T. Martin Wood

“ There is a difference between artistic work and other sorts of work. Outside the arts, in other professions, what a man’s personality is, whilst it affects the way his work is accomplished, does not alter the nature of that work. Immediately, however, the work becomes of such a nature that the word art can be inserted, then the personal equation is before everything to be considered. “Temperament” meets us at every turn, in the touch of brush to paper, in the arrangement of the design, in the subject chosen, in the way of viewing that subject, in the shape that subject takes. ”

“ Other men are dandies, with little conception of the grace of their part; with Whistler a supreme artist stepped into the question. He designed himself. Nor had he the illusions of vanity, but a groundwork of philosophy upon which every detail of his personal life was part of an elaborate and delicately designed structure, his art the turret of it all, from which he saw over the heads of others. There is no contradiction between the dandy and his splendid art. ”

“ Both painting and music are so different from writing in this, that the thoughts of a painter and musician have to issue through their fingers, they have to clothe with their own hands the offsprings of their fancy. ”

“ For he has a greater consciousness of the salt wet air than any other sea painter, of the veil behind which all ships are sailing and through which the waves break, the atmosphere which descends so mystically and invisibly and yet which if not accounted for [Pg 37] in a canvas leaves ships with their sails set in a vacuum and the waves as if they were crested with candle-grease. Is it not absence of this atmosphere which has tortured us on so many occasions when with everything quite real a picture has not brought us pleasure. ”

“ Pleasure comes to us always with reality in art, and the end of art is realism. All is real even around a mystic, though his thoughts are out of our sight. Whistler was not a mystic but above everything he wished to suggest the atmosphere which is invisible except for its visible effect, and I cannot help thinking his vision essentially abstract. ”

“ He worked by gradually refining and refining upon an eager start, or else by starting with great deliberation and proceeding very slowly with the brush balanced before every touch while he waited for it to receive its next inspiration. So he was always working at the top of his powers. Those pleasant mornings in the studio in which the Academy-picture painter works with pipe in mouth contentedly, but more than half-mechanically, upon some corner of his picture were not for him. ”

“ Instead of its figure being painted in some such accidental contact with its environment as would naturally occur, we have an arrangement. In rearranging things thus for itself, art is at least one remove farther away from things as they are, and as things as they are reflect the influences that brought them together, art must come closer to life by the interpretation of this reflection than by its alteration. There must be an arrangement in every picture, but the improbability of this one, outside of a studio, spoils the picture for me. ”

“ It is Whistler who represents her movement as she turns into the room, his art seeming to show a consciousness that the body that turns thus, the grace of the clothes, are but a temporary habitation of swiftly passing spirit. ”

“ No one knows how Whistler came to know so much about peacocks. A duffer can paint the bird until he comes to the neck—and then we have to turn to photographs for the reality that gives us pleasure, it eludes all modern genius. So for the most part, fortunately, peacocks are left severely alone. The dancing of the première danseuse at the Empire, perfected with ardent years of study, is a less recondite theme of movement than a peacock raising its head. ”

“ He was twenty when he left America and he never returned to it, so that as far as America is concerned infancy can be pleaded. America has since bought more than her share of the fruits of his genius, finding in this open-handed way charming expression for her envy. ”

“ To all adventurers there comes at last the event which knocks all their venturousness out of them or is the beginning of a triumphant way. Whistler had been before the footlights a long time, but it was his contact with Professor Ruskin which brought him into the full lime-light, which he was so much prepared to enjoy. Ruskin paid him the only tribute strength can pay to strength when it is not on the same side—with a prophetic instinct that as regards picture exhibitions Whistler’s art was the sign of a coming, and licentious, freedom from the old rules of the game. ”

“ But there is a destiny too for the spirit of a picture of which all this valuable perfection is but the outward shrine. Where human experience rises to intensity of expression in art it is born into life anew and less perishably. It is thus that the [Pg 61] picture of Whistler’s Mother is by common consent enthroned above the level of criticism, what we say for and against it being only as water lapping at the foot of a cliff. Incorporate with the traditions of a race it is acknowledged a classic, and of a classic one may speak as one does of life, with freedom as to how it affects oneself. ”

“ Yet he misunderstood when he thought the artist’s rights extended beyond his creations to the attitude in which one should approach them, and the picture is famous for the beautiful rendering of the lady and to us only incidentally interesting as an arrangement. One does not escape the music of the outline of the figure in the picture, the balance of all parts of the design, the refreshing convention in comparison with other conventions. ”

“ He hugged to himself the delusion that a knowledge of his craft enabled artists to understand him—but it is common for artists of abundant gifts not to have the necessary refinement of sense, and after all artists are not so numerous that these appreciators will be many. But in the wide world outside the studios there are many people thus delicately attuned, their numbers to be increased when Whistler in his subtlety of vision is less ahead of the world in point of evolution. ”

“ The second great public event in Whistler’s career was his election in 1886 to the Presidency of the Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street, which made exciting history at the time. Whistler was just one of those people who want everything in the world arranged after some secret pattern of their own. They make the best reformers. But what could be a more strange spectacle than the revolutionary Whistler in the presidential chair of the staidest of art societies? ”

“ Also we can be sure that a picture suffers by every quality, either of mere craftsmanship or surface finish, that tends to obscure individuality of touch and feeling. Outside the arts every job must be finished, if not by one man then by another. A half-built motor-car means nothing to any one, it cannot be regarded as a mode of personal expression, but in art it is otherwise, no one can finish a work for some one else, and as Whistler pointed out, “A work of art is finished from the beginning.” ”

“ And of course this is not to say that art should never pass such an early stage. All this depends on what the artist has to say: sometimes we have to value above everything the completeness, the perfection of surface with which a picture has been brought to an end. Whistler’s paradox sums up the fact that finish should be inextricably bound up with the method of working and the personal touch never be so “played out” that resort is made to that appearance of finish which can always be obtained by labour descending to a mechanical character. ”

“ In this impression of grey sea-weather we have the colour equivalent of that expressive economy which Whistler practised with his line; and the butterfly touch—like a butterfly alighting.
The Society had come into existence with aims of its own. An order of art was [Pg 71] represented which had to be represented somewhere. A great amount of capable work for which the Academy had not room was on view here, representative of the everyday activity of London studio life. It was amusing to think of Whistler as the President of this Society as it was constituted in those days—and absurd. ”

“ The irritation caused by misconception, the necessity of justifying even his limitations to a world which was apparently prepared to consider nothing else about him at one time—these were the wine-press of his eloquence. ”

“ Nothing can make us realise the great significance of the Whistler influence in art more than the contrast between the esteem [Pg 51] in which his etchings are now held and the early criticisms of them which he collected and scornfully embodied in his book. These are indeed the most depressing reading—and Whistler’s quaint termination to those pages, “they roar all like bears,” does very aptly express the feeling of desolation that must overcome any one who appreciates the spirit of his etchings. ”

“ He was such an instinctive artist that the explanation of his art must, to some extent, have remained hidden from himself, and Art fixing his place among her masters, will remember that great limitation in some ways is always the price of a new and instinctive knowledge in others. ”

“ He had a remarkable regard for purity of speech, as became the painter of such spiritual types of womanhood. It would seem that women liked him, and readily apprehended in his art his sensitive view of life. At table he drank but little and was a slender eater. When alone he would sometimes forget all about his meals, or eat scarcely anything ”

“ Only conventions perhaps are best left for portraits where the traditional environment connected with the high social status or office of the sitter, supplants in our imagination the more everyday aspect of their life. The unnaturalness of the photographer’s art may require concessions from every one; though [Pg 63] even here as in painting, the art which conceals art must save the situation; and Whistler managed this gracefully enough in all his other portraits. ”

“ In them we get bit by bit the revelation which he had received as a genius in his craft.
It was the force of his personality that obtained for Whistler’s evasive art such recognition in his lifetime as in the natural [Pg 36] course only falls to fine painters of the obvious, whom every one delights to honour. He had said that “art is for artists,” and it is true that the perfection of his own art is the pleasure of those who study it. It reached heights of lyrical expression where life in completeness has not yet been represented in painting ”

“ Other people’s ideas, old-fashioned ones, coming into collision with the intensity of his own, produced sparks on every occasion, and this without over anxiety to be brilliant on Whistler’s part. It is so with original minds. ”

“ He lived as exquisitely and carefully as he painted. Literary culture, merely, in his case was not great perhaps, yet he could be called one of the most cultured figures of his time. In every direction he marked the path of his mind with fastidious borders. And it is interesting that he should have painted the greatest portrait of Carlyle, who, we will say, represented in English literature Goethe’s philosophy [Pg 12] of culture, which if it has an echo in the plastic arts, has it in the work of Whistler. ”

“ It was 1878, the year of the Ruskin trial, that he started working in lithography as a medium, being initiated into the technicalities by Mr. Thomas Way. In the “Fair Women” Exhibition held by The International Society, which is open whilst I write, there are some lithographs by Whistler, [Pg 52] which suggest purity of type and the charm of beautiful womanhood in a manner that puts to flight the claims of many a famous canvas in the gallery. It is the most delicate of all mediums; it suited his touch and the sensitive order of his perceptions. ”

“ Well, work that is held thus sacred by its own creator, should tempt people to search for all that made it seem so valuable to him. Whistler had an intense dislike of parting with his work. When a picture was bought from him he was like a man selling his child. ”

“ When praise is forthcoming it is only for the early etchings at the expense of those later ones in which he conceived such an inspired use of the needle. By the criticisms in this book we know the exhausting struggle and how right it was that a life, the first half of which had been spent thus, should have no “Waterloo,” but end with rest—and with honour, accorded to this “Merlin,” so evidently great, if only a few knew why. ”

“ The painter’s election as President of the Society taking place just after the hanging of the exhibition. A newspaper criticism at the time was to the effect that the only note-worthy fact about the painting was the price, £630, “just about twenty shillings to the square inch.” The figure of an investment, we may add, which was to improve beyond the wildest calculations.
It is easier to explain Whistler’s personality than his work. In his lifetime most people had recognised all the force of his personality, but it was not so with his art. ”