Читать книгу The Life of James McNeill Whistler - Joseph Pennell - Страница 7

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"The boys were brought up like little princes until their father's death, which changed everything," Miss Emma W. Palmer writes us. Major Whistler's salary was large, so were his expenses; we have never heard there was a pension. He left his family comparatively poor—fifteen hundred dollars a year.

Mrs. Whistler would have preferred to stay at Stonington, but for her two sons' sake she went to Pomfret, Connecticut, where there was a good school, Christ Church Hall. The principal was Rev. Dr. Roswell Park, a West Point engineer before he became parson and school teacher. At Pomfret Mrs. Whistler made herself a home. She could only afford part of an old farmhouse, and she felt keenly the discomfort for her boys. Yet she kept up the old discipline. On Christmas Day she wrote to her mother that they had been busy all morning bringing in wood and listing draughty doors, though she allowed them to lighten their task by hanging up evergreens and to sweeten it with "Stuart's Candy." After a snowstorm, they had, like other boys, to shovel paths, and all the while they had to study. "Jimmie was still an excitable spirit with little perseverance," she wrote; however, she would not faint but labour, and "I urged them on daily, and could see already their exertions to overcome habits of indolence." The Bible was read and the two boys were made to recite a verse every morning before breakfast. Miss Palmer, their schoolmate, during the winter of 1850, remembers that Mrs. Whistler "was very strict with them," and describes Whistler at this period as "tall and slight, with a pensive, delicate face, shaded by soft brown curls, one lock of which fell over his forehead. … He had a somewhat foreign appearance and manner, which, aided by his natural abilities, made him very charming even at that age. … He was one of the sweetest, loveliest boys I ever met, and was a great favourite."

The deepest impression he left at Pomfret was as a draughtsman. He made caricatures and illustrations to the books he read, portraits of his friends, and landscapes. Many of his sketches have been preserved. The late Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, also one of his schoolmates, describes him as "a man as fascinating as he was great, with a charm which from the very beginning everyone who knew him recognised." Whistler told us that he used to walk to school with her, carrying her books and basket, and she wrote us:

"He was very attentive and kind; full of fun in those days. The master of the school—Rev. Dr. Roswell Park—was one of the stiffest and most precise of clergymen, and dressed the part. One day Whistler came to school with a high, stiff collar and a tie precisely copied from Dr. Park's. Of course, the schoolroom was full of suppressed laughter. The reverend gentleman was very angry, but he could hardly take open notice of an offence of that sort. So he bottled up his wrath, but when Jimmy—as we used to call him in those schooldays—gave him some trifling cause of offence, the Rev. Dr. went for him with a ferrule. The school was in two divisions—the girls sitting on one side of the large hall, and the boys on the other. Jimmy, pursued by the Dr. and the ferrule, went round back of the girls' row, and threw himself down on the floor, and the Dr. followed him and whacked him, more, I think, to Jimmy's amusement than to his discomfort."

Mrs. Moulton had further recollections of the maps he drew, which "were at once the pride and the envy of all the rest of us—they were so perfect, so delicate, so exquisitely dainty in workmanship."

The work done at Pomfret by Whistler which we have seen does not strike us as remarkable. It has its historic importance, but shows no greater evidence of genius than the early work of any great artist.