Читать книгу The Life of James McNeill Whistler - Joseph Pennell - Страница 29
ANNIE HADEN
ОглавлениеDRY-POINT. G. 62
Whistler sent The White Girl to the Academy of 1862, with The Twenty-fifth of December, 1860, on the Thames; Alone with the Tide; and one etching, Rotherithe. The White Girl was rejected. The two other pictures and the print were accepted, hung, and praised. The Athenæum compared the Rotherithe to Rembrandt. Whistler could scarcely be mentioned as an etcher without this comparison; since Rembrandt his were "the most striking and original" etchings, everyone then said, Mr. W. M. Rossetti being among the first in England to say it boldly. Alone with the Tide was approved as "perfectly expressed," and The Twenty-fifth of December as "broad and vigorous, though perhaps vigour was pushed over the bounds of coarseness to become mere dash." Other work he showed elsewhere was praised. The Punt and Sketching, published in Passages from Modern English Poets, were singled out for admiration. Thames Warehouses and Black Lion Wharf won him recognition as "the most admirable etcher of the present day," at South Kensington Museum, where in 1862 an International Exhibition was held. Whistler had no pictures, but the collection of modern continental art was one of the finest ever seen in England.
In nothing had Whistler been so completely himself as in The White Girl, and it failed to please. The artist is born to pick and choose, and group with science, the elements in Nature that the result may be beautiful, he wrote in The Ten O'Clock, and The White Girl was his first attempt to conform to a principle no one ever put so clearly into words. It was an attempt, we know now, comparing the painting to the symphonies and harmonies that came after. But at the time it was disquieting in its defiance of modern conventions. It was without subject according to Victorian standards, and the bold massing of white upon white was more bewildering than the minute detail of the Pre-Raphaelites. This summer (1862) the Berners Street Gallery was opened, "with the avowed purpose of placing before the public the works of young artists who may not have access to the ordinary galleries." Maclise, Egg, Frith, Cooper, Poynter forced their way in. But the Manager had the courage to exhibit The White Girl, stating in the catalogue that the Royal Academy had refused it. The Athenæum was independent enough to say that it was the most prominent picture in the collection, though not the most perfect, for, "able as this bizarre production shows Mr. Whistler to be, we are certain that in a very few years he will recognize the reasonableness of its rejection. It is one of the most incomplete paintings we ever met with. A woman in a quaint morning dress of white, with her hair about her shoulders, stands alone in the background of nothing in particular. But for the rich vigour of the textures, we might conceive this to be some old portrait by Zucchero, or a pupil of his, practising in a provincial town. The face is well done, but it is not that of Mr. Wilkie Collins' Woman in White."
The criticism brought from Whistler his first letter to the press, published in the Athenæum, July 5:
"62 Sloane Street. July 1, 1862.
"May I beg to correct an erroneous impression likely to be confirmed in your last number? The Proprietors of the Berners Street Gallery have, without my sanction, called my picture 'The Woman in White.' I had no intention whatever of illustrating Mr. Wilkie Collins' novel; it so happens, indeed, that I have never read it. My painting simply represents a girl dressed in white, standing in front of a white curtain.—I am, &c.,
James Whistler."
The critics were spared the sting of his wit, but they disapproved strongly enough for him to tell his friends that The White Girl enjoyed a succès d'exécration.
A different success awaited his Thames etchings in Paris, where they were shown in a dealer's gallery. Baudelaire saw them and understood, as he was the first to understand the work of Manet, Poe, Wagner, and many others. He wrote:
"Tout récemment, un jeune artiste américain, M. Whistler, exposait à la galerie Martinet une série d'eaux fortes, subtiles, éveillées comme l'improvisation et l'inspiration, représentant les bords de la Tamise; merveilleux fouillis d'agrés, de vergues, de cordages; chaos de brumes, de fourneaux et de fumées tire-bouchonnées; poésie profonde et compliquée d'une vaste capitale."
According to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Whistler soon moved to Queen's Road, Chelsea: "I fancy that the houses in Queen's Road have been much altered since Whistler was there in 1862–63. They were then low (say two-storeyed), quite old-fashioned houses, of a cosy, homely character, with small forecourts. I have a kind of idea that Whistler's house was No. 12, but this is quite uncertain to me.[3] As my brother and I were much in that neighbourhood, to and fro, prior to settling down in No. 16 Cheyne Walk, we came into contact with Whistler, who every now and then accompanied us on our jaunts. I forget how it was exactly that we got introduced to him; possibly by Mr. Algernon Swinburne, who was also to be an inmate of No. 16. Either (as I think) before meeting Whistler or just about the time we met him, we had seen one or two of his paintings. At the Piano must have been one, and we most heartily admired him, and discerned unmistakably that he was destined for renown."
The friendship may have led to Whistler's interest in black-and-white, for in England it was Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who revolutionised illustration and proved it a dignified and serious form of art. The more brilliant of the younger men were working for the illustrated magazines, and Whistler found a place among them. He made six drawings in 1862. Four appeared in Once a Week: The Morning before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, Count Burckhardt, The Major's Daughter, The Relief Fund in Lancashire, intended to be used as an illustration to the reprint of an address by Tennyson on the subject of the famine in Lancashire, but never written because of his illness. To this fund we believe Whistler contributed a drawing. The two other illustrations, for The First Sermon, were published in Good Words. They were drawn on wood in pencil, pen and wash, are full of character, and, in the use of line, are like his etchings. They were engraved by the Dalziel Brothers and Joseph Swain, and from Mr. Strahan, the publisher of Once a Week, we have these additional facts:
"They were arranged for by Edward Dalziel, and I cannot say how he came to know the artist or his work, as Mr. Whistler was young then, and, as far as I know, had not contributed to any magazine.
The average price we paid to artists was nine pounds, and we reckoned that the same amount had to be paid for engravings. As a matter of fact, the sum paid to Mr. Whistler was nine pounds for each drawing."
We showed Whistler once The Morning before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. "Well, now, not bad, you know—not bad even then!" and he followed, with his expressive little finger, the flowing line, pointing to the hand lost in the draperies. This and The Major's Daughter were the two he preferred, and when J. was preparing The History of Modern Illustration Whistler picked them out as "very pretty ones" that should be reproduced, though, if but a single example of his work could be used, he wished The Morning before the Massacre to be selected, for it was "as delicate as an etching, and altogether characteristic and personal." Count Burckhardt he did not care for, insisting that he would rather not be represented if this were to be the only example in the book. "It was never a favourite," he added.
The four drawings of Once a Week were reprinted in Thornbury's Legendary Ballads, 1876. Thornbury implied that the drawings were made for the book, and thought that "the startling drawings by Mr. Whistler prove his singular power of hand, strong artistic feeling, and daring manner."
Our copy belonged to George Augustus Sala. On the margin of The Morning before the Massacre he wrote: "Jemmy Whistler.—Clever, sketchy, and incomplete, like everything he has done. A loaf of excellent, fine flour, but slack-baked." So Sala believed in 1883, and it is typical of the time.
Another important work of 1862 was The Last of Old Westminster. Mr. Arthur Severn knows more about it than anyone, as his account to us explains: "On my return from Rome to join my brother in his rooms in Manchester Buildings, on the Thames at Westminster Bridge (where the New Scotland Yard now is), I found Whistler beginning his picture of Westminster Bridge. My brother had given him permission to use our sitting-room, with its bow-windows looking over the river and towards the bridge. He was always courteous and pleasant in manner, and it was interesting to see him at work. The bridge was in perspective, still surrounded with piles, for it had only just been finished. It was the piles with their rich colour and delightful confusion that took his fancy, not the bridge, which hardly showed. He would look steadily at a pile for some time, then mix up the colour, then, holding his brush quite at the end, with no mahlstick, make a downward stroke and the pile was done. I remember his looking very carefully at a hansom cab that had pulled up for some purpose on the bridge, and in a few strokes he got the look of it perfectly. He was long over the picture, sometimes coming only once a week, and we got rather tired of it. One day some friends came to see it. He stood it against a table in an upright position for them to see; it suddenly fell on its face, to my brother's disgust, as he had just got a new carpet. Luckily Whistler's sky was pretty dry, and I don't think the picture got any damage, and the artist was most good-natured about my brother's anxiety lest the carpet should have suffered."
The Last of Old Westminster was ready for the Academy of 1863, to which it was sent with six prints: Weary, Old Westminster Bridge, Hungerford Bridge, Monsieur Becquet, The Forge, The Pool. The dignity of composition in the picture and the vigour of handling impressed all who saw it in the London Memorial Exhibition, though they had to regret its shocking condition, cracked from end to end. It failed to impress Academicians in 1863, and was badly hung, as were the prints, reproductive work being then, as now, preferred to original etching.
The White Girl, after its Berners Street success, was sent by Whistler to the Salon. He took it to Paris, to Fantin's studio, there having it unrolled and framed. It is hard to say why the strongest work of the strongest young men was rejected from the Salon of 1863. Fantin, Legros, Manet, Bracquemond, Jongkind, Harpignies, Cazin, Jean-Paul Laurens, Vollon, Whistler were refused. It was a scandal; 1859 was nothing to it. The town was in an uproar that reached the ears of the Emperor. Martinet, the dealer, offered to show the rejected pictures in his gallery. But before this was arranged, Napoleon III ordered that a Salon des Refusés should be held in the same building as the official Salon, the Palais de l'Industrie. The decree was published in the Moniteur for April 24, 1863. The notice was issued by the Directeur-Général of the Imperial Museums, and the exhibition opened on May 15. The success was as great as the scandal. The exhibition was the talk of the town, it was caricatured as the Exposition des Comiques, and parodied as the Club des Refusés at the Variétés; everyone rushed to the galleries. The rooms were crowded by artists, because, in the midst of much no doubt weak and foolish, the best work of the day was shown; by the public, because of the stir the affair made. The public laughed with the idea that it was a duty to laugh, and because the critics said that never was succès pour rire better deserved. Zola described in L'Œuvre the gaiety and cruelty of the crowd, convulsed and hysterical in front of La Dame en Blanc. Hamerton wrote in the Fine Arts Quarterly:
"The hangers must have thought her particularly ugly, for they have given her a sort of place of honour, before an opening through which all pass, so that nobody misses her. I watched several parties, to see the impression The Woman in White made on them. They all stopped instantly, struck with amazement. This for two or three seconds, then they always looked at each other and laughed. Here, for once, I have the happiness to be quite of the popular way of thinking."
On the other hand, Fernand Desnoyers, who wrote a pamphlet on the Salon des Refusés, thought that Whistler was "le plus spirite des peintres," and the painting the most original that had passed before the jury of the Salon, altogether remarkable, at once simple and fantastic, the portrait of a spirit, a medium, though of a beauty so peculiar that the public did not know whether to think it beautiful or ugly. Paul Mantz considered it the most important picture in the exhibition, full of knowledge and strange charm, and his article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts is the more interesting because he described the picture as a Symphonie du Blanc some years before Whistler called it so, and pointed out that it carried on French tradition, for, a hundred years earlier, painters had shown in the Salon studies of white upon white.
The picture hardly explained the sensation of its first appearance when we saw it with Miss Alexander, the Mother, Carlyle, The Fur Jacket, and Irving in the London Memorial Exhibition. But it seemed revolutionary enough in the sixties, to become the clou of the Salon des Refusés, though nothing was further from Whistler's intention. It eclipsed Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, then called Le Bain.
Whistler was in Amsterdam with Legros, looking at Rembrandt with delight, at Van der Helst with disappointment, etching Amsterdam from the Tolhuis, no doubt hunting for old paper and adding to his collection of blue and white, when the news came of the reception of his picture in Paris, and he wrote to Fantin that he longed to be there and in the movement. It was a satisfaction that the picture, slighted in London, should be honoured in Paris. He was all impatience to know what was said in the Café de Bade, the café of Manet, and by the critics.
To add to his triumph in Paris, official honours were coming to him in Holland and England. Some of his etchings were in an exhibition at The Hague, though he said he did not know how they got there, and he was given one of three gold medals awarded to foreigners—his first medal. Though atrociously hung at the Academy, his prints were honoured at the British Museum, where twelve were bought for the Print Room this year.
The excitement did not keep him from work, to which, as he wrote to Fantin, wandering was a drawback. He felt the need of his studio, of "the familiar all about him." The "familiar" he loved best was in London, and when he returned he began to look for a house of his own. It was fortunate for him that his mother was in England. At the beginning of the Civil War, in which Whistler took the keenest interest as a patriot and a "West Point man," she had been in Richmond with her son William, serving as surgeon in the Confederate Army, had run the blockade, and come to join her other children in London.
Whistler no longer made the Hadens' house his home. The relations of the brothers-in-law had become strained, both being of strong character. Haden had had much to put up with, while Whistler, the artist, resented the criticism of Haden, the surgeon. One story we have from Whistler explains the situation, and though he never gave a date, it can be told here. Haden was the schoolmaster Whistler found him when they first met; one's older relatives have a way of forgetting one can grow up. Once, when Whistler had done something more enormous than ever in Haden's eyes, he was summoned to the workroom upstairs, and lectured until he refused to listen to another word. He started down the four flights of stairs, with Haden close behind still lecturing. At last the front door was reached. And then: "Oh, dear," said Whistler, "I've left my hat upstairs, and now we have got to go all through this again!" As there was no further question of Whistler living with the Hadens, it was decided that he and his mother should live together, and some of his most delightful years were those that followed.
Footnotes
[2]See Duret's Whistler.
[3]Not only have the houses been much altered, but the name of the street has changed, and Queen's Road is now Royal Hospital Road. The present No. 12 corresponds to Mr. Rossetti's description, but we think it more likely—and he does too—that Whistler lived in one of the little brick cottages of Paradise Row. In any case, we doubt if he had more than rooms or lodgings. He gave us to understand that the house he took shortly after, in Lindsey Row, was his first in London.
