Chapter X: John S. Sargent 243 (4)

In 1859 he went to Newport to study painting under William M. Hunt, whose methods he did not altogether like, though he was fond of the man. Hunt was then devoted to Jean François Millet, and, through Hunt, La Farge came to know that painter’s work. He copied two or three of Millet’s pictures but could not accept him wholly any more than he could Hunt. The truth was that even then La Farge was an original and would follow no one. He could not abide recipes for doing or making things, though eventually he invented a recipe of his own and followed that.

At Newport he did some landscapes looking through a window to show the difference in light between the inside and the outside. It was for educative purposes, not for picture-making. In the same way he painted flowers in a vase at haphazard, or did the corner of a table, with no idea of composition but merely to get acquainted with all phases of light, texture, and surface. The next year he was back in New York, painting was temporarily abandoned, and presently he departed for Louisiana. He could not, however, keep away from painting wherever he went, and he soon returned to New York to start a picture of St. Paul Preaching for the Church of the Paulists. With John Bancroft he next took up the question of light and color, then being investigated by scientific men. That, he declares, had an important influence on his later work. But probably the event that definitely decided him for an art career was his marriage in 1860 to Miss Margaret Brown Perry, a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin.

I have helped myself largely to Mr. Cortissoz’s book (for which I am sure he will not quarrel with me) regarding these educational happenings of La Farge’s early days, because they point to an unusual acquaintance with philosophic, literary, and artistic traditions. La Farge was saturated with them at twenty-two. His education was extraordinary when compared with his American contemporaries--Inness, Wyant, Martin, Homer. He had found himself before he was thirty and knew what he wanted to say and do, whereas Homer at sixty was still uncertain and groping. Art had come to La Farge almost as a child learns to talk, that is, unconsciously, without great effort. The formulas had been largely thought out for him and he had merely to accept them. With Inness, Wyant, and Martin it was necessary to make their own formulas, work out their own philosophy, establish their own premises. And that, too, after they had come to man’s estate. La Farge had a great advantage over them. He was not only born to art but had it thrust upon him. With his fine natural endowments of mind and eye it is not, perhaps, remarkable that he afterward was able to achieve art in a large way and in more than one department.

But he did not rest content with his early experiences. He took up new problems and remained a student to his latest day. His mental curiosity was remarkable. He was always trying to get at the cause or sequence of things. I remember very well arguing at him one day, with undue vehemence perhaps, about some question of the hour, and hearing his quiet answer that it made no difference which of us was right, but that we should go along together and try to get at the truth. That was his Gallic cast of mind. He had no wish or care to put the other fellow in the wrong, and as for disputatious argument, it was not intellectually good form. In this respect Ruskin had amused and vexed him during his early years. The great critic was not only wrong in matter but in the method of presenting it. Fromentin, on the contrary, pleased him much. The French critic’s mind was of the same order as his own.

La Farge had evidently heard of Japanese art in Paris, for in 1863 he began collecting Japanese prints, sending directly to Japan for them. He records that he imported at that time many for himself and his friend Bancroft. He was interested not only in their linear patterns but in their color relations, particularly as shown in landscape. He was painting landscapes at this time and working out-of-doors.

“My programme was to paint from nature a portrait and yet to make distinctly a work of art which should remain as a type of the sort of subject I undertook.”

Almost the whole of his theory of art lies in that sentence. It will apply to his painting of water-lilies as well as to his figures or landscapes. He was after a type of the species--something typical and universal rather than something odd or singular. Perhaps the most notable result of his theory and practice at this time was the landscape called “Paradise Valley,” painted between 1866 and 1868.

The material for the “Paradise Valley” was found along the Rhode Island coast near Newport. It is a bare, almost treeless, scene, looking down toward the sea, and is cut up somewhat in the middle distance by the angle lines of stone fences. There is nothing about it of “the view,” nothing that a Hudson River painter would have looked at the second time; yet La Farge added beauty to its bare truth in such degree that it became a masterpiece. All of the painter’s studies in light and line were put into it and yet kept from attracting too much attention in the exposition. And all of the infinite variety of tone and color common to the Atlantic shore landscape were added and blended together as one. The type as a whole emerged--the universal came out of the commonplace. A more perfect piece of work, a more beautiful picture of landscape, had not then, and has not since, been produced in American art. Of its kind it is unequalled.

“Paradise Valley,” by John La Farge.

In the Collection of General Thornton K. Lothrop.]

The last time I saw this landscape was many years ago at an exhibition in the gallery of the Century Club. It held the place of honor on the wall, and I was looking at it, praising it unstintedly to a friend standing beside me. After I had exhausted my adjectives, I became aware of some one in the room behind me. I turned and saw La Farge standing there. Whether or not he had overheard me I did not know, but there being nothing to conceal, I told him just what I had been saying to my companion. He smiled and bowed and seemed greatly pleased. He was always too polite to question the compliments of his admirers, and much too broadminded to scoff at praise, however unintelligent he might think it. But the point of my story is further along.

After his telling me how he came to paint the landscape and what he had sought to make out of it, I asked him why he had not continued with work of that kind--why he had not painted more Paradise Valleys. His answer was that he had done a number of landscapes similar in character but that no one seemed to care for them. There was no audience, no demand for them, and, worst of all, no one would buy them. He was forced to do something that would produce a revenue. That seemed to me at the time deplorable, but perhaps it was not all sheer loss to art, for his lack of pecuniary success with easel pictures probably had much to do with his taking up mural decoration and glass-work.

With a select public, however, La Farge had already won recognition. His landscapes and flower pictures--especially the latter with their lovely color, texture, and surface, and that indefinable feeling that is La Farge--met with appreciation from artists and amateurs. The Academy of Design elected him to its membership, and, a little later, a firm of Boston publishers began publishing some of his illustrations made for Browning’s poems. He had planned some three hundred drawings for Browning, and for an edition of the Gospels many more. These were La Farge’s romantic days, and the influences of French romanticism intellectually and his Japanese prints technically were rather strong with him. In fancy he was harking back to Greek and mediæval myths, Bible legends, and Arabian Nights tales. But only a few drawings from each field finally found their way into print. They appeared in the old _Riverside Magazine_ and were accounted very effective, even after the engraver had translated them. Every one who has written about La Farge has devoted a page or so to an analysis of his “Wolf Charmer” and “Piper of Hamelin.” Criticised they were for what has been declared faulty construction and drawing but never for their lack of life. They were excellent examples of naturalistic drawing wherein accuracy is often sacrificed to vitality. But the telling quality of the illustrations was not so much their technique as their imagination. La Farge had inner as well as outer vision, and the conception of the wolf charmer, for example, as half-wolf himself, gnawing rather than playing his pipe, was perhaps the better part of its excellence.

But illustration was to engage his attention for only a short period. He was interested in things of larger decorative significance. Describing one day some work of art that I cannot now recall he used the word “decorative” and I remember his pausing and saying rather emphatically in parenthesis: “And when I say decorative, I am saying about the best thing I can about a picture.” Imagination he had in abundance, but perhaps it was manifested stronger in the light and color of his decorations than in such literary readings as the “Wolf Charmer.” His glass was the finest flight in color of modern times. It remains so to this day. The same creative sense of hue on a large scale was shown in his mural work. His panels and lunettes have their individual meaning and their imaginative presentation of the type, but these are only parts of a whole which carries again by its decorative color sweep.

His first wall decorations were those for Trinity Church, Boston, in 1876. They were done under time pressure in less than six months--done in winter with open windows and everybody clad in overcoats and gloves. Ten or a dozen painters worked under him and with him, among them Frank Millet, Francis Lothrop, and George Maynard. It was the first attempt in America to do church decoration on a large scale with a group of painters directed by one head. The unusual conditions and requirements limited its success, and yet it was quickly recognized as being an initial step of much importance and La Farge was acclaimed as the leader of the new order. Thereafter commissions for churches, public buildings, and private houses came to him and did not cease to come up to his death. He at first did panels for the Church of the Incarnation, decorations for St. Thomas’s Church, afterward destroyed by fire, and for the Reid house in New York; in his late years he painted great lunettes for the capitol at St. Paul. Perhaps the climax of these wall-paintings is the picture of the “Ascension” set up on the chancel wall of the Church of the Ascension, in New York. It is his chief work, and is picture-making, wall-painting, and church decoration all in one.

The “Ascension” had its origin in one of La Farge’s drawings for a western chapel. It was enlarged to meet the new need by putting in at the back a high and wide mountain landscape. The architectural place for it was simplified by placing on the chancel wall of the church a heavily gilded moulding, deep-niched, and with an arched top which acted at once both as a frame and a limit to the picture. The space was practically that of a huge window with a square base and a half-circle top requiring for its filling two groups of figures one above the other. La Farge placed his standing figures of the apostles and the holy women in the lower space and their perpendicular lines paralleled the uprights of the frame; at the top he placed an oval of angels hovering about the risen Christ, and, again, the rounded lines of the angel group repeated the curves of the gilded arch.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]

There was no great novelty in this arrangement. It was frankly adopted from Italian Renaissance painting and had been used for high altar-pieces by all the later painters--Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, Titian, Palma. They had worked out the best way of filling that upright-and-arched space, and La Farge followed the tradition because he recognized its sufficiency. But when all that is said it should be added that his “Ascension” is no close following of Italian example. The grouping is different and the setting is quite the opposite of the Italian. This is an open-air Ascension, not a studio-lighted gathering of academic figures posed merely to repeat each other’s linear contours. The apostles stand in a great valley plain with mountains at the sides and back. They stand _in_, not _out_, of the landscape. The angels are in a huge floating oval about the risen Christ. What beautiful moving circling figures they are! With what superb recognition of light, air, and space they are given! And how they hold their exact place in relation to the background and to the figures below them! All of La Farge’s knowledge and skill came into play in painting these two groups that contrast with and yet complete each other. They are his highest achievement in figure-painting. It may be merely provincial pride that makes one think they do not suffer by comparison with the groups of the great Italians, yet there are intelligent people who believe that.

But after one has studied and wondered over these figures, he begins to look further, and finally comes to question if the enveloping landscape is not the more beautiful part of the picture. No such landscape was ever painted by any old master, not even by Titian in his “Presentation” picture in the Venice Academy. And thereby hangs a tale. La Farge could not at first get the right landscape for it, and in the middle of the work, that is in 1886, he and his friend Henry Adams went on a long trip to Japan. It was in the mountains of Japan (or was it, perhaps, later in the South Sea islands?) that he saw and sketched the superb landscape that now does service in the background of the “Ascension.” It fitted the figures exactly and is their natural and proper environment. Figures and groups from Italy that are not Italian and landscapes from Japan that are not Japanese blend together perfectly because translated, transmuted, by the genius of La Farge into something that is peculiarly his own type of the Ascension. In such fashion, and of such materials, is great art brought into being.

La Farge’s glass-work carried over the greater part of his artistic life. Mr. Cortissoz tells us that he did several thousand windows of various patterns and designs. For many years, and up to his death, he had a shop in South Washington Square where, with assistants and workmen, the more mechanical part of window construction was carried on. But he looked after every part of it from start to finish. He never let go of his workman, never allowed himself as a designer to be eliminated by turning his design over wholly to the shop. He followed up everything and exacted results while inspiring enthusiasm and intelligence in his men. The result was that the work, in spite of the touch of others, remained peculiarly that of La Farge and bore his individual stamp.

In window-making he tried dozens of different experiments to get depth, variation, and complement of tone by repeated platings of pot-metal glass. As a result he produced brilliant jewel-like glass theretofore never dreamed of. With iridescent and opalescent sheets at hand in countless tones and shades he began the construction of his window, not in patches of color, but with a crayon cartoon, just as he had designed pictures. He made a pattern, filled the spaces rightly, and thought of the colors afterward. The lead lines helped out the design and did not break or block it by haphazard crossings at stated intervals. In other words, his radiant color schemes were every one of them based in design and had a foundation of drawing under them.

“This, then, is a study of line and is different from the notion of some intellectual friends that the line is to be put on afterward.”[9]

[9] La Farge in a letter to Mr. Cortissoz.

And yet there was no attempt to do in glass what could be better done on canvas. The brilliant transparent tones were peculiarly fitted for glass because they could not be squeezed out of a tube or laid down with a brush. I recall seeing in his shop years ago a tall narrow window, done, if I remember rightly, for the Whitney house, showing a robed female figure scattering autumn leaves upon a pool. The brilliant autumn tints, the light from the reflecting water, would have been impossible to render fully with pigments, and the blending of light and air seemed attainable only with La Farge’s delicate opaline glass. It seemed to me at the time a quite wonderful window, and yet he did many of them pitched in the same key of splendor.

In the midst of wall and window decorations La Farge found little time for easel-painting--something he regretted but could not help. Twice, however, he broke away from the shop and went upon long trips. The first was to Japan with Henry Adams in 1886. Out of that came many water-color sketches and drawings, besides a charming book, _An Artist’s Letters from Japan_. To some the book is of more interest than the drawings. The temple-doors and interiors and Buddhas of his sketches are, no doubt, truthfully illustrative, and that is perhaps their failing as pictures. The model was too apparent and the artist not so much in evidence as could be wished for. His own negative definition of art applies just here: “It is never the _mere representation_ of what we see.” Some of the mountain landscapes, however, are very fine, and his garden bits recall the early La Farge of the pond-lilies and the “Paradise Valley.”

In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.]

His second long trip was again with Henry Adams and this time to the South Seas. He was gone for a year or more, from 1890 and on, and out of this trip came another engaging book, _Reminiscences of the South Seas_, besides many water-color drawings. The water-colors were again illustrative, but perhaps they were more animated than the Japanese series, had to do more intimately with the island life, and were often strikingly picturesque in theme and movement. With them came also a number of small sea-pieces showing bays, harbors, and islands done with the greatest simplicity and yet having a satin-and-silk quality about them quite indescribable in its beauty. These silvery sea-pieces are in the same class with La Farge’s early violets and roses--things that are exquisite in their surface texture and their color beauty. His mountain landscapes of the South Seas are again superb in their greens and blues. A love and a gift for landscape always remained with him, and one often wonders, had he devoted himself to this alone, what new revelations of the world about us he might have handed down in art.

The groups of natives in dances or games or ceremonies naturally attract the most attention in the South Seas water-colors. Technically they are interesting because of their hark back to Delacroix. Not only the reds, blues, greens, and flesh notes are like Delacroix, but the drawing of the hands and feet, the movement of arms and legs are much like that master. All his life La Farge had carried that impress about with him. A few years before he died one of his pictures, at an exhibition or sale, was so like a Delacroix that at first, from across the room, I thought it by the great romanticist. Some time later in mentioning the fact to La Farge he nodded his head and said that he had been very much influenced by Delacroix and no doubt unconsciously did things in his style or manner.

To say that one prefers La Farge’s travel books to his travel sketches is not to disparage the sketches, for the books were extraordinarily good. He had a great admiration for Fromentin’s _Une Année dans le Sahel_, and perhaps that volume had not a little to do in suggesting the form of the volumes on Japan and the South Seas. They are impressionistic in that they record moods, thoughts, and talks that make up a quite perfect text for his sketches. They are both grave and gay, profound and volatile, forceful and yet charming. La Farge had the literary sense quite as much as the pictorial, and had he chosen to make a profession of letters he would perhaps have risen to as great a height as he did in painting.

While a student under Hunt at Newport he became well acquainted with Henry James, whom he later on advised to take up literature. In the light of subsequent achievement that must be regarded as good advice, and yet James had the pictorial cast of mind and might have made a fine painter. At any rate, some of his best work in writing was his criticism of painting. La Farge, too, with a mind pictorially inclined, put out some of his best thoughts in a book of art criticism entitled _Considerations on Painting_. It was delivered originally as lectures to art students, but it must have shot far over their little heads. It is too profound to be grasped at once and often requires a second reading to apprehend the meaning, but it is the best piece of art criticism put forth in America. In kind and excellence it ranks with Fromentin’s _Les Maîtres d’autrefois_--the classic of the craft.

Fromentin was about the only writer on art that La Farge cared for. He was kind enough to send me a copy of his _Considerations on Painting_ when it was published, and later, in talking over the book with him, he took occasion to remark (as afterward in print) that he had read thousands of pages of art criticism “without finding anything that a person seriously devoted to his profession of art could find of the slightest use.” At the time I ventured to suggest to him that aid to artists was not the object of art criticism, that an attempt to instruct professionals would argue greater knowledge in the critic than in the artist and be presumptuous, that the critic wrote for the public and thought to be of service by calling attention to and explaining certain things that might otherwise be overlooked or misjudged. Moreover, it was suggested that the writer, too, had his design and pattern in words which he was trying to work out artistically and decoratively, and that the subject, whether criticism, history, poetry, or fiction, was of as little importance with him as with the painter. Ruskin in art criticism, Newman in sermons and lectures, and Carlyle in history and essay were possibly greater artists than Dickens and Thackeray in fiction.

There was nothing new about that to La Farge, but he acquiesced in it by bowing and smiling a little, especially over Ruskin, for whom he came as near having contempt as for any one. Not only Ruskin’s ideas but his vehemence of style were not to La Farge’s fancy. He wrote in no such hectic vein in his _Considerations on Painting_. The whole treatise is an inquiry, not an argument, and through it all you feel the evenly poised, well-balanced mind that is weighing the question and is not to be stampeded by rhetoric or eloquence of any kind. He was too intelligent for enthusiasm or emotion. He thought out everything very calmly, and in the midst of conviction often doubted or questioned his own conclusions. It was his normal attitude of mind--a mind that indulged in subtleties, that saw as many meanings in a problem as a rug-weaver’s eye sees colors in a pattern of tapestry. It was the attempt to put these subtleties in parenthesis that sometimes makes his _Considerations on Painting_ hard reading, and yet no one would wish them deleted. They are side-lights that illumine the quest. The book is an epitome of La Farge’s method of thinking and is a type of its kind in literature as truly as his “Paradise Valley” is a type in painting.

As for the philosophic mind, he practically describes himself in one passage in an article in _Scribner’s Magazine_[10] on the “Teaching of Art.” It is worth quoting:

“The noblest of all the gifts of the great institutions of learning is a certain fostering of elevation of mind. It is not so much by what he knows that the man brought under the trainings of the great academies is marked; it is by his acquaintance with the size of knowledge; with, if I may say so, the impossibility of completing its full circle; with the acquaintance of the manners of enlarging his boundaries; with the respect of other knowledge than his own; with a certain relative humility as compared with the narrower pride of him who knows not the size of the spaces of the world of knowledge. And such an attitude of mind, such an elevation above petty prides, such a belief in something larger than one’s self, such an openness to the world, is the privilege of a full artistic development.”

[10] _Scribner’s Magazine_, vol. 64, page 181.

La Farge as a painter, as an inventor of precious glass, as an illustrator of Oriental life, as a writer of books, was a great success; as a student, a man of learning, a philosopher and a talker he was not less so. He had been born of cultivated parents and all his life had been saturated with the intellectual. He knew how to think, weigh, and judge matters, and he knew how to express himself in paint, in letters, and in words. His mental poise was remarkable for its stability, though he was not stubborn and was always open to new light. His conversation was serious, and his manner grave, courteous, calm as that of a French academician. Certain eccentricities--mental habits that indicated the questioner--were peculiar to him, and Henry Adams, his travelling companion, was led to speak of him as a wonderful mind and a wonderful contradiction. By that, perhaps he meant that La Farge always stopped short of the positive conclusion. He guarded himself with qualifying clauses, as though conscious of another side to the question.

His talk was quite as delightful as his books. He had read almost everything, knew almost every one in the modern art world, and his fund of information seemed as exhaustless as his charm of manner. And yet withal he was rather a shy man and had to be sought out. For many years he dined regularly at the Century Club, and more often alone than with company. If any one sat opposite to him at his little table, the chances were two to one that the visitor was self-invited. He held as intimates for many years Clarence King, John Hay, and Henry Adams. They must have proved a rare quartet of wits around a dinner-table, for all of them were exceptionally brilliant talkers. But I never heard of a fifth at the table.

Honors had come to La Farge from the beginning. He had received medals and prizes and degrees, he wore the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, was president of the Society of American Artists, and an initial member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He took them all very calmly. They were recognitions that he did not despise; neither did he count them as crowns of glory. His well-poised mind, with its Oriental sympathies, could rise above praise, and yet he was human enough to like it. When the gold medal of the Architectural League was presented to him he startled the honor-bearers by suggesting that it was late in coming. That was not so much egotism as the bald truth, and he could not refrain from pointing it out.

La Farge had never been physically robust, and during his latter years he had known much illness. There were periods when he was totally incapacitated and could do no more than lie still. He took that calmly, too. He was a philosopher always and made the best of things. Perhaps that is the reason why with his frail body he lived on to seventy-four, not dying until November, 1910. He lived his character to the last, and when he died the painter-world, if no other, knew that a master mind as well as a master craftsman had passed out.

In the arts he was our first great scholar and spoke as one having authority. With his learning, his imagination, and his skill he gave rank to American art more than any other of the craft. For that reason he is to-day hailed as master and written down in our annals as belonging with the Olympians. He deserves the title and the separate niche.

VII

JAMES ABBOTT McNEILL WHISTLER

After considering La Farge, it is difficult to think of Whistler other than in terms of contrast. They were of the same time, their tastes were not dissimilar, and many features of their theory and practice were in agreement; but Whistler’s impetuosity and contentiousness seem magnified when set over against the gravity and reticence of La Farge. He had not the latter’s mental poise, nor philosophy, nor tenacity, nor patience. The seriousness of his art always suffered from the acrimony of his talk or the cleverness of his writing or the flare of his conduct. He was a wit, to be sure, but not a wise one; a brilliant writer but not a profound one; an æsthetic bravo but not a discreet one. His social activities gave his art a wide notoriety, but that rather harmed than helped its permanent fame. The mob enjoyed his caustic utterances but continued to look askance at his symphonies and nocturnes. What else could have been expected? Art explains itself or it falls. Talk may make it talked about but does not establish its final worth.

And so one, at times, wishes that Whistler had said nothing, written nothing, explained nothing. His art standing alone would eventually have vindicated itself as did that of Hals and Rembrandt and Velasquez. There is not the least bit of flippancy or irritability or waspishness about it. If we knew naught of his life and had never read _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_ and the _Ten O’Clock_, we could not have derived the militant Whistler from his pictures. They are cast in a vein of decorative beauty and done not only with the greatest seriousness but with the greatest tranquillity. With their simplicity and largeness of vision, their fastidiousness of arrangement, their charm of mood and loveliness of color they would point to an Ariel-like creator who was in love with color refinements, a devotee of nature’s minor chords, her shadowy manifestations, her evanescent harmonies. And that would have been the true Whistler--the Whistler that fame will not allow to die. But his clarification is still some distance away. Appreciation is clouded by the presence of the egotist, the dandy, the bitter-tongued wit, the maker of paradoxes--passing phases of temperament quite aside from his reckoning as an artist, mental poses forced upon him by circumstances which he doubtless felt he had to meet and overcome.

That is not to say that the capacity for verbal fisticuffs was not born in him, though he did not show it in his early days, nor while a student in Paris. It was only after he took up life in London and was reviled by British criticism that he stepped outside of his art to defend himself. Perhaps he took to words as readily as Cellini to throat-cutting or Goya to bull-fighting, but it was not the less unfortunate. That Cellini was a bravo and Goya a roysterer and Whistler a maker of enemies merely suggests that artists may have dual natures like other people and not be the better for them. Their art is not improved thereby.

But it is perhaps useless to argue against the admission of the irrelevant. The world likes it and will have it. That Bacon, Titian, Goethe were mean in spirit is inconsequent backstairs gossip, but it is taken as a relish along with their vision and their wisdom. Just so with Whistler. The present generation of painters thinks his _Ten O’Clock_ the law and gospel of art, and a dozen biographies of him record his epigrams and corrosive remarks along with his epoch-making pictures. We shall have to take the chaff with the wheat.

Perhaps the chief infirmity of Whistler’s make-up was his lack of patience. Nature had endowed him with a bright, alert mind that flashed and scintillated but wavered perhaps in continuity of purpose. It was a true-enough American mind in that at first it balked at effort and sought to vault over obstacles by bursts of speed or sudden inspiration. The average American believes more in inspiration than in work, though as applied directly to Whistler we must not push that point too far. There were periods when he labored hard but there was no prolonged patience, no calm philosophy of enduring and biding his time. As a boy he would never submit entirely to education, and as a young man the rigor of studio-training fretted him. He took as much of each as pleased him and let the rest go. He resented guidance and resisted discipline as more or less of a restraint on individuality.

The story of his birth, family, and early education is told minutely in the excellent biography by the Pennells.[11] From their account it appears that Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834. He was reported to have been born in Baltimore, and he did not deny the report. “If any one likes to think I was born in Baltimore, why should I deny it? It is of no consequence to me.” His parents were refined, educated people, the best that the United States at that time was capable of producing. His father was a West Point graduate, a major in the United States army, and, at the time of Whistler’s birth, an engineer, building locks and canals at Lowell. In 1843 the whole Whistler family went to Russia, where the father had been called by the Czar to build the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. In St. Petersburg the children were carefully tutored, especially in such polite learning as the languages and the arts. Whistler was already drawing in a boyish way, and was no doubt receiving impressions of art from various sources. In 1847 he was in England for the summer with his mother, and again in 1849 he went there for the winter because his health could not stand the Russian climate. In the latter year his father died, and shortly thereafter Mrs. Whistler, with the children, returned to America. Whistler the boy was sent to school at Pomfret, and his mother records that he was still “an excitable spirit with littler perseverance,” and had “habits of indolence.”

[11] _The Life of James McNeill Whistler_, by E. R. and J. Pennell, Philadelphia, 1911.

Two years of Pomfret and he was entered as a cadet at the West Point Military Academy. He remained there three years, and was dropped in 1854 because deficient in chemistry. Besides, he could not remember dates, and at cavalry drill he had difficulty in keeping on his horse. These seem slight reasons for dropping his name from the rolls, but the West Point requirements in those days, as now, were rather rigorous. He appealed to Washington for reinstatement but was denied. In its place a job was offered him in the Coast Survey. He accepted and drew on government maps for some months, resigning in 1855. The same year he went to Paris to study art and entered the studio of Gleyre, one of the leading semiclassic painters of the time.

Whistler’s boyhood and youth suggest little out of the ordinary except that he was better born, better educated, and had better advantages than the average aspiring youth. In art he had left only the usual record of desultory drawings. Professor Weir at West Point had given him lessons, but nothing remarkable resulted therefrom. Some of the sketches of his West Point days are preserved, and while they are not astonishing, they are nevertheless moderately indicative of the coming master. Two drawings called “The Valentine” and “Sam Weller and Mary” have the same small delicate line and an attempt at tone by shadings and hatchings that characterize his etchings and lithographs of later date. But Whistler’s career does not begin for us until he reached Paris in 1855--the year before La Farge’s arrival.

There are conflicting stories about what he did or did not do under Gleyre. He must have learned something of drawing and construction besides such small studio devices as arranging colors on the palette, preparing the canvas, using ivory-black as a base of tone--a method which he retained all his life. In actual handling of the brush he seems to have gotten something from his associates, Fantin-Latour and Degas, who were then following Courbet. Evidently he did not care for the routine of the _atelier_. Drouet, the sculptor, who was one of his intimates, did not think that he worked much but was well disposed toward jokes, pranks, and a good time. By way of interlude during his two years with Gleyre he went with a companion on a trip through Alsace and did some etchings, known as the French set. In 1857 he made a trip to England and studied pictures at the Manchester Exhibition. Returned to Paris, he remained there until 1859, living in the Latin Quarter, copying pictures at the Louvre, and doing original work of his own. His first notable picture, “At the Piano,” was sent to the Salon of 1859 and rejected, though two of his etchings were accepted. Sent to the Royal Academy the same year, the picture and the etchings were well received and praised.

There were many journeyings backward and forward from London during this year. Whistler’s sister had married Seymour Haden and was living there; his student friends of Paris days--Poynter, Armstrong, Ionides, Du Maurier--were there and he had not as yet quarrelled with them; above all, the Thames was there. So finally he took up his residence in London and began work along the river. He did eleven etchings of the Thames set, and the next year painted the “Wapping,” the “Thames in Ice,” and later in the year “The Music Room,” besides a number of portraits. In 1861 he was in Brittany doing the “Coast of Brittany” in the style of Courbet, then in Paris at work on “The White Girl,” and later at Biarritz painting “The Blue Wave,” again in the style of Courbet.

Up to this time everything had gone fairly well with him. He had had an artistic success at the English exhibitions, though his “White Girl” had been rejected; many friends--Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, and others--recognized his ability; there was as yet no marked denunciation from press or public. It was not called for, even from a Philistine point of view. Nothing very ultra or bizarre showed in his painting. It was modern, but it was the modernity of Gleyre, Courbet, Fantin--the advanced painting of the times. The pattern of his pictures was perhaps something of an innovation, because already he had begun flattening it. That may have been the reason for the rejection of “At the Piano” and “The White Girl.” But there could have been nothing very forced about the flattening then, for to-day the pictures look just a little old-fashioned. For the realistic requirements of 1860 they were extremely well planned and executed, and the wonder now is that every one did not give them positive recognition at once. Perhaps the handling was a little too free and the modelling of the figures too low in relief for the man in the street, but on the whole there was small cause for complaint on the part of the young painter.

If there was little question at this time about Whistler’s pictures, there was none at all about his etchings. Every one, even the stodgiest of Britons, liked them. Perhaps that was due again to their conformity to custom. There was little about the early work very different from that of other etchers except that it was freer, surer, and better. The long swinging line, as in the dry point of “Jo,” or the sharply contrasted blacks, as in the “Drouet,” were given with emphasis. Contrast rather than uniformity was the aim and there was little attempt at pronounced tone effect, or flattening of the figure, or disturbance of perspective--the thing most dear to the viewing public. In fact, Whistler’s etchings have always been exempt from the denunciation of his paintings. People could see in them things realistic and representative; the decorative pattern did not bother them.

There was no hue and cry raised in England over Whistler’s early work because it was not vehemently radical or audaciously assertive. He had accepted and followed the classic tradition of Gleyre, had modified it by studies of Rembrandt, Courbet, Fantin, Manet, had bettered it by observations and methods entirely his own; but he was going with the tide, not against it or across it. Had he died at, say, twenty-seven, and the world had only his early etchings, “The White Girl,” “At the Piano,” and “The Music Room,” to go by, it is doubtful if his dozen biographies would have been written, or that he would have held more than a modest niche in the hall of fame. It was when he became a great innovator that he met with vituperation, and, by the same token, it was only then that he became a really great artist.

The innovation came with his modification of the realistic tradition of the Western world and his introduction of the decorative tradition of the Eastern world. The latter was a better-based, a fairer, a more alluring tradition than the one he had been reared in; but he did not, could not, go over to it in its entirety and turn himself into an Occidental painter on silk. That would have been mere forceless imitation. Instead of doing so, he strove to graft the Eastern shoot upon the Western stock, to take what was best of Japanese art and blend it with French art, thus harmonizing the two traditions. Representative figures from the Western world were put into an Eastern pattern and made to do decorative service. The Thames was turned into nocturnes, portraits were changed to arrangements in grays or browns or blacks, and London _genre_ became so many symphonies or harmonies in gold, blue, or old rose. The result was a rare bouquet of orchids which the English public, reared on primroses and daisies, did not find in its botany book and could not understand. No wonder there was confusion, misunderstanding, and denunciation. With his Oriental gospel Whistler in London was scoffed at and reviled. He had brought a new faith to English art, but no one believed in it or would receive it. There was nothing to do but stone the evangelist. The stoning roused his ire.

“though young he was a Tartar
And not at all disposed to prove a martyr.”

And so the quarrel began and ran on for forty years, until the painter died, and the British public bought his pictures and hung them in its national galleries, and the incident was declared closed. The story is old in art but this one possesses distinctly modern variations.

In the Freer Collection, Smithsonian Institution.]

Whistler had probably begun the study of Japanese art before 1860, and there is equal probability that in Paris he saw not the best examples of it, but only its latter-day manifestations in the color prints of Hokusai, Utamaro, and Hiroshige. However that may have been, he saw enough to change his ideas about pattern and to turn him half-way round, at least, from the representative to the decorative. That was the beginning of the misunderstanding. Time out of mind artist and public had been conscious that painting possessed the dimensions of height and breadth, and, by illusion, was capable of a third dimension in depth or thickness. The illusion was produced by variations of light, shade, or color which gave modelling. From long custom a preference grew up for figures modelled out--a depth by protrusion rather than by recession. When, therefore, Whistler came to the fore and insisted that the third dimension was something of a vulgarity and that figures should not be round and stand out but be flat and _stand in_, there was instant disagreement.

He went further. Linear perspective was a cheap accomplishment and the delight in it was unintelligent. There was infinitely more distinction in aerial perspective whereby recession and depth were produced by a degradation of values. Aerial perspective was, in fact, the only perspective worth while. There should not be too much depth. The pattern should be kept flat and the picture should not “break through the wall” but be a part of it. Moreover, contrast of color was less decorative, less charming, than accord. A picture should be pitched in a certain tonal key and maintain the tone throughout. The minor chords were more refined than those of higher pitch and greater resonance; a twilight or a midnight was more lovely than “a foolish sunset.” Finally the picture was finished when its decorative pattern was complete. The whole meaning of the picture was in its look. It should make no other appeal. Piety, patriotism, sentiment, emotion, story were all barred out as beside the mark--foreign to the medium.

All this Whistler said in his pictures and it irritated him that the public would not recognize his point of view, but chose instead to judge his work by the standards of a Leighton and a Millais. By way of supplement he sought to explain with tongue and pen, but he used too many metaphors, paradoxes, and sophisms, with the result that the audience was more mystified than ever. He achieved a reputation for insincerity; was derided as a coxcomb, a mountebank, an impostor, a charlatan. Finally it was discovered that some of the things he said were sharp-pointed, that he was a wit, a dandy, a gay fellow. And they laughed. They would not take either his word or his art seriously. It was admitted, with some complacency, that he was a good etcher, but as a painter he had not fulfilled expectations. The prophet had arrived ahead of his time.

The Japanese influence--the most potent of all in Whistler’s art--began to show itself gradually and did not come out entirely in the open until such pictures as the “Lange Leizen,” “The Gold Screen,” “The Balcony,” and the “Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine” appeared. With them not only the flat pattern but Tokio porcelains, fans, screens, robes were shown. There was some incongruity in the appearances, which Whistler did not seek to conceal. The figure in the “Lange Leizen” is English, sits on a chair like an English model, and is in an English interior; but Japanese costume and blue-and-white pots and jars are introduced. Whistler regarded it as a color scheme and called it “An Arrangement in Purple and Rose,” but his audience saw only the incongruity. “The Balcony” again was mystifying. There were four figures in Japanese robes on an iron-railed platform with an outlook on the Thames. There were bamboo screens and potted azaleas and blue-and-white tea things. Again there was the impossible--Japan set down in London. The subtitle, “A Harmony in Flesh Color and Green,” explained nothing. The picture was judged by its meaning, not by its appearance, and, of course, it meant nothing in an English sense.

The “Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine” was even more startling. Every one knew it was a young Greek girl who posed as the Princesse, and the masquerade of Japanese robe and rug and screen and fan was only a pretense. The subtitle of “Rose and Silver” again did not enlighten. What was wanted was the common sense of it and not the harmony or the arrangement. But it had no common sense; it was merely a fantasy in color. Persistently they looked for the wrong thing and would not see what the painter wished them to see. It was just so with “The Little White Girl”--a beautiful symphony in white showing a young girl in muslin leaning against a white mantel with her face reflected in a mirror. It was Japanese only in the fan, the flowers, and the vase, but the arrangement was too flat for public appreciation, and the girl was declared the “most bizarre of bipeds.”

In the Freer Collection, Smithsonian Institution.]

All through the sixties this misapprehension of purpose and aim persisted, and toward 1870 another riddle was presented with the appearance of the nocturnes. They were things done along the Thames at dusk and were revelations of that blue-air envelope which forms when the shadow of the world begins to creep up the Eastern sky. The idea had perhaps been suggested to Whistler in the color prints of Hiroshige and he had afterward found its reality in English twilights. Such a motive was quite the opposite of Turner’s blazing sunset upon which the generations had been reared. Everything was muffled, vague in outline, half seen as to place. Much was left to the imagination, and as for the composition, it was arranged with the greatest simplicity. Indeed, it was so simple that people thought it must be foolish and said so without hesitation.

Again the subtitles of “Blue and Gold” and “Black and Gold” carried no meaning. Even the experienced Ruskin could see nothing in the later “Falling Rocket” but “a coxcomb flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” It was “cockney impudence” and “wilful imposture.” That was more than Whistler could stand, and he began a libel suit against Ruskin in the course of which the Attorney-General of England said he “did not know when so much amusement had been afforded the British public as by Mr. Whistler’s pictures.” The trial was a farce and the laugh went against Whistler. But he laughs best who laughs last, and it has not been the British public that has done the latest laughing.

There had been merriment before that, and--incredible as it may seem--over Whistler’s now celebrated portrait of his mother. It was admitted to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1872 only after a well-known academician had threatened to resign if it were rejected. It was not wanted, but having been received, it was treated as a joke. London revised its opinion about the portrait later on. After the French Government bought it for the Luxembourg it was thought, even by the hosts of Philistia, to be Whistler’s best effort, and there was much talk of its refined motherly spirit and decent air--praises that the painter resented, telling the public that the sitter was no affair of theirs and that their only interest should be in “the arrangement in gray and black.”

The portrait of Carlyle followed, and was not unlike the mother portrait in its color scheme and pattern. Nothing was round in modelling, or projected, or stood out in the canvas. The wall, the chair, the figure, even the head, were flattened, and to that extent rendered incomprehensible to the general. The ponderous _Times_ proclaimed that “before such pictures ... critic and spectator are alike puzzled. Criticism and admiration seem alike impossible, and the mind vacillates between a feeling that the artist is playing a practical joke upon the spectator or that the painter is suffering from some peculiar optical illusion.” Eventually the Carlyle won its way, and is now one of the treasures of the Glasgow Corporation Art Gallery. But for years no one would touch it with a pair of tongs.