"Stop?" shrieked Whistler. "Stop when everything is going so beautifully? Go and stuff myself with food when I can paint like this? Never! Never! Besides, they won't do anything until I get there. They never do."
* * * * *
Whistler was in a London shop one day when a customer came in who mistook him for a clerk.
"I say, this 'at doesn't fit!"
"Neither does your coat," observed the painter, after eying him critically.
* * * * *
A young woman student protested under criticism, "Mr. Whistler, is there any reason why I shouldn't paint things as I see them?"
"Well, really, there is no statute against it; but the dreadful moment will be when you see things as you painted them!"
"Britain's Realm," by John Brett, R.A., now in the National Gallery at Millbank, made a stir when first exhibited at the Academy. It shows the sea. Whistler walked into a wave of adulation one day during the exhibition, and, affecting to "knock" with his knuckles, said sardonically: "Ha! Ha! Tin! If you threw a stone on to this it would make a rumbling noise!"
* * * * *
His early price for the use of one of his lithographs by a magazine was ten guineas. Later he charged twenty, either sum being petty enough. To one editor who tendered ten pounds he wrote:
"Guineas, M. le Rédacteur; guineas, not pounds!"
* * * * *
At a reception one evening in Prince's Hall he was introduced to Henrietta Rae, whose painting "Psyche Before the Throne of Venus" had made her notable. She had been described to him in advance as rather weighty in figure.
"I don't think you're a bit too fat," was his encouraging greeting.
* * * * *
"Why have you withered people and stung them all your life?" asked a lady.
"My dear," he said, "I will tell you a secret. Early in life I made the discovery that I was charming; and if one is delightful, one has to thrust the world away to keep from being bored to death."
* * * * *
During the Boxer troubles, when Pekin was under siege to rescue the legations, he remarked:
"Dear! dear! I hope they will save the palace. All the Englishmen in the world are not worth one blue china vase."
One evening at Pennell's Miss Annulet Andrews mentioned attending theRoyal Society soirée the evening before.
"Poor thing!" he said. "Poor, misguided child! Did you come all the way to London to consort with such—well, what shall we call them? Why, there isn't a fellow among them who had his h's five years ago!"
* * * * *
"You should be grateful to me," said Whistler to Leyland, after he had painted the Peacock Room in the latter's house. "I have made you famous. My work will live when you are forgotten. Still, perchance in the dim ages to come you may be remembered as the proprietor of the Peacock Room."
* * * * *
Whistler's butterfly was the moth of the silkworm borrowed from Hokusai. Otto H. Bacher thought the addition of a sting to the signature came from this incident at Venice: In 1880 he found a scorpion and impaled it on his etching needle. As the little creature writhed and struck, Whistler exclaimed: "Look at the beggar now! See him strike! Isn't he fine? Look at him! Look at him now! See how hard he hits! That's right—that's the way! Hit hard! And do you see the poison that comes out when he strikes? Isn't he superb?"
* * * * *
Referring long after to his retirement from West Point, where he had been a cadet for three years, the artist explained his fall by saying: "If silicon had been a gas, I should have been a soldier!"
* * * * *
He was always proud of his West Point cadetship. "West Point is America," he would say. Julian Alden Weir, son of Whistler's instructor at the Academy, once dining with him in London, chanced to remark that football had been introduced at the school. "Good God!" cried Whistler. "A West Point cadet to be rolled in the mud by a Harvard junior!"
* * * * *
When a student at the Point he had the habit of combing his long hair in class with his fingers, which brought this frequent command from Lieutenant Caleb Huse:
"Mr. Whistler, go to your room and comb your hair!"
* * * * *
Examined on history at West Point, he failed to recall the date of the battle of Buena Vista. "Suppose," said the exasperated instructor, "you were to go out to dinner and the company began to talk of the Mexican War, and you, a West Point man, were asked the date of the battle; what would you do?"
"Do?" was the reply. "Why, I should refuse to associate with people who could talk of such things at dinner!"
* * * * *
He disliked the work of the riding class at West Point, and one day wished to exchange his heavy horse for a lighter animal. The dragoon in charge called out: "Oh, don't swap, don't you swap! Yours is a war-horse!"
"A war-horse!" exclaimed the little cadet. "That settles it. I certainly don't want him!"
"Yes, you do, sir," insisted the dragoon. "He's a war-horse, I tell you, for he'd rather die than run!"
* * * * *
"Of course you don't know what fear is," observed Mortimer Menpes.
"Ah, yes, I do!" Whistler answered. "I should hate, for example, to be standing opposite a man who was a better shot than I, far away out in the forest, in the bleak, cold, early morning. Fancy me, the master, standing out in the open as a target to be shot at. Pshaw! It would be foolish and inartistic. I never mind calling a man out; but I always have the sense to know he is not likely to come."
* * * * *
Mr. Howard Mansfield relates that while in London in the summer of 1900 with Mr. Whistler, reference was one day made to West Point. He broke at once into enthusiastic praise of that institution, declaring that there was no finer institution in the world, and adding that next to it came the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Then he went on to say: "What was it which really saved you in your late deplorable war with the politest nation of Europe but the bearing of your naval gentlemen? After the affair in that sea—what's its name?—off the island of Cuba, when dear old Admiral Cervera was fished up like a dollop of cotton out of an ink-pot and was received on one of your ships with all the honors due to his rank, the officers all saluting and the crew manning the yards, as it were—only they haven't any yards now—but lined up in quite the proper way—why, it was splendid, just splendid!"
* * * * *
Dining one night at a house where there were a number of his pictures about the room, he could give attention to nothing but his own work. When he left he begged that one painting be sent to his studio to be revarnished. The unsuspecting hostess complied. Once delivered, she could not get it back. Finally she wrote: "I can live no longer without my beautiful picture, and I am sending to have it taken away."
"Isn't it appalling?" he cried to Menpes. "Just think of it! Ten years ago this woman bought my picture for a ridiculously small sum, a mere bagatelle, a few pounds; she has had the privilege of living with this masterpiece for ten whole years, and now she has the presumption to ask for it back again. Pshaw! The thing's unspeakable!"
* * * * *
"What a series of accidents!" was his comment on a row of Turners at the National Gallery.
* * * * *
On another occasion, when he arrived at his host's house two hours after the time set for dining, he found the meal well under way. "How extraordinary!" he exclaimed to the amazed company.
"Really, I should think you could have waited a bit. Why, you're just like a lot of pigs with your eating!"
* * * * *
Sir John E. Millais said to Whistler one day: "Jimmy, why don't you paint more pictures? Put out more canvases!"
"I know better," was the shrewd reply. "The fool!" he muttered, as he entered his studio. "He spreads himself on canvas on every possible occasion, and, do you know, he called me Jimmy! Mind you, I don't know the fellow well at all."
* * * * *
His "Nocturne in Blue and Gold, Valparaiso," was in the Hill collection at Brighton. Whistler made Mr. Hill a visit which he thus described: "I was shown into the galleries, and, of course, took a chair and sat looking at my beautiful 'Nocturne'; then, as there was nothing else to do, I went to sleep."
In this state Mr. Hill found him!
This sleeping habit was common with him when the company or the goings-on failed to interest him. On one occasion his sweet snore alarmed his neighbor, who nudged him and whispered:
"I say, Whistler, you must not sleep here!"
"Leave me alone!" commanded the artist, crossly. "I've said all I wanted to. I've no interest at all in what you and your friends have to say."
* * * * *
He once slumbered through a dinner where Edwin A. Abbey was a fellow-guest. The next morning he blandly asked Mr. Chase:
"What did Abbey have to say last night? Anything worth while?"
When Dan Smith was at the beginning of his career as an illustrator he was employed by an important lithographing house. One day, while making a large picture of Antony and Cleopatra in the barge scene, which was to be used by Kyrle Bellew and Mrs. James Brown Potter as a poster for their joint starring tour, Whistler, accompanied by a friend, visited the studio:
Whistler examined, with evident interest and approval, the canvas upon which the youthful artist was at work, holding his glass to his eyes; then, looking quizzically over it, remarked to his friend, "What a mercantile wretch it is!"
* * * * *
Whistler presented a copy of his edition ofThe Gentle Art of MakingEnemiesto "Theodore Watts, the Worldling."
Asked why he started the unlucky school in the Latin Quarter, he answered:
"It was for Carmen Rossi [long his model], poor little Carmen, who is a mere child and has no money, and is saddled with the usual Italian burden of a large, disreputable family—banditti brothers, a trifling husband, and all the rest of it."
"Carmen" was then thirty years old; weight, one hundred and ninety pounds. But she once had been his child-model.
* * * * *
A Scotch student in the class had worked out the face of an old peasant woman illuminated by a candle. "How beautifully you have painted the candle!" Whistler commended. "Good morning, gentlemen!"
* * * * *
One day, when the pupils had been sketching from life, he came upon the work of one which, if it contained all of the truth, did not contain all of the beautiful.
After gazing at it for some time Whistler observed to the student:
"Ah, well! You can hardly expect me to teach you morals." And he walked away.
* * * * *
A carelessly kept palette was an abhorrence to the painter. He would inspect those used by his class, and on the discovery of untidiness uttered a reproof like this: "My friends, have you noticed the way in which a musician cares for his violin? How beautiful it is? How well kept? How tenderly handled? Your palette is your instrument, its colors the notes, and upon it you play your symphonies!"
* * * * *
The colloquies with the class were spirited, sarcastic, interesting.Here is a characteristic one:
Question:"Do you know what I mean when I say tone, value, light, shade, quality, movement, construction, etc.?"
Chorus:"Oh, yes, Mr. Whistler!"
Mr. Whistler:"I'm glad, for it's more than I do myself!"
* * * * *
He objected to smoking in the atelier, partly because it obscured the light and partly because of its obfuscating qualities. In Paris a big Englishman clouded the class-room with a copious discharge of smoke. "My dear sir," said Whistler, gently, "I know you do not smoke to show disrespect for my request that students refrain from smoking on the days I come to them, nor would you desire to infringe upon the rules of the atelier, but—er—it seems to me—er—that when you are painting—er—you might possibly become so absorbed in your work as to—er—let your cigar go out!"
Visiting Earl Stetson Crawford in his studio at Paris, he noted on the wall a photographic copy of the Nicholson portrait of himself.
"Is that the best you have of me?" he asked. "Not that it is not very beautiful and artistic and so on—but I say, come now, you don't think it quite does me justice, do you?"
* * * * *
When the class was formed, so runs the tale, Whistler inquired of each pupil with whom he had studied before.
"With Julian," said one.
"Couldn't have done better, sir," Whistler answered.
"With Chase," replied another.
"Couldn't have done better, sir."
"With Mowbray," answered a third.
"Couldn't have done better, sir," and so on.
He approached a student slightly deaf, who stammered in reply, "I beg pardon?"
"Couldn't have done better, sir," responded Whistler, placidly, passing on to the next.
* * * * *
"It suffices not, Messieurs," he once observed to the class, "that a life spent among pictures makes a painter, else the policeman in the National Gallery might assert himself."
* * * * *
A pupil told him proudly she had studied with Bouguereau.
"Bouguereau! Bouguereau! Who is Bouguereau?"
* * * * *
One young lady in the class offended him. She received a polite note, signed with a neat butterfly, requesting her not to attend further. "It was worth being expelled to get the note," she said. Whistler heard of the comment.
"Well, they'll all have a note some day," he observed. His retirement soon followed.
* * * * *
H. Villiers Barnett, editor of theContinental Weekly, when in the employ of theMagazine of Artvisited the Dowdeswell Gallery at a press view of the Venice pastels. He alone of the critics developed some interest, and soon found himself alone with Whistler.
"I beg your pardon," said the latter, "but do you represent a religious journal?"
"No," Barnett replied, jokingly, "mine is an out-and-out sporting paper!"
"Oh," said Whistler, "that accounts for it."
"Accounts for what?"
"Well, you see," said Whistler, with an exquisite sneer, "I have been watching you gentlemen of the press all morning. You are the only one in the whole lot who seems to find anything here worth looking at, and you have been taking such very serious interest that I was certain you must be representing some church paper."
"Mr. Whistler," retorted Barnett, "make your mind easy. There is nothing ecclesiastical about me nor the publication I have the honor to represent; but all the same, for you this is the day of judgment!"
"I wish you good morning," rejoined the painter, pertly.
* * * * *
His "artistic" make-up of flat-brimmed hat, lemon-colored vest, curls, eyeglass, and beribboned cane sometimes upset the cockney crowd. R.A.M. Stevenson, cousin of Robert Louis, was working in his studio one day when the bell rang violently. He ran to the door just in time to rescue the symphony into which Whistler had turned himself from a growling mob.
"For God's sake, Stevenson," said Whistler, "save me from these howling brutes!"
He went home in a cab with all his trimmings.
* * * * *
Harper Pennington has revealed to us the origin of the "standing-room only" joke. It appears that there was hardly ever any furniture in Whistler's house. He was peculiarly parsimonious in the matter of chairs. This led to a remark of Corny Grain's which became famous.
"Ah, Jimmy! Glad to see you playing to such a full house!" said Dick (Corny) Grain when shaking hands before a Sunday luncheon, while glaring around the studio with his large, protruding eyes, in search of something to sit on.
"What do you mean?" asked Whistler.
"Standing-room only," replied the actor.
* * * * *
Henry Labouchere, who first met Whistler as a boy in Washington in the fifties, when he himself was an attaché of the British Legation, took the credit for bringing Whistler and his wife together. His story was denied by Mrs. Whistler's relatives, but is interesting enough to be recorded.
"I believe," wrote Mr. Labouchere inTruth, "I was responsible for his marriage to the widow of Mr. Godwin, the architect. She was a remarkably pretty woman and very agreeable, and both she and he were thorough Bohemians.
"I was dining with them and some others one evening at Earl's Court. They were obviously greatly attracted to each other, and in a vague sort of way they thought of marrying, so I took the matter in hand to bring things to a practical point.
"'Jimmy,' I said, 'will you marry Mrs. Godwin?'
"'Certainly.'
"'Mrs. Godwin,' I said, 'will you marry Jimmy?'
"'Certainly,' she replied.
"'When?' I asked.
"'Oh, some day,' said Whistler.
"'That won't do,' I said. 'We must have a date.'
"So they both agreed that I should choose the day, tell them what church to come to for the ceremony, provide a clergyman, and give the bride away.
"I fixed an early date and got them the chaplain of the House of Commons to perform the ceremony. It took place a few days later. After the ceremony was over we adjourned to Whistler's studio, where he had prepared a banquet. The banquet was on the table, but there were no chairs, so we sat on packing-cases. The happy pair, when I left, had not quite decided whether they would go that evening to Paris or remain in the studio.
"How unpractical they were was shown when I happened to meet the bride the day before the marriage in the street.
"'Don't forget to-morrow,' I said.
"'No,' she replied; 'I am just going to buy my trousseau.'
"'A little late for that, is it not?' I asked.
"'No,' she answered, 'for I am only going to buy a tooth-brush and a new sponge, as one ought to have new ones when one marries.'
"However, there never was a more successful marriage. They adored each other, and lived most happily together, and when she died he was broken-hearted indeed. He never recovered from the loss."
* * * * *
When Frederick Keppel, the American print expert, first called upon the artist at the Tite Street studio, the famous portrait of Sarasate, "black on black," stood at the end of the long corridor that he used to form a vista for proper perspective of his work. Laying his hand on Keppel's shoulder, he said:
"Now, isn't it beautiful?"
"It certainly is," was the reply.
"No," said he; "but isn't itbeautiful?"
"It is indeed," said Keppel.
This was too mild a form of agreement. Whistler raised his voice to a scream:
"D—-n it, man!" he piped. "Isn't it BEAUTIFUL?"
Adopting the emphasis and the exclamation, Mr. Keppel shouted:
"D——n it, it is!"
This was satisfactory.
* * * * *
The proof-sheets ofThe Gentle Art, Whistler version, had just arrived as Mr. Keppel called. "Read them aloud," he commanded, "so I can hear how it sounds."
Mr. Keppel started in, but his elocution was not satisfactory.
"Stop!" Whistler cried. "You are murdering it! Let me read it to you!"
He read about two hours to his own keen delight, but was finally interrupted by a servant announcing, "Lady ——."
"Where is she?" asked the artist.
"In her carriage at the door."
He went on reading until Mr. Keppel suggested that he had forgotten the lady.
"Oh," he said, carelessly, "let her wait! I'm mobbed with these people."
After another quarter-hour he condescended to go down and greet her shivering ladyship.
* * * * *
A little later during this visit a foreign artist called and was pleasantly received. Admiring a small painting, the visitor said:
"Now, that is one of your good ones."
"Don't look at it, dear boy," replied Whistler, airily; "it's not finished."
"Finished!" said the visitor. "Why, it's the most carefully finished picture of yours I've seen."
"Don't look at it," insisted Whistler. "You are doing an injustice to yourself, you are doing an injustice to the picture, and you're doing an injustice to me!"
Then, theatrically:
"Stop! I'll finish it now." With that he picked a very small brush, anointed, its delicate point with paint, and touched the picture in one spot with a speck of pigment.
"Now it's finished!" he exclaimed. "Now you may look at it."
Forgetting his umbrella, the foreign gentleman called at the studio the next day to get it. Whistler was out, but the visitor was much moved to find the "finishing touch" had been carefully wiped off!
* * * * *
Mr. Keppel's personal relations with Whistler ended when, by an idle chance, he sent a copy ofThe University of the State of New York Bulletin, Bibliography, No. I, a Guide to the Study of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, compiled by Walter Greenwood Forsyth and Joseph Le Roy Harrison, to Joseph Pennell, and another to Ernest Brown, in London. Mr. Keppel, arriving in London the day of Mrs. Whistler's funeral, sent a note of condolence, and, receiving a mourning envelope sealed with a black butterfly, opened it expecting a grateful acknowledgment. Instead, it was a fierce, rasping denunciation for the distribution of the pamphlet—a mere catalogue so far as it went.
"I must not let the occasion of your being in town pass," he wrote, "without acknowledging the gratuitous zeal with which you have done your best to further the circulation of one of the most malignant innuendos, in the way of scurrilous half-assertions, it has been my fate hitherto to meet. Mr. Brown very properly sent on to me the pamphlet you had promptly posted to him. Mr. Pennell, also, I find, you had carefully supplied with a copy—and I have no doubt that, with the untiring energy of the 'busy' one, you have smartly placed the pretty work in the hands of many another before this."
* * * * *
Mr. Keppel replied in kind, but Whistler never wrote him directly again. Some business letter of the former requiring a reply, he summoned the house-porter, who wrote under dictation, beginning his crude epistle thus: "Sir:—Mr. Whistler, who is present, orders me to write as follows." Roiled by this beyond measure, Mr. Keppel resorted to verse to relieve his feelings, after which Whistler twice sent verbal messages through friends that if he ever saw him again he would kill him!
* * * * *
John M. Cauldwell, the United States Commissioner for the Department of Art at the Paris Exposition of 1900, sent a circular letter to American artists in the city announcing his arrival and making appointments to discuss the hanging of their work. Whistler received one, asking him to call at "precisely four-thirty" on the afternoon of the following Thursday.
"I congratulate you," he replied. "Personally, I never have been able and never shall be able to be anywhere at precisely four-thirty."
* * * * *
"Parbleu!This is a nice get-up to come and see me in, to be sure!" was his greeting to a newspaper writer who called to tap him on art, clad in a brown jacket, blue trousers, and decked with a red necktie. "I must request you to leave this place instantly! These scribblers, rag-smudges,incroyable! Why, it is perfectly preposterous! Did you ever hear such dissonance? His tie is in G major, and I am painting this symphony in E minor. I will have to start it again. Take that roaring tie of yours off, you miserable wretch! Remove it instantly!"
The visitor removed the "roar." "Thank goodness!" said Whistler. "My sight is perfectly deaf!"
"I am so sorry, Mr. Whistler," apologized the scribe.
"Whistler, sir? Whistler? That's not my name!" he cried, in a highly wrought voice.
"I beg your pardon?"
"That is not my name. I say, you don't seem to know your own language.W-h is pronounced Wh-h-h—Wh-h-histler. Bah!"
* * * * *
Max Beerbohm, the caricaturist, was rather clumsy with the Gallic tongue. Whistler used to term it "Max Beerbohm's Limburger French."
The carefully cultivated and insistently displayed white lock played a part in many amusing incidents. Sir Coutts Lindsay's butler whispered to him excitedly one evening: "There's a gent downstairs says he's come to dinner, wot's forgot his necktie and stuck a feather in his 'air."
Another evening, at the theater, an usher said obligingly: "Beg pardon, sir, but there's a white feather in your hair, just on top."
* * * * *
Raging characteristically once when in Paris, he earned this rebuke from Degas, the matchless draughtsman: "Whistler, you talk as if you were a man without talent."
* * * * *
Some one gave Henry Irving a Whistler etching for a Christmas gift. "Of course I was delighted," he said, "for I was a great admirer of the artist as well as a personal friend of the man, but when I started to hang the etching I was puzzled. I couldn't for the life of me tell which was the top and which the bottom. Finally, after reversing the picture half a dozen times and finding it looked equally well either way up, I decided to try an experiment.
"I invited Whistler to dine with me and seated him opposite his picture. During dinner he glanced at it from time to time; between the soup and the fish he put up his eyeglass and squinted at it; between the roast and the dessert he got up and walked over to take a closer view of it; finally, by the time we reached the coffee, he had discovered what the trouble was.
"'Why, Henry,' he said, reproachfully, 'you've hung my etching upside down.'
"'Indeed!' I said. 'Well, my friend, it's taken you an hour to discover it!'" "The man in possession" furnishes an amusing incident in the artist's career.
When the creditors at last landed a bailiff in the painter's Chelsea mansion, he tried to wear his hat in the drawing-room and smoke and spit all over the house. But Whistler, in his own airy way, soon settled that. He went out into the hall, and, selecting a stick from his collection of canes, he daintily knocked the man's hat off. The bailiff was so surprised that he forgot to be angry, and in a day or two he had been trained to wait at table. But though he was now in possession and a favored household servant, he could not obtain his money. So he declared that if he was not paid he would have to put bills up outside the house announcing a sale. And sure enough, a few days after great posters were stuck up all over the front of the house announcing so many tables and so many chairs and so much old Nankin China for sale on a given day. Whistler enjoyed the joke hugely, and hastened to send out invitations to all his friends to a luncheon-party, adding as a postscript: "You will know the house by the bills of sale stuck up outside." And the bailiff proved an admirable butler and the party one of the merriest ever known.
As the guests were rising from the table a lady observed to the host:
"Your servants seem to be extremely attentive, Mr. Whistler, and anxious to please you."
"Oh, yes," replied he; "I assure you they wouldn't leave me!"
But the bailiff stayed on, and the day of sale approached; so Whistler, having been educated at West Point, determined to practise strategy. Some one had told him that a mixture of snuff and beer had the property of sending people off to sleep. So he bought a big parcel of snuff and put the greater part of it into a gigantic tankard of beer, which he sent out to the bailiff in the garden. It was a very hot summer afternoon, and the man eagerly welcomed his refreshment. Whistler was in his studio painting and soon forgot all about him. In the evening he said to his servant, "Where's the man?" The servant replied: "I don't know, sir. I suppose he must have gone away."
The next morning Whistler got up very late and went out into the garden, where he was astonished to see the bailiff sitting in precisely the same position as the day before. The empty tankard was on the table beside him and his pipe had fallen from his hand upon the grass. "Hello, my sleeping beauty!" said Whistler. "Have you been there all night?" But the man made no answer, and all the painter's efforts to rouse him were unavailing. Late in the afternoon, however, he awoke in the most natural way in the world, exclaiming that it was dreadfully hot weather and that he must have been asleep over an hour. Whistler's strategy had been even more successful than he anticipated; the bailiff had slept through the entire day appointed for the sale of the painter's household effects, and was induced to go away in a very bewildered state of mind and with a small payment on account in his pocket.
* * * * *
Lady de Grey went once to the Tite Street studio for luncheon and chided Whistler for his extravagance in having two man servants to wait on the table, when he was always complaining of being hard up.
"Hush!" whispered Whistler. "One of them is the man in possession, and he has consented to act as footman for the day; but he asks me to please settle up as soon as possible, because he too has a man in possession at his own place and wants to get clear of him."
* * * * *
Once at a garden party the rapt hostess rushed up to the artist and exclaimed:
"Oh, Mr. Whistler! Do help me out! I have just bought a magnificentTurner, but Lord——says it isn't genuine, merely a clever imitation.Now I want you to look at it, and if you say it is genuine, as I knowyou will, I shall be perfectly satisfied."
"My dear lady," replied Whistler, "you expect a good deal of me. The distinction between a real Turner and an imitation Turner is so extremely subtle."
* * * * *
A flippant reply to the secretary of a London club where Whistler's account was past due produced this retort—and the money was paid:
"DEAR MR. WHISTLER:—It is not a Nocturne in Purple or a Symphony inBlue and Gray we are after, but an Arrangement in Gold and Silver."
* * * * *
At an exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts there was a portrait in subdued colors by Whistler, "The Little Lady of Soho." Before this picture Secretary Harrison S. Morris stood one day. "It is beautiful," he observed, "and it reminds me of a story about Whistler—not a very appropriate or poetical one, perhaps. But here it is, anyhow. Whistler one summer day took a walk through the Downs with three or four young men. They stopped at an ale-house and called for beer. Tankards were set before them and they drank. Then Whistler said to the host:
"'My man, would you like to sell a great deal more beer than you do?'
"'Aye, sir, I would that!'
"'Then don't sell so much froth!'"
* * * * *
When a French magazine located his birthplace in Baltimore, and the error traveled far, Whistler took no pains to correct it. "My dear cousin Kate," he said to Mrs. Livermore, "if any one likes to think I was born in Baltimore, why should I deny it? It is of no consequence to me."
* * * * *
A chance American introduced himself by saying: "You know, Mr. Whistler, we were born at Lowell, and at very much the same time. You are sixty-seven and I am sixty-eight."
"Very charming," he replied. "And so you are sixty-eight and were born at Lowell. Most interesting, no doubt, and as you please! But I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell and I refuse to be sixty-seven!"
* * * * *
"Don't be afraid," said Whistler to Howard Paul, who recoiled from the presence of a huge dog because he did not like the look in the animal's eyes. "Look at his tail—how it wags. When a dog wags his tail he's in good humor."
"That may be," replied Paul, "but observe the wild glitter in his eye!I don't know which end to believe."
* * * * *
Comyns Carr met a foreign painter who had been known to breakfast withWhistler at Chelsea and asked him if he had seen him lately.
"Ah no, not now so much," was the reply. "He ask me a little while ago to breakfast, and I go. My cab-fare two shilling, 'arf crown. I arrive. Very nice. Goldfish in bowl. Very pretty. But breakfast! One egg, one toast, no more! Ah, no! My cab-fare back, two shilling, 'arf crown. For me no more!"
* * * * *
A.G. Plowden, the London police magistrate, attended a private view atGrosvenor Gallery. The first person he met was Whistler. He tookPlowden, very amiably, to his full-length portrait of Lady ArchibaldCampbell, where, after sufficiently expressing his admiration, Plowdenasked if there were any other pictures he ought to see.
"Other pictures!" cried Whistler, in a tone of horror. "Other pictures! There are no other pictures! You are through!"
* * * * *
Dining at a Paris restaurant in his early days, Mr. Whistler noted the struggle an elderly Englishman was having to make himself understood. He politely volunteered to interpret.
"Sir," said the person addressed, "I assure you, sir, I can give my order without assistance!"
"Can you indeed?" quoth Whistler, airily. "I fancied the contrary just now, when I heard you desire the waiter to bring you a pair of stairs."
* * * * *
Dining, and dining well, at George H. Boughton's house in London, Whistler was obliged to leave the table and go up-stairs to indite a note. In a few moments a great noise revealed the fact that he had fallen down the flight.
"Who is your architect?" he asked, when picked up.
The host told him Norman Shaw.
"I might have known it," said Whistler. "The d——d teetotaler!"
* * * * *
A young artist had brought Whistler to view his maiden effort. The two stood before the canvas for some moments in silence. Finally the junior asked, timidly:
"Don't you think this painting of mine is a—er—a tolerable picture, sir?"
Whistler's eyes twinkled.
"What is your opinion of a tolerable egg?" he asked.
* * * * *
"Irish girls have the most beautiful hands," he once wrote, "with long, slender fingers and delightful articulations. American girls' hands come next; they are a little narrow and thin. The hands of the English girls are red and coarse. The German hand is broad and flat; the Spanish hand is full of big veins. I always use Irish models for the hands, and I think Irish eyes are also the most beautiful."
An American artist studying in Paris, like many others, was too poor to have a perfect wardrobe. Strolling on the Boulevard, he heard a call and, turning, saw Whistler hastening toward him, waving his long black cane.
Rather flattered, he said, "So you recognized me from behind, did you, master?"
"Yes," said Whistler, with a wicked laugh; "I spied you through a hole in your coat."
* * * * *
"Do you think genius is hereditary?" asked an admiring lady one day.
"I can't tell you, madam," Whistler replied. "Heaven has granted me no offspring."
* * * * *
Whistler once took Horne, his framer, to look at one of his paintings at the exhibition.
"Well, Horne," he asked, "what do you think of it?"
"Think of it?" he cried, enthusiastically. "Why, sir, it's perfect—perfect. Mr. —— has got one just like it."
"What!" said the puzzled Whistler. "A picture like this?"
"Oh," said Horne, "I wasn't talking about the picture; I was talking about the frame."
* * * * *
"Well, Mr. Whistler, how are you getting on?" said an undesirable acquaintance in a Paris restaurant.
"I'm not," said Whistler, emptying his glass. "I'm getting off."
* * * * *
Miss Pamela Smith, a designer in black and white, while a crude draughtsman, had a fine imagination. Whistler was asked to look over some of her work. After careful examination he said:
"She can't draw."
Another look and a gruff "She can't paint" followed.
A third look and a long thought wound up with, "But she doesn't need to."
* * * * *
A lady who rejoiced in "temperament" once said gushingly to Whistler:
"It is wonderful what a difference there is between people."
"Yes," he replied. "There is a great deal of difference between matches, too, if you will only look closely enough, but they all make about the same blaze."
* * * * *
A certain gentleman whose portrait Whistler had painted failed to appreciate the work, and finally remarked, "After all, Mr. Whistler, you can't call that a great work of art."
"Perhaps not," replied the painter, "but then you can't call yourself a great work of nature!"
* * * * *
The artist and a friend strolled along the Thames Embankment one wonderfully starry night. Whistler was in a discontented mood and found fault with everything. The houses were ugly, the river not what it might have been, the lights hard and glaring. The friend pointed out several things that appealed to him as beautiful, but the master would not give in.
"No," he said, "nature is only sometimes beautiful—only sometimes—very, very seldom indeed; and to-night she is, as so often, positively ugly."
"But the stars! Surely they are fine to-night," urged the other.
Whistler looked up at the sky.
"Yes," he drawled, "they're not bad, perhaps, but, my dear fellow, there's too many of them."
A sitter asked him how it was possible to paint in the growing dusk, as he often did. The reply was:
"As the light fades and the shadows deepen, all the petty and exacting details vanish; everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are, in great, strong masses; the buttons are lost, but the garment remains; the garment is lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter's imagination."
* * * * *
Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema, of the classic brush, loved yellow, a color which Whistler had annexed unto himself. Sir Laurence in employing the color in his decorations did not consider himself a plagiarist. He had not seen Whistler's. This defense led to a war of words. Whistler broke out:
"Sly Alma! His Romano-Dutch St. John's wooden eye has never looked upon them, and the fine jaundice of his flesh is none of the jaundice of my yellows. To-de-ma-boom-de-ay!"
* * * * *
Seated in a stall at the West End Theater one evening, he was constantly irritated by his next neighbor—a lady—who not only went out between the acts, but several times while the curtain was up. The space between the run of seats was narrow, and the annoyance as she squeezed past was considerable.
"Madam," he said at last, "I trust I do not incommode you by keeping my seat!"
* * * * *
He regarded the United States tariff on art as barbarous.
"When are you coming to America?" he was asked.
"When the tariff on art is removed."
The Copley Society asked his aid in making up their exhibition inBoston. He refused, saying:
"God bless me! Why should you hold an exhibition of pictures inAmerica? The people do not care for art!"
"How do you know? You have not been there for many years."
"How do I know? Why, haven't you a law to keep out pictures and statues? Is it not in black and white that the works of the great masters must not enter America, that they are not wanted? A people that tolerate such a law have no love for art; their protestation is mere pretense."
* * * * *
Asked by a lady if a certain picture in a gallery was not indecent, he replied:
"No, madam. But your question is!"
Mark Twain visited the studio and, assuming an air of hopeless stupidity, approached a nearly completed painting and said:
"Not at all bad, Mr. Whistler; not at all bad. Only here in this corner," he added, reflectively, with a motion as if to rub out a cloud effect, "if I were you I'd do away with that cloud!"
"Gad, sir!" cried the painter. "Do be careful there! Don't you see the paint is not yet dry?"
"Oh, don't mind that," said Mark, sweetly. "I am wearing gloves, you see!"
They got on after that.
* * * * *
In Paris, Whistler and an English painter got into a turbulent talk over Velasquez at a studio tea. In the course of the argument Whistler praised himself extravagantly.
"It's a good thing we can't see ourselves as others see us," sneered the Briton.
"Isn't it, though?" rejoined Whistler, gently. "I know in my case I should grow intolerably conceited."
* * * * *
Financial necessities once caused the sale of Whistler's choice furnishings. Some of the family, returning to the house during his absence, found the floor covered with chalk diagrams, the largest of which was labeled: "This is the dining-table."
Surrounding it were a number of small squares, each marked: "This is a chair."
Another square: "This is the sideboard."
* * * * *
Cope Whitehouse once described a boat-load of Egyptians "floating down the Nile with the thermometer one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade, and no shade."
"And no thermometer," interjected Whistler.
* * * * *
A lady sitter brought a cat with her and placed it on her knee. The cat was nervous and yowled continuously.
"Madam," said the vexed artist, "will you have the cat in the foreground or in the back yard?"
* * * * *
While painting one of his famous nocturnes a critic of considerable pretensions called. "Good heavens, Whistler!" he cried, "what in the world are you splashing at?"
"I am teaching art to posterity," Whistler replied, quietly.
"Oh!" said the critic, visibly relieved. "I was afraid you were painting for the Royal Academy."
"Oh, no," answered Whistler; "they do not want masterpieces there, but some of their picture-frames are exquisite and really worth bus-fare to look at."
* * * * *
Walking in the Champs-Elysées in Paris one morning, Whistler heard oneEnglishman say to another:
"See that chap over there?"
"What? That chap with the long hair and spindle legs?"
"Yes, that's the one. That's Whistler, the American, who thinks he's the greatest painter on earth."
Walking up to the pair, Whistler held out his hand and said gravely to the last speaker:
"Sir, I beg your acceptance of these ten centimes. Go buy yourself a little hay!"
* * * * *
Sitting for a portrait was an ordeal. Many were quite upset after a siege in the studio. One man annoyed the artist by saying at each dismissal:
"How-about that ear, Mr. Whistler? Don't forget to finish that." At the last session, all being finished but this ear, Whistler said, "Well, I think I'm through; now I'll sign it." This he did in a very solemn and important way.
"But my ear!" exclaimed the victim. "You're not going to leave it that way?"
"Oh," said Whistler, grimly, "you can put it in after you get home."
* * * * *
He occasionally contemplated visiting America in his late years, but the dread of the journey was too much for him to overcome. "If I escape the Atlantic," he said, "I shall be wrecked by some reporter at the pier." Finally, he definitely canceled his last proposed trip, observing airily: "One cannot continuously disappoint a continent."
"America," he once said, lightly, "is a country where I never can be a prophet."
* * * * *
Sir Rennell Rodd recalled that at a breakfast Waldo Story gave at Dieu-donné's in Paris there was a great company, including Whistler. Every one there was by the way of having written a book or painted a picture, or having in some way outraged the Philistine, with the exception of one young gentleman whoseraison d'êtrewas not so apparent as his high collar and the glory of his attire. He nevertheless intruded boldly into the talk and laid down his opinions very flatly. He even went so far as to combat some dictum of the master's, whereat that gentleman adjusted his glasses and, looking pleasantly at the youth, queried:
"And whose son are you?"
When Dorothy Menpes was a babe in the cradle a white feather lay across her infant brow. The sight pleased Whistler. "That child is going to develop into something great," he prophesied, "for see, she begins with a feather, just like me."
* * * * *
In the last two years of his life Mr. Whistler's disputes grew less frequent and his public flashes were few. TheMorning Postof London, however, provoked an admirable specimen of his best style, which it printed under date of August 6th, 1902. In its "Art and Artists" column the paper had made the following statement:
"Mr. Whistler is so young in spirit that his friends must have read with surprise the Dutch physician's announcement that the present illness is due to 'advanced age.' In England sixty-seven is not exactly regarded as 'advanced age,' but even for the gay 'butterfly' time does not stand still, and some who are unacquainted with the details of Mr. Whistler's career, though they know his work well, will be surprised to learn that he was exhibiting at the Academy forty-three years ago. His contributions to the exhibition of 1859 were 'Two Etchings from Nature,' and at intervals during the following fourteen or fifteen years Mr. Whistler was represented at the Academy by a number of works, both paintings and etchings. In 1863 his contributions numbered seven in all, and in 1865 four. Among his Academy pictures of 1865 was the famous 'Little White Girl,' the painting that attracted so much attention at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. This picture—rejected at the Salon of 1863—was inspired, though the fact seems to have been forgotten of late, by the following lines of Swinburne:
Come snow, come wind or thunderHigh up in air,I watch my face and wonderAt my bright hair, etc."
Under date of August 3d Mr. Whistler sent from The Hague this brisk reply:
I feel it no indiscretion to speak of my "convalescence," since you have given it official existence.
May I, therefore, acknowledge the tender little glow of health induced by reading, as I sat here in the morning sun, the flattering attention paid me by your gentleman of the ready wreath and quick biography?
I cannot, as I look at my improving self with daily satisfaction, really believe it all—still it has helped to do me good!—and it is with almost sorrow that I must beg you, perhaps, to put back into its pigeonhole for later on this present summary and replace it with something preparatory, which, doubtless, you have also ready.
This will give you time, however, for some correction—if really it be worth while—but certainly the "Little White Girl," which was not rejected at the Salon of '63, was, I am forced to say, not "inspired by the following lines of Swinburne," for the one simple reason that those lines were only written, in my studio, after the picture was painted. And the writing of them was a rare and graceful tribute from the poet to the painter—a noble recognition of work by the production of a nobler one!
Again, of the many tales concerning the hanging at the Academy of the well-known portrait of the artist's mother, now at the Luxembourg, one is true—let us trust your gentleman may have time to find it out—that I may correct it. I surely may always hereafter rely on theMorning Postto see that no vulgar Woking joke reach me?
It is my marvelous privilege then to come back, as who should say, while the air is still warm with appreciation, affection, and regret, and to learn in how little I had offended. The continuing to wear my own hair and eyebrows, after distinguished confrères and eminent persons had long ceased their habit, has, I gather, clearly given pain. This, I see, is much remarked on. It is even found inconsiderate and unseemly in me, as hinting at affectation.
I might beg you, sir, to find a pretty place for this, that I would make my apology, containing also promise, in years to come, to lose these outer signs of vexing presumption.
Protesting, with full enjoyment of its unmerited eulogy, against your premature tablet, I ask you again to contradict it, and appeal to your own sense of kind sympathy when I tell you I learn that I have lurking in London still "a friend"—though for the life of me I cannot remember his name. And I have, sir, the honor to be,
The last dispute that found its way to print came through the New YorkSunand Will H. Low, to whom Mr. Whistler sought to convey a piece of his mindviathe newspaper channel, under date of May 8th, 1903, This grew out of a complication in which Mr. Low became involved with the Hanging Committee of the Society of American Artists over the placing in its exhibition of "Rosa Corder" and two marines by Whistler borrowed from Charles L. Freer, of Detroit, on the condition that they be hung "in a good position." The position selected did not suit Mr. Low, and he withdrew the pictures. Mr. Whistler sent his remonstrance to theSun'sLondon office, from which it was cabled to New York and published on May 9th, as follows:
"I had waited for Mr. Low to publish my reply to a letter from himself concerning the withdrawal of my pictures from the Society of American Artists.
"This gentle opinion of my own upon the situation is, I understand, expert. I therefore inclose it to you for publication. I have the honor to be, dear sir, your obedient servant."
The remarks to Mr. Low read:
"I have just learned with distress that my canvases have been a trouble and a cause of thought to the gentlemen of the Hanging Committee!
"Pray present to them my compliments and my deep regrets.
"I fear also that this is not the first time of simple and good-natured intrusion—looking in, as who would say, with beaming fellowship and crass camaraderie upon the highly finished table and well-seated guests—to be kindly and swiftly shuffled into some further respectable place—that all be well and hospitality endure.
"Promise, then, for me, that I have learned and that 'this shall not occur again.' And, above all, do not allow a matter of colossal importance to ever interfere with the afternoon habit of peace and good will, and the leaf of the mint so pleasantly associated with this society.
"I could not be other than much affected by your warm and immediate demonstration, but I should never forgive myself were the consequence of lasting vexation to your distinguished confrères."