an art critic, spoke of his "quaintly acquired" copy of the lecture as "smart but misleading," Whistler should pause to note, "that if the lecture had not seemed misleading to him it would surely not have been worth uttering at all."

England in the seventies and eighties accepted as her picture-makers, roughly speaking, the Royal Academy for oil pictures and the "Old Society" for watercolors. The Grosvenor Gallery was more or less an annex to the Academy, with the exception of one or two men and Whistler; the former painting the serious pictures, the latter a poseur whose painting, as Tom Taylor wrote at the time, "belongs to the region of chaff." With Whistler the position was the same himself and the others; but the definition was reversed: Whistler most seriously occupied with his personal vision, his sense of beauty; while the others were painting pictures with which he had little or no sympathy. To him they were "the commercial-travellers of Art, whose works are their wares and whose exchange is the Academy."

Whistler told me an incident which states the situation in two sentences. It seems that about 1874 there was talk of his portrait of Carlyle being bought for the nation. Sir George Scharf, then curator of the National Portrait Gallery, came to Mr. Graves's gallery in Pall Mall to see "the Carlyle" in this connection. Voicing precisely his public, all he said was, as he looked at it,

"Well, and has painting come to this!"

"I told Mr. Graves," said Whistler, "that he should have said, 'No, it has n't.'"

It was some seventeen or eighteen years later that "the Carlyle " was bought for Glasgow, and it is these years that are interesting - the years of Whistler's fighting, during which I saw him continually, and when he was often in need of money. For it was not until 1892 that he sold his pictures to any great extent, or for anything like the prices VOL. 101 - NO. 4

achieved by "the commercial-travellers of Art."

Whistler's jaunty carriage before the world of London is well known. He was courage personified during this time of fluctuating finances, pawning his large gold medal from Paris one day, lending £500 to the Society of British Artists the next. He often found "a long face and a short account at the bank," as he said one day. Once he spoke in the manner of an injured child of the sums So-and-So, R. A., made, while he had little or nothing. I told him he could not expect to live like a prince and paint like a prince; that the R. A.'s painted to please the public and reaped their reward.

"I don't think they do," he demurred, "I think they paint as well as they can." "People like, as they say, 'to look into a picture.' They adore Tadema's pictures because they can ‘look into' the marble," I told him.

"Well," said Whistler, "they can look into mine, they're simple enough. Yes, I suppose they do love to see what they call 'earnest work,' but they ought not to see it. My only objection to Tadema's pictures is that they are unfinished."

I spoke of one R. A. as being a better painter than another, pointing out the difference.

"Well," he said indifferently, "it's a nasty difference."

I spoke of the young men then exhibiting, some of whom are now R. A.'s or A. R. A.'s.

"They are all tarred," said he, "with the same brush; they are of the schools."

Of one, who was held to be England's most brilliant young artist, "Yes," he said thoughtfully, "he's clever, but there's something common in everything he does, so what's the use of it?"

All of which would show that Whistler had but little time for any but his own work, as indeed few great men have, much as we like to think to the contrary. He told me a story demonstrating this most clearly. His Nocturne in Blue and Gold, Valparaiso, was in the Hill Collec

"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."

Mr. Hill came in later to find him -dreaming of it probably. And I remember when Walter Sickert, a pupil of Whistler, in an article on the Manchester "Art Treasures" Exhibition, spoke of Lord Leighton's Harvest Moon in terms of praise, a telegram came from Whistler, Chelsea, to Sickert, Hampstead, in these words,

"The Harvest Moon rises over Hampstead and the cocks of Chelsea crow.'

But with those of his circle with whom Whistler was not quarreling, never was a kinder, a more delightful friend. And it was in those days that he said, "Yes, we are always forgiving Walter."

Alas! for another pupil, soon in disgrace, never forgiven, who, when scenting the end of Whistler's presidency of the Royal Society of British Artists, and foreseeing a sinking ship, handed in his resignation some months ahead of time. Whistler said with a grim smile, "The early rat."

He was disposed of in the Gentle Art of Making Enemies, in Whistler's best manner, without mentioning his name, and a final, “You will blow out your brains, of course."

Mr. Singer, in his monograph on Whistler, describes in some detail the continuous quarrels, and the long line of friends passing down and out. But with some few at least he never quarreled, G. H. Boughton, R. A., Albert Moore, and others I could name. That Moore and Boughton were men loved by their friends and held in high esteem by their brother artists, would seem little to the point, if Whistler found occasion for quarrel. Boughton, an Academician, whose work was prettier than most of 'em," and Moore, whose work he said

was beautiful, were his friends to the end. Of the work of others I have heard him speak in praise on occasion, — of that of C. E. Holloway whom he helped as he did many another; of that of Charles Keene and A. B. Houghton, over whose drawings of American subjects, and illustrations to Don Quixote, he grew quite enthusiastic one evening, talking to Mrs. Whistler and myself, in the blue diningroom of his house in Chelsea.

But in Bond Street, his battle-ground, he was usually the Whistler of the "gentle answer that sometimes turneth not away wrath." Going into the Fine Art Society's Galleries with him one day, we met at the door a once popular R. A., now knighted I believe, whom I knew only by sight and so went on into the galleries, leaving the two talking. On Whistler's coming to me I said, on mischief

intent,

"Who on earth was that to whom you spoke ?"

"Really, now," he answered, "I forget, but whoever it was, it's some one of no importance, you know, no importance whatever."

It was in Bond Street too that Whistler went into the gallery, then full of Dore's pictures, and asked the man who solicited subscriptions for engravings of the works on view, if a certain Academician's large religious picture was not on exhibition there.

"No; that," said the man, "is much lower down."

"Impossible," said the delighted Whis

Millais and the others. For Millais, in his earlier years an artist, said, "People had better buy my pictures now, when I am working for fame, than a few years later, when I shall be married and working for a wife and children," - giving them stories in his marvelous canvases, and later again stories or "catchy" titles with his obvious pot-boilers, of which he had forewarned his world. Whistler

cared for none of this. It was the miraculous birth of the picture, the appearance of effortless completion that he desired more and more. To this end he adopted, from the first, a method — “a scientific proceeding," he said, - probably the simplest ever used by any painter and for his purpose the most unerring. He never changed it, save to paint more thinly as time went on, as did Velasquez.

um,

a

The first words Whistler said to me on my first visit to his studio were, "It don't smell of paint, does it?" He was painting a portrait of Sir Henry Cole, then director of the South Kensington Musea tall dark portrait of a man in long cloak of dark blue, turned back over the right shoulder, a man with a ruddy face and a white stubby beard. Before he spoke he put a slow decisive stroke on the right cheek-bone and then stood back. The sitting was over, and that was the last stroke he put on that canvas. The portrait was never finished, for Sir Henry Cole died soon after, and I never knew Whistler to touch a canvas without the sitter.

When a student in 1874, I had seen Whistler's first exhibition in Pall Mall, and wrote to a friend, "You can paint a dress-suit black, if you like, and Whistler can make a canvas look like the water and sky of the Thames at night, and not like paint."

Of the portrait of Miss Alexander, George Moore wrote in 1892 as "surely the loveliest in the world." Mr. Christian Brinton, understanding it so charmingly, writes in a recent article, "The greatest galleries of the world can show nothing more lovely, more appealing, or more sen

But perhaps this is the only tribute possible from the Mob to the Master," though the names of the journals, since dead, would seem misleading. Joseph Pennell points out in his preface to The Works of Charles Keene, that the English critics did not speak of Charles Keene as a great artist until he was dead, and then they misunderstood his work. W. E. Henley says that R. A. M. Stevenson created art criticism in England. That before his criticisms, culminating in the book on Velasquez, art criticism did not exist. Both Pennell and Henley seem severe, but a study of the subject inclines one to agree with them.

When the Miss Alexander hung in the Goupil Gallery in the Whistler exhibition of 1892, it had gained in beauty. Whether the original coat of varnish had been rubbed off, I do not know, but a coat of varnish had recently been put on it. The picture was more delicate in quality, the whites having gained translucence in the ten years or so of its life. Certainly just before the exhibition, Whistler had told me of the man in Berners Street, Oxford Street," the finest picture-restorer in the world," whose broad thumb was then taking the original coat of varnish from one of his larger canvases, he did not say which. George Moore and I were looking at this portrait, hung at one end of the large room in the old galleries in Bond Street, but we were not long allowed to forget that our idea of the beautiful was not popular. A large pompous person, with a party of ladies in his wake, stopped before it and said with

a sweep of the arm, "If I could endorse these things. I would, but I can't."

Those were his very words. I said to Moore, "He has no need to say that, all he has to do is to stand there."

When the Miss Alexander was in the studio before it went to the Grosvenor, Whistler told me that Tom Taylor, art critic of The Times, came to see it. There were other visitors. Taylor said, "Ah, yes, um;" then remarked that the upright line in the paneling of the wall was wrong and the picture would be better without it, adding, "Of course it's a matter of taste." To which Whistler replied, "I thought that perhaps for once you were going to get away without having said anything foolish; but remember, so that you may not make the mistake again, it's not a matter of taste at all, it is a matter of knowledge. Good-by."

It was curious to note the effect of Whistler's pictures in a general exhibition, the intrusion of his art among the hitherto little-disturbed ideals of the British public. A work by Whistler made all others on that wall appear as if done by one man, of the same colors, key, and facture, whatever the subject. It was startling, and one felt the truth of his statement that "They were all tarred with the same brush." And once The Fur-Jacket hung in the Goupil Galleries and on the opposite wall a large Fortuny. One would imagine that the Fortuny would sparkle and the Whistler would look sombre. No, the beautiful tone of the whole canvas, the delicate flush on the face of the figure by Whistler made the Fortuny look "black," in spite of its emerald greens, pinks, and yellows.

66

Of Whistler's presidency of the Royal Society of British Artists and his endeavor to make it an art-centre," I shall speak only of such things as are not well known, or not known at all a difficult thing to do in this connection. He exhibited in the society some of his best work. His first contribution, I think, was the portrait of Mrs. Louis Huth. This beautiful canvas is but little known;

the first reproduction I have seen of it since his death is in The Work of James McNeill Whistler, by Elizabeth Luther Cary. It was painted some years before its exhibition in the Royal Society. In earlier years Whistler painted many portraits showing the face in profile. Later, one may observe he nearly always chose the full face. Walter Sickert asked him why he no longer painted profiles. “Oh, the blue Alsatian Mountains," said he.

66

As I was a member of the society and on the hanging-committee twice during his active career, I naturally saw the effect which Whistler's personality and the enforcing of his principles had on the "British" that afterwards "remained," as well as on the "artists who came out." Whistler gained from Queen Victoria permission to prefix the title "Royal," much coveted by art societies in London, and invited the present King and Queen, then the Prince and Princess of Wales, to visit the exhibition. The Prince, on coming up the staircase, asked the President what the society was, saying that he had “never heard of it.” The society is the oldest in London with the exception of the Royal Academy, but the appropriate answer was with Whistler, and he said, "Sir, it dates from to-day."

The Prince laughed good-naturedly, and then learned of the society's antiquity and of the charter it alone possessed. Whistler told me that the Princess particularly liked my picture, and on my showing gratification, said with a diabolical twinkle in his eye, "But she also liked that," and pointed to one by a British artist artfully hidden in a corner.

There came a press-day when Whistler's picture was not there, only the frame on the wall. It was the custom of the society, instituted before Whistler's time and not discontinued by him, to provide for the press a well-spread table and such comfort as a good cellar contains, to cheer them as they appraised the pictures. Telegrams were sent imploring the placing of the President's canvas. But