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THE COURIER.
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WHlkTLER.
Jaa. Abbott McNeil Whistler, was
born in Lowell, Mass., in 1834. So be
is now 61 years old. He was educated
at West Point. After leaving school he
studied for two years at the studio of
Gleyre in Paris. In 1863 he went to
London and within three years he has
settled in Paris.
He has become cosmopolitian, not
through love of cosmopolitanism, but
because he is disgusted with America
and England. He is conceited, eccen
tric, aggressive. Ho possesses a mag
netism which pushes away from him
friends and admirers. The history of
his life is a record of desertions.
He wrote the "Gentlo Art of Making
Enemies"' to show how to convert
friendship into enmity, to cut himself
loose from all who opposed him and to
prove to everybody how little ht cared
for anybody. Truly the book shows
how to make enemies. And the publi
city has made reconciliation impossible;
but his third object is not accomplished.
He would not have published the book
had he cared not at all for the loss of
his friends. He cannot keep the bitterness
of their loss from out of his pages.
Under these conditions it is difficult
to consider him and his works with im
partiality. His pugnacious attitude
puts us either on the defensive or else
behind him where we face his enemies
with somewhat of his own spirit.
Hostile criticism has affected to some
extent his work, though I think a fair
critic will not call his painting, on the
whole, eccentric. Some parts of some
pictures are painted in a 6pirit of
bravado and defiance, as for instance
the foot of the little girl in the portrait
exhibited at the World's Fair. The
master pieces, by which he must be
judged, are superb examples of drawing.
Whistler's influence on modern art is
tremendous. Younger and less ag.
gressive artists have yielded to his in
fluence and picture buyers have testified
io the soundness of his principles by
their patronage. Not the founder of
the impressionist school, he was an im
pressionist before the word was. Prob
ably Edouard Manet, of France, born in
1833 had more to do with the founding
of this school than Whistler. At any
rate Whistler's early work shows Manet's
influence. Poor Manet died in 1883 be
fore the tide of appreciation, then turn
ed his way, had reached him. Nor had
he fully expressed himself. But the
hints which his work gave of another
starting point than the academic one
were enough for a keenly modern mind
like Whistler's.
A late French review of the work
Whistler has in the Musee du
Luxembourg shows the adoration the
French feel for Lis work.
"The most illustrious among its mem
bers, M. Jas. McNeil Whistler, is today
one of our citizens, and it is even among
us here that he has studied in 1854 in
the Atelier of the Gleyre, still h can
not be attached to this" school nor pre
cisely to any other contemporary school.
His art, profoundly original, is made up
of sensations of dreams and of fantasy,
of stratagems, of implications and of
mystery; it seems to have come from
the palette of Velasquez and of Goya; it
is relieved by a point of irony and of
British eccentricity, with something,
you cannot tell what, captivating and
unexpected, taken at caprice from the
imagination of the Orient. Le Musee
du Luxembourg justly prides itself on
possessing his chef d'oeuvre most poet
ical and most moving, the reverend pic
ture of his mother, seated and thought
ful in that arrangement in grey and
black, gentle, sad and full of depth,
which puts us in communication with
the dreamy soul of the model. Mr.
Whistler exhibited his first picture in
tne salon of rejected pictures in 1863.
This picture was the Girl in White and
made a great sensation. Then after
having exhibited in the salon of 1865
and 1867 he showed nothing more for
fifteen years. In 1882 and thereafter he
appeared regularly in the salon with a
series of superb master-pieces. Mistress
Harry Meux, the portrait of his mother,
Carlyle, (now in the museum at Glas
gow) Lady Archibald Campbell, M.
Thomas Deuret, etc., together with a
number of those harmonious combin
ations of tones; arrangements in black,
iu blue and silver, in grey and black, in
green and grey, in purple and rose, in
opal and silver, nocturnes and marines
profoundly strange, affecting and fan
tastic, apparently seen in the spirit of
Edgar Poe or of Baudelaire and as with
the enlargementof a dream of the mem
ory."' The translation is literally rendered.
The French appreciate him, the Eng
lish, in the person of Ruskin, their
elected monarch of art, call him "an
impudent coxcomb for flinging a pot of
paint in the public's face.'
All nations go to Paris to study art,
all, I 6hould say, except the English.
They stay at home, mostly; or if they
do go they never forget that the "sun
never sets on the British empire." Their
ringers are as stiff as their necks. They
might as well stay at home. They took
an outiiderlike Ruskin for their master,
and art in England is lifeless.
At the World's Fair it was easy to
compare the master pieces of Chase,
Sargent, Zorn, Baldini, Aivazoovsky,
Breton and Millet with Sir Frederick
Leigh ton, Alma Tadema and Millais.
The work of the Englishmen is a terrible
example of what happens to a nation
tied to a tradition academic which re
fuses support to genius if the genius go
about his appointed work in his own
way.
Paris then, the art-school of the
nations, recognizes a master in Whistler
and welcomes him with unconcealed
pride.
In the famous suit of Whistler vs.
Ruskin in 1878, the plaintiff sued for
.1,000 damages and received one far
thing. The artist contends that the
critic has no right to call him in the
public prints a "coxcomb" and to refer
to him as charging a hundred guineas
for throwing a pot of paint in the pub
lic's face. Mr. Ruskin thought that
he and men like him, who have studied
art from the outside all their long, and
in so far useless lives, should stand
between the public and the painter for a
double purpose. Firstly, for the good of
the artist, to interpret nature to him,
and to keep him from straying from
the strictly defined path of historical
development marked out by his prede
cessors; in the second place, their funct
ion is that of an interpreter to the pub
lic. If it were not for the critic artists
might get an audience of their own and
expound their own revelations; the pub
lic would look and not listen and in time
might feel some of the wonderful
mystery of color.
Until Mr. Whistler's protest the
critics had succeeded in making people
think their mediation necessary. Rus
kin was especially idolized. He took for
granted that no further progress was
possible in painting, that tho Italian
masters had settled the limits and the
technique of that art years ago, and that
a modern who attempted to follow his
otvn inspiration showed only brazen
impudence and incapacity.
People in Nebraska, far from a crea
tive center, whether of literature or art,
knew better than that years ago. The
sweep of the prairies, the limitless sky,
have taught the irreverence of distrust
ing one's own inspiration. After hav
ing acquired knowledge and training
from the schools each human being
must be guided by that inner light
which his creator has lighted and set
in his soul. If he extinguish it whether
by following some other light or in any
other way creation is thereafter impos
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sible, his body is a corpse. No intelli
gence, however small, is without this
light, but the soul of a genius glows
with it and all should reverence it as tho
gift of God through him to them.
Tho supremacy of Ruskin was baleful
because he hindered progress. For a
time truth could not get by him. He
had his own great gift. What lovely
English he wrote! His phrases aro
musical, poetical, orientally rich. He
was a maker of books; he belongs to
literature. Art never knew him. Ho
should have Kept his hands off that
which was not revealed to him. He
never knew that genius is as various as
humanity and must always make itBown
choice of expression.
In 1892 forty of Mr. Whistler's works
were exhibited at a picture dealer's in
London. The shop was crowded most
of the time and most all the pictures
were sold at high prices. In fourteen
years the people had learned to enjoy
his pictures, tho' they are not yet
through laughing at him. Tho London
correspondent of The Nation in review
ing the pictures, says "Ruskin 'b teach
ings are already obsolete except in the
provinces. Whistler's power has grown
with the years.""
His early pictures show him a master
of line and color, his latest ones a mas
ter of tone. He can paint the wet grey
of a Thames twilight, so that the next
time we see the Thames in that light
the greys reveal themselves to our own
eyes and we feel their tenderness, depth
and relation to each other.
Whistler, twenty years ago, was a
quarter of a century ahead of his con
temporaries. When a man gets far
ahead of the procession, it, the proces
sion, thinks him crazy; it scoffs and
hisses, spits on him and sometimes will
crucify him if he be weak enough to
allow them to do it.
In Whistler's case persecution has
made him the champion of three conti
nents. He is abreast of the twentieth
century which will enroll his name
among the highest names of the nine
teenth. It will forgive his conceit and
his malice for the sake of the genius and
his willingness to sacrifice everything
else to it.
His method ot painting is his own.
He uses his table as a palette.
He takes out from his tubes large
lumps of color and uses very large
brushes. After they are painted he
places his pictures out in the sunlight
to dry.
Whistler paints pictures. He is
concerned about aspect, never about
situation. Yet in all of his portraits
tlje beauty of the epirit overpowers
even the beauty of composition.
Of the combination ot colors
mystically related he hasmade the study
and experiment' of his life. He
leaves story telling to the makers of
books, he will have nothing to do
with dramatic situation or historic
moments. His audience must not
expect him to be literary. He is an
When wanting a clean, easy shave
or an artistic hair-cut, try
8.F.
WESTERF1ELD
THE POPULAR TONSORIAL
ARTIST,
who has an elegant barber shop
with oak chairs, etc., called "The
Annex" at 117 North Thirteenth
street, south ot Lansing theatre.
Vf HAS ALSO EHT MEAT BATH MOMS.
artist. He has that to teach us we can
not leai n from books nor even from
nature. For "nature contains the
elements in color and form, of all
pictutn, as the keyboard contains tile
notes of all music."
But the artist is fain to pick and
chose, and group with sience these
elements that tho result may bo
beautiful, as the musician gathers his
notes and forms his chords, until he
brings forth from chaos glorious
harmony.
To say to the painter that nature is
to he taken as she is is to say to the
player that he may sit on the piano,
(Ten O'clock).
I have spoken of his unmeasured
influence on artists in the last twenty
years. Tho modern school owes more
to Whistler than any other influence.
He trusted in God and did as he was
commanded; he heeded not man nor his
ways. Valesquez.was his predecessor.
He studied him reverently, constantly
and never lost an opportunity to praise
him. He was influenced as well by the
simplicity and decorative scheme of tho
Japanese. But his original genius is so
strong it has cut its own channel. "He
was harder hit than most artists."
Raphaelle or i'intorett or Titian
could not paint like this? The ideas
that make this style of painting possible
were not yet in tho world. They could
not paint this way any more than they
could use the telephone. Another cen
tury and Whistler may be called an old
fogy, that is, technically artists may go
further, but the poetry of his conception,
its strength and sincerity will not be
surpassed.
His pictures are characterized by an
absence of vulgan y; and the sacchar
ine quality which is so evident in Boug
ereau, Meyer von Bremen and Millais
Think bow maddening to have a
picture like "Breaking Home Ties" for
ever on your walls. How the people at
the fair gabbled "Oh's" and "Ah's" be
fore this picture; how silent they were
before "The Lad" With the Yellow
Buskin.'" Which picture would you
rather live with? I thin': this a final
test. Where the color scheme is the
work of a master it will take me years
and years to Ieirn its secrets, perhaps I
never shall. Never mind, all the while
the concept of beauty is growing in my
soul. It is less and less easy to satisfy
with anything cheap or unhealthful.
Sarah B. Harris.
