a > Z5 = YN 1) = < a ts LW ae as «i a ra be DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN ARTISTS JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER Pennell Collection, Library of Congress, Washington DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN ARTISTS JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER Compiled by INCL ELA NIEL eves Pl B-DART With an introduction by Joseph & Elizabeth Robbins Pennell NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPA All rights reserved Printed in the United st : JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER AMES McNEILL WHISTLER is the greatest of all American artists, the greatest of all artists of his time. His greatness is not to be accounted for by environment or inheritance. He was born in America at a period when art was an alien in the country; he came of a family of soldiers; he was educated in the Military Academy at West Point; he began his career in a Govern- ment office at Washington ;—far from those influences known to have made some men artists in spite of them- selves. He is, therefore, the most splendid proof of his true belief that “art happens.” He had at least the advantage of a training in Paris, though it was begun at an age when the average student leaves the schools, and, according to his critics, he profited little by it. Poynter, the industrious Briton, called him the Idle Yankee Apprentice, and this still lingers, though Poynter is near forgotten. But more came of his idleness than of most men’s industry, and his early paintings and etchings were the heralds of his greatness—his genius—for from the beginning he was absorbed in the pursuit of beauty. He was an artist born and noc a ready-made painter. In the prevailing idea of him today he was not only the Idle Apprentice but the rebel, posing in his work as the leader of revolt and the enemy of tradition, doing strange things to call attention to himself, as he later did, knowing if he did not he would be ignored or reviled— then none too mean not to revile him, now none to Vv grand not to toady to him. But there never was an artist whose belief in tradition was so unwavering, whose re- spect for the art of the past was so strong, whose love for the beautiful was so deep. He would have had no use for the so-called Modernists who are concerned not with art but their escape from it, because otherwise they are failures. He would have had no sympathy with men who, disdaining the beauty created by artists through the ages, attempt self-consciously to return to the gropings of the savage seeking to express what he sees with neither knowl- edge nor tools—only these latter-day prophets are not savages but incompetents. Whistler’s ambition was “to carry on,” and if he was not understood by the people in whose midst he lived, the fault was theirs, and theirs the loss. It was a grief to him that he felt bitterly. That was why he laughed, and then they understood him less than ever. It was not to escape from his responsibility as an artist, not notoriety, not eccentricity he strove for, but beauty always—beauty of design, beauty of line, beauty of colour, beauty of handling, beauty of surface—‘the one skin all over it” that delighted him. Not even when he wrote his joyous, cruel letters to the press, or his Art and Art Critics, and The Ten o’Clock, was he for a moment forgetful of the beauty which he gave to everything he touched, and his Gentle Art is not only one of the few great books on art, but a masterpiece of the art of writing. The artists, whether of Paris or Tokio, of Spain or Hol- land, or even England, who could teach him anything of the beauty he sought were his masters. It is easy to point to this inspiration and that in his prints and paintings, to the debt he owed at the start to Courbet and Fantin, then to Hiroshige and Hokusai at the foot of Fusiyama, vel easy to trace the influence of the greatest of all, the Master at Madrid, the first in his portraits to make men stand upon their feet and to fill his canvasses with atmosphere and light, or his interest in “subject pictures” when painted by Terborch or ‘Titian. Nobody was readier than Whistler to accept the truths these men had taught him and the technical methods they had solved long before. ‘There is the story of him at the very end, old, recovering from a serious illness, standing on a chair in the gallery at Haarlem that he might see and feel the wonderful brushwork of Franz Hals and try to find out how it was done. But always, whatever debt can be dis- covered, whatever influence traced to the past, he was himself, unmistakable, untiring in his pursuit of beauty, constant in his belief that beauty is the end of art, not “emotions entirely foreign to it’—the faith for which he was ridiculed by the popular Victorian painters of anec- dotes, classical, scriptural and domestic, by the up-to-date Americans of today, Victorians too in the valour of their ignorance. He was a realist in his reliance upon Nature; but from Nature it was his right as artist to pick and choose and, spurning the ugly and the vulgar, he chose the beautiful, the exquisite, translating all into “the painter’s poetry.” Here is the reason of his greatness. And if we say he was the greatest artist of his time, it is because he succeeded absolutely in his lifelong search, not only in one, but in many mediums. Paint alone could not satisfy him. There were things he could say better in other ways and he was not content until he had tried and mastered them all. He was not a lop-sided painter but a many-sided artist. In the technique of etching he had been trained in the vil Coast Survey office. No sooner was he in Paris than he used this training to begin that long series of etchings which place him above Rembrandt—yes, above Rem- brandt, as we know, and the world has begun to know. Never has the etched line expressed form with such mastery. The line is vital, direct, the effect obtained with the utmost rightness. But if Whistler was ever the same in his concern with beauty, he was never man- nered. He might say that there was no change in his work, that the last did not differ from the first. But there was growth—the elaboration of the French Set through the Thames Set, developing into the Venice Set, and then the austere simplicity of the latest again in France. Always, however, in them all was the same vital, expressive line. He would admit of no change in his painting either, no difference from first to last, but again growth—growth through the period when Courbet fired his enthusiasm and he painted Alone with the Tide, At the Piano, and The Music Room, and showed them, and at once they made for him the reputation which has been rapidly increasing ever since; growth through the period when Japan held him under its spell, and no loveliness was to him as the loveliness of night, the Japanese Pictures, with their wealth of beautiful detail, leading to the Nocturnes, more eloquent in their simplicity, and to the Six Projects, never carried out in the large deco- rative scheme for which they were the motives; growth through the period when Velasquez claimed his allegiance and he, too, made his men and women stand upon their feet, in air and light. But always and in every period, Whistler is Whistler himself and no one else, always concerned with beauty, always adapting his technique Vill to express it in its full perfection, his mark set upon the Mother, and Carlyle, the Miss Alexander, and Rosa Corder of his young Chelsea days, no less than upon the Lady Meux, Sarasate, and Yellow Buskin of his joyous return from Venice, or the Little Rose, and Master Smith of Lyme Regis, painted in the sad twilight of his later years. And so with every other medium. He experimented in lithography and with his first experiments mastered the medium as triumphantly as in the last, beauty ever the aim and the fulfillment of his many portraits as of his impressions of architecture and the ‘Thames he loved. He turned to water-colour and the simplest washes again yielded beauty, whether of the little sun-drenched room, or the rain-washed English skies, or the red roofs nestling in the sand dunes of Holland. He took up pastel at the darkest moment of his life and, once at work, drawing on sheets of tinted paper with a few colours, his own most sad misfortunes could not dull his eyes to the vision of beauty in Venice, nor stay his hand in the rendering of the life around him. In his study of Beauty throught every period and in every medium, Whistler gained power with the passing of the years. Ihe Ists of our degenerate days would appropriate “expressionism’’ as their monopoly, certain that no artists every sought to express themselves before. But Whistler was the true expressionist—even the un- impressed and the expressionless have to accept him— unceasing in his endeavour to express himself in terms of beauty, for to him art and beauty were inseparable. And he knew there could be no beauty, no art, without refine- ment, without delicacy, without perfection. In his words, art is a dainty goddess; also a jealous mistress, demanding ix the artist’s unswerving devotion, and all the labour of his days, her servant and her master. He gave her both without reserve. And yet, it was only at the end of his life that he felt he was at the beginning of his knowledge and his accomplishment. He, who was looked upon by his contemporaries as irresponsible and a charlatan in his art, was the most thorough, the most hard-working, the most persevering of all artists, understanding the truth ‘ that genius without industry is of no avail. “To the revelation of beauty in his art his time and his energies were consecrated, and the reward of this consecration was the success that endures. Only in his own country has the generous recognition, the worthy tribute been slow in coming. He is not yet in the Hall of Fame among the great American artists, of some of whom few ever heard. But the great art and the great literature he created honour him more than any bust. And today he, like Lincoln, has his monument in Washington—in the Library of Congress and the Freer Gallery—but few know and fewer care. How- ever, as we wrote in our Life of Whistler, ““His name and his fame will live forever.” J. and EK. Ro Pexwere Authors of the “Authorized Life of Whistler” and the “Whistler Journal.” The sixty-four paintings herein reproduced illustrate the varied characteristics of this artist's work. LA MERE GERARD Owned by A. Edward Newton, Esq. PorTRAIT oF LUKE A. IoNIDES Owned by the Estate of Luke A. Ionides THE Music Room Owned by Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. SadayIvy Jap avvysnviy “yYeo‘d ayn fo Ksazsnog7 ANVILIYG JO ISVOD AH], LA PRINCESSE DU PAYS DE LA PORCELAINE Owned by Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. ‘bsg ‘sung punwpq 4q pauago ONVId AHL LV THE WHire Giri (Symphony in White, No. I) Owned by Harris Whittemore, Esq. THe LITTLE WHITE GIRL (Symphony in White, No. II) THE THAMES IN ICE Owned by Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. W APPING Owned by Mrs. Hutton "09 yorulddiy -g ‘f fo Ksazsnoy ‘bsq ‘9d0d ‘PF ‘Pp «