Читать книгу The Life of James McNeill Whistler - Joseph Pennell - Страница 17

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PEN DRAWINGS

(See page 44)

Though he was frequently hard up, Whistler's income seemed princely to students who lived on nothing. When there was money in his pockets, Mr. Ionides says, he spent it royally on others. When his pockets were empty, he managed to refill them in a way that still amazes Oulevey, who told us of the night when, after the café where they had squandered their last sous on kirsch had closed, he and Lambert and Whistler adjourned to the Halles for supper, ordered the best, and ate it. Then he and Lambert stayed in the restaurant as hostages, while Whistler, at dawn, went off to find the money. He was back when they awoke, with three or four hundred francs in his pocket. He had been to see an American friend, he said, a painter: "And do you know, he had the bad manners to abuse the situation; he insisted on my looking at his pictures!"

There were times when everybody failed, even Mr. Lucas, George Whistler's friend, who was living in Paris and often came to his rescue. One summer day he pawned his coat when he was penniless and wanted an iced drink in a buvette across the way from his rooms in Rue Bourbon-le-Château. "What would you?" he said. "It is warm!" And for the next two or three days he went in shirt-sleeves. From Mr. Ionides we have heard how Whistler and Ernest Delannoy carried their straw mattresses to the nearest Mont-de-Piété, stumbling up three flights of stairs under them, and were refused an advance by the man at the window. "C'est bien," said Ernest with his grandest air. "C'est bien. J'enverrai un commissionnaire!" And they dropped the mattresses and walked out with difficulty, to go bedless home. Then there was a bootmaker to whom Whistler owed money, and who appeared with his bill, refusing to move unless he was paid. Whistler was courtesy itself, and, regretting his momentary embarrassment, begged the bootmaker to accept an engraving of Garibaldi, which he ventured to admire. The bootmaker was so charmed that he spoke no more of his bill, but took another order on the spot, and made new shoes into the bargain.

Many of the things told of Whistler he used to tell us of Ernest or the others. Ernest he said it was, though some say it was Whistler, who had a commission to copy in the Louvre, but no canvas, paints, or brushes, and not a sou to buy them with. However, he went to the gallery in the morning, the first to arrive, and his businesslike air disarmed the gardien as he picked out an easel, a clean canvas, a palette, a brush or two, and a stick of charcoal. He wrote his name in large letters on the back of the canvas, and, when the others began to drop in, was too busy to see anything but his work. Presently there was a row. What! an easel missing, a canvas gone, brushes not to be found! The gardien bustled round. Everybody talked at once. Ernest looked up in a fury—shameful! Why should he be disturbed? What was it all about, anyhow? When he heard what had happened no one was louder. It had come to a pretty pass in the Louvre when you couldn't leave your belongings overnight without having them stolen! Things at last quieted down. Ernest finished his charcoal sketch, but his palette was bare. He stretched, jumped down from his high stool, strolled about, stopped to criticise here, to praise there, until he saw the colours he needed. The copy of the man who owned them ravished him. Astonishing! He stepped back to see it better. He advanced to look at the original, he grew excited, he gesticulated. The man, who had never been noticed before, grew excited too. Ernest talked the faster, gesticulated the more, until down came his thumb on the white or the blue or the red he wanted, and, with another sweep of his arm, a lump of it was on his palette. Farther on another supply offered. In the end, his palette well set, he went back to his easel, painting his copy. In some way he had supplied himself most plentifully with "turps," so that several times the picture was in danger of running off his canvas. At last it was finished and shown to his patron, who refused to have it. Whistler succeeded in selling it for Ernest to a dealer; and, "Do you know," he said, "I saw the picture years afterwards, and I think it was rather better than the original!" Oulevey's version is that Whistler helped himself to a box of colours, and, when discovered by its owner, was all innocence and surprise and apology: why, he supposed, of course, the boxes of colour were there for the benefit of students.

On another occasion, when Ernest, according to Whistler, had finished a large copy of Veronese's Marriage Feast at Cana, he and a friend, carrying it between them, started out to find a buyer. They crossed the Seine and offered it for five hundred francs to the big dealers on the right bank. Then they offered it for two hundred and fifty to the little dealers on the left. Then they went back and offered it for one hundred and twenty-five. Then they came across and offered it for seventy-five. And back again for twenty-five, and over once more for ten. And they were crossing still again, to try to get rid of it for five, when, on the Pont des Arts, an idea: they lifted it; "Un," they said with a great swing, "deux, trois, v'lan!" and over it went into the river. There was a cry from the crowd, a rush to their side of the bridge, sergents de ville came running, omnibuses and cabs stopped on both banks, boats pushed out. It was an immense success, and they went home enchanted.

Ernest was Whistler's companion in the most wonderful adventure of all, the journey to Alsace when most of the French Set of etchings were made. Mr. Luke Ionides thinks it was in 1856. Fantin, who did not meet Whistler until 1858, remembered him just back from a journey to the Rhine, coming to the Café Molière, and showing the etchings made on the way. The French Set was published in November of that year, and if Whistler returned late in the autumn, the series could scarcely have appeared so soon. However, more important than the date is the fact that on his journey the Liverdun, the Street at Saverne, and The Kitchen were etched. He had made somehow two hundred and fifty francs, and he and Ernest started out for Nancy and Strasburg. Mr. Leon Dabo tells us that his father was a fellow student of Whistler's at Gleyre's and lived at Saverne, in Alsace, and that it was to see him Whistler went there. And from Mr. Dabo we have the story of excursions that Whistler and Ernest made with his father and several friends: one to the ruins of the castle near the village of Dabo, where it is said their signatures may still be seen on a rock of brown sandstone; another to Gross Geroldseck, and the sketches Whistler made there were afterwards presented to the Saverne Museum. It may be that a third excursion was to Pfalzburg, the birthplace of Erckmann and Chatrian, whom Whistler knew and possibly then met for the first time.

On the way back, at Cologne, one morning, Whistler and Ernest woke up to find their money gone. "What is to be done?" asked Ernest. "Order breakfast," said Whistler, which they did. There was no American Consul in the town, and after breakfast he wrote to everybody who might help him: to a fellow student he had asked to forward letters from Paris, to Seymour Haden in London, to Amsterdam, where he thought letters might have been sent by mistake. Then they settled down to wait. Every day they would go to the post-office for letters, every day the official would say, "Nichts! Nichts!" until they got known to the town—Whistler with his long hair, Ernest with his brown hollands and straw hat fearfully out of season. The boys of the town would follow to the post-office, where, before they were at the door, the official was shaking his head and saying "Nichts! Nichts!" and all the crowd would yell, "Nichts! Nichts!" At last, to escape attention, they spent their days sitting on the ramparts.

At the end of a fortnight Whistler took his knapsack, put his plates in it, and carried it to the landlord, Herr Schmitz, whose daughter, Little Gretchen he had etched—probably the plate called Gretchen at Heidelberg. He said he was penniless, but here were his copper-plates in his knapsack upon which he would set his seal. What was to be done with copper-plates? the landlord asked. They were to be kept with the greatest care as the work of a distinguished artist, Whistler answered, and when he was back in Paris, he would send the money to pay his bill, and then the landlord would send him the knapsack. Herr Schmitz hesitated, while Whistler and Ernest were in despair over the necessity of trusting masterpieces to him. The bargain was struck after much talk. The landlord gave them a last breakfast. Lina, the maid, slipped her last groschen into Whistler's hand, and the two set out to walk from Cologne to Paris with paper and pencils for baggage.

Whistler used to say that, had they been less young, they could have seen only the terror of that tramp. A portrait was the price of every plate of soup, every egg, every glass of milk on the road. The children who hooted them had to be drawn before a bit of bread was given to them. They slept in straw. And they walked until Whistler's light shoes got rid of most of their soles and bits of their uppers, and Ernest's hollands grew seedier and seedier. But they were young enough to laugh, and one day Whistler, seeing Ernest tramping ahead solemnly through the mud, the rain dripping from his straw hat, his linen coat a rag, shrieked with laughter as he limped. "Que voulez-vous?" Ernest said mournfully, "les saisons m'ont toujours devancé!" But it was the time of the autumn fairs, and, joining a lady who played the violin and a gentleman who played the harp, they gave entertainments in every village, beating a big drum, announcing themselves as distinguished artists from Paris, offering to draw portraits, five francs the full length, three francs the half-length. At times they beat the big drum in vain, and Whistler was reduced to charging five sous apiece for his portraits, but he did his best, he said, and there was not a drawing to be ashamed of.

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