Elizabeth Robins Pennell

“ Rebellion sent Holman Hunt to Palestine, Rossetti to mediævalism, Burne-Jones to legend; it kept Courbet at home, for the true was the beautiful and truth was to be found in the life and the people about him. Moreover, the painter was to see these things through, not a microscope, but his eyes. No man who looks upon a broad landscape can count the blades of grass in a field, or the leaves of ivy on a wall, or the stars in the heavens; the eye can take in only the whole, enveloped in atmosphere, bathed in light, shrouded in darkness, all things keeping their places in their planes. ”

“ There was no great past, no mean present, for art, no drawing of lines between the marbles of the Greek and the fans and broideries of Japan. There was no artistic period, no art-loving people. Art happened, and, in a few eloquent words, he told the history of its happening and the coming of the cheap and tawdry, when the taste of the tradesman supplanted the science of the artist, and the multitude rejoiced. Art is a science—the science by which the artist picks and chooses and groups the elements contained in Nature, that beauty may result. ”

“ In some she stands with her filmy draperies floating about her or falling in long, straight folds to her feet; in others she lies upon a couch, indolent and lovely; she dances across the paper, she bends over a great bowl, she sits with her slim legs crossed and a cup of tea in her hand, she holds a fan or a flower; but whatever she may be doing or however she may rest, she is but another expression of the beauty that haunted Whistler, the beauty that was the inspiration of the Harmonies in White and the Six Projects. ”

“ He reserved his chief abuse for Whistler's Falling Rocket at Cremorne, with the sudden burst of fire and shower of gold and detail disappearing in the illimitable darkness of night. That fireworks in a place of entertainment could have in them the elements of beauty was a truth Ruskin could not grasp, and with this wonderful canvas before him, he remained blind to the splendour of the subject and the mastery of the painter: "I have seen and heard much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." ”

“ But Ruskin was impossible to follow, Pater was a recluse, Rossetti's health was broken, the prehistoric Fabians, Morris and Burne-Jones, were the foci of a little group of their own. When Wilde came to London Whistler was the focus of the world. Whistler was sought out, Wilde tried to play up. In Tite Street blue and white was used, not as a symbol of faith, but every day; flowers bloomed, not as a pledge of "culture," but for their colour and form; beauty was accepted as no discovery, but as the aim of art since the first artist drew a line and saw that it was beautiful. ”

“ Whistler is not so feeble as to aim at theatrical effects in his costume. In the black clothes of ordinary wear, straight from the street, he stands at his easel. To those accustomed to studios the completeness of the arrangement ... in accordance with the scheme of the picture that is in progress is striking, as striking indeed as the personality of the artist. His whole body seems instinct with energy and enthusiasm, his face lit up with flashes of quick and strong thought, as that of a man who sees with his brains as well as with his eyes.... ”

“ But Turner must paint nothing less than the sun, and he sticks on a blob of paint—let us be thankful that it isn't a red wafer, as in some of his other pictures—and there isn't any illusion whatever, and the Englishman lifts up his head in ecstatic conceit with the English painter, who alone has dared to do what no artist would ever be fool enough to attempt! And look at the architecture. Claude could draw a classical building as it is; Turner must invent, imagine architecture as no architect could design it, and no builder could put it up, and as it never would stand up—the old amateur! ”

“ The Dutchmen knew how to paint—they had respect for the surface of a picture; the modern painter has no respect for anything but his own cleverness, and he is sometimes so clever that his work is like that of a bad boy, and I'm not sure that he ought not to be taken out and whipped for it. Cleverness!—well, cleverness has nothing to do with art; there can be the same sort of cleverness in painting as that of the popular officer who cuts an orange into fancy shapes after dinner. ”

“ London, dirty, gloomy, despised by most artists, with its little shops and taverns in the fog-bound streets; the Thames, with its ugly warehouses and gaunt factories in the mist-laden night; the crinolines of the sixties; the clinging, tight draperies of the seventies, became beautiful as he saw them. He made no effort to reform Nature, only reserving his right to select the elements that were beautiful and could be brought together, as notes in music, to create harmony, putting into practice his teaching of The Ten O'Clock. He sought colour, mass, not detail. ”

“ It was full of the charm of youth, and the colour was a harmony in silver and green. Miss Kinsella, a third American girl who posed in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and in Fitzroy Street, secured her portrait after Whistler's death. We remember it in the Fitzroy Street studio, when it was so perfect that one more day's work would ruin it. In no other did he ever paint flesh with such perfection. Face and neck had the golden tone of Titian, with a subtlety of modelling beyond the Venetian's powers, for in his later years it was to surpass the Venetians he was trying. ”

“ Many poses are suggested in lithographs, etchings, and water-colours; none show greater tenderness than when she returned with her child. He put his own tenderness into the encircling hands of the mother holding the baby on her knee, he found the most rhythmic lines when, standing, she balanced herself to clasp the child the more closely to her. Nothing could be slighter than the means by which the effect is produced, the figures drawn in black upon the brown paper, the colour—blue, or rose, or violet—suggested in the gauzy draperies or the cap or handkerchief knotted about the curls. ”

“ No one delighted in them more than he, no one ever told them so well. They became the favourite yarns of Duveneck's boys, to which we listened many an evening when we came to Venice four years later. It was then we first heard of Wolkoff, or Roussoff as he is known in Bond Street, and his boast that he could make pastels like Whistler's and the Americans' bet of a champagne dinner that he couldn't, and the evening in the Casa Jankovitz, when Rico, Duveneck, Curtis, Bacher, Woods, and Van Haanen recognised Wolkoff's work and every time one of his pastels was produced cried: "Take it away!" ”

“ If Carlyle liked the portrait of the Mother, he must have liked his own. There is the same quiet balance, the same careful spacing. Take away either the circular print or the Butterfly in its circle, and the repose is gone. But with such care has every detail been arranged, one never thinks of the balance, the arabesque, the pattern. It is done, and all traces of the thought and the work are gone. One sees only the result Whistler meant should be seen. It has been criticised for showing a want of invention. ”

“ Once at a dinner of French artists given at our house in honour of Whistler, Mrs. Whistler expressed the most Gallophobe sentiments, complaining loudly of the inhospitality of the French towards her husband. Although sixty years when I knew him, he had the enthusiasm and energy of early years. His handsome grey-blue eyes sparkled with the fire of youth—they were young eyes in an old face. I think it strange that no one ever seems to emphasise his singular beauty. ”

“ John Ruskin, leader of taste, critic of art, prophet, and propounder of the gospel of "the Beautiful," led not only a devout following, but that enormous public which believes blindly in Britons. Whistler knew that either he or Ruskin must settle the question whether an artist may paint what he wants in his own way, though this may not be understood by the patron, the critic, the Academy, or the real British judge, the man in the street; whether the artist should rule or be ruled. ”

“ The cry of Nature had appealed to his vanity, Whistler said, and so he had mocked at tradition, and in his early work had copied Nature with the self-confidence of "l'écolier débauché." If at one moment he boasted that the race was for Fantin and himself, because in art, as at the Derby, "c'est le pur sang qui gagné," the next he chafed over the time he had lost before discovering that art is not the exact reproduction of Nature, but its interpretation, and that the artist must seek his motives in Nature and weave from them a pattern on his canvas. ”

“ I am invited to gaze at an unfinished, rubbishy sketch of a young woman, who, if she is not naked, ought to be, for she would then be more decent.... The figure is more naked than nude: the colour what there is of it, is distinctly unpleasant. For my part, sir, I will not believe in Mr. Whistler; my daughters have commanded me to admire him—I will not admire him. How they can quietly stare at the ill-painted, sooty-faced young woman in 'blue and gold' passes me. ”

“ The only decorations, except the harmony of colour, were the prints on the walls, a flight of Japanese fans in one place, in another shelves of blue and white. People, copying him, stuck up fans anywhere, and hung plates from wires. Whistler's fans were arranged for colour and line. His decorations bewildered people even more than the work of the new firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. The Victorian artist covered his walls with tapestry, filled his studio with costly things, and made the public measure beauty by price, a fact overlooked by Whistler, but never by Morris. ”

“ Occasionally the brothers played so that Whistler might dance. He was always full of drolleries and fun. He would imitate a man sawing, or two men fighting at the door so cleverly that Mrs. Greaves never ceased to be astonished when he walked into the room alone and unhur. He delighted in American mechanical toys, and his house was full of Japanese dolls. One great doll, dressed like a man, he would take with him not only to the Greaves', but to dinners at Little Holland House, where the Prinseps then lived, and to other houses, where he put it through amazing performances. ”

“ But a painter really should not have to worry about 'various,' you know. Poverty may induce industry, but it does not produce the fine flower of painting. The test is not poverty, it's money. Give a painter money and see what he'll do; if he does not paint his work is well lost to the world. If I had had, say, three thousand pounds a year, what beautiful things I could have done. ”

“ Duret saw that it was a question not only of drawing, but of colour, of tone, and understood Whistler's theory that to bring the whole into harmony and preserve it the whole must be repainted as a whole, if there was any repainting to be done. There are finer portraits, but not many that show so well Whistler's meaning when he said that colour is "the arrangement of colour." The rose of the domino, the fan, and the flesh is so managed that the cold grey of the background seems to be flushed with rose. ”

“ Cole:
"You know, there Leyland will sit at dinner, his back to the Princesse, and always before him the apotheosis of l'art et l'argent!"
And this was what happened. Leyland knew that, in return for the loss of his leather and his irritation with Whistler, he had been given something beautiful, and he kept the dining-room as Whistler left it, toning down not a flying feather, not a piece of gold in that triumphant caricature. Until the colour fades from the panel, the world cannot forget the quarrel. Whistler never forgot it, and his resentment against Leyland never lessened. ”

“ It is absurd for anyone to say that Whistler idled away his four full years in Paris.
The younger men in their rebellion against official art were not so foolish as to disdain the Old Masters. They went to the Louvre [Pg 47] to learn how to use their eyes and their hands. There they copied the pictures, and there they met each other. To Whistler the Frenchmen were more sympathetic than the English, and he joined them at the Louvre. Respect for the great traditions of art always was his standard: "What is not worthy of the Louvre is not art," he said. ”

“ A special quality of Whistler's genius, Swinburne said, is "a freshness and fullness of the loveliest life of things, with a high, clear power upon them which seems to educe a picture as the sun does a blossom or a fruit." ”

“ The Envoie, without his explanation, is interesting, for it consists of the Propositions No. 2, which have become famous: that a picture is finished when all traces of the means that produced it have disappeared; that industry in art is a necessity, not a virtue; that the work of the master reeks not of the sweat of the brow; that the masterpiece should appear as the flower of the painter, perfect in its bud as in its bloom. ”

“ We remember how it impressed us when we came to the fine Queen Anne house in the quiet, out-of-the-way square, how indignant we were to find nobody but a solitary man and a young lady at the desk, and how urgently we wrote in the Star that, "if there were as many as half a dozen people who cared for good work, they should go at once to see this exhibition of the man who has done more to influence artists than any modern." ”

“ Whistler looked back to West Point with equal affection. He failed, but West Point was the basis of his code of conduct. As a "West Point man" he met every emergency, and his bearing, his carriage, showed the influence of those days when he liked to look back to himself "very dandy in grey." For the discipline, the tradition, the tone of the Academy he never lost his respect. He knew what it could do in making men of boys. "From the moment we came," he said to us, "we were United States officers, not schoolboys, not college students. ”

“ Very late, on hot scirocco nights, long after the concert crowd had dispersed, one little knot of men might often been seen in the deserted Piazza, sipping refreshment in front of Florian's. You might be sure that was Whistler in white duck, praising France, abusing England, and thoroughly enjoying Italy. He was telling how he had seen painting in Paris revolutionised by innovators of powerful handling: Manet, Courbet, Vollon, Regnault, Carolus Duran. He felt far more enthusiasm for the then recently resuscitated popularity of Velasquez and Hals. ”

“ It is difficult to give examples, because there are so many. The Ten O'Clock is full of passages that show him at his best, none finer than the often-quoted description of London "when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil." The Propositions and The Red Rag are as complete, as simple and direct as his prints. The book, as an exposition of his beliefs and doctrines, ranks with Reynolds' Lectures; as a chronicle of an artist's adventures, it is as personal and characteristic as the Memoirs of Cellini. ”

“ The hisses in their ears, the British Artists were dismayed by his one contribution to the Summer Exhibition of 1886. This was a Harmony in Blue and Gold, a full-length of a girl in draperies of blue and green, leaning against a railing and holding a parasol, an arrangement, like the Six Projects, uniting classic design with Japanese detail. The draperies were transparent, and to defy Horsley and the British Matron was no part of the British Artists' policy. They were doubtless the more shocked when they read the comments in the Press. ”

“ The artist is born to pick and choose, and group with science, the elements in Nature that the result may be beautiful, he wrote in The Ten O'Clock, and The White Girl was his first attempt to conform to a principle no one ever put so clearly into words. It was an attempt, we know now, comparing the painting to the symphonies and harmonies that came after. But at the time it was disquieting in its defiance of modern conventions. It was without subject according to Victorian standards, and the bold massing of white upon white was more bewildering than the minute detail of the Pre-Raphaelites. ”