



Produced by sp1nd and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet Archive)








MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR

EDITED BY--T. LEMAN HARE


WHISTLER

1834-1903




IN THE SAME SERIES

    ARTIST.             AUTHOR.
  VELAZQUEZ.          S. L. BENSUSAN.
  REYNOLDS.           S. L. BENSUSAN.
  TURNER.             C. LEWIS HIND.
  ROMNEY.             C. LEWIS HIND.
  GREUZE.             ALYS EYRE MACKLIN.
  BOTTICELLI.         HENRY B. BINNS.
  ROSSETTI.           LUCIEN PISSARRO.
  BELLINI.            GEORGE HAY.
  FRA ANGELICO.       JAMES MASON.
  REMBRANDT.          JOSEF ISRAELS.
  LEIGHTON.           A. LYS BALDRY.
  RAPHAEL.            PAUL G. KONODY.
  HOLMAN HUNT.        MARY E. COLERIDGE.
  TITIAN              S. L. BENSUSAN.
  MILLAIS.            A. LYS BALDRY.
  CARLO DOLCI.        GEORGE HAY.
  GAINSBOROUGH.       MAX ROTHSCHILD.
  TINTORETTO.         S. L. BENSUSAN.
  LUINI.              JAMES MASON.
  FRANZ HALS.         EDGCUMBE STALEY.
  VAN DYCK.           PERCY M. TURNER.
  LEONARDO DA VINCI.  M. W. BROCKWELL.
  RUBENS.             S. L. BENSUSAN.
  WHISTLER.           T. MARTIN WOOD.
  HOLBEIN.            S. L. BENSUSAN.
  BURNE-JONES.        A. LYS BALDRY.
  VIGEE LE BRUN.      C. HALDANE MACFALL.
  CHARDIN.            PAUL G. KONODY.
  FRAGONARD.          C. HALDANE MACFALL.
  MEMLINC.            W. H. J. & J. C. WEALE.
  CONSTABLE.          C. LEWIS HIND.
  RAEBURN.            JAMES L. CAW.
  JOHN S. SARGENT     T. MARTIN WOOD.

_Others in Preparation._




[Illustration: PLATE I.--OLD BATTERSEA BRIDGE. Frontispiece

(In the National Gallery)

This nocturne was bought by the National Collections Fund from
the Whistler Memorial Exhibition. It was one of the canvases
brought forward during the cross-examination of the artist in the
Whistler v. Ruskin trial.]




Whistler

BY T. MARTIN WOOD

ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR


[Illustration]


LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK

NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  Plate
     I. Old Battersea Bridge                            Frontispiece
          In the National Gallery
                                                                Page
    II. Nocturne, St. Mark's, Venice                              14
          In the possession of John J. Cowan, Esq.

   III. The Artist's Studio                                       24
          In the possession of Douglas Freshfield, Esq.

    IV. Portrait of my Mother                                     34
          In the Luxembourg Galleries, Paris

     V. Lillie in Our Alley                                       40
          In the possession of John J. Cowan, Esq.

    VI. Nocturne, Blue and Silver                                 50
          In the possession of the Hon. Percy Wyndham

   VII. Portrait of Thomas Carlyle                                60
          In the Corporation Art Galleries, Glasgow

  VIII. In the Channel                                            70
          In the possession of Mrs. L. Knowles




[Illustration]

I


At the time when Rossetti and his circle were foregathering chiefly at
Rossetti's house, quiet Chelsea scarcely knew how daily were
associations added which will always cluster round her name. Whistler's
share in those associations is very large, and he has left in his
paintings the memory of many a night, as he returned beside the river.
Before Whistler painted it, night was more opaque than it is now. It had
been viewed only through the window of tradition. It was left for a man
of the world coming out of an artificial London room to paint its
stillness, and also to show us that we ourselves had made night more
beautiful, with ghostly silver and gold; and to tell us that the dark
bridges that sweep into it do not interrupt--that we cannot interrupt,
the music of nature.

The figure of Whistler emerges: with his extreme concern as to his
appearance, his careful choice of clothes, his hair so carefully
arranged. He had quite made up his mind as to the part he intended to
play and the light in which he wished to be regarded. He had a dual
personality. Himself as he really was and the personality which he put
forward as himself. In a sense he never went anywhere unaccompanied; he
was followed and watched by another self that would perhaps have been
happier at home. Tiring of this he would disappear from society for a
time. Other men's ringlets fall into their places accidentally--so it
might be with the young Disraeli. Other men's clothes have seemed
characteristic without any of this elaborate pose. He chose his clothes
with a view to their being characteristic, which is rather different and
less interesting than the fact of their becoming so because he,
Whistler, wore them. Other men are dandies, with little conception of
the grace of their part; with Whistler a supreme artist stepped into the
question. He designed himself. Nor had he the illusions of vanity, but a
groundwork of philosophy upon which every detail of his personal life
was part of an elaborate and delicately designed structure, his art the
turret of it all, from which he saw over the heads of others. There is
no contradiction between the dandy and his splendid art. He lived as
exquisitely and carefully as he painted. Literary culture, merely, in
his case was not great perhaps, yet he could be called one of the most
cultured figures of his time. In every direction he marked the path of
his mind with fastidious borders. And it is interesting that he should
have painted the greatest portrait of Carlyle, who, we will say,
represented in English literature Goethe's philosophy of culture, which
if it has an echo in the plastic arts, has it in the work of Whistler.
In his "Heretics" Mr. G. K. Chesterton condemned Whistler for going in
for the art of living--I think he says the miserable art of living--I
have not seen the book for a long time, but surely the fact that
Whistler was more than a private workman, that his temperament had
energy enough to turn from the ardours of his work to live this other
part of life--indicates extraordinary vitality rather than any weakness.
Whistler was never weak: he came very early to an understanding of his
limitations, and well within those limitations took his stand. Because
of this his art was perfect. In it he declined to dissipate his energy
in any but its natural way. In that way he is as supreme as any master.
Attacked from another point his whole art seems but a cobweb of
beautiful ingenuity--sustained by evasions. Whistler, one thinks, would
have been equally happy and meteorically successful in any profession;
one can imagine what an enlivening personality his would have been in a
Parliamentary debate, and how fascinating. Any public would have
suited him. Art was just an accident coming on the top of many other
gifts. It took possession of him as his chief gift, but without it he
was singularly well equipped to play a prominent part in the world. As
things happened all his other energy went to forward, indirectly and
directly, the claims of art. Perhaps his methods of self-advancement
were not so beautiful as his art, and his wit was of a more robust
character. For this we should be very glad; the world would have been
too ready to overlook his delicate work--except that it had to feed his
inordinate ambition. At first it recognised his wit and then it
recognised his art, or did its level best to, in answer to his repeated
challenges.

[Illustration: PLATE II.--NOCTURNE, ST. MARK'S, VENICE

(In the possession of John J. Cowan, Esq.)

This picture was first exhibited in the winter of 1886 at the Royal
Society of British Artists. The painter's election as President of the
Society taking place just after the hanging of the exhibition. A
newspaper criticism at the time was to the effect that the only
note-worthy fact about the painting was the price, L630, "just about
twenty shillings to the square inch." The figure of an investment, we
may add, which was to improve beyond the wildest calculations.]

It is easier to explain Whistler's personality than his work. In his
lifetime most people had recognised all the force of his personality,
but it was not so with his art. In this he is as a player of violin
music, or a composer after the fashion of the masters of music--his
relationship to the subject which suggests the motif, of course, could
not be quite so slight as theirs--but it was their standpoint that he
adopted and so approached his art from another direction than the
ordinary one. To a great extent he established the unity of the arts.
Without being a musical man, through painting he divined the mission of
music and passed from the one art almost into the other. And the effort
above everything else for self-expression was in its essence a musical
one too, as also the fact that he never allowed a line or brushmark to
survive that was not as sensitively inspired--played we might almost
say--as the touch of a player, playing with great expression, upon the
keyboard of his piano. This quality of touch--how much it counts for in
the art of Whistler--as it counts in music. It is one of the essential
things which we have to understand about his work, to appreciate and
enjoy it.

Both painting and music are so different from writing in this, that the
thoughts of a painter and musician have to issue through their fingers,
they have to clothe with their own hands the offsprings of their fancy.
They cannot put this work out, as the writer does, by dictation to a
type-writer. It is not in the style he lays the ink that the poet finds
the expression, its thickness or its thinness bears no resemblance to
his soul, but the intimacies of a painter's genius are expressed in the
actual substance of his paint and in the touch with which he lays it. So
in painting the mysterious virtue arises which among painters is called
"quality," a certain beauty of surface resultant from the perfection of
method. And it is "quality," which Whistler's work has superlatively, in
this it approaches the work of the old masters, his method was more
similar to the old traditions than to the systems current in the modern
schools. And part of the remote beauty, the flavour of distinction which
belongs to old canvases is simulated by Whistler almost unconsciously.

Mr. Mortimer Mempes has put on record the painful care with which
Whistler printed his etchings. The Count de Montesquieu, whom Whistler
painted, tells of the "sixteen agonising sittings," whilst "by some
fifty strokes a sitting the portrait advanced. The finished work
consisted of some hundred accents, of which none was corrected or
painted out." From such glimpses of his working days we are enabled to
appreciate that desire for perfection which was a ruling factor both in
his life and work. In art he deliberately limited himself for the sake
of attaining in some one or two phases absolute perfection; he strained
away from his pictures everything but the quintessence of the vision and
the mood. He worked by gradually refining and refining upon an eager
start, or else by starting with great deliberation and proceeding very
slowly with the brush balanced before every touch while he waited for it
to receive its next inspiration. So he was always working at the top of
his powers. Those pleasant mornings in the studio in which the
Academy-picture painter works with pipe in mouth contentedly, but more
than half-mechanically, upon some corner of his picture were not for
him. Full inspiration came to him as he took up his brushes, and the
moment it flagged he laid them aside. So that in his art there is not a
brush mark or a line without feeling. His inspiration, however, was not
of the yeasty foaming order of which mad poets speak, but spontaneity.
Spontaneous action is inspired. And this is why his work looks always as
if it was done with grace and ease, and why it seemed so careless to
Ruskin. However, such winged moments will not follow each other all day
long, and though they take flight very quickly, work at this high
pressure--with every touch as fresh as the first one--cannot be
indefinitely prolonged. Whistler's friends regretted that he should
suddenly leave his work for the sake of a garden party. It is more
likely that he turned to go to the garden party just when the right
moment came for him to leave off working and so conserve the result, for
it is the tendency of the artist in inspired moments to waste his
inspiration by allowing the work of one moment to undo what was done in
the one before it.




II


The wit of Whistler was not like the wit, let us say, of Sheridan, but
it was the result of intense personal convictions as to the lines along
which art and life move together. About one or two things in this world
Whistler was overflowing with wisdom, and upon those things his
conversation was always salt, his sayings falling with a pretty and a
startling sound. He talked about things which were much in advance of
his day. His was not the wisdom of the past which always sounds
impressive, but the greater wisdom of the future, of instincts not yet
established upon the printed page. By these he formed his convictions as
he went, referring all his experiences, chiefly artistic ones, back to
his intelligence, which as we know was an extraordinarily acute one.
Other people's ideas, old-fashioned ones, coming into collision with the
intensity of his own, produced sparks on every occasion, and this
without over anxiety to be brilliant on Whistler's part. It is so with
original minds.

There is a difference between artistic work and other sorts of work.
Outside the arts, in other professions, what a man's personality is,
whilst it affects the way his work is accomplished, does not alter the
nature of that work. Immediately, however, the work becomes of such a
nature that the word art can be inserted, then the personal equation is
before everything to be considered. "Temperament" meets us at every
turn, in the touch of brush to paper, in the arrangement of the design,
in the subject chosen, in the way of viewing that subject, in the shape
that subject takes. Also we can be sure that a picture suffers by every
quality, either of mere craftsmanship or surface finish, that tends to
obscure individuality of touch and feeling. Outside the arts every job
must be finished, if not by one man then by another. A half-built
motor-car means nothing to any one, it cannot be regarded as a mode of
personal expression, but in art it is otherwise, no one can finish a
work for some one else, and as Whistler pointed out, "A work of art is
finished from the beginning." In such a saying Whistler showed the
depths from which his wit spilt over. His intuitiveness in certain
directions was almost uncanny, taking the place of a profound
scholarship, and this saying is a case in point. For however fragmentary
a work of art is, if it contains only a first impulse, so far as the
work there is sufficient to explain and communicate that impulse, it is
finished--finish can do no more. And of course this is not to say that
art should never pass such an early stage. All this depends on what the
artist has to say: sometimes we have to value above everything the
completeness, the perfection of surface with which a picture has been
brought to an end. Whistler's paradox sums up the fact that finish
should be inextricably bound up with the method of working and the
personal touch never be so "played out" that resort is made to that
appearance of finish which can always be obtained by labour descending
to a mechanical character. This may sound rather technical, but it is
not so really.

[Illustration: PLATE III.--THE ARTIST'S STUDIO

(In the possession of Douglas Freshfield, Esq.)

In this Whistler stands in profile before his easel. The picture belongs
to Mr. Douglas Freshfield. There is another version, in a lower key and
less finished, in the Lane gift at the City of Dublin Gallery, from
which this was perhaps painted.]

Here we may remark on all that is due to Whistler, as to Manet, for
disturbing the dust in the Academies, at one time so thick that the
great difference between art and mere craft seemed almost totally
obscured.




III


Whistler's life is at present a skeleton of dates on which this incident
occurred or that, and at which the most notable of his pictures
appeared. And this must remain so until an authoritative biography of
the painter has appeared. With whom the authority rests was made the
subject of a recent Law Case. Till such a work appears we can only deal
with his art and with the Whistler legend, the impressions, recorded and
otherwise, he left upon those who were brought into contact with him.[1]
These are strangely at variance--some having only met him cloaked from
head to foot in the species of misunderstanding in which, as he
explained, in surroundings of antagonism he had wrapped himself for
protection; others remembering him for his kindliness and his
old-fashioned courtesy.

  [1] Since going to press, "The Life of Whistler," by E. R. and
      J. Pennell has appeared.

Permitting himself sufficient popularity with a few to be called
"Jimmy," Whistler's full name was James Abbot McNeill Whistler, and the
initials gradually twisted themselves into that strange arabesque with a
wavy tail which he called a butterfly and with which he signed his
pictures and his letters. Born on 11th July 1834 at Lowell,
Massachusetts, he was the descendant of an Irish branch of an old
English family, and in his seventeenth year he entered the West Point
Military Academy, where after making his first etchings on the margins
of the map which he should have been engraving, he decided to devote his
life to art. He was twenty when he left America and he never returned to
it, so that as far as America is concerned infancy can be pleaded.
America has since bought more than her share of the fruits of his
genius, finding in this open-handed way charming expression for her
envy. He went to Paris to study art, where he was gay, and attracted
attention to himself by the enjoyable way in which he spent his time. It
was not until he was twenty-five that he arrived in London, and a
little later moving to Chelsea commenced work in earnest.

A charming picture suggests itself of the painter escorting his aged
mother every Sunday morning to the door of Chelsea old church, as was
his habit, bowing to her as she enters and hastening back to the studio
to be witty with his Sunday friends.

Whistler's first important picture, "At the Piano," issued from Chelsea.
It was hung in the Academy in 1860 and was bought by a member of the
Academy. He followed the next year with "La Mere Gerard," which belongs
to Mr. Swinburne. He sent a picture called "The White Girl," to the
Salon of 1863. It was, however, rejected. It was then hung at the
collection called the "Salon des Refuses," an exhibition held as a
protest against the Academic prejudices which still marked the Salon.
There it met with an enthusiastic reception which set Whistler off on
his career of defiance. In 1865 the painter went to Valparaiso for a
visit, from which resulted the beautiful Valparaiso nocturnes. Back
again in Chelsea, he devoted himself to the river there. He was then
living in a house in Lindsay Row. At this time he was greatly affected
by Japanese art, and one or two pictures show curious attempts to adapt
scenes of the life of the West to the Eastern conventions. This phase of
his art was beautiful, but he passed it on the way to work of greater
sincerity, and more clearly the outcome of his own vision. In 1874 the
first exhibition of Whistler's work was held at a Gallery in Pall Mall,
containing among other things "The Painter's Mother," "Thomas Carlyle,"
and "Miss Alexander." It is interesting that the Piano Picture, painted
just as he emerged from his studentship, is of the flower of his art; he
did things afterwards of great significance, and did them quite
differently, but the Piano Picture does not seem a first work preparing
his art for future perfection, it is so perfect in itself. And here
perhaps we may observe another fact in connection with Whistler, that in
the last days of his life he painted with the same genius for the
beautiful as at the beginning; none of that deterioration had set in,
which so often comes in the wake of flattery and belated public esteem.
He was never betrayed by success into over, or too rapid, production. He
never succumbed to the delight of anticipating a cheque by every post
instead of bills. He found no difficulty in declining the most tempting
offers. Well, work that is held thus sacred by its own creator, should
tempt people to search for all that made it seem so valuable to him.
Whistler had an intense dislike of parting with his work. When a picture
was bought from him he was like a man selling his child. Sometimes he
would see somewhere a picture he had painted, he would borrow it to add
to or improve it, but he would keep it and live with it and gradually
forget all about its possessor. Whatever qualms attacked his conscience
for this procrastination, it was no part of his genius to confess,
instead he would say "For years, this dear person has had the privilege
of living with that masterpiece--what more do they want?" At Whistler's
death, however, it was found that the circumstances under which a
picture had at any time been borrowed were methodically entered up,
with minute directions as to the return of one or two pictures, borrowed
thus, that were in his studio when he died.

In Chelsea, Rossetti and Whistler were good friends, they shared a love
of blue china, in fact inventing the modern taste for certain kinds,
especially for what they called "Long Elizas," a specimen upon which
slim figures are painted,--"_Lange leises_"--tall damsels--as they were
called by the Dutch. One supposes that it is through Rossetti that he
came into contact with Swinburne, who was inspired to write the poem
called "Before the Mirror," by Whistler's picture "The White Girl," and
of which some of the verses were printed after the title in the
catalogue of the Royal Academy Exhibition. The first verse in itself
suggests a scheme of white:--

  "White rose in red rose-garden
    Is not so white;
  Snowdrops that plead for pardon
    And pine for fright
  Because the hard East blows
  Over their maiden rows
    Grow not as this face grows from pale to bright."

The poem was printed on gilded paper on the frame; this was however
removed on the picture going to the Academy, and in the catalogue the
two following verses were printed after the title:--

  "Come snow, come wind or thunder
    High up in air,
  I watch my face, and wonder
    At my bright hair;
  Nought else exalts or grieves
  The rose at heart, that heaves
    With love of her own leaves and lips that pair.

  "I cannot tell what pleasure
    Or what pains were;
  What pale new loves and treasures
    New years will bear:
  What beam will fall, what shower,
  What grief or joy for dower;
    But one thing knows the flower; the flower is fair."

Later on, Swinburne did not allow the Ten o'clock lecture to go
unchallenged, and he subjects its glittering rhetoric to a not unkind
but cold analysis which, however, Whistler has the grace to print with
marginal reflections in "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies," the book
which contains the paradoxes which reflect so well his powers as a
thinker. It is doubtful whether Whistler in kinder circumstances would
have produced his brilliant theories. The irritation caused by
misconception, the necessity of justifying even his limitations to a
world which was apparently prepared to consider nothing else about him
at one time--these were the wine-press of his eloquence. He disliked the
role of teacher and apologised for it at the beginning of his "Ten
o'clock," and when, in later life, following the fashion, he started a
school, he relied upon the example of his own methods of setting the
palette rather than upon precept, with a little banter to keep good
humour in his class-room. A young lady protested "I am sure that I am
painting what I see." "Yes!" answered her master, "but the shock will
come when you see what you are painting." A student at the short-lived
Academie-Whistler has written that merely attempting to initiate them
into some purely technical matters of art, he succeeded--almost without
his or their volition--in transforming their ways of seeing! "Not alone
in a refining of the actual physical sight of things, not only in a
quickening of the desire for a choicer, rarer vision of the world about
them, but in opening the door to a more intimate sympathy with the
masters of the past."

[Illustration: PLATE IV.--PORTRAIT OF MY MOTHER

(In the Luxembourg Galleries, Paris)

This was first exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1872. For many years it
remained in the painter's possession. It left this country to become the
property of the French Government in the Luxembourg at the sum of L120.
In "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" Whistler writes of the picture as
an "Arrangement in Grey and Black." "To me," he adds, "it is interesting
as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care
about the identity of the portrait?"]

The thing that strikes one in reading "The Gentle Art" is how badly
those who entered into combat with its author came off in the end, some
of them in what they consider their witty replies committing suicide so
far as their reputation as authorities on art went. Notable is the case
of the critic of _The Times_, replying "I ought to remember your
penning, like your painting, belongs to the region of chaff." We have
indicated the source of Whistler's success as a wit--at that source we
find the reason why he always scored when talking about painting. He is
playing something more than a game of repartee. His best replies are
crystallised from his inner knowledge. In them we get bit by bit the
revelation which he had received as a genius in his craft.

It was the force of his personality that obtained for Whistler's evasive
art such recognition in his lifetime as in the natural course only
falls to fine painters of the obvious, whom every one delights to
honour. He had said that "art is for artists," and it is true that the
perfection of his own art is the pleasure of those who study it. It
reached heights of lyrical expression where life in completeness has not
yet been represented in painting; reached them perhaps because so
lightly freighted with elementary human feeling. His work so often
leaves us cold, and we turn seeking for art mixed further with the fire
of life and alight with everyday desire.

But nature showed many things to this her appreciator--I write, her
intimate friend. As a moth which goes out from the artificial atmosphere
of a London room into the blue night, I think of the painter of the
nocturnes--yet always as a lover of nature, never more so than when his
subject is the sea. For he has a greater consciousness of the salt wet
air than any other sea painter, of the veil behind which all ships are
sailing and through which the waves break, the atmosphere which descends
so mystically and invisibly and yet which if not accounted for in a
canvas leaves ships with their sails set in a vacuum and the waves as if
they were crested with candle-grease. Is it not absence of this
atmosphere which has tortured us on so many occasions when with
everything quite real a picture has not brought us pleasure. Pleasure
comes to us always with reality in art, and the end of art is realism.
All is real even around a mystic, though his thoughts are out of our
sight. Whistler was not a mystic but above everything he wished to
suggest the atmosphere which is invisible except for its visible effect,
and I cannot help thinking his vision essentially abstract.

He did not paint subject pictures. To make our meaning quite clear, let
us say such pictures as Frith's, or better still, as Hogarth's in which
we have the extreme. The art of Hogarth moved upon a plane lower down,
but there it had a strength unknown to Whistler, a careless and lavish
inspiration of life itself. He had to find speech for all sorts of
things in his art, beauty was but one of these, creeping in less as a
deliberate aim than as the accident of a nature artistic. Whistler in
painting desired to express nothing but his sense of beauty. For the
rest of his nature, he found expression altogether outside his art in
enthusiasm for life itself, its combats, difficulties, and its
opportunities for saying brilliant things at dinner. His dinner
conversation, I have been told, was like the abstract methods of his
etching, always cryptic, full of suggestion,--wonderful conversation,
full of short ejaculations which carried your imagination from one point
to another with hints that seemed to throw open doorways into passages
of thought leading right behind things.

[Illustration: PLATE V.--LILLIE IN OUR ALLEY

(In the possession of John J. Cowan, Esq.)

This study in brown and gold was made about the time (1865) when the
Little Rose of Lyme Regis was painted, one of the most beautiful
portraits of an English child. The latter picture unfortunately left
these shores and is now in the Boston Museum, U.S.A.]

He had a remarkable regard for purity of speech, as became the painter
of such spiritual types of womanhood. It would seem that women liked
him, and readily apprehended in his art his sensitive view of life. At
table he drank but little and was a slender eater. When alone he would
sometimes forget all about his meals, or eat scarcely anything; in later
years, feeling the necessity of taking care of himself he would guard
against his indifference by always seeking companionship when away from
his house. His nervous disposition forced him to content himself with
little sleep, his active brain keeping him awake conceiving witticisms
and planning the battle for the morrow.




IV


It would be incomplete in any memoir of Whistler to omit the most
thrilling battle of his life. To all adventurers there comes at last the
event which knocks all their venturousness out of them or is the
beginning of a triumphant way. Whistler had been before the footlights a
long time, but it was his contact with Professor Ruskin which brought
him into the full lime-light, which he was so much prepared to enjoy.
Ruskin paid him the only tribute strength can pay to strength when it is
not on the same side--with a prophetic instinct that as regards picture
exhibitions Whistler's art was the sign of a coming, and licentious,
freedom from the old rules of the game. He saw in Whistler's work the
end of old fair things, the laws of those old things all set aside. In
reading the so well-known criticism of Whistler one has a feeling that
after all Ruskin has only half expressed his feelings in it--however it
resulted in the famous libel action. Whistler received one farthing
damages, which sum he afterwards magnanimously returned to