ART AND A SAVAGE TONGUE

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33739, 11 January 1975, Page 9

ART AND A SAVAGE TONGUE

Whistler: A Biography. By Stanley Weintraub. Collins. 468 pp. Notes and Index.

"The master stands in no relation to the moment at which he occurs a moment of isolation — hinting at sadness — having no part in the progress of his fellow men.

“He is also no more the product of civilisation than is the scientific truth asserted, dependent upon the wisdom of a period. The assertion itself requires the man to make it. The truth was from the beginning. “So Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there cannot progress." James Abbott McNeill Whistler preached the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake to Victorian England in what became known as “The Ten O’Clock,” his first public lecture which he chose to deliver at that late hour one evening in February, 1885. He was already famous — and infamous — in England, France and America. His work, his capacity to make enemies, his confused private life, and his vitriolic tongue and pen all combined to express his doctrine of the artist as exile and outsider.

Of the lecture an enthusiastic young critic in the “Pall Mall Gazette” wrote:

“Mr Whistler’s lecture last night was, like everything else that he does, a masterpiece . . . For that he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting, is my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr Whistler himself entirely concurs.” The young critic was Oscar Wilde, perhaps the only figure among Whistler’s acquaintances able to meet “the master” on his own ground of swift verbal exchanges and hold his own. The friendship — and the chill which followed it — between these two remarkable men forms one of the best chapters in this superb biography of a painter who deserves to be much better known and understood than he is, even now.

The exchanges with Wilde and the more bitter suit for libel which Whistler pursued against John Ruskin receive due attention. But this is a full and searching biography and Stanley Weintraub, of Pennsylvania State University, succeeds in uncovering much that will be refreshingly new to almost all his readers. Whistler spent much of his childhood in Imperial Russia where his father, an American army engineer, was helping to design and build the railway from St Petersburg to Moscow.

After his father’s death he was entered at West Point as an army cadet only to be expelled for his lack of discipline by the head of that august academy, Robert E. Lee, future commander of the Army of the Confederacy. Through family connections the Whistler family next tried the Navy; James became a draftsman for the coastal survey. He lasted only a few months for, while his drawing was superb, his tendency to sprinkle decorative seagulls was not appreciated. It was as a bohemian in Paris, in the life that George du Maurier, who was also there, would later make famous in his novel “Trilby,” that Whistler’s philosophy and talepts began to emerge. Quite consciously Whistler and his friends, in the days of the Second Empire, lived out the life described in Henri Murger’s novel “Scenes de la vie de Boheme.”

In the process they laid one of the foundation stones for the Impressionist movement and for a revaluation in art and in the public’s appreciation of it Yet du Maurier’s novel, many years later, angered Whistler to the point where its publishers had to have it changed to avoid yet another Whistler legal action. Whistler is probably known best of all for his portrait of his mother, Anna Whistler, a stem New England Puritan who disapproved of her son’s romantic liaisons, and is said to have been forced frequently into prayer while posing for the picture because of the language used by Jimmy when the work would not go as he wanted.

She was to remain an important influence on him, however, for much of his adult life, and her training was evident even in the famous lecture on Art when many of Whistler’s allusions were drawn from the Old Testament which she had taught him as a child. For there was a tender side to Whistler, underneath the fierce litigant and savage tongue. His marriage, late in his life, to “Trixie,” the widow of his old friend the architect E. W. Godwin, was a true love match and Whistler never recovered fully from his wife’s death a few years later. Even in his declining years, when recognition and honours were being heaped upon the artist who had so often been scorned and penniless, Whistler could not resist the temptation to turn his shrill wit on his acquaintance. When he heard that Oscar Wilde, released from gaol, was working on a new romantic drama, Whistler remarked, “It must be known as ‘The Bugger’s Opera’.”

He died, in 1903, at the home of a friend in Cheyne Walk on the bank of the Thames in Chelsea where nearly 50 years before he had begun to paint those strange “impressions” of the river which he was later to sign with his personal motif — a butterfly with a sting in its tail. As the poet, Yeats, wrote a few jsears later: "His function was not to represent but always to suggest . . .” All the suggestiveness of the master finds a place in this fine biography.