picture signing that should be generally adopted. Every artist should have his own monogram, and use it with discretion.

But it has even a deeper significance in Whistler's life. It is in a way a symbol of his evolution as a painter. As we study his work we find that the butterfly monogram does not appear before Whistler freed himself from foreign influences, and invented an individual and independent style of his own. The butterfly may well stand for the full awakening and realization of his own faculties. Did he not say himself:

"In the pale citron wing of the butterfly, with its dainty spots of orange, he saw the stately halls of fair gold, with their slender saffron pillars, and was taught how the delicate drawing high upon the walls should be traced in slender tones of orpiment and repeated by the base in notes of graver hue."

Like all painters Whistler had to learn his trade, and then find his peculiar way of expression. It took him well nigh a quarter of a century. He entered the studio of Gleyre in the summer of 1855 as a young man of twenty-one, and was nearly forty-seven when he had finished the "Portrait of the Artist's Mother" and had painted a few nocturnes. All his earlier pictures remind us of some other master. "The Music Room" recalls Stevens, "The Blue Wave: Biarritz" the forceful style of Courbet, and "The White Symphony" even the light manner of Alma Tadema.

Charles Gleyre was an excellent draughtsman of the Ingres school, but all he could teach his pupils was to draw. That he had once been capable of some finer appreciation of colour and atmosphere, students of art may notice in his "Evening," painted in 1843, but he became, like so many other painters of this period, the victim of the academic style. Outline drawing reigned supreme, there was room for nothing else, and it was surely not a congenial environment for young Whistler, who, even at that time, differed with the prevalent ideas of art. Drawing, however, is one of the most important factors of the technique of painting. Velasquez even thought it was the most important one, and Whistler, with the peculiar tendency of his art, was, no doubt, fortunate that he reached Paris while draughtsmanship was still honoured and not neglected, as in the later days of the impressionists. A student in Paris either becomes an enthusiastic worker from the nude, making one study after the other, like all those Julian and Colarossi pupils—or he gets so imbued with the art atmosphere that he sets about on conquests of his own, and the city of Seine, with its museums, monuments, artists, population, pleasures and sights is just the right place for "free lance" education. Whistler chose the latter way.

The canvases of this period show strong influences of Stevens and Courbet. He must have been enamoured with the style of that great painter of woman, as he was undoubtedly with the rude sincerity of Courbet. If any man could paint at that time it was Courbet. He was the simplifier of planes and values, who advocated frankness and freedom of expression, and detached painting from all the absurdities and abstractions of the classic and romantic periods. From him Whistler learned to put on his pigments in a bold, vigorous way. He was never fond of brushwork, but at that time he liked to pile it on in a flat and solid manner. Only gradually his brushwork became thinner and thinner, invisible and almost untraceable, carrying out his maxim: "A picture is finished when all traces of means used to bring about the end have disappeared." As is the case with all great paintings, one must forget all about technique.

From Stevens he learned, as he often said in later years, all that could be learned from him. I believe that the influence was subtler and more spiritual, and one that lasted all his life. Stevens was for him what the chart from which we learn history in school days remains for us. We can never forget it and entirely get away from it. In the beginning, of course, it was a technical preference. Like Stevens, he used precise outlines, a profusion of details and yet with all a poetic atmosphere that is produced principally by a beautiful juxtaposition of colour values. Even to-day few of Whistler's earlier canvases have more admirers than the "Harmony in Green and Rose," perhaps better known as "The Music Room" (in the possession of Frank J. Hecker). It was painted in 1860, in the London home of Haden, the painter-etcher. This picture was first known as "The Morning Call." In the corner of the room a mirror reflects the profile of a woman, who is not represented in the picture. This is a portrait of Lady Seymour Haden, Whistler's stepsister, with whom he was lodging at the time. In front of the window hang a pair of white curtains with a green and red flower pattern. A young woman (Miss Booth, a relative of the Hadens) in a black riding habit, which she holds up with her gloved hand, stands on the dark red carpet. In the background sits a little girl reading.

Owned by Frank J. Hecker
HARMONY IN GREEN AND ROSE: THE MUSIC ROOM.

Another more exotic influence became palpable in his work soon after, and exercised an almost despotic control for several years. At the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1863 Whistler became acquainted, for the first time, with Japanese art. The Parisian artists, particularly the set with which Whistler was acquainted, got colour mad. The suggestiveness of Oriental composition, which accentuates detail here and neglects it there; the peculiar space arrangement and the decorative treatment of detail, captivated all modern spirit.

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the æsthetes of the Empire, and the forerunners of the Japanese enthusiasts, and specialists like Cernuschi, Regamey, Guimet, and Bing became the spokesmen for Japanese bibelots. Paris was deluged with little art objects fashioned out of bronze, porcelain, cloisonne, jade, ivory, wood and metal. Everybody started a collection, and became a member of the "Societé du Jinglar," with annual meetings at Sèvres, which was fanatically devoted to the worship and exploitation of Eastern art.

The harmonious arrangement of the Japanese colour prints in particular fascinated the cognoscenti. The application of colour in Japanese art is somewhat different to ours. It is more primitive, and based on the decorative principle of simultaneous contrast. It deals solely with flat tints with occasional gradations on the outer edges, and vibration is produced by the simple method of letting the paper, or silk, shine through the pigment. If Japanese colouring does not directly recall the polychromic designs of primitive people, of pottery decorations, wall designs, carpets and mats, Scandinavian wood ornamentation, etc., the reason is entirely to be found in its refinement and finish. It has the same origin; a totem pole is the beginning, and a Japanese print about the end of the development.

True enough, coloured prints were classified as vulgar art. They were considered ordinary pictorial commodities of no more importance to the natives than coloured supplements to our Sunday readers. But they were of such exquisite finish that we wonderingly ask ourselves if the nobler branches of art in this country really reached a higher standard of perfection. It is hardly possible. It was rather their application than their art value which offended the nobility. Many of the most cherished prints of Kiyonaga, Sharaku, Shunsho, and Outomaro, depicting teahouse scenes, actors, wrestlers and ladies of the Yoshiwara, were drawn for no other purpose than to serve as souvenir cards and advertisements.

The colour appreciation of the Japanese clerk, labourer and peasant must have been developed to an exceptional degree, if these designs, that were so cheap that everybody bought them as we do newspapers, could arouse nothing but ordinary appreciation and matter-of-fact comment.

The Japanese used colours in combinations that seem strange and unusual to us. They did not seem to care about any complementary laws, but introduced yellow with pink, purple with green, brown with red without the slightest hesitation. This may be explained by the restraint of their palette. Their old hand-made colours are all keyed in middle tints; they did not lack decision or strength, but they were never loud or vehement. Thus arrangements were possible that would look crude with the use of Western colours. Cheret's and Toulouse Lautrec's posters, even when of three-sheet dimensions and seen in open air, seldom expressed more than contrast and animation. They worked on the principle of the Japanese colour print, but in a very crude and superficial fashion. They wished to startle, not to please.

If colour is seen in flat tint patches it produces a more vivid image on the retina than a pictorial representation of mixed pigments, as flat tints are more favourable to the brilliancy of colour. Each separate soft tint creates a complementary image, and the eye would be easily fatigued if the colours were strong. In the Japanese colour print they are softened and blended together not so much by the skilful and harmonious juxtaposition, as by the suavity of the medium, the introduction of neutral tints, the mellow white foundation of the paper, and the arrangement of shapes encased in precise lines.

The European painter had a different idea. Although recognizing the supremacy of colour, he took visual appearances as they were and actually appeared in life as guiding models for his representations. Colour became submerged in other qualities almost equally important, as those of line, perspective, chiaroscura, relief drawing and minute observation. The Eastern artist applied colour for colour's sake, and kept all other elements, notably those of line, feeling, shape and space arrangement independent—not independent as far as the tonality of the final effect was concerned, but independent in their function as vehicles of expression. They were never diffused in the same way as in an Old Master. Each line, shape and colour had to tell its own story, while in Western art composition, colour and idea often became inseparable by the application of the blurred outline.

Whistler, at this stage of his development, was interested simply in recreating Japanese colour arrangements, to paint local values in such a way that they would reflect the beauty, contrast and variety of an Outamaro print. The pictures of this period remind one of that capricious Chinese princess, of whom Heinrich Heine speaks, whose quaint and solitary pleasure consisted of tearing costly silks into tatters, to scatter the rags to the winds and to watch them flutter like rose, blue and yellow butterflies to the lily ponds below.

Already in his "Woman in White" Whistler had shown some preferences for colour, but not until after he had taken his first house in London, when his mother came to live with him, did he show those peculiar outbursts of colour that were a direct outcome of the study of Japanese prints. In later years it was all tone, but in the years 1863-66, it was all colour, with a preference for white. The principal pictures of this period were "Lange Leizen of the Six Marks: In purple and rose" (in the possession of John G. Johnson); "The Little White Girl" (owned by Arthur Studd), "The Golden Screen," "The Princess of the Porcelain Land," and "The Balcony: Variations of Flesh Colour" (owned by Charles W. Freer) and "The White Symphony" (owned by John G. Whittemore).

Whistler clothed his English models in Eastern dress, and reproduced the beautiful colours with Japanese detail. He was among the first to appreciate the beauty of Chinese porcelain, of which he owned many choice pieces. In his "Lange Leizen" is shown a young woman in a Japanese costume, seated and holding with her left hand on her lap a blue and white vase of the shape known in Holland as the "Lange Leizen of the Six Marks" (referring to the potter's mark on the bottom of the vase). Her right hand, covered by the sleeve of the kimono, is raised and holds a brush. Her skirt is black with a delicate design in colours. The kimono is cream white, decorated with bright flowers and lined with rose colours. Around her hair, which falls over her shoulders, is tied a black scarf. On the floor are several blue and white vases and an Oriental carpet. To the right is a red covered table, and behind the figure is a chest. The painting is signed "Whistler, 1864," in the upper right-hand corner. The frame was designed by Whistler himself and decorated with Chinese fret and six marks. It was shown in the Royal Academy of 1864.

Owned by John G. Johnson
LANGE LEIZEN OF THE SIX MARKS: PURPLE AND ROSE.

Another picture of this period is the "Golden Screen." A young woman in Japanese costume is seated on a brown rug, her head seen in profile, as she examines a Japanese print. She wears a purple kimono decorated with multicoloured flowers and bordered with a vermilion scarf, and a green obi tied around her waist; her outer kimono is white with a red flowered design. To the left is a tea box, some roses and a white vase with pansies. Hiroshige prints are scattered over the floor. The background consists of a folding screen with Japanese houses and figures, painted on a gold ground. These two pictures are far from being satisfactory. The composition is restless, the colours do not harmonize, and the figure is one of that peculiar nightmarish type which some artists affect; a being belonging to that peculiar class of humanity who wear slouch drapery instead of tailor-made costumes, and carry crystal balls, urns and sunflowers as an æsthetic amusement, I suppose, about their person.

The model for both these pictures was Joanna Heffernan, an Irish girl, neither particularly handsome nor well educated; but she was a good model, who adapted herself easily to a painter's idea, and her native wit and willingness to learn atoned for any lack of knowledge. She generally read while she was posing for Whistler, and as she talked with his friends, posed for other artists and visited picture exhibitions, she played quite an important part in the painter's life during his early years in London. She went to Paris in the winter of 1861-2 to pose for "The Woman in White," in his studio on the boulevard des Battignoles. He painted her in a number of other pictures, notably as "Jo" and "The Little White Girl." Although different in each picture, now young, now more mature, in one case a lady and in another a buxom girl, she is really beautiful in none, though always attractive. He probably merely used her as a suggestion. He liked to have her in his studio even when he did not paint her form or features. There is also a dry point of "Jo," dated 1861, which shows her with streaming hair, which is probably the nearest approach to a likeness. It is a beautiful bit of drawing and interesting as a space arrangement. It shows how a head can almost fill the entire space of a picture without becoming obtrusive or looking too large. The line work is excellent in its purity of design and apparent carelessness.

A change of method is noticeable in "The Little White Girl," the colour scheme of which is exquisite. The white dress of the young girl, in profile, with loosened hair, leaning against a mantelpiece, and her reflection in the glass, are accentuated in a beautiful manner by the brilliant colour notes of a red lacquer box, a blue and white vase, a fan with a Hiroshige-like design and a decorative arrangement of pink and purple azaleas. The painting is thinner and there is greater repose in the composition. Swinburne saw the picture before it was sent up to the Royal Academy in 1865, and expressed his admiration by writing "Before the Mirror. Verses under a Picture:"

"Come snow, come wind or thunder, High up in the air I watch my face and wonder
At my bright hair. Naught else exalts or grieves The rose at heart that heaves With love of our own leaves, and lips that pair.

"I cannot tell what pleasures
Or what pains were,
What pale new loves and treasures
New Years will bear,
What beam will fall, what shower
With grief or joy for dower. But one thing knows the flower, the flower is fair."

Owned by Arthur Studd
SYMPHONY IN WHITE, II: THE LITTLE WHITE GIRL.

"La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine" (Whistler apparently was fond of using elaborate titles) is perhaps his finest work in vivid colouring. The colour differentiations are well placed, but the canvas, after all, looks too much like a huge Japanese print, painted in the Western style, which represents objects round and in relief, and not merely in flat tints. The placing of the screen with the face looming above it is as peculiar as it is attractive, but it is an arrangement that is strictly Japanese in character. Whistler began with painting detail, and only gradually learned to see life in a broader and more mysterious way. It is a portrait of Miss Christie Spartali, a real Rossetti type, daughter of the Consul-General for Greece in London in 1863. Her father did not like it; but Rossetti did, and sold it from his own studio to help Whistler along. Later it came into the possession of F. R. Leyland, and was used to decorate the "Peacock Room." It was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1865. It is really a combination of Rossetti and Outomaro, with a slight flavour of Whistler's individuality.

National Gallery, Washington
THE PRINCESS OF THE PORCELAIN LAND.

"On the Balcony" (exhibited first in 1866) of the Freer collection is a peculiar combination of models masquerading in kimonos and a background of English river scenery. He essayed the same task as Chavannes in his mural decorations, i. e., to determine the local tints of each face or arm by the surrounding colours. The problem was made still more difficult by showing each face in a different illumination. One face is silhouetted in profile against the river, another shaded by a fan and the form of a standing figure, the others are seen in front light. I do not believe he has ever attempted a more ambitious problem, and he solved it in a most subtle and convincing fashion. It is a delightful harmony in colour, and exceedingly well-balanced; it reminds one of the Japanese, but the colour and vibrating atmosphere is Occidental. Pity that he found it necessary to introduce Japanese costumes. I perfectly realize that one of the principal charms of this picture is the incongruity of the ensemble. Yet who ever saw in a London town such a balcony with Japanese awnings, and English girls dressed up like geishas, whiling away the early hours of the night. The figures belong neither to Japan nor Great Britain. They are simply there for colour's sake, but, after all, such associations of thought, no matter whether in paint or poetry, never constitute the greatest art. The composition is more restful and simpler than in his earlier works. When Whistler began to realize this shortcoming of his earlier style, he turned away from "orchestral explosions of colour" and "volleys of paint," and began that wonderful process of elimination which helped him to become one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century.

National Gallery, Washington
ON THE BALCONY: VARIATIONS IN FLESH-COLOUR AND GREEN.

In his later work Whistler returned once more to vivid colouring. It was solely in pastels and water colours, never in oils. And the butterfly, the symbol of Whistler's individuality, fluttered gaily from picture to picture, from print to print, and letter to letter; now disappearing in greyish mists, then peeping forth from a dark olive background, and again asserting his existence at times as a mere shadow, as a dark or coral red silhouette. Changing his colour and size on every canvas; he is now shaded blue, brown, rose, red, violet or peacock blue and then, suddenly assuming unusually large proportions, he spreads his wings in full flight to be lost once more as a grey, almost imperceptible spot, in some twilight atmosphere. At one moment he appears on a vase, a rug, or a curtain. He floats on the sea, rest on doorposts, wings his way over flowers and rocks, shifts sportively from the lower left to the right corner, thereupon rises to almost the middle of the canvas, flutters around the figures, even touches their forms delicately, as a dainty creature may do, and continues his endless variations and gyrations; ever ready to assert the final approval of the master.

CHAPTER IV
THE ART OF OMISSION

A Blue-black night, broken by sparks of bursting skyrockets and weird forms of light, in which two illuminated towers are vaguely indicated. To the left a cluster of foliage and a crowd of people, felt rather than seen. Such is the subject matter of this little 17 x 23 canvas which probably excited more controversy and discussion than any other of Whistler's pictures. It was scarcely noticed when it was first exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in October. But in 1877 the storm broke loose, and the famous libel suit against Ruskin, and the record of all details of the trial in a brown-covered pamphlet, under the title "Whistler v. Ruskin, Art and Art Critics" (in 1878), were the immediate results. And the discussion con or pro has not ceased to this very day. Some call it merely a clever sketch; others consider it one of the highest expressions beauty is capable of.

What is there so remarkable and fascinating in this picture, that it can exercise such an influence! Technically it is not perfect, the blacks are rather opaque, and it does not possess the haunting charm of the "Old Battersea Bridge" or even of the "Valparaiso Harbour."

Is it the subject matter? Fireworks were never painted before, or, at least, did not constitute the sole motif of a picture. Yet this should be no objection. Fireworks are one of the modern amusements that enjoy great popularity. There should be no objection to their representation, as little as to a baseball game, a prize fight or any realistic phase of our personal life. The curious interest of this painting, or any of Whistler's nocturnes, does not lie merely in the novelty of the subject (i. e. novel to pictorial representation), nor that it depicts the mystery of night in an unusual manner, as some artists and writers claim.

Its significance lies much deeper. It actually represents the beginning of a new way of painting, not merely of atmospheric conditions, but of an art different in its intentions from any previous form of representation.

During the trial Whistler himself gave the following definition of a nocturne:

"I have perhaps meant rather to indicate an artistic interest alone in the work, divesting the picture of any sort of interest which might have been otherwise attached to it. It is an arrangement of line, form and colour first, and I make use of any incident which shall bring about a symmetrical result. Among my works are some night pieces, and I have chosen the word 'Nocturne' because it generalizes and simplifies the whole set of them."

After Whistler had stated that he had worked two days on the "Falling Rocket," the General Attorney said:

"The labour of two days, then, is that for what you ask two hundred guineas?"

To which Whistler replied:

"No—I ask it for the knowledge of a life-time."

Owned by Mrs. Samuel Untermyer
NOCTURNE IN BLACK AND GOLD: THE FALLING ROCKET.

This is hardly a satisfactory explanation. It merely informs us that the consideration of line, form and colour is more important than the incident depicted. Have not all painters worked in that way! The actual manipulation of the pigment on the canvas is the supreme pleasure of every genuine painter. But the source of inspiration after all lies in the incident that is in the line, form and colour indicated by the incident. Or does Whistler wish to convince us that he mentally invented a colour scheme and then set out to find the incident? He might have said to himself, "I want to paint a night scene, in blue and gold, and I want such a silhouette to dominate the scene," but, after all, the incident had to furnish, or rather suggest, the possibilities of the mental vision. He, more than most painters, saw poetry in nature. His wonderful description of a river scene at night in the "Ten O'clock" vouches for that. Read these lines that are worthy of any poet:

"When the evening mist clothes the riverside with 'poetry' as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky and the tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and the fairy land is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home, the workman and the cultured one, the wise and the one of pleasures cease to understand as they have ceased to see, and nature, who for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master; her son in that he loves her, and her master in that he knows her."

A man who wrote like that surely received his inspirations from nature, and was dependent on the incident as much as anybody else. No, the true significance of his nocturne, as remarked before, lies in the original intention, not in the final effect of the subject he wished to produce. For conventionalist and impressionist alike, nature is the source of symbols for their mood. With them the standpoint is remarkably different from that of the superficial realists, who imagine that the mere copy of a scene must give the emotion that the scene itself arouses; who forget that the artist's emotion is as much a selective factor as his vision of the objective signs needful for the communication of his feeling to his public.

He probably wished to remain under cover, and not come out boldly and say: "This is the Japanese way of doing things. I disengage the poetical significance from an object or fact in Eastern fashion. I have learned this from the Hiroshige prints."

Few artists are willing to lay bare the mechanism of their individual way of interpretation. They would be misunderstood anyhow. Painters would have rejoiced to call him a downright imitator. And that is just the point where he differed from the average artist who followed the Eastern trail of art. He succeeded in combining the two great art elements of the world, those of the East and the West. In the sixties he was interested merely in a phase of Japanese art, that of colour. Hiroshige prints were hung on the wall or scattered on the floor of his studio, as can be noted in several of his earlier paintings. The Japanese artists were virtuosos of colour. They combined the most contradictory colours into a harmony, nuances which for centuries had escaped the appreciation of the European eye. After many experiments Whistler realized that this refined sense of colour was only one of the external accomplishments of Japanese art, that its true soul was revealed in its suggestive quality.

The Japanese artists work without perspective, shadows and reflections, and even when they apply them they do so in a purely decorative way. They rely entirely on design, on line and the juxtaposition of flat colour shapes. They do not care to produce an illusion, as if the frame afforded a view on a scene of actual life. They are satisfied with making a mere delineation, a suggestion of a beautiful gown or mountain view.

In literature, or even in such a simple matter as the naming of things, the Japanese invariably give play to the exercise of their imagination to bring out a suggestive effect. The same tendency extends into their fine arts. In treating objects of nature, however insignificant, the Japanese artist strives to suggest or indicate some sentiment beyond what is conveyed by the facts represented, just as the poet strives to store up a mine of thought in the thirty-one syllables of an ordinary verse, the Tanka, or in the still shorter Haikai of seventeen syllables. In short, the Japanese artist exerts himself to produce more than beauty of form or colour. This quality is less apparent in the coloured wood print so popular with Westerners. An Outomaro is really lacking suggestiveness. It runs too much into technical detail, and just for that reason perhaps we more readily understand the European artists.

Take for instant a simple representation of summer plants, merely a few stalks. The artist is not satisfied to show us the actual facts but endeavours to indicate something beyond what is actually represented, the delight of a flowery field in summer or the cool refreshing breeze under which the plants are bending and swaying.

The Western artists hitherto entertained a different ideal and though there were many schools, each advocating a different ideal, they all agreed on one point: that they had to create an illusion, with modelling, rotundity of form, light, shade and distance. Suggesting a fact is subtler than actually representing a fact. A sketch has something, a virility and freshness that a finished painting rarely has. We prefer Courbet to Ingres, Israels to Leighton. There must be something left to imagination, to our emotions and æsthetic consciousness. The Japanese leave most to imagination. Their method lacks strength but is capable of conveying finer poetic sentiments. Their vision is clearer, more rapid and less disturbed by intellectual preoccupations than ours. They are perhaps more perceptual than conceptual. Not that they lack deep poignant expression, but that they are deficient in intensity and depth of representation. The grandiose unity of effect of a Titian, Tintoretto or Rubens is beyond the kakemono and colour print. They succeeded in some instances in adumbrating in lines of conventional severity and precision strange and mystical intimations of spiritual existence. But we find it difficult to discern these qualities as we need more than suggestion to arrive at such conclusions.

Whistler tried and succeeded in translating this suggestiveness in such a manner that the Western mind could understand and appreciate it. How did he accomplish this task! He realized that he could not abandon atmosphere, light and distance. He had to apply the Eastern principle without deteriorating the Western technique. To proceed like the Japanese would have resulted in a failure. His "Princess of the Porcelain Land" must have taught him this. He strove for something else than a mere resemblance. He adopted certain ideas of space arrangement, certain forms of design and the elimination of detail. The underlying composition reminds of the Japanese, but not the finish.

Hiroshige was the first designer of Japanese colour prints who devoted himself largely to landscapes with figures, and with Eastern ingenuity almost exhausted the subject. His "Hundred Views of Fusi-yama" contain the most startling designs and problems of composition that have ever been attempted, and they are treated with incomparable boldness, and solved with astounding skill. The rarest aspects of nature are treated with perfect balance. It is a play of curves and geometrical shapes that bewilders the Western mind that has been content with comparatively few formulæ.

The vista idea of representing a scene as if viewed through the frame of a doorway, which Whistler so frequently used in his etchings as in "The Lime Burner" and "The Garden," is strictly Japanese. One of his friends said that Whistler never objected to any one trying to copy his way of painting, but looked upon filching of ideas as grand larceny. This proves how ignorant we all are about our conduct of life. If anybody ever plagiarized ideas it was Whistler. The "T" shape of the "Old Battersea Bridge," in his nocturne of blue and gold, is almost an exact copy of a Hiroshige design. The same can be said of the branch of leaves protruding like a silhouette from the margin of his "Ocean," and the composition of several other nocturnes. But Whistler added something which no Japanese print suggests. He added light, atmosphere, distance and mystery.

Tate Gallery, London
NOCTURNE IN BLUE AND GOLD: OLD BATTERSEA BRIDGE.

Hiroshige relied entirely upon design and line, and he was not a good draughtsman at that, at least not in his figures. His human figures frequently look like miniature caricatures or curious little insects. His line lacks purity and sweep, but is more realistic and less conventional than that of his predecessors. His colour is crude in comparison with the older artists. His prints that were executed after the introduction of European aniline colours in 1850, with their streaks of vivid red and blue, are almost offensive to the eye. His earlier ones, when he was content in working in pale colours, in pale blue and black with just a suggestion of pink, are vastly superior. Later on he tried to learn from the Europeans, and strove for atmospheric effects, but always suggested it rather by design than colour. If he used colour for that purpose it went never beyond a simple wash.

Whistler sacrificed line almost entirely. He worked in big masses, shapes and silhouettes and made colour the principal attraction. The simplicity of design he borrowed from the Japanese, but the intimate charm of his colour he got from another art, the art of music. Many paintings of the latter half of the nineteenth century show this musical tendency. Chavannes, Cazin, our American landscape painter Tryon, even the Impressionists, try to produce with colour something similar to the effect of sound. It is either a resemblance of feeling in execution, or the desire to deliver us over to a mood like music. Generally both desires go hand in hand.

The painter, to accomplish this, must go back to the emotional elements of things, to view objects with primitive enthusiasm and to disregard all cumbersome detail. These qualities must dominate his conception, and his treatment must be slightly decorative. He must see things flat, in curious shapes, and then juxtapose and complement his colours in such fashion that they produce instantaneously a pleasant retinal image. In most paintings the subject matter attracts our attention first, and the appreciation of its technique reaches our emotion through a mental process. A Chavannes fresco and a Cazin landscape, on the other hand, appeal directly to our emotions. Henner, Corot, Carrière are musical, Leighton, Dagnan-Bouveret, Böcklin are not. Chavannes and Tryon construct their compositions like a composer his score. By applying parallelism of line and repetition of form and colour shapes with slight variation, they attempt to transpose musical conditions to the sphere of colour.

Cazin goes further than either. He comes nearest to Whistler. He actually tries to make the colour sing, not a composition of diversified interests, but a simple sweet melody that instantaneously produces a distinct lyrical emotion. In his best pictures he reproduces successfully the perfect harmony of a few fugitive tints, such as occur so frequently in nature by a combination of the evening sky and a shimmering surface of water, by a white cottage in moonlight, or desolate marshes against a starlit sky. In this, Whistler excelled. He advanced another step by using the smallest limit of colours possible, without obliterating form and subject matter. Although Whistler accentuated the breadth of vision, divided his space arrangement into as few planes as possible, juxtaposed rarely more than two colours, and made all objects appear shadowy and weird against a glimmering sky, it is astonishing how vibrant he kept his colour; the more so as his colours are laid on rather flatly, and, occasionally, so thinly that the canvas shines through. This, of course, helps the vibrating quality, but the colour tints contain so many subtle variations that they scarcely become discernible to the eye but merely conscious as a vague shimmer, like that of night and atmosphere themselves.

The colour combinations are frequently the same. Blue and silver, and blue and gold appear most frequently. Then there is brown with gold or silver, and a crepuscule in flesh colour and green, which was also the theme of "On the Balcony."

His subjects were chosen with great discretion. Outside of the "Valparaiso Harbour" picture, a "Southampton Water" and a "St. Marks, Venice," most were devoted to London. There is a Chelsea embankment in winter, a Chelsea in snow and ice, the Westminster Bridge, the Trafalgar Square in snow, and the old Battersea reach and bridge in three versions. Whistler never stopped work at a picture until it was as perfect as he could make it. Many of the pictures that are now on the market, mere scraps and fragments at ridiculous prices, he would not have allowed to go out of his studio. He had the conscience of the true artist, but he never went to the extreme. He knew when to stop, a quality which is exceedingly rare. He would never have spoiled a canvas as Maris and Ryder do. He worked very hard on most of his pictures, but they do not show it. The difficulties and deliberate slowness of execution are lost in the final result. "To say of a picture, as it is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view." He followed this maxim out to the letter. Industry was with him a necessity—not a virtue. Were you to ask me to define the charm of his nocturnes, I should say, I fancy that it lies in the delicious purity of their expression. The emotions which Whistler wishes to excite are those of visional pleasure, of subtle speculation and vague emotional joy. In him inspiration always prevailed over caprice. The picture had first to express the arrangement of colour entrusted to it, and was scarcely allowed any dash or extravagance of brushwork or form, unless they would form a part of his original plan and serve as a contrast or dissonance. He never added anything in his repaintings, but cut out one passage after another; he did not graft on, he pruned, for he meant nothing should remain but the most essential. If there was ever a man tormented by the accursed ambition to put the whole world into one picture, the whole picture into one tonality, and the whole tonality into one colour note, it was Whistler. It is difficult to understand why his work was ever criticized as being unfinished. When Burne-Jones, in a spirit hostile to Whistler's work, declared in the witness box at the Ruskin trial: "In my opinion ... a picture ought not to fall short of what has been for ages considered as complete and finished," Whistler retorted effectively: "A picture is completely finished when nothing more can be done to improve it."

NOCTURNE IN GRAY AND GOLD: CHELSEA, SNOW.

And for this finish he tried incessantly. There was never an artist who was more conscientious and more ardently striving for perfection than he. He sometimes tried experiments with different mediums in oil painting. At one time he used benzine to thin the colours, another time kerosene. He would cover a large canvas all over with the latter, in order to bring out the dried tints, before he started to repaint or overpaint. And he said to Clifford Adams, his last apprentice, "In the morning we may not succeed in getting the direct relation of colour, but at noon it may become more harmonious and at sundown we might strike just the right thing." And so he worked, day after day and year after year, on his pictures, until every trace of labour was obliterated and the picture had become a masterpiece. "A masterpiece that would appear "as a flower" to the painter—perfect in its bud as in its bloom—with no reason to explain its presence, no mission to fulfil; a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist—a puzzle to the botanist—an accident of sentiment to the literary man."

This flatly contradicts the general idea rampant among painters that he furnished his paintings au premier coup. His friends endorse the denial. Mr. R. A. Canfield has seen not less than sixteen changes of background to one portrait, "and heaven knows how many more that were not counted." Whenever he was dissatisfied with a painting, he started a new canvas until he finally realized the task he had attempted. In that sense his colleagues are right, his pictures look as if they were painted au premier coup but it was a roundabout way. It is impossible to advance any theory about his technique. All his pictures are painted in varying thicknesses of paint, in varying degrees of liquidity of paint, in varying smoothness and roughness, in few or many sittings, in fact, in the varying technique which alone can correspond to moods of so great a painter and the circumstances of each picture.

The only thing which has any semblance to a constant method is a moderate adherence, in his portraits at least, to the old way of painting from dark to light which, in the final painting, in overlapping pieces of paint, as in the case of most oil paintings until recently, results in the thickening of the paint towards the light.

There are scarcely more than sixteen finished nocturnes on record. Of these, most are masterpieces, or would pass as belonging to the best of his works. And as he worked at them ever since he returned from Valparaiso in 1866 and held the first important exhibition of nocturnes at the Dowdswell Gallery, and in Paris (in the Rue Sèze) not previous to 1883, when quite a number were still unfinished, we are astonished at the small output. But masterpieces are scarce. And if a painter can be credited with two or three every year he is a hero in his profession.

The importance of the nocturne in Whistler's own career, everybody must realize who is familiar with his work. They add to his personality a delicious flavour that even his lithographs and large paintings do not grant in the same manner. It was to him an instrument that obeyed his slightest wishes. It was art, at once aristocratic, delicate, of high finish and moreover imbued with an individual rhythm and the poetry of nature.

NOCTURNE IN BLUE AND SILVER.

What wonderful rain and snow this man has painted! What vast expanses of water as mystic as the night! And those vagrant mists, that envelop everything and blot out the very existence of things! There has not been anything in art since Turner that could be compared with it. There are no banal sunsets, no glaring moonlights, only the more intricate moods of nature, snowfall, mist, late evening and night. Also in the choice of his subject he added a new note.

The art of a landscape painter is determined by a thousand influences upon his mind other than those of nature. The essence of Monet's art is one of an hour, but with such a painter as Daubigny or Rousseau it is one of a place. There is the sense of the atmosphere of the moment given by one school of landscape painters, of locality by another, poetry by a third and of the historic associations of a place by yet another school. These things are, of course, determined by temperament, and schools of painting may be classified in this way more adequately than they are. Human association creeps into landscapes in various degrees, and also in other ways than the historical way which we feel,—as in F. E. Church's pictures, for instance,—but landscape, generally subordinate to the human interest, now sometimes tries to free itself from this influence entirely. It has become like poetry, simply the record of an emotion or mood remembered in colour. This is Whistler's peculiar innovation.

And yet the final significance of the nocturne in the world of art is still an open question. Time alone can decide its value. The rest is mere hypothesis. Many—and I only talk of people who understand—argue that despite its perfection, the nocturne represents a minor phase of art. Of course, a nocturne, no matter how beautiful, cannot compete in importance with the "Portrait of Carlyle," or "The Artist's Mother." Size does not mean much, but it means something. A small painting can be as exquisite in workmanship as a large one, but it can never rise to the same dignity of expression. A frescoe by Chavannes would lose much if executed in the size of the average easel picture.

But the nocturne stands for something in modern art which lends it special importance, aside of all workmanship and beauty of pictorial treatment. It represents a return to the art of painting for painting's sake. Every art, may it be music, poetry, dancing, sculpture or painting, has its own peculiar technique, which the technically ignorant person cannot appreciate. Poetry which has no formal conventions is inconceivable. And, in a similar manner, painting has the charm of texture and brushwork, the charm of how the paint is actually put on and displayed on the canvas. The æsthetic satisfaction derived from an art is in exact proportion to one's knowledge of the art's technique.

This largely explains the general public's indifference to art. And the everlasting fight between the artist and the public has been on these lines. The plea of the modern experimentist that all poetry of painting should be in the paint, which also Whistler advanced, is a just one if not carried to extremes. Absolute paucity of idea is as unfavourable as story-telling. The intrinsic beauty of a painting lies in the method of painting, and the only guide for the painter is colour and the general arrangement—not a method learned by rote, not an arrangement garroted by a thousand rules which others have invented, but that personal style or rhythm which is inveterately the painter's own. So Whistler's style is beautiful because it is personal. His revolt was against story-telling, against the genre pictures, which adulterated painting with the skill of the novel writer. It is for future æsthetics to decide whether the introduction of musical ideals is not just as dangerous as the intermixture of any other art. There is no doubt, however, that the new combination grants a higher pleasure to the connoisseur at present. Music is the most fashionable and, perhaps, most widely understood art to-day.

This be as it may, Whistler did a great service to modern art. By realizing its limitations he bestowed upon it a new vitality and glow. His art, far from being lawless, is the expression of a new law. Make any kind of pictures you like, dear painters, provided they are beautiful. For each age there is a different beauty. Old forms and old perfections wither.

There has been too much story-telling. The David school, with its pompous historical, allegorical and mythological representations, has become intolerable to us. David, Vernet, etc., up to Ingres and Delaroche all seem lifeless. Also the Romanticists, who were the interpreters of poets, appear highstrung to more recent art ideas. The reaction was inevitable. The Impressionists—and their merit lies principally in that their work represents a technical reaction—went too far, inasmuch as it allows scarcely any scope to intellectual expansion. It is based on immediate vision, and occupies itself only with the consideration of light and colour, and keen observation of modern life. All the great painters met the public half way. The great painters, we need only to recall Rembrandt, Velasquez or Leonardo, were painters as much as they were poets, but each in equal measure. The qualities balanced each other, and they did not, like the modern painters, sacrifice one for the other.

Whistler has to be classified as an Impressionist, but he remained true to the old tradition. He was as much a reactionist against classic and romantic painting as any of them; but he had no use for the new technique. Like Monet, he went back to Velasquez and Goya, Franz Hals, Van Dyke and all the Old Masters who could paint. Like Courbet, he reduced a scene to three or four broad tones, but he was more exact in the grade of tones, and invariably endeavoured to explain the sentiment inspired by them. His work was never anti intellectual. On the contrary he was a true visionary.

He protested against literary elements, but emphasized the psychological and symbolical qualities of painting. Nobody was further remote from gross superficial realism. Like Flaubert and the Goncourts, he proved that realism can go hand in hand with refined form and delicate psychology. He was sane throughout. And that is why the æsthetic revolution, produced by him, is not yet at an end.

The first principle for the painter is to acquire a personal mode of feeling and thinking, and the second that he should find an adequate and personal method of expressing himself. The painter must choose his method. If he has only the old themes to paint the old forms will suit him well enough—portraits and single figures, landscapes and marines, cattle pictures and still life—but if he has anything special to say, he must find for himself a special and unique form of expression. The only criterion is beauty.

CHAPTER V
ON LIGHT AND TONE PROBLEMS

In his "Art in the Netherlands," and his various books on Italian art, H. Taine has maintained that the hand of the mediæval painter was largely guided by optical sensations. And, following this rather suggestive, than conclusive, trend of argument, we will readily perceive that the peculiar lighting conditions of those days, the semi-darkness of the interiors, the play of sunlight dying in the obscurity of shadows, and the absence of strong artificial lights have done much to disclose to the genius of a Titian and a Rembrandt the manifold harmonies of chiaroscura, of colouring, modelling and emotion. The tallow candle, the oil lamp, the torch and the open fire-place were the only artificial light appliances known to the Middle Ages, and they were all only like solitary rays of light in universal darkness. Illumine a room by night, by placing a candle on the table or on the floor, and judge for yourself. The effects obtained, no doubt, would appear to you as weird and picturesque. The flickering light is uncertain, the shadows are intensely dark and pronounced, almost crude and vacillating, as if engaged in a continual combat with light. The contrasts are startling, yet not discordant, the vague train of light mingled with shadows accentuate only a few places with vivid spots, perchance the polished surface of a piece of furniture, a glass or pewter mug on the table, the collaret or jewelled belt of some fair lady. The eye is led to noticing gradations of obscurity, the darkness grows animated with colour and form, and we see the objects as through a glaze of Van Dyke brown.

No wonder that the painter of the Middle Ages, having become sensible to the beauty of transparent darkness and the brilliant passages of light, dared to unite extremes and to show every form and colour in its full strength. The vagueness of chiaroscural effects was the great modifier which enveloped all adjacent objects in clair obscure and tempered them with a warm and mellow radiance.

How different are the conditions in our time. There are no more Schalcken or Rembrandt effects. We have succeeded in banishing darkness from our homes. We have become very sanitary, we want light and air, the walls of houses are built less substantial, and through the increased largeness and transparency of panes, the daylight streams in with dazzling vehemence. It penetrates into the remotest nooks and corners. Even at dawn the shadows are only vaguely dark, of an uncertain and mixed bluish grey. Lenbach, the portrait painter, realized this deficiency, and found it necessary to construct a special studio, where the light was only sparingly admitted through deep casements, and where the sitters for his old-master-like interpretations of modern characters were placed far away from the windows.

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum, New York
LADY IN GRAY.

The greatest havoc among chiaroscural effects, however, has been played by modern light appliances. Gas and electric light, with their various modifiers and intensifiers, have killed all the old ideals. There are no longer any striking chiaroscural contrasts or strong accentuations. In the Middle Ages dress and drapery showed depth of folds and recesses which are absolutely unknown to-day. Now, everything is diffused with light. Nothing is steady and fixed, and yet objects stand out in painful relief. The modelling has lost much of its tonal variety, and all objects vaguely reflect the imprint of all-pervading light. The values of colour appear bleached and vary incessantly. Our eyes are perpetually moving in a restless manner from one part to another, and no longer find any place to rest in the depth of shadows.

Luckily for us, we have been rendered unconscious of these dangers, we have grown accustomed to them, but their influence on modern painting has been a most palpable one. Chiaroscural composition underwent a complete transformation. Saliency of object induced the modern painter for a time, at the beginning of the last century, to strive solely for fixed and precise conceptions of form and to utterly neglect the beauty of light and shade. When he discovered his error, he went to the other extreme, and not merely softened contours, but blotted them out completely. At a loss how to meet this difficulty he lost himself in an intenser and more varied study of illumination, with the aim to reach a higher pitch of light. Lamplight and firelight effects and the contrasts of commingling light rays from two, or even three, sources became the order of the day. Sargent studied the effect of Japanese lanterns on white dresses in twilight. Harrison tried to fix the play of sunlight on the naked human body. Dannat experimented with flesh tones and electrical arclight and magnesium flashlight illumination. Zorn endeavoured to solve in his Omnibus picture the conflict of various lights in a glass-encased interior. Degas and Besnard became enchanted with illumination from below, in the cross lights and the lurid unnatural lights of the stage, and his disciples introduced the effects of footlights into interiors by placing the lamp on the floor.

All these studies address themselves most powerfully to the modern mind, as they depict contemporary conditions. The eye may be offended or even repelled by unnecessary trivialities at times, but the underlying aspiration is, after all, the truth. From an æsthetic view-point it is less satisfactory, as this modern substitute of light and shade composition, consisting of an opposition of colours, rather than of masses, does not afford, in the speech of Herbert Spencer, "the maximum of stimulation with the minimum of fatigue." It contains a discord, a lack of normal gratification, and this shortcoming, in conjunction with the deterioration of the crafts, which were replaced by factory labour, and the hopelessly prosaic aspect of modern dress, as far as colour is concerned, directed the painter into other fields of investigation. He realized that nature had remained unchanged, that the colour-symphony of sea and landscapes, of dawn and sunset, were as beautiful as ever, and he went out of doors for inspiration. And then, to his great astonishment, he discovered that the optical sensations afforded by nature were very similar to those he had experienced in his home life, also how everything was diffused with light, and forms rendered uncertain by the vibration of light.

The famous colour harmony of Italian painters, red, green and violet, which aroused action successively in the whole field of vision without exhausting it, seemed meaningless. Strange, apparently discordant combinations of green and blue and yellow, orange and red, which stimulate only certain portions of the retina at the expense of others, obtruded themselves upon his optical consciousness. It became apparent that light does not emphasize, but that it generalizes, and that colours and tones, although more varied, are less decisive than in the painting of the Old Masters. The charm of pictorial illusion seemed to have shifted from the juxtaposition of contrast to the more subtle and less powerful variety of half tones. It is not so much the richness and fullness of colour the modern painter strives for, as Raffaelli has pointed out, but the combination of colours which yield a sensation of light, which, in a way, is a reflection of our temporary light conditions. That the Impressionists banished black from their palette is significant itself.

Owned by John H. Whittemore
"L'ANDALUSIENNE."

Ever since the semi-darkness of the Middle Ages was dispelled, the minds of painters had been occupied with the invention of a new method of painting. Chardin and Watteau, who crosshatched and stippled pure colours in their pastels and water colours, were really the forerunners of impressionism. Delacroix was the first master-painter who scientifically concerned himself with light and colour notation, as Turner (viz. Ruskin) introduced the emphasis of the colour of shadows at the expense of their tones. But not before science came to the assistance of the painter, was he able to perfect his system of open air mosaics, of producing tone by the parallel and distinct projection of pure colours.

And it is Chevreul, Young, Helmholtz and Ogden Rood, who, after analyzing colour sensations from a physiological viewpoint and tracing them to their causes, supplied the genius of Manet, Monet and Degas with a new pictorial revelation of light and colour. The modern style of painting is a direct outcome of the environment in which we live. With the decline of candlelight parties the new era was ushered in, and the kerosene lamp was the last harmonizer of light and darkness. As it went slowly out of fashion, the reign of half and quarter tones, or, in other words, a new reign of light, of light transposed into tone, set in.

It set in, however, at the expense of everything else. It is largely technical, and the representations are photographic, prosaic, crude and often without the slightest suggestion of sentiment, not even that which an ordinary scene out of doors produces in an imaginative mind. This, more than any other course, estranges art from the approval of the general public.

The subject of an Old Master, although mostly of a religious order and legible to the ordinary mind, at times may have soared beyond the ordinary faculties of comprehension, but the object represented invariably appealed to the sense of sight, as it was painted in such a way as to create an illusion. The Old Masters succeeded in suggesting on a flat surface the roundness and actual colouring of things. The modern painter depicts objects in which the beauty is not always palpable to the layman, and in a manner which is less convincing, as he suggests form rather than actually representing it, and adheres most stubbornly to individual colour interpretation. It needs connoisseurship and technical knowledge to understand and appreciate the paintings of to-day. The paintings of a Degas, Besnard or Renoir remain a myth even to the people who are fond of art. Comparatively few persons are versed in the thought-transference from colour to sentiment.

Whistler did not believe in the constant mechanical mixture of seven solar tones, which make the eye perform the work which should be done by the painter. He tried hard for the dissociation of tones by endeavouring to translate the flat tints of the Japanese into oil paintings executed in Western fashion, but was not satisfied with the result.

Living in London, with a view on the Thames, he realized that the aspects of modern life have turned grey. They have nothing to do with Oriental embroideries. Our large cities with their smoke and manifold exhalations (not to speak of communities subjected to the use of soft coal) have acquired a dust-laden, misty atmosphere. This peculiarity of city atmosphere, however, to be noticed in London and Paris as much as in Chicago and Pittsburg, is a wonderful subduer and eliminator of detail, and should prove a valuable ally in conquering new suggestions of light effects. This Whistler realized, and he used it to express what the inner life of things in modern art needed most to express, the poetry of paint expressed in tone and light. "The study of light per se" as Leon Dabo says, "had become a creed with Monet, Manet and their followers. Somehow Whistler's contribution to this naissance—for it was a real birth, first successfully carried out by Constable—has been entirely neglected for the more obvious quality of full sunlight produced by the so-called Impressionists. Whistler's paintings prove conclusively that where there is harmony of colour there is vibration of atmosphere, and, therefore, the illusion of light."

When we stand before the "Mona Lisa" of Leonardo da Vinci and before his less famous, but almost equally fascinating woman of the Liechtenstein Gallery, we do not marvel merely at the lifelike representation, which seems to actually vibrate; but at something evasive and unfathomable that we find difficult to express in words. We experience something similar when we contemplate Whistler's "Mother" or some portraits of modern masters like Blanche, Lavery, enigmatic Khnopff, or the grey men and women of Carriere, who rise so softly and mistily out of the background. Although they have not attained the mastership of the former in the representation of the living, breathing people, there is the same mysterious mood in their paintings. They seem to quiver with something that is essentially modern, and cannot emanate alone from the charm of momentary expression which is one of their main attractions. The modern figures have a less corporeal effect than those of the Renaissance; they resemble apparitions which have suddenly taken shape in the greyness of life only to dissolve again into shadows. This is more than a technical change, it is a new way of thinking. We concede a new attribute to these painters and call their achievements the "psychological style" of painting. Robert Henri's "Young Woman in Black" is an interesting attempt in this direction.

By this we wish to convey that the figures tell us something of the inner life, and that the way in which this is accomplished impresses us like a commentary on their souls. Of course this is nothing new. All the masterpieces of portraiture, no matter how different technically they may be, whether clear and sharp or soft and diffused, whether by a Raphael or a Rembrandt, Titian or Franz Hals, have the faculty to make us dream and invent some psychical annotation to the figures represented, but modern life is more analytical. We rejoice in dissecting our thoughts, sentiments and moods, and some of our foremost contemporaries, though they may wield their brushes as dexterously as the Old Masters, concentrate upon the endeavour to reflect specifically the spiritual qualities and to accentuate its functions as far as it is possible in paint.

The modern painter is fond of specializing, not only in subject, but technically, because he lacks the overflowing energy and strength to conquer all the elements of his profession in one effort. This age, at least in the upper intellectual strata, has become very skeptical. We are not concerned so much about divinities and our future state as about ourselves in the present. Religion no longer furnishes the emotional staff on which we may lean on our pilgrimage of life, and yet we need some spiritual support, some science for the soul, and we may look about for something that may mystify us and lift us above the prose of every-day existence. And this search is mirrored in the endeavour of these men who would like to paint enigmatic figures, like "Mona Lisa" and the woman of the Liechtenstein Gallery.

Conditions change, but not so much that they become entirely extinct. The possibilities for emotional art are to-day as great as ever.

For portraiture, single figure representation and character delineation gentle effects capable of subtler gradations are more desirable. They may be found in many out-of-the-way places. A modern Ribera may find endless suggestions for new light and shade combinations in an ordinary cellar, and the picturesque "tavern atmosphere" of a Caravaggio or Terborg can surely be substituted in some obscure nooks and corners of our towns. Our living-rooms show a wealth of still life that, by the play of light, could be turned into beautiful accessories. There is nothing more gratifying to the eye than a bright, haphazard shimmer on some objects while the remainder is lost in a vague, picturesque haze.

The student of light and shade will find the range of light is still a very wide one. The vivid glow of firelight, here flickering brightly, there vanishing in gloom, will always produce a striking effect. A pale splendour caressing the human form with vague reflections could be obtained by light streaming through stained-glass windows. The dazzling illumination of the hour of sunset, which pales and subdues all objects, and, concentrated on the human body, makes it look as if it had been absorbed all in light and radiated it (which Prudhon has attempted and Henner specialized), may fill our minds with new dreams of vision. Even the ghostlike rays of shimmering moonlight (as Steichen has shown in his versions of Rodin's Balzac) may open novel methods to render tone and form in the broadest and softest manner possible.

Still I do not believe in the garish effects of certain modern painters, who take special delight in reproducing the flaring vagaries of artificial light. The trend of such works is towards an affected æstheticism. They may be fascinating and "stunningly clever" but they do not ring true. They are at their best only in colour experiments specially made to startle the beholder. When Elsheimer painted his "Christ Taken Prisoner," showing the pale light of the moon in the background, while the nocturnal figures in the foreground are enveloped by the glare of torches, he ventured upon a problem that was, after all, logical and true to life. But to place a lamp on the floor merely for the purpose of throwing interesting diagonal shadows upwards on a woman's figure, is not far from being an absurdity.

The various aspects of electrical illumination, gaslight, flashlight effects, searchlight, etc., no doubt can be solved pictorially, but they should never be applied unless the character of the picture absolutely demands them.

Tone is the ideal of the modern painter. It is his highest ambition. It is the powerful subduer of all the incongruities of modern art.

But what painters strive for, in most instances are merely fragmentary accomplishments. It is not tone in the large sense as the Old Masters understood it. To Titian and Rembrandt and Velasquez "tone" meant a combination of all pictorial qualities, the contrast of colour, the balance of lighter and darker planes, the linear arrangement; all these together produced tone. They do not sacrifice form or detail, correct drawing, the physiognomy of the faces and the idea and conception of the picture to it.

Do not misunderstand me. Tone is desirable; no picture should be without it. But it is merely one of the elements that enter into the making of a picture, and not the whole thing. There are light tonalities as well as dark tonalities. A Renoir is as much in tone as a black-in-black Tissot.

What tonal painters see in tone is merely the appearance of old age. The Old Masters have become famous, and the public has acquired a certain predilection for dark-toned pictures. The modern painters try to reproduce it, overlooking (perhaps wilfully) that the dark tonality is entirely an artificial product, caused by dirt and dampness, the chemical action of light, and the gradual change of colour, oil and varnish.

The Old Masters painted in a low key, but they probably never thought that some day their pictures would look as they do now. The modern painters try to produce a quality that has nothing to do with art, they cater to the taste of certain art patrons that have a liking for old-looking things.

In portraiture the simplest scheme will always be most certain of success. Variety is desirable, but no exaggeration or strained effects. Of all modern painters Whistler and Carrière seem to have excelled in conquering the modern limitations of light and shade composition and making the most of them. They have enveloped their figures in clair-obscure that is uncertain in form, mystic in tendency, but suggestive of atmosphere, depth and space, some grey or dark interior filled with struggling shadows, capricious gleams of light and tonal gradations, tantalizing in their subtlety and power of suggestion.

All sharp lines are dissolved, each detail vanishes with soft delicacy into the other and their light, falling from some unknown source, quivers like a soft chord through the twilight.

The "Mother and Child" of Carrière has but little of the robust yet sweet and seductive charm of the Madonna pictures. Its glimmer of light is sad and dreamy, as if it were woven out of grey monotonies of everyday life. And in Whistler's "Sarasate" we see in the plastic, but solitary light passage, on face and shirt front a symbol of all the glamour of romance and poetry that light can yield in our prosaic age. Whistler translated all objects into flat surface planes, and, in that way, sacrificed more to the realization of tone than any other painter. His fragmentary visions are almost colourless but never give the impression of monochrome. Looking at one of his enigmatic figures receding into vague shadows, a strange association of thought occurs to me: I see in one of the sunless courtyards of the Escurial the dark figure of a woman standing near a fountain and holding a red rose in her hand. At one of the palace windows is seen the proud face of Velasquez, gazing absent-mindedly upon the scene. And the wind ruffles the flower, carries one petal after another and scatters them upon the surface of the water. Is this dark silent woman the personification of Whistler's muse, and does she tell us that the splendour of light and shade composition of the Old Masters has faded, that we know nothing of its fervour that rose from the depths of a more picturesque age, and that all we can do is to scatter a few colour notes across the darkness of space? For the jubilant and passionate note is altogether missing in Whistler's art, though it can claim profundity and some dreaminess.

Carnegie Art Institute, Pittsburg
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK: SENOR PABLO SARASATE.

Light now flits phantom-like across the masterpieces of pictorial delineation, but it is still the great elixir of art, that will give life to any scene and animate any object. No special method can be indicated. Every worker must be his own pioneer and pathfinder. The new era of light is yet in a primitive stage. It is a lonely art whose language is understood but by the few, though we have approached the hour of dawn before the awakening. Life may seem dreary and colourless to us, yet we should realize that only one beam of light is needed to change it into a vision of beauty.

To Rembrandt even the Bree-straat in Amsterdam, resplendent in his time of Oriental culture and Moorish pomp, may have seemed dull and colourless. He had to create for himself a distant and enchanted realm from out the prosaic world in which he lived. And so must every ambitious artist dream himself far away from the grey of everyday life and construct a poetic world for himself alone.

Light is, after all, objective and merely suggestive. The artist's mind must serve as some Faustean retort, which will turn these suggestions into the soft gleams and sparkling shimmers of art. Whistler was one of the few to accomplish the task.

CHAPTER VI
SYMPHONIES IN INTERIOR DECORATION

William Morris demanded that our entire environment should be beautiful. Only in moments of superior enjoyment do we realize the significance of human life, and by a poem, picture or sonata we construct the symbols that bring us closest to this appreciation. Why then not construct a candlestick, a chair, the surface of a wall, in such a way that they might be taken for symbols, to remind us of the existence of our soul? The candlestick shall no longer be a mere stand and holder for a candle but a souvenir of reminiscences. That is the philosophical idea that underlies all interior decoration and furnishing.

As Sheridan Ford so aptly expressed it in an article in "St. Stephen's Review" in 1889:

"There are in England two new, and in their origin, distinct methods of interior decoration. Gradually they have coalesced to a degree, although they will always retain their individual traits and differences. These two methods may be termed the Whistlerian, and the English or pre-Raphaelite; the one, spontaneous, fresh—simple, the other, a revival—complex—reformatory. Through many years, from the early days of the pre-Raphaelites down to the last meeting of the Painter-socialists, an outside influence—a personality—has been making itself felt in London in strange and subtle ways."

The Morris arts and crafts movement believes in patterned design and the dominant force of the material. Every material speaks its own language, and we must understand, before we can lend expression to it. When the actual moment of designing arrives, the artist-artisan should work with a piece of the material itself before his eyes—wood, stone, iron or plain silk, linen or wool stuff, according to circumstances. This memory of nature's forms, dominated by the momentary impression of the material, with its requirements, capabilities and limitations, would lead him to a more congenial and workmanlike result than all the contents of a natural history museum, botanical garden or library. In the same way as we can give to words a dramatic, epic or lyrical significance, so has wood, leather and glass their own sphere of expression. Harmony in every detail is the ultimate result. A room is no museum, every object must be related to the other, the candlestick must make a rhyme with the wall-paper, with the woodwork, the hangings, the table and chairs.

Whistler, on the other hand, was the apostle of Japanese simplicity, of suggestion rather than realization. He tried to express his own æsthetic creed, and that consisted of restful expanses of unbroken wall, of decorative devices and ornamental motifs, individual caprices accentuated by black, and, finally, by colour. Colour in interior decoration meant to him the same thing as tone in painting. It reigned supreme. Our feeling of beauty varies; it may find its expression in a certain flower, a certain hour of the day or season, in a certain poem or song or, as it was the case with Whistler, in a certain delicate colour tint, that would make a room look gay and cheerful. He tried to bring the sun into the house, even in a land of fog and cloud. Pale pink, brown, pale turquoise, primrose, saffron, sulphure and lemon-yellow were his favourite colours. These he endeavoured to express. It was the gesture of his soul translated into every object and material.

A colour is like a special metric form, and all lines, and every combination of tint—the sofa, the lamp, wall-paper—take the place of stanzas in a finished poem. In such a house we would see mirrors everywhere reflecting our own personality. Such were Whistler's creations. They reflected his own face, and echoed his own song. Whistler arrived at these conclusions early in his life. During his Stevens-Japanese print period he interested himself a good deal with decorative schemes. He had painted "The Princess of the Porcelain Land," which was purely decorative, and, in a way, served as inspiration for the Peacock Room, as the design for the latter was really invented to find a proper environment for the painting.

In a diary of William Michael Rossetti, the ever busy biographers have found a note referring to six schemes or projects of practically the same size. It reads: "Whistler is doing on a large scale, for Leyland, the subject of women with flowers." They were never executed, although some of the sketches are still in existence. He abandoned decorative schemes entirely in later years, but became more and more engrossed in the problems of interior decoration. In later years he intended to paint a grand decoration with full orchestration that he would call "The Symphony of Colours—Full Palette." This would have been indeed interesting, but I fear he went too deep into blacks to have accomplished it. In most instances he abstained from mural decoration,—the panels over the chimney-place, and the shutter and ceiling decoration of the Peacock Room for the Leyland home at Prince's Gate, London, were his only supreme effort in that direction. They show the right idea about decorative painting. He agreed with all decorative painters from Gozzoli to Bob Chanler, that it should be an arrangement of colours which, within its frame, affords a pleasant visual entertainment.

There is no intention to give food for thought. The peacocks in blue on gold and gold on blue relate as little as does an Oriental carpet. He merely wished to please the eye by depicting them more beautifully than they were in nature. But why did he select peacocks? Do they not convey an idea? Figures usually are story-telling symbols, but not necessarily so; with him they were vehicles of colour, to invent a pattern for their luminosity. Peacock designs occur frequently in Japanese art. No doubt, Whistler studied them. There is a certain resemblance, but he individualized them in his own way. The sharply silhouetted forms of the birds are a happy invention of luminous colour and interesting design. The Japanese would have made a more lavish use of gold, that is they would have left larger spaces untouched by any additional colour. Blank spaces of gold (or any colour) act in such instances like the musical silence of a pause between music, they represent the birth of beauty from luxury. But the Leyland room was overcrowded, with its elaborate ceiling, bulky chandelier and collection of blue and white porcelain on walnut shelves, broken by an endless repetition of perpendicular lines. He could not change the architecture of the place, so he went to work and decorated the few spaces that were available. To decorate the inside shutters with a peacock design was a unique performance, and to cover the moulding of the chandelier and the entire ceiling with conventionalized peacock feathers, utilizing the eyes of the feathers as accents, was even more marvellous. In the elegance of its scheme, and its individual perfection, splendour and restfulness it has no equal.

SHUTTER DECORATION, PEACOCK ROOM.

When Whistler moved into houses of his own, he had, like all ambitious house-owners, the desire to create a comfortable and beautiful home. None of his houses were ever completely decorated and finished; they had a look, as Pennell tells us, as if he had just moved in, or was just moving out; often there were packing cases and trunks about, but as much as was finished was always beautiful.