Whistler Stories written by Don C. Seitz
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Don C. Seitz >> Whistler Stories
"How unpractical they were was shown when I happened to meet the bride
the day before the marriage in the street.
"'Don't forget to-morrow,' I said.
"'No,' she replied; 'I am just going to buy my trousseau.'
"'A little late for that, is it not?' I asked.
"'No,' she answered, 'for I am only going to buy a tooth-brush and a
new sponge, as one ought to have new ones when one marries.'
"However, there never was a more successful marriage. They adored each
other, and lived most happily together, and when she died he was
broken-hearted indeed. He never recovered from the loss."
* * * * *
When Frederick Keppel, the American print expert, first called upon
the artist at the Tite Street studio, the famous portrait of Sarasate,
"black on black," stood at the end of the long corridor that he used
to form a vista for proper perspective of his work. Laying his hand on
Keppel's shoulder, he said:
"Now, isn't it beautiful?"
"It certainly is," was the reply.
"No," said he; "but isn't it _beautiful_?"
"It is indeed," said Keppel.
This was too mild a form of agreement. Whistler raised his voice to a
scream:
"D---n it, man!" he piped. "Isn't it BEAUTIFUL?"
Adopting the emphasis and the exclamation, Mr. Keppel shouted:
"D----n it, it is!"
This was satisfactory.
* * * * *
The proof-sheets of _The Gentle Art_, Whistler version, had just
arrived as Mr. Keppel called. "Read them aloud," he commanded, "so I
can hear how it sounds."
Mr. Keppel started in, but his elocution was not satisfactory.
"Stop!" Whistler cried. "You are murdering it! Let me read it to you!"
He read about two hours to his own keen delight, but was finally
interrupted by a servant announcing, "Lady ----."
"Where is she?" asked the artist.
"In her carriage at the door."
He went on reading until Mr. Keppel suggested that he had forgotten
the lady.
"Oh," he said, carelessly, "let her wait! I'm mobbed with these
people."
After another quarter-hour he condescended to go down and greet her
shivering ladyship.
* * * * *
A little later during this visit a foreign artist called and was
pleasantly received. Admiring a small painting, the visitor said:
"Now, that is one of your good ones."
"Don't look at it, dear boy," replied Whistler, airily; "it's not
finished."
"Finished!" said the visitor. "Why, it's the most carefully finished
picture of yours I've seen."
"Don't look at it," insisted Whistler. "You are doing an injustice to
yourself, you are doing an injustice to the picture, and you're doing
an injustice to me!"
Then, theatrically:
"Stop! I'll finish it now." With that he picked a very small brush,
anointed, its delicate point with paint, and touched the picture in
one spot with a speck of pigment.
"Now it's finished!" he exclaimed. "Now you may look at it."
Forgetting his umbrella, the foreign gentleman called at the studio
the next day to get it. Whistler was out, but the visitor was much
moved to find the "finishing touch" had been carefully wiped off!
* * * * *
Mr. Keppel's personal relations with Whistler ended when, by an idle
chance, he sent a copy of _The University of the State of New York
Bulletin, Bibliography, No. I, a Guide to the Study of James Abbott
McNeill Whistler_, compiled by Walter Greenwood Forsyth and Joseph Le
Roy Harrison, to Joseph Pennell, and another to Ernest Brown, in
London. Mr. Keppel, arriving in London the day of Mrs. Whistler's
funeral, sent a note of condolence, and, receiving a mourning envelope
sealed with a black butterfly, opened it expecting a grateful
acknowledgment. Instead, it was a fierce, rasping denunciation for the
distribution of the pamphlet--a mere catalogue so far as it went.
"I must not let the occasion of your being in town pass," he wrote,
"without acknowledging the gratuitous zeal with which you have done
your best to further the circulation of one of the most malignant
innuendos, in the way of scurrilous half-assertions, it has been my
fate hitherto to meet. Mr. Brown very properly sent on to me the
pamphlet you had promptly posted to him. Mr. Pennell, also, I find,
you had carefully supplied with a copy--and I have no doubt that, with
the untiring energy of the 'busy' one, you have smartly placed the
pretty work in the hands of many another before this."
* * * * *
Mr. Keppel replied in kind, but Whistler never wrote him directly
again. Some business letter of the former requiring a reply, he
summoned the house-porter, who wrote under dictation, beginning his
crude epistle thus: "Sir:--Mr. Whistler, who is present, orders me to
write as follows." Roiled by this beyond measure, Mr. Keppel resorted
to verse to relieve his feelings, after which Whistler twice sent
verbal messages through friends that if he ever saw him again he would
kill him!
* * * * *
John M. Cauldwell, the United States Commissioner for the Department
of Art at the Paris Exposition of 1900, sent a circular letter to
American artists in the city announcing his arrival and making
appointments to discuss the hanging of their work. Whistler received
one, asking him to call at "precisely four-thirty" on the afternoon of
the following Thursday.
"I congratulate you," he replied.
"Personally, I never have been able and never shall be able to be
anywhere at precisely four-thirty."
* * * * *
"_Parbleu!_ This is a nice get-up to come and see me in, to be sure!"
was his greeting to a newspaper writer who called to tap him on art,
clad in a brown jacket, blue trousers, and decked with a red necktie.
"I must request you to leave this place instantly! These scribblers,
rag-smudges, _incroyable_! Why, it is perfectly preposterous! Did you
ever hear such dissonance? His tie is in G major, and I am painting
this symphony in E minor. I will have to start it again. Take that
roaring tie of yours off, you miserable wretch! Remove it instantly!"
The visitor removed the "roar." "Thank goodness!" said Whistler. "My
sight is perfectly deaf!"
"I am so sorry, Mr. Whistler," apologized the scribe.
"Whistler, sir? Whistler? That's not my name!" he cried, in a highly
wrought voice.
"I beg your pardon?"
"That is not my name. I say, you don't seem to know your own language.
W-h is pronounced Wh-h-h--Wh-h-histler. Bah!"
* * * * *
Max Beerbohm, the caricaturist, was rather clumsy with the Gallic
tongue. Whistler used to term it "Max Beerbohm's Limburger French."
The carefully cultivated and insistently displayed white lock played a
part in many amusing incidents. Sir Coutts Lindsay's butler whispered
to him excitedly one evening: "There's a gent downstairs says he's
come to dinner, wot's forgot his necktie and stuck a feather in his
'air."
Another evening, at the theater, an usher said obligingly: "Beg
pardon, sir, but there's a white feather in your hair, just on top."
* * * * *
Raging characteristically once when in Paris, he earned this rebuke
from Degas, the matchless draughtsman: "Whistler, you talk as if you
were a man without talent."
* * * * *
Some one gave Henry Irving a Whistler etching for a Christmas gift.
"Of course I was delighted," he said, "for I was a great admirer of
the artist as well as a personal friend of the man, but when I started
to hang the etching I was puzzled. I couldn't for the life of me tell
which was the top and which the bottom. Finally, after reversing the
picture half a dozen times and finding it looked equally well either
way up, I decided to try an experiment.
"I invited Whistler to dine with me and seated him opposite his
picture. During dinner he glanced at it from time to time; between the
soup and the fish he put up his eyeglass and squinted at it; between
the roast and the dessert he got up and walked over to take a closer
view of it; finally, by the time we reached the coffee, he had
discovered what the trouble was.
"'Why, Henry,' he said, reproachfully, 'you've hung my etching upside
down.'
"'Indeed!' I said. 'Well, my friend, it's taken you an hour to
discover it!'" "The man in possession" furnishes an amusing incident
in the artist's career.
When the creditors at last landed a bailiff in the painter's Chelsea
mansion, he tried to wear his hat in the drawing-room and smoke and
spit all over the house. But Whistler, in his own airy way, soon
settled that. He went out into the hall, and, selecting a stick from
his collection of canes, he daintily knocked the man's hat off. The
bailiff was so surprised that he forgot to be angry, and in a day or
two he had been trained to wait at table. But though he was now in
possession and a favored household servant, he could not obtain his
money. So he declared that if he was not paid he would have to put
bills up outside the house announcing a sale. And sure enough, a few
days after great posters were stuck up all over the front of the house
announcing so many tables and so many chairs and so much old Nankin
China for sale on a given day. Whistler enjoyed the joke hugely, and
hastened to send out invitations to all his friends to a
luncheon-party, adding as a postscript: "You will know the house by
the bills of sale stuck up outside." And the bailiff proved an
admirable butler and the party one of the merriest ever known.
As the guests were rising from the table a lady observed to the host:
"Your servants seem to be extremely attentive, Mr. Whistler, and
anxious to please you."
"Oh, yes," replied he; "I assure you they wouldn't leave me!"
But the bailiff stayed on, and the day of sale approached; so
Whistler, having been educated at West Point, determined to practise
strategy. Some one had told him that a mixture of snuff and beer had
the property of sending people off to sleep. So he bought a big parcel
of snuff and put the greater part of it into a gigantic tankard of
beer, which he sent out to the bailiff in the garden. It was a very
hot summer afternoon, and the man eagerly welcomed his refreshment.
Whistler was in his studio painting and soon forgot all about him. In
the evening he said to his servant, "Where's the man?" The servant
replied: "I don't know, sir. I suppose he must have gone away."
The next morning Whistler got up very late and went out into the
garden, where he was astonished to see the bailiff sitting in
precisely the same position as the day before. The empty tankard was
on the table beside him and his pipe had fallen from his hand upon the
grass. "Hello, my sleeping beauty!" said Whistler. "Have you been
there all night?" But the man made no answer, and all the painter's
efforts to rouse him were unavailing. Late in the afternoon, however,
he awoke in the most natural way in the world, exclaiming that it was
dreadfully hot weather and that he must have been asleep over an hour.
Whistler's strategy had been even more successful than he anticipated;
the bailiff had slept through the entire day appointed for the sale of
the painter's household effects, and was induced to go away in a very
bewildered state of mind and with a small payment on account in his
pocket.
* * * * *
Lady de Grey went once to the Tite Street studio for luncheon and
chided Whistler for his extravagance in having two man servants to
wait on the table, when he was always complaining of being hard up.
"Hush!" whispered Whistler. "One of them is the man in possession, and
he has consented to act as footman for the day; but he asks me to
please settle up as soon as possible, because he too has a man in
possession at his own place and wants to get clear of him."
* * * * *
Once at a garden party the rapt hostess rushed up to the artist and
exclaimed:
"Oh, Mr. Whistler! Do help me out! I have just bought a magnificent
Turner, but Lord----says it isn't genuine, merely a clever imitation.
Now I want you to look at it, and if you say it is genuine, as I know
you will, I shall be perfectly satisfied."
"My dear lady," replied Whistler, "you expect a good deal of me. The
distinction between a real Turner and an imitation Turner is so
extremely subtle."
* * * * *
A flippant reply to the secretary of a London club where Whistler's
account was past due produced this retort--and the money was paid:
"DEAR MR. WHISTLER:--It is not a Nocturne in Purple or a Symphony in
Blue and Gray we are after, but an Arrangement in Gold and Silver."
* * * * *
At an exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts there was a portrait in
subdued colors by Whistler, "The Little Lady of Soho." Before this
picture Secretary Harrison S. Morris stood one day. "It is beautiful,"
he observed, "and it reminds me of a story about Whistler--not a very
appropriate or poetical one, perhaps. But here it is, anyhow. Whistler
one summer day took a walk through the Downs with three or four young
men. They stopped at an ale-house and called for beer. Tankards were
set before them and they drank. Then Whistler said to the host:
"'My man, would you like to sell a great deal more beer than you do?'
"'Aye, sir, I would that!'
"'Then don't sell so much froth!'"
* * * * *
When a French magazine located his birthplace in Baltimore, and the
error traveled far, Whistler took no pains to correct it. "My dear
cousin Kate," he said to Mrs. Livermore, "if any one likes to think I
was born in Baltimore, why should I deny it? It is of no consequence
to me."
* * * * *
A chance American introduced himself by saying: "You know, Mr.
Whistler, we were born at Lowell, and at very much the same time. You
are sixty-seven and I am sixty-eight."
"Very charming," he replied. "And so you are sixty-eight and were born
at Lowell. Most interesting, no doubt, and as you please! But I shall
be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in
Lowell and I refuse to be sixty-seven!"
* * * * *
"Don't be afraid," said Whistler to Howard Paul, who recoiled from the
presence of a huge dog because he did not like the look in the
animal's eyes. "Look at his tail--how it wags. When a dog wags his
tail he's in good humor."
"That may be," replied Paul, "but observe the wild glitter in his eye!
I don't know which end to believe."
* * * * *
Comyns Carr met a foreign painter who had been known to breakfast with
Whistler at Chelsea and asked him if he had seen him lately.
"Ah no, not now so much," was the reply. "He ask me a little while ago
to breakfast, and I go. My cab-fare two shilling, 'arf crown. I
arrive. Very nice. Goldfish in bowl. Very pretty. But breakfast! One
egg, one toast, no more! Ah, no! My cab-fare back, two shilling, 'arf
crown. For me no more!"
* * * * *
A.G. Plowden, the London police magistrate, attended a private view at
Grosvenor Gallery. The first person he met was Whistler. He took
Plowden, very amiably, to his full-length portrait of Lady Archibald
Campbell, where, after sufficiently expressing his admiration, Plowden
asked if there were any other pictures he ought to see.
"Other pictures!" cried Whistler, in a tone of horror. "Other
pictures! There are no other pictures! You are through!"
* * * * *
Dining at a Paris restaurant in his early days, Mr. Whistler noted the
struggle an elderly Englishman was having to make himself understood.
He politely volunteered to interpret.
"Sir," said the person addressed, "I assure you, sir, I can give my
order without assistance!"
"Can you indeed?" quoth Whistler, airily. "I fancied the contrary just
now, when I heard you desire the waiter to bring you a pair of
stairs."
* * * * *
Dining, and dining well, at George H. Boughton's house in London,
Whistler was obliged to leave the table and go up-stairs to indite a
note. In a few moments a great noise revealed the fact that he had
fallen down the flight.
"Who is your architect?" he asked, when picked up.
The host told him Norman Shaw.
"I might have known it," said Whistler. "The d----d teetotaler!"
* * * * *
A young artist had brought Whistler to view his maiden effort. The two
stood before the canvas for some moments in silence. Finally the
junior asked, timidly:
"Don't you think this painting of mine is a--er--a tolerable picture,
sir?"
Whistler's eyes twinkled.
"What is your opinion of a tolerable egg?" he asked.
* * * * *
"Irish girls have the most beautiful hands," he once wrote, "with
long, slender fingers and delightful articulations. American girls'
hands come next; they are a little narrow and thin. The hands of the
English girls are red and coarse. The German hand is broad and flat;
the Spanish hand is full of big veins. I always use Irish models for
the hands, and I think Irish eyes are also the most beautiful."
An American artist studying in Paris, like many others, was too poor
to have a perfect wardrobe. Strolling on the Boulevard, he heard a
call and, turning, saw Whistler hastening toward him, waving his long
black cane.
Rather flattered, he said, "So you recognized me from behind, did you,
master?"
"Yes," said Whistler, with a wicked laugh; "I spied you through a hole
in your coat."
* * * * *
"Do you think genius is hereditary?" asked an admiring lady one day.
"I can't tell you, madam," Whistler replied. "Heaven has granted me no
offspring."
* * * * *
Whistler once took Horne, his framer, to look at one of his paintings
at the exhibition.
"Well, Horne," he asked, "what do you think of it?"
"Think of it?" he cried, enthusiastically. "Why, sir, it's
perfect--perfect. Mr. ---- has got one just like it."
"What!" said the puzzled Whistler. "A picture like this?"
"Oh," said Horne, "I wasn't talking about the picture; I was talking
about the frame."
* * * * *
"Well, Mr. Whistler, how are you getting on?" said an undesirable
acquaintance in a Paris restaurant.
"I'm not," said Whistler, emptying his glass. "I'm getting off."
* * * * *
Miss Pamela Smith, a designer in black and white, while a crude
draughtsman, had a fine imagination. Whistler was asked to look over
some of her work. After careful examination he said:
"She can't draw."
Another look and a gruff "She can't paint" followed.
A third look and a long thought wound up with, "But she doesn't need
to."
* * * * *
A lady who rejoiced in "temperament" once said gushingly to Whistler:
"It is wonderful what a difference there is between people."
"Yes," he replied. "There is a great deal of difference between
matches, too, if you will only look closely enough, but they all make
about the same blaze."
* * * * *
A certain gentleman whose portrait Whistler had painted failed to
appreciate the work, and finally remarked, "After all, Mr. Whistler,
you can't call that a great work of art."
"Perhaps not," replied the painter, "but then you can't call yourself
a great work of nature!"
* * * * *
The artist and a friend strolled along the Thames Embankment one
wonderfully starry night. Whistler was in a discontented mood and
found fault with everything. The houses were ugly, the river not what
it might have been, the lights hard and glaring. The friend pointed
out several things that appealed to him as beautiful, but the master
would not give in.
"No," he said, "nature is only sometimes beautiful--only
sometimes--very, very seldom indeed; and to-night she is, as so often,
positively ugly."
"But the stars! Surely they are fine to-night," urged the other.
Whistler looked up at the sky.
"Yes," he drawled, "they're not bad, perhaps, but, my dear fellow,
there's too many of them."
A sitter asked him how it was possible to paint in the growing dusk,
as he often did. The reply was:
"As the light fades and the shadows deepen, all the petty and exacting
details vanish; everything trivial disappears, and I see things as
they are, in great, strong masses; the buttons are lost, but the
garment remains; the garment is lost, but the sitter remains; the
sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the
picture remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter's
imagination."
* * * * *
Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema, of the classic brush, loved yellow, a color
which Whistler had annexed unto himself. Sir Laurence in employing the
color in his decorations did not consider himself a plagiarist. He had
not seen Whistler's. This defense led to a war of words. Whistler
broke out:
"Sly Alma! His Romano-Dutch St. John's wooden eye has never looked
upon them, and the fine jaundice of his flesh is none of the jaundice
of my yellows. To-de-ma-boom-de-ay!"
* * * * *
Seated in a stall at the West End Theater one evening, he was
constantly irritated by his next neighbor--a lady--who not only went
out between the acts, but several times while the curtain was up. The
space between the run of seats was narrow, and the annoyance as she
squeezed past was considerable.
"Madam," he said at last, "I trust I do not incommode you by keeping
my seat!"
* * * * *
He regarded the United States tariff on art as barbarous.
"When are you coming to America?"
he was asked.
"When the tariff on art is removed."
The Copley Society asked his aid in making up their exhibition in
Boston. He refused, saying:
"God bless me! Why should you hold an exhibition of pictures in
America? The people do not care for art!"
"How do you know? You have not been there for many years."
"How do I know? Why, haven't you a law to keep out pictures and
statues? Is it not in black and white that the works of the great
masters must not enter America, that they are not wanted? A people
that tolerate such a law have no love for art; their protestation is
mere pretense."
* * * * *
Asked by a lady if a certain picture in a gallery was not indecent, he
replied:
"No, madam. But your question is!"
Mark Twain visited the studio and, assuming an air of hopeless
stupidity, approached a nearly completed painting and said:
"Not at all bad, Mr. Whistler; not at all bad. Only here in this
corner," he added, reflectively, with a motion as if to rub out a
cloud effect, "if I were you I'd do away with that cloud!"
"Gad, sir!" cried the painter. "Do be careful there! Don't you see the
paint is not yet dry?"
"Oh, don't mind that," said Mark, sweetly. "I am wearing gloves, you
see!"
They got on after that.
* * * * *
In Paris, Whistler and an English painter got into a turbulent talk
over Velasquez at a studio tea. In the course of the argument Whistler
praised himself extravagantly.
"It's a good thing we can't see ourselves as others see us," sneered
the Briton.
"Isn't it, though?" rejoined Whistler, gently. "I know in my case I
should grow intolerably conceited."
* * * * *
Financial necessities once caused the sale of Whistler's choice
furnishings. Some of the family, returning to the house during his
absence, found the floor covered with chalk diagrams, the largest of
which was labeled: "This is the dining-table."
Surrounding it were a number of small squares, each marked: "This is a
chair."
Another square: "This is the sideboard."
* * * * *
Cope Whitehouse once described a boat-load of Egyptians "floating down
the Nile with the thermometer one hundred and twenty degrees in the
shade, and no shade."
"And no thermometer," interjected Whistler.
* * * * *
A lady sitter brought a cat with her and placed it on her knee. The
cat was nervous and yowled continuously.
"Madam," said the vexed artist, "will you have the cat in the
foreground or in the back yard?"
* * * * *
While painting one of his famous nocturnes a critic of considerable
pretensions called. "Good heavens, Whistler!" he cried, "what in the
world are you splashing at?"
"I am teaching art to posterity," Whistler replied, quietly.
"Oh!" said the critic, visibly relieved. "I was afraid you were
painting for the Royal Academy."
"Oh, no," answered Whistler; "they do not want masterpieces there, but
some of their picture-frames are exquisite and really worth bus-fare
to look at."
* * * * *
Walking in the Champs-Elysées in Paris one morning, Whistler heard one
Englishman say to another: