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BOOKS BY DON C. SEITZ

HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK

WHISTLER STORIES

COLLECTED AND ARRANGED BY DON C. SEITZ

"WRITINGS BY AND ABOUT JAMES ABBOTT McNEILL WHISTLER"

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 1913

TO SHERIDAN FORD,

DISCOVERER OF THE ART OF FOLLY AND OF MANY FOLLIES OF ART

WHISTLER STORIES

The studios of Chelsea are full of Whistler anecdotes. One tells of a female model to whom he owed some fifteen shillings for sittings. She was a Philistine of the Philistines who knew nothing of her patron's fame and was in no way impressed with his work. One day she told another artist that she had been sitting to a little Frenchman called Whistler, who jumped about his studio and was always complaining that people were swindling him, and that he was making very little money. The artist suggested that if she could get any piece of painting out of Whistler's studio he would give her ten pounds for it. Although skeptical, the model decided to tell her "little Frenchman" of this too generous offer, and selected one of the biggest and finest works in the studio. "What did he say?" asked the artist who had made the offer, when the model appeared in a state of great excitement and looking almost as if she had come second best out of a scrimmage. "He said, 'Ten pounds--Good heavens!--ten pounds!' and he got so mad--well, that's how I came in here like this."

Mr. W.P. Frith, R.A., following the custom of artists, talked to a model one day to keep her expression animated. He asked the girl to whom she had been sitting of late, and received the answer:

"Mr. Whistler."

"And did he talk to you?"

"Yes, sir."

"What did he say?"

"He asked me who I'd been sitting to, same as you do; and I told him I'd been sitting to Mr. Cope, sir."

"Well, what else?"

"He asked me who I'd been sitting to before that, and I said Mr. Horsley."

"And what next?"

"He asked me who I'd been sitting to before that, and I said I'd been sitting to you, sir."

"What did he say then?"

Whistler once came very near painting a portrait of Disraeli. He had the commission; he even went down to the country where Disraeli was; but the great man did not manage to get into the mood. Whistler departed disappointed, and shortly afterward took place a meeting in Whitehall which was the occasion of a well-known story: Disraeli put his arm in Whistler's for a little way on the street, bringing from the artist the exclamation, "If only my creditors could see!"

Whistler's ideas, the reverse of commercial, not infrequently placed him in want. He pawned his portrait of his mother, by many considered the best of his productions.

Miss Marion Peck, a niece of Ferdinand Peck, United States Commissioner to the Paris Exposition, wanted her portrait done by Whistler. She sat for him nineteen times. Further, she requested, as the picture was nearing completion, that extra pains be taken with its finishing. Also, she inquired if it could, without danger of injury, be shipped.

"Why?" asked Whistler.

"Because I wish to send it to my home in Chicago," explained Miss Peck.

Whistler threw down his brush, overturned the easel, and ran around the studio like a madman. "What!" he shrieked. "Send a Whistler to Chicago! Allow one of my paintings to enter Hog Town! Never!"

Miss Peck didn't get the painting.

Whistler acknowledged the point. But the acknowledgment terminates in a way that is delicious. "I fancy you will admit that this is the only ass on record who ever did 'see the Angel of the Lord,' and that we are past the age of miracles."

Even in defeat he was triumphant.

Whistler found that Mortimer Menpes, once his very dear friend, sketched in Chelsea. "How dare you sketch in my Chelsea?" he indignantly demanded.

A vigorous attack on Mr. Menpes then followed in the press. One of the first articles began in this style, Menpes, of course, being an Australian: "I can only liken him to his native kangaroo--a robber by birth--born with a pocket!" "He is the claimant of lemon yellow"--a color to which Mr. Whistler deemed he had the sole right; and when he thought he had pulverized him in the press , Whistler one evening thrust this pleasant note into Mr. Menpes's letter-box, scrawled on a half-sheet of paper, with the well-known butterfly cipher attached:

"You will blow your brains out, of course. Pigott has shown you what to do under the circumstances, and you know the way to Spain. Good-by!"

Speaking at a meeting held to complete the details of a movement for the erection of a memorial to Whistler, Lord Redesdale gave a remarkable account of the artist's methods of work. "One day when he was to begin a portrait of a lady," said Lord Redesdale, "the painter took up his position at one end of the room, with his sitter and canvas at the other. For a long time he stood looking at her, holding in his hand a huge brush as a man would use to whitewash a house. Suddenly he ran forward and smashed the brush full of color upon the canvas. Then he ran back, and forty or fifty times he repeated this. At the end of that time there stood out on the canvas a space which exactly indicated the figure and the expression of his sitter."

This portrait was to have belonged to Lord Redesdale, but through circumstances nothing less than tragic it never came into his possession. There were bailiffs in the house when it was finished. This was no novelty to Whistler. He only laughed, and, laughing, made a circuit of his studio with a palette-knife, deliberately destroying all the pictures exposed there. The portrait of the lady was among them.

Moncure D. Conway in his autobiography relates this:

"At a dinner given to W.J. Stillman, at which Whistler related with satisfaction his fisticuffs with a Yankee on shipboard, William Rossetti remarked: 'I must say, Whistler, that your conduct was scandalous.' Stillman and myself were silent. Dante Gabriel Rossetti promptly wrote:

"'There is a young artist called Whistler, Who in every respect is a bristler; A tube of white lead Or a punch on the head Come equally handy to Whistler.'"

On one occasion a woman said to Whistler:

"I just came up from the country this morning along the Thames, and there was an exquisite haze in the atmosphere which reminded me so much of some of your little things. It was really a perfect series of Whistlers."

"Yes, madam," responded Whistler, gravely. "Nature is creeping up."

Richard A. Canfield, who sat for the portrait now called "His Reverence," though Canfield was something quite unclerical, recites:

"After I had my first sitting on New Year's Day, 1903, I saw Whistler every day until the day I sailed for New York, which was on May 16th. He was not able to work, however, on all those days. In fact, there were days at a time when he could do nothing but lie on a couch and talk, as only Whistler could talk, about those things which interested him. It was mostly of art and artists that he conversed, but now and again he would revert to his younger days at home, to the greatness to which the republic had attained, and to his years at West Point.

"In spite of all that has been said of him, I know that James McNeill Whistler was one of the intensest Americans who ever lived. He was not what you call an enthusiastic man, but when he reverted to the old days at the Military Academy his enthusiasm was infectious. I think he was really prouder of the years he spent there--three, I think they were--than any other years of his life. He never tired of telling of the splendid men and soldiers his classmates turned out to be, and he has often said to me that the American army officer trained at West Point was the finest specimen of manhood and of honor in the world.

"It was in this way that I spent every afternoon with Whistler from New Year's until May 15th, the day before I sailed. When he was able to work I would sit as I was told, and then he would paint, sometimes an hour, sometimes three. At other times he would lie on the couch and ask me to sit by and talk to him. On the morning of the day of the last sitting he sent me a note asking me to take luncheon with him, and Adding that he felt quite himself and up to plenty of work.

"So I went around to his studio, and he painted until well into the late afternoon. When he was done he said that with a touch or two here and there the picture might be considered finished. Then he added:

"'You are going home to-morrow, to my home as well as yours, and you won't be coming back till the autumn. I've just been thinking that maybe you had better take the picture along with you. His Reverence will do very well as he is, and maybe there won't be any work in me when you come back. I believe I would rather like to think of you having this clerical gentleman in your collection, for I have a notion that it's the best work I have done.'

"Whistler had never talked that way before, and I have since thought that he was thinking that the end was not far away. I told him, more to get the notion, if he had it, out of his mind than anything else, that I would not think of taking the picture, and that if he didn't put on one of those finishing touches until I got back, so much the better, for then I could see him work. That seemed to bring him back to himself, and he said:

A group of American and English artists were discussing the manifold perfections of the late Lord Leighton, president of the Royal Academy.

"Exquisite musician--played the violin like a professional," said one.

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