Whistler

Contents

PAGE

The Test of Time

I. Years of Youth .......

Chapter I Years Of Youth

Whistler was bom on 10th July 1834, at Lowell, in Massachusetts, and was baptized there, in the Church of St Anne, with the Christian names of James Abbott, on 9th November 1834. His father, George Washington Whistler, after completing his course of study at the military college of West Point, became an officer in the United States army and attained the rank of Major. After leaving the army Major Whistler adopted the profession of a railway engineer in the States. He acquired a considerable reputation in his profession, and when the Russian Government, desirous of constructing railways, resolved to call in the assistance of an American engineer, it fixed its choice on Major Whistler. So in 1842 he journeyed to Russia, with his family, and became the chief adviser for the first railway undertaken, that from Moscow to Petrograd. At his death; in 1849, his widow returned to America, bringing her children with her. A part of James Whistler’s youth was thus spent in Petrograd.

Major Whistler was twice married. By his first wife he had three children : two sons, of whom the younger, an engineer, died in England in 1869 ; and a daughter, married to Mr Seymour Haden, a medical man since known as an etcher. By his second marriage, with Matilda McNeill of Wilmington, he had five sons, of whom the eldest, James Abbott, the subject of this book, was to survive all the others. Whistler during his youth used only his first name, James — “ Jim ” or “Jimmy” for his intimates — but later in life he adopted his mother’s name, and, adding it to those he had been christened by, he definitely called himself James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Following in his father’s footsteps he entered, in 1851, the military college of West Point, there to make those studies which would eventually give him also the rank of officer in the United States army. But at the test quite another vocation than that of arms declared itself. He developed an extraordinary aptitude for drawing, and soon the handling of the pencil absorbed him and dominated all his other studies. He had begun drawing when he was quite a child, and there are at Petrograd drawings which he made when he was ten years old. The drawings made at West Point are already very free and very personal.

Governed by his artistic tastes, and being, as he was to be all his life, the very incarnation of independence, Whistler could not adapt himself to the rules of a military college. When he had been three years at West Point it was evident that he lacked the aptitudes requisite for the studies he pursued there, and that he could not bend himself to the severe and meticulous discipline that was imposed. He was informed of his dismissal, brought about by his want of discipline and his failure in chemistry. The examiner had asked him what he knew about silicon. Whistler had replied : “ Silicon is a gas.” At this the examiner put a stop to his questioning, and Whistler was able to say later : “ If silicon had been a gas I might have become a general in the United States army.” One must confess that if it is difficult to imagine Whistler, with his way of living, amenable to military obedience, he does not appear any better fitted for the study of chemistry. His artistic vocation and impulsive nature kept him outside all rules and forbade him a formal school.

At the end of 1854 he was taken on as a draughtsman in the Government Coast Survey Department at Washington, and there he seemed to occupy a position for which his faculties were well suited. But he was strangled, so to speak, in drawing maps, and the restrictions of topography appeared to him as insupportable

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YEARS OF YOUTH as military discipline. Once he was told to engrave a plate showing a view, taken from the sea, of cliffs along the coast. He acquitted himself of the task extremely well, but afterwards, carried away by his fancy, he had added, of his own accord, at the top and in the corners of the plate, heads and groups of people, kinds of caricatures. With the introduction of these additions the plate could no longer be of any use for printing on the maps for which it was intended, and it became evident he was not made for the rigid toil of topography. He had then to quit the office at Washington as he had to quit the college of West Point.

His artistic vocation taking definitely the upper hand, he then left the United States, whither he was never to return, and, arriving in Paris towards the end of 1855, entered the studio of Gleyre.

Chapter II

Whistler in Paris possessed the great advantage of being able to speak and write French fluently, as a second mother’s tongue. He had learnt it young at Petrograd and made use of it in Russia. He had contracted the habit, which he never lost, of sprinkling his conversation and English writings with French words. Thanks to his knowledge of the language, therefore, he was able to find himself perfectly at home in Parisian artistic circles.

He was certainly not what one could call a good student. He frequented the studio of Gleyre irregularly, little impelled to follow the direction of the master, from whom he differed profoundly, both in inclination and idea. As a souvenir of his stay with Gleyre it has only been related that at this time he and Tissot must have copied side by side the Angelique of Ingres.

The Parisian environment was to have a very great influence on Whistler. At the epoch when he arrived there the artists and students in the schools had developed certain customs which distinguished them — customs they have since lost, to become, in appearance at least, like everybody else. The pose they then affected induced them to lead a sort of life of “ ragging ” ; they liked to make themselves noticed by wearing unorthodox clothes. Above all, they aspired to despise the common mortal, and the desire to astonish, mock and bewilder what they called “ the bourgeois ” was general among them. This special manner of living was to take possession of Whistler, finding a well-prepared soil in his manner as an artist. On the “ gentleman,” the man who had lived in the best circles of Russia and America and taken their stamp, there was thus grafted the habit of a separate pose, whimsical attire, a way of despising and setting at defiance the vulgum pecus (vulgar herd) incapable of seeing and feeling like an artist. This combination of the distinctive characteristics of a French art student and the manner of an American gentleman, in a man otherwise full of life, spirit and originality, was bound to make of him a quaint original who could not fail to be everywhere immediately remarked.

Arrived in Paris, then, Whistler, plunging hotfoot into the ways of artists, forming comradeships with many and intimate friendships with several, led a gay and careless life. He had read, in America, La Vie de Boheme, which had vividly struck his imagination. The heroes of Murger had shown him free and attractive manners, which he had promised himself to adopt on going to Paris. He behaved himself now as in Bohemia, but in reality he only gave an imitation, for the true Bohemian is poor and endures all kinds of privations, whereas he was in easy circumstances. His father had died, leaving a fortune. Whistler had left the management of his portion of the inheritance to his eldest half-brother, the engineer, who secured him an income of some two thousand francs (£80), and though led away by pleasures he often strained his resources and fell into money difficulties, he never knew real want as so many others have. All the time he was amusing himself, he worked. Indeed, whatever may have been the distractions, the quarrels, the lawsuits, the polemics which came into his life and took up a part of his time, he was never altogether distracted from his art ; all his life was spent in work, and often he gave himself to it furiously for long periods.

As an artist in Paris he was divided between etching and painting. Etching, nevertheless, has been the first to leave productions susceptible to precise chronology, for his quite early works in painting are to-day difficult to find and classify. On the other hand, 1858 shows us a series of dated etchings. Among

B the number are found subjects taken in the course of a journey through Alsace-Lorraine, pushed as far as Cologne in Germany, and made in the company of Ernest Delannoy, a young artist who had become his intimate friend. They set off costumed in gaiters and great straw hats of unusual shape. Whistler represents himself thus in the etching which serves as a frontispiece to the series. Their journey, owing to shortness of funds, was finished on foot, and was full of incidents. I have heard it related at Oulevey’s, a comrade of Whistler at this epoch, that in one town where they found themselves with empty purses the two companions had had a drum beaten to announce that two distinguished artists from Paris would draw portraits at three francs the bust, five francs a full length, and that the announcement had brought them sufficient amateurs to extract them from their embarrassment. Si non e vero, e ben trovato.

Whistler returned to Paris, added some plates previously engraved to those he had drawn during the tour, and, taking the collection to the printer Delatre, obtained a first series of twelve etchings, thirteen with the frontispiece, known as his French Set ; limited to a small number of proofs, it was offered at the price of fifty francs (£2). The author was his own publisher, and looked after the sales himself. The additions made to the views in Alsace-Lorraine, Liverdun, Rue a Saverne, consisted of subjects taken from popular Parisian life, La Vieille aux toques (the old rag-woman), the Marchande de Moutarde, La Cuisine ; the portraits of Annie and Le Petit Arthur, his niece and nephew, the Hadens, Fumette, a little dressmaker of the Latin Quarter, shown seated, whose head was also etched separately, and finally La Mere Gerard. This Mother Gerard came from the middle classes, was well educated and made verses. By repeated misfortunes, after having kept a reading-room, she was reduced to selling flowers outside the entrance to the Bal Bullier. Whistler, attracted by her picturesque appearance, wished to use her as a model, and the better to dispose of her he kept her for a long time by him.

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Sri i.i Li i i. and 1'i.owi k promenading with her in town and taking her into the country, to the astonishment of spectators. In addition to the etching he also painted a head of her, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1861.

He continued, after this, to make etchings in Paris : Finette , a creole of light character who danced at the Bal Bullier, La Soupe a trois sous, a low restaurant frequented by the very poor. One of his most esteemed subjects. The Forge, was done at Perros- Guirec in Brittany in the summer of 1861. The year 1859 saw the commencement of the subjects executed in London, The Thames Set. Then he attained the culminating point, as it were, of his art, by the perfection of the technique, the lightness and elasticity of his line and the vivacity of the whole. He was able to make later, renewing himself, works in a different style, perfect of their kind, but nevertheless not surpassing these productions of his debut. One of his finest Thames etchings, Rotherhithe, in which we see two sailors’ heads in the foreground, and beyond, ships’ masts and the waters of the river, is so perfect in craftsmanship that it suggests a work produced in calm and contemplation . Quite the contrary, Whistler graved his copper in a kind of warehouse that was being repaired. At one moment a brick falling from above, almost on top of him, caused him to turn abruptly, and the hand that was working, wandering, placed perpendicularly on the middle of the plate a long line visible in the engraving.

Whistler devoted himself to etching in the most diverse circumstances, tracing the image directly on the copper without any preparation or preliminary drawings. The copper-plate and the point were for him what paper and pen or pencil are for others. So his drawings are rare, while his engraved work is considerable. He made his point move with sureness ; each line told and fell into its place. He could thus bring rapidly to conclusion any work he undertook. The portrait of the sculptor Drouet, a characteristic work of this period, was accomplished in two sittings, five hours’ pose. He was really an engraver by birth and instinct. The true engraver ought, without concealing the nature of the instrument employed — on the contrary, even allowing us to perceive that it is a point of metal he is using — nevertheless, to get rid in his execution of that rigidity, those dry, hard and set lines which seem inseparable from the implement. It is for this reason that there are so few true engravers : because a man may know how to paint and draw without knowing how to engrave, because the qualities necessary to the making of an engraver are of a special kind. How numerous are the artists who, having only given passing attention to this branch of art, or lacking the requisite qualities, have only given indistinct works in etching. We do not perceive that they have handled a point. They have simply counterfeited pen or chalk drawings. They have not known how to engrave. Now, Whistler’s etchings let us see immediately that they have come from a man without an equal in his art. They have decidedly the special character of works obtained by a rigid point, by a needle ; yet we discover in them neither harshness nor stiffness ; they are always supple and light.

Whistler had his studio in the Rue Campagne Premiere. Here he painted, among his earliest works (1857-1859), his bust portrait of himself, with a hat on his head, engraved by H. Guerard. In this there has been discovered the influence of Rembrandt, in whom he was then deeply interested. He had been particularly taken by Rembrandt’s head of a young man at the Louvre, with the wide biretta and the long wavy hair, and he amused himself by painting his own portrait in a similar get-up. Here is a heavily loaded canvas, a strong opposition of light and shade, while the wide-brimmed hat and tousled hair complete the analogy. A second portrait of himself, also of bust length, and with a hat on, which is reproduced as a frontispiece to this volume, but less Rembrandtesque and more marked by his own personality, must have been painted at about this period, only a little later.

In 1859 he submitted for the first time to the Salon a picture. At the Piano. It was rejected by the jury. It represented the painter’s half-sister, Mrs Seymour Haden, seated, playing the piano, against which her little daughter Annie, in white, stood leaning. The refusal of the jury prevented Whistler from showing it to the public, but it did not prevent it receiving the approbation of his comrades and painters of renown. Other beginners, Fantin-Latour, Legros, Ribot, were seen to be rejected from the Salon this year. Bonvin took all their paintings and showed them in his own studio. Courbet was one of those who saw them. He was particularly struck by the picture, At the Piano, which he highly praised. Whistler found his praise a great encouragement, and had henceforward with him continuous relations.

The picture shown in Bonvin’s studio had drawn upon Whistler the attention of a whole group. From this moment his comrades, who had already recognised his talent as an etcher, knew that he was equally gifted as a painter. Young artists destined later to make their names, with whom Whistler in these early years contracted friendships, were Fantin-Latour, Legros, painters, and Drouet, the sculptor. His friendship with Fantin was the closest, and for years they lived their lives almost in common. In Paris Whistler would occasionally share Fantin’s room, and then, when he had established himself in London, he made Fantin come over, and introduced him to his friends and people who might be useful.

The common life established during these years between Whistler and Fantin expressed itself in the interpenetration of their studies. The pleasure which one took in the other’s productions is pushed to a point where each borrows from the other. Fantin always delighted in painting still-life and flowers, and although Whistler did not share this taste, we find him painting, in 1859, a still-life with flowers. This picture, while revealing the personality of its author, is both conceived and painted quite in the manner of a Fantin still-life.

Among other souvenirs of their intimate friendship at this period there exists a drawing made under pleasant circumstances. One winter’s day in 1859 Whistler, arriving at Fantin’s, found him keeping himself warm by sitting up in bed with all his clothes on, strangely keeping his top hat on his head, and thus working away at a drawing. Whistler amused himself by sketching the scene on a piece of paper, which Fantin preserved. On his side Fantin, some years later, placed Whistler in the foreground of his great composition, Hommage a Delacroix, shown at the Salon of 1864, 1 where are grouped together the men who then represented originality and the future at Paris. Whistler is found there in company with Manet, Fantin, Legros, Bracquemond, Baudelaire and Champfleury. To the Salon of 1865 Fantin sent another group of artists, with the title The Toast, in which Whistler figured, wearing a Japanese robe. Fantin afterwards destroyed the picture, but before doing so he cut out the head of Whistler to keep it as a portrait. It afterwards passed into the possession of Mr Avery of New York.

From 1861 to 1865 the correspondence between Whistler and Fantin was very active. The letters of Whistler, written in fluent French, testify a keen friendship for Fantin. Whistler took the greatest interest in all that concerned him. He signals his efforts in London to make him known and find buyers for him. He keeps him informed of his own doings and goings ; he gives him details about his own works that he is planning or executing, with sketches accompanying the text.

One learns from this correspondence that Whistler, in the summer of 1862, puts himself on the road for Madrid with the desire of seeing the work of Velasquez. He stopped at Guethary, between Biarritz and St Jean-de-Luz, seduced by the beauty of the place, and stayed there a good long time. He began several pictures, but rain and variations in the light stopped him from bringing any to a conclusion. His stay at Guethary brought him

xNow in the Collection Moreau in the Musee des Arts D6coratifs, Paris.

Fantin-Latour working in his Bei nothing of any account, for he did not succeed in working there fruitfully. He had to return to Paris without going to Madrid, and he very nearly drowned himself while bathing. He gives Fantin a lively account of this accident :

“ The sea here is terrible. I was carried away by a strong current which dragged me towards those breakers in question, and if it had not been for my model in the red shirt I should have left my canvas unfinished. Because I should have been stone dead. The sea was enormous. The sun was setting, all lent itself to the occasion, and I saw the land getting further and further away. A wave fifteen feet high engulfed me, I drank a ton of salt water, passed through it, to be swallowed up in a second twenty feet high, in w hich I turned round like a catherinevrheel and wras overwhelmed by a third. I swam and swam, and the more I swam the less I approached. Ah my dear Fantin, to feel one’s useless efforts and lookers-on to be saying, ‘ But this gentleman is amusing himself ; he must be jolly strong.’ I cried, I howled in despair, I disappeared three, four times. At last they understood. A brave railway contractor ran and was twice rolled over on the beach. The bathing-attendant, my model, heard the call and arrived at a galop, jumped into the sea like a Newfoundland, succeeded in catching my hand and the twro pulled me out.”

His correspondence show's him to have been in Amsterdam for the first time in 1863, expressing his admiration for The Night Watch and his disdain for Van der Heist, whom he qualified as mediocre and no more.

Before 1863 the Salons were held only every other year. There wras one in 1859, and consequently none in 1860. In 1861 Whistler must have declined to send, for he was not among the exhibitors, and I cannot discover that he wras rejected this year, or, if so, what picture he could have sent. As there was no Salon in 1862, it was not till 1863 that he repeated his first attempt of 1859 to exhibit. This time he submitted a work, the fruit of a great effort, which exceeded in dimensions anything he had hitherto produced. It was The White Girl. This was again refused by the jury, the enemy then of all originality and anchored in old traditions. But this year, on the intervention of the Emperor Napoleon III., the rejected were allowed to exhibit at the Palace de PLidustrie, the same place where the official Salon was held and where a special room was allotted to them. Thus there was, in 1863, a “ Salon des Refuses ” which has become famous. There one saw Bracquemond, Cals, Cazin, Chintreuil, Fantin-Latour, Harpignies, Jongkind, Jean Paul Laurens, Legros, Manet, Pissarro, Vollon and Whistler.

The White Girl was the picture best received at the Salon des Refuses, both by artists and critics. She was a young Irish girl whom Whistler had taken as a model. He also made of her head an etching known as Jo. Courbet, having found her with Whistler at Trouville in 1866, also found occasion to paint her with her wonderful head of hair. He made two portraits, one of which was called La Belle Irlandaise ; the other was shown at the exhibition of his works in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1882, with the title, J o, femme dArlande.

The White Girl stands life-size, clothed in white, against a white curtain. Her unbound hair falls over her shoulders and she holds in her left hand, close to her body, a white flower. Her expression is thoughtful and mysterious. Paul Mantz said of the painting, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts : “ The White Girl of M. James Whistler is a morsel full of flavour. There exhales from it a strange charm.” And Burger-Tliore, in his Salon , said : “ The image is rare, conceived and painted like a vision, which belongs not to all the world but to a poet.” Ernest Chesneau, in his book, L’ Art et les Artistes Modernes, published in 1864, expressed his attraction thus : “ I feel a particular weakness for this work, which is not without defects, but reveals superior picturesque qualities, an imagination amorous of dreams and poetry.” Fernand Desnoyers, in a booklet on the Salon des Refuses, has described it as follows : — “ The most original and singular painting is that of M. Whistler. The title of his picture is La Fille blanche. It is the portrait of a spirit, a medium. The figure, the attitude, the physiognomy, the colour are all strange. It is at the same time simple and fantastic. The face has a tormented and charming expression which rivets the attention. There is something vague and profound in the gaze of this young girl, who is of so individual a beauty that the public does not know whether to find her ugly or pretty. This portrait is alive. It is a remarkable painting.”

By the year 1863 then, Whistler, both as etcher and painter, had shown his originality and produced extraordinary works. From the beginning he had felt himself drawn towards the two arts of painting and etching, and he had cultivated them both in parallel — that is the right word, for with him the two arts never impinged one on the other. Whether he painted or whether he etched, he executed each time before the model or the view seen an original work, destined never to be repeated by another process than that which had given it birth. All his life he pursued the two arts in the same manner. The etcher and the painter form constantly the double aspect of his personality.

From 1859 Whistler had played shuttlecock between Pans and London, dividing his time between the two cities. In 1863 he fixed his residence in London.

Chapter III

In London Whistler rejoined his family. Settled there were one of his half-brothers, an engineer, his half-sister Mrs Seymour Haden, and his mother, who had left America and now lived with her second son, William, a rising doctor.

At the time when he was residing principally in Paris Whistler had occasionally worked in London and exhibited there. In 1859 he had begun his series of etchings of the Thames, and in that year showed some of his engraved work at the Royal Academy. There also, in 1860, he exhibited his picture, At the Piano. In 1862 he contributed four drawings as illustrations to Once a Week, engraved on wood by Swain, and two others to Good Words, the woodcuts by Dalziel. The ten years following his establishment in London were fertile in achievements of great power and variety. His various gifts finding their scope in different directions, he produced works in which the originality of his genius was developed to the full.

Whistler had been greatly struck by the decorative colour scale of the Japanese. He painted several pictures in which he proceeded to adopt it, making use of Japanese costumes and accessories, reproduced in all the daring of the original tints. He became a great enthusiast of blue and white Chinese porcelain, the collection of which, partly owing to his example, afterwards became the vogue in London. It has been asserted that Rossetti was the first to form this particular taste, and that Whistler only borrowed it from him. It had, however, always been common to

The Thames at Rothehhithe them both ; they devoted themselves to the joys of collecting simultaneously, and it is impossible to determine the question as to who should have the credit of the initiative. What is certain is that Whistler loved to grace his house with blue and white Chinese porcelain, and that he introduced it decoratively into the interiors which he arranged or inspired.

Under the direction of this influence he painted, in 1864, The Gold Screen, a young woman in Japanese costume seated and placed against a background filled with a number of variously coloured objects. About the same time he painted the much more important La Princesse da Pays de la Porcelaine. The woman stands, life-size, wearing a Japanese dress of brilliant colours. The title indicates that the painter wished to affirm the fanciful character of the subject. In spite of her Eastern costume, the Princess remains emphatically European in her face, with its expression of melancholy and languor. The sitter on this occasion was Miss Christina Spartali, daughter of the Greek Consul-General in London, the picture being in effect her portrait. Christina Spartali had a sister, Marie, afterwards Mrs Stillman, who had been a pupil of Rossetti. He used her as a model, and introduced her, with certain modifications, in a number of his pictures, and notably in one of his best-knowm works, Fiametta. Thus it happened that La Princesse da Pays de la Porcelaine, by reason of the family likeness common to the two sisters, Christina and Marie Spartali, presented a type peculiar to Rossetti. It is doubtless owing to this circumstance that it has been said that at a certain period Whistler was subject to Rossetti’s influence. But the apparent similarity between the two artists is due only to the use of similar models of a very striking physiognomy, for a close examination of methods reveals no hint of any borrowing by WTiistler from Rossetti. La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine, accepted by the Salon in 1865, was the first work of its author to be exhibited in any official exhibition in Paris. In the same style as that of the two pictures just mentioned, Whistler painted The

Lange Leizen , exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1864, and The Balcony , perhaps the most frankly Japanese of all his works, also shown at the Academy in 1870. It depicts a group of women on a balcony dressed in variously coloured Japanese costumes.

At the same period he painted The Little White Girl, adhering, however, to his earlier manner and introducing only one Japanese detail, a fan. The picture is also known as Symphony in White No. 2, and was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1870. Like The White Girl shown at the Salon des Refuses in Paris in 1863, the picture derived its name from the girl’s white dress. It is a work full of charm, intensely alive. The fair, sad little girl stands with one arm resting on the mantelpiece, the other hanging straight down, a Japanese fan in her hand. Above the mantelpiece is a mirror, in which the head is reflected. After having seen the picture in Whistler’s studio Swinburne wrote the poem, Before the Mirror, afterwards included in Poems and Ballads.