Читать книгу The Life of James McNeill Whistler - Joseph Pennell - Страница 39

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It was late in 1866 when Whistler returned from Valparaiso. Soon after he moved into No. 2,[4] at the east end of Lindsey Row, now

No. 96 Cheyne Walk. It was a three-storey house with an attic, part of the old palace remodelled, and, like No. 7, it looked on the river. Here he lived longer than anywhere else; here he painted the Nocturnes and the great portraits; here he gave his Sunday breakfasts. He had a house-warming on February 5 (1867), when the two Rossettis dined with him, and Mr. W. M. Rossetti wrote in his diary:

"There are some fine old fixtures, such as doors, fireplaces, and Whistler has got up the rooms with many delightful Japanesisms. Saw for the first time his pagoda cabinet. He has two or three sea-pieces new to me: one, on which he particularly lays stress, larger than the others, a very grey unbroken sea [probably Sea and Rain], also a clever vivacious portrait of himself begun."

No doubt this is the portrait in round hat, with paint-brushes in his hand.

Mr. Greaves says that the dining-room at No. 2 was blue, with a darker blue dado and doors, and purple Japanese fans tacked on the walls and ceiling; other friends remember "a fluttering of purple fans." One evening Miss Chapman was dining, and Whistler, wanting her to see the view up the river from the other end of the bridge, told her he would show her something "as lovely as a fan!" The studio, again the second-storey back room, was grey, with black dado and doors; from the Mother and the Carlyle one knows that Japanese hangings and his prints were on the walls; and in it was the big screen he painted for Leyland but kept for himself, with Battersea Bridge across the top, Chelsea Church beyond, and a great gold moon in the deep blue sky. The stairs were covered with Dutch metal. He slept in a huge Chinese bed. Beautiful silver was on his table. He ate off blue and white. "Suppose one of these plates was smashed?" Miss Chapman asked Whistler once. "Why, then, you know," he said, "we might as well all take hands and go throw ourselves into the Thames!"

The beauty of the decoration, as at No. 7, was its simplicity. Rossetti's house was a museum, an antiquity shop, in comparison. The simplicity seemed the more bewildering because it was the growth, not of weeks, but of years. The drawing-room was not painted until the day of Whistler's first dinner-party. In the morning he sent for the brothers Greaves to help him. "It will never be dry in time!" they feared. "What matter?" said Whistler, "it will be beautiful!" "We three worked like mad," is Mr. Walter Greaves' account, and by evening the walls were flushed with flesh-colour, pale yellow, and white spread over doors and woodwork, and we have heard gowns and coats too were touched with flesh-colour and yellow before the evening was at an end. One Sunday morning Whistler, after he had taken his mother to Chelsea Church, as he always did, again sent for his pupils and painted a great ship with spreading sails in each of the two panels at the end of the hall; the ships are said to be still on the wall covered up. His mother was not so pleased when, on her return, she saw the blue and white harmony, for she would have had him put away his brushes on Sunday as once she put away his toys. But she had many other trials and revelations: coming into the studio one day, she found the parlour-maid posing for "the all-over!" The ships were in place long before the dado of hall and stairway was covered with gold and sprinkled with rose and white chrysanthemum petals. Miss Alexander (Mrs. Spring-Rice) saw Whistler at work upon it when she came to sit, and he had lived six years at No. 2. Whistler's houses were never completely decorated and furnished; they had a look as if he had just moved in or was just moving out. But what was decorated was beautiful.

Whistler sent to the exhibitions of 1867, in London and Paris. He began the year by showing at the French Gallery, in January, one of the paintings of Valparaiso: Crépuscule in Flesh Colour and Green. It is the long picture of Valparaiso Harbour in the early evening, ships moored with partly furled sails; the first painting of twilight, and one of the first paintings carried out in the liquid manner of the Nocturnes. There were critics to call it a poem "in colour," though Whistler had not taught them to look for the "painter's poetry" in his work. The upright Valparaiso, a perfect Nocturne, was done at the same time, 1866, but not exhibited until later, and there is an unfinished version of the same subject.

In the Salon of 1867, where it had been rejected eight years before, At the Piano was accepted, and also The Thames in Ice—Sur la Tamise: l'Hiver. It was the year of the French Universal Exhibition. M. Duret writes that probably Mr. George Lucas spoke of Whistler to Mr. Avery, the United States Art Commissioner at the Exhibition. The result was that a number of his etchings and four pictures were hung: The White Girl, Wapping or On the Thames, Old Battersea Bridge, Twilight on the Ocean, the title then of the Crépuscule in Flesh Colour and Green. The Hudson River School dominated American art, and Whistler's paintings had to compete with the big machines of Church and Bierstadt. Tuckerman, in his Book of the Artists, quotes an unnamed American critic who, in 1867, found that Whistler's etchings differed from his paintings in meriting the attention they attracted, but he could see in the Marines only "blurred, foggy imperfections," and in The White Girl only "a powerful female with red hair, and a vacant stare in her soulless eyes. She is standing on a wolfskin hearthrug, for what reason is unrecorded. The picture evidently means vastly more than it expresses—albeit expressing too much. Notwithstanding an obvious want of purpose, there is some boldness in the handling, and singularity in the glare of the colours which cannot fail to divert the eye and weary it."

Americans were not treated with respect by the Hanging Committee. Their work was put in corridors and dark corners, and Whistler suffered. French critics, enthusiastic over his pictures four years earlier, were now no more appreciative than the American. Paul Mantz was distressed by the "strange white apparition" upon which, at the Salon des Refusés, he had lavished his praise. Burty thought that either time exaggerated the defects of the prints or else critical eyes had lost their indulgence, for the etchings were photographic and had a dryness and minuteness due to the early training of "Mr. Whystler." Both wrote in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Mr. Avery, however, had the sense to appreciate the etchings, and it was probably at this time he commenced his great collection, now in the New York Public Library.

Whistler and his brother, the Doctor, went to Paris in April. There they heard of the sudden death of Traer, Seymour Haden's assistant, and a member of the British Jury, on which Haden also served. Whistler liked Traer, and the circumstances of his death and burial led to a misunderstanding between the two brothers and the brother-in-law. The three met. The dispute was short and sharp; the result, a summons for the brothers to appear before a juge de paix. Whistler had been in the same court a few days earlier. A workman had dropped plaster on him as he passed through a narrow street in the Latin Quarter, and he had met the offence in the only way possible according to his code. Whistler sent for the American Minister, and the magistrate apologised. When he appeared again, "Connu!" said the judge, and there was no apology, but a fine. Haden said he fell through a plate-glass window, Whistler that he knocked him through. Haden maintained that both brothers were against him, Whistler that he demolished Haden single-handed.

It happened just when London gossip got hold of the story of the Marquis de Marmalade and Whistler's return from Valparaiso. Dr. Moncure Conway, in his Reminiscences, recalls a dinner given by Dante Rossetti to W. J. Stillman, in the winter of 1867, when "Whistler (a Confederate) related with satisfaction his fisticuff with a Yankee [really the black Marquis] on shipboard, William Rossetti remarked: 'I must say, Whistler, that your conduct was scandalous.' (Stillman and myself were silent.) Dante Gabriel promptly wrote: