J.M. WHISTLER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21906, 15 September 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

J.M. WHISTLER

BY KOTARF.

ECCENTRIC AND WIT

This is Whistler's centenary year. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, but his artistic life was spent chiefly in Paris and London. Apparently he despised Englishmen, but like Bernard Shaw, and his fellow-Americans Sargent and Henry James, he found England the best counvrv to live in and work in. Ho seems to have been the perfect cosmopolitan, the man without a country and equally at home or not at home everywhere. Certainly he could not easily merge into any environment; he systematically fought and mocked and criticised wherever he found himself. But he reserved some of his bitterest comments for certain aspects of American life. A distinguished American lady had sat nineteen times for a portrait, and the work was nearly finished. Then she let drop that she was taking it back to Chicago with her. Whistler threw down his brush, upset his easel, pranced round his studio like a madman, and shrieked at her: "What! Send a Whistler to Chicago! Allow one of my paintings to enter Hog Town! Never!" And that was the last she saw of her picture. You could always count on Whistler's doing the bizarre, unexpected thing. Probably that came natural to him. He bad the gift of cutting and blistering speech, and he sedulously cultivated his talent. His sense of his own value and importance came very near megalomania; but he was also a horn poseur who had created in the public mind an impression of his personality and was bent at all costs on living up to his reputation. He was verv small and very lean, and he drerse<f to secure the maximum of eccentricity in his appearance. A snow-white lock providentially planted in the middle of his forehead gave him something striking to dress up to, and he never failed to suggest to any company that here was no ordinary mortal. His hat was always set at a certain angle. Ho wore a frock coat of an incredible length, and l carried a cane four feet long. Attracting Attention

In his early days he had to adopt special tricks to attract attention, both to himself and to the things he stood for in art. Later, when everybody knew him and he was accepted as a master by a large and influential constituency, oddity and extravagance had become second nature to him. As a consequence every outre word or action perpetrated by lesser men, or invented by the mythlo\ ing imagination, was inevitably attributed to him, and he became a convenient peg on which to hang a multitude of absurdities and rudenesses for which he was not responsible. But, even so, there are enough authenticated examples to declare what manner of man he was and what idea he wished the public to hold of him. He always alleged that he was abnormally sensitive to colour, and he would command a visitor to his studio to remove any article of attire which he insisted clashed w'ith his colour scheme. He was the first man in England to collect blue china. When a group of Britons was besieged in China, and a relief force was fighting its way to its relief, he publicly expressed the hope that no blue vases would be broken in the operation, because one lovely bit of porcelain was worth many Englishmen. He was reputed to tint his table butter a delicate apple-green that it might harmonise with his beloved blue china. The Critics It is easy/enough to understand the sensation his artistic theories and methods caused in mid-Victorian England, when the pre-Raphaolites held the field and Ruskin was the doyen tof art critics. What was of Value in him has been absorbed long ago into the main stream of art, and the new currents have long since flowed far and wide in other directions. But to the conservatives of his day his works were impudent and incomprehensible daubs, aftd he with his modernist rubbish was nothing but an incompetent and lazy upstart who for his own self-advertisement and to cover his own limitations was fooling the ignorant public to the top of its bent. His own flamboyant and bitter personality gave some ground for the contemptuous dismissal of his work by the recognised critics of the day. His greatest publicity was secured through Ruskin's attack on his "Nocturne in Black and Gold" exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. Ruskin, in the July issue of "Fors Clavigera," stated that he had seen and heard much of cockney impudence before, but he had never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. Whistler had described his Nqcturne as a "distant view of Cremorne Gardens with a falling rocket and other fireworks." Ruskin's comment was that "tho illeducated conceit of the artist nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture."

Whistler promptly brought an action for libel against Ruskin, claiming £IOOO damages. The case is probably the most famous of its kind in legal history. The Attorney-General, who led for Ruskin, in his cross-examination of Whistler, asked in cutting tones how long he had taken to knock off the Nocturne. Whistler, bristling at this flippancy, coldly bogged his pardon. The question was repeated in less derogatory terms, with an apology. "About a day," said Whistler, and as an afterthought, in the interests of complete accuracy—"l may have put a few touches to It next day." "For two days' labour you ask two hundred guineas?" "No," said Whistler in a flash, "I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime." Repartee All through the fates put the counsel for the defence into Whistler's hands. They said exactly the things that gave the mocking incisive wit of the artist its chance to make a devastating retort. They made the mistake of underestimating Whistler's almost diabolic quickness of repartee, though things played into their hands when the counsel for the plaintiff lost his bearings and insisted on holding tho picture upside down. -

" Do you think now," asked tho At-torney-General, "you could make me see the beauty of that picture? " Whistler calmly and carefully examined the lawyer's features. "No." ho said at last with cold deliberetion. "Do you know, I fear it would be as hopeless as for the musician to pour his notes into a deaf man's car." Whistler won, and was awarded a farthing damages. That farthing he always wore conspicuously on his watch chain. Whistler wrote a book on the "Gentle Art of Making Enemies." Ho could speak with authority, for his maxim was that any fool could make friends, but a good enemy was worth any number of friends. He sincerely mourned the death of an arch-enemy, Taylor, the art-critic of the Times. "I'm lonesome," he said; "I have hardly a warm personal enemy left." " 1 wish I had said that," Oscar Wilde said to him when he had made a particularly witty retort during a dinner at Forbes-Robertson's. "Never mind, dear Oscar," came back the rapier, "never mind—you will."