The Piano Picture was painted toward the end of his student years in Paris, the Mère Gérard a little earlier, so that this agrees with Fantin's notes. In 1858, Fantin says, "I was copying the Marriage Feast at Cana in the Louvre when I saw passing one day a strange creature—personnage étrange, le Whistler en chapeau bizarre, who, amiable and charming, stopped to talk, and the talk was the beginning of our friendship, strengthened that evening at the Café Molière."
Carolus Duran writes us, from the Académie de France in Rome, that he and Whistler met as students in Paris; after that he lost sight of Whistler until the days of the new Salon, but, though there were a few meetings then, his memories are altogether of the student years. Bracquemond has recalled for us that he was making the preliminary drawing for his etching after Holbein's Erasmus in the Louvre when he first saw Whistler. Their meetings were cordial, but never led to intimacy. With Legros Whistler's friendship did become intimate, and the two, with Fantin, formed at that date what Whistler called their "Society of Three."
Fantin was somewhat older, and had been studying much longer, and had, among students, a reputation for wide and sound knowledge: "a learned painter," Armstrong says. M. Bénédite thinks that the friendship was useful to Fantin, but of the greatest importance to Whistler, on whose art in its development it had a marked influence. Mr. Luke Ionides, on the other hand, insists that "even in those early days, Whistler's influence was very much felt. He had decided views, which were always listened to with respect and regard by many older artists, who seemed to recognise his genius." The truth probably is that Whistler and Fantin influenced each other. They worked in sympathy, and the understanding between them was complete. They not only studied in the Louvre, but joined the group at Bonvin's studio to work from the model under Courbet.
With Courbet, we come to an influence which cannot be doubted, much as Whistler regretted it as time went on. Oulevey remembers Whistler calling on Courbet once, and saying enthusiastically as he left the house, "C'est un grand homme!" and for several years his pictures showed how strong this influence was. M. Duret even sees in Courbet's "Manifestoes" forerunners of Whistler's letters at a later date to the papers. Courbet, whatever mad pranks he might play with the bourgeois, was seriousness itself in his art, and the men who studied under him learned to be serious, Whistler most of all.
The proof of Whistler's industry is in his work—in his pictures and prints, which are amazing in quality and quantity for the student who, Sir Edward Poynter believes, worked in two or three years only as many weeks. It would be nearer the truth to say that he never stopped working. Everything that interested him he made use of. The women he danced with at night were his models by day: Fumette, who, as she crouches, her hair loose on her shoulders, in that early etching, looks the Tigresse who tore up his drawings in a passion; and Finette, the dancer in a famous quadrille, who, when she came to London, was announced as "Madame Finette in the cancan, the national dance of France." His friends had to pose for him: Drouet, in the plate, done, he told us, in two sittings, one of two and a half hours, the other of an hour and a half; Axenfeld, the brother of a famous physician; Becquet, the sculptor-musician, "the greatest man who ever lived" to his friends, to the world unknown; Astruc, painter, sculptor, poet, editor of L'Artiste, of whom his wife said that he was the first man since the Renaissance who combined all the arts, but who is only remembered in Whistler's print; Delâtre, the printer; Riault, the engraver. Bibi Valentin was the son of another engraver. And there is the amusing pencil sketch of Fantin in bed on a winter day, working away in his overcoat, muffler, and top hat, trying to keep warm: one kept among a hundred lost. The streets where Whistler wandered, the restaurants where he dined, became his studios. At the house near the Rue Dauphine he etched Bibi Lalouette. His Soupe à Trois Sous was done in a cabaret kept by Martin, whose portrait is in the print at the extreme left, and who was famous in the Quarter for having won the Cross of the Legion of Honour at an earlier age than any man ever decorated, and then promptly losing it. Mr. Ralph Thomas says: "While Whistler was etching this, at twelve o'clock at night, a gendarme came up to him and wanted to know what he was doing. Whistler gave him the plate upside down, but officialism could make nothing of it."
There is hardly one of these etchings that is not a record of his daily life and of the people among whom he lived, though to make it such a record was the last thing he was thinking of.
Whistler's first set of etchings was published in November 1858. The prints were not the first he made after leaving Washington. On the rare Au Sixième, supposed to be unique, Haden, to whom it had belonged, wrote, "Probably the first of Whistler's etchings," but then Haden wrote these things on others, and knew little about them. A portrait of himself, another of his niece Annie Haden, the Dutchman holding the Glass, are as early, if not earlier. There were twelve plates, some done in Paris, some during the journey to the Rhine, some in London. There was also an etched title with his portrait, for which Ernest, putting on the big hat, sat. Etched above is "Douze Eaux Fortes d'après Nature par James Whistler," and to one side, "Imp. Delâtre, Rue St. Jacques, 171, Paris, Nov. 1858." Whistler dedicated the set to mon vieil ami Seymour Haden, and issued and sold it himself for two guineas. Delâtre printed the plates, and, standing at his side, Drouet said, Whistler learned the art. Delâtre's shop was the room described by the De Goncourts, with the two windows looking on a bare garden, the star wheel, the man in grey blouse pulling it, the old noisy clock in the corner, the sleeping dog, the children peeping in at the door; the room where they waited for their first proof with the emotion they thought nothing else could give. Drouet said that Whistler never printed at this time. But Oulevey remembers a little press in the Rue Campagne-Première, and Whistler pulling the proofs for those who came to buy them. He was already hunting for old paper, loitering at the boxes along the quais, tearing out fly-leaves from old books. Passages in many plates of the series, especially in La Mère Gérard and La Marchande de Moutarde, are, as we have said, like his work in The Coast Survey, No. 1. For the only time, and as a result of his training at Washington, his handling threatened to become mannered. But in the Street at Saverne he overcame his mannerism, while in others, not in the series but done during these years, the Drouet, Soupe à Trois Sous, Bibi Lalouette, he had perfected his early style of drawing, biting, and dry-point. We never asked him how the French plates were bitten, but, no doubt, it was in the traditional way by biting all over and stopping out. They were drawn directly from Nature, as can be seen in his portraits of places which are reversed in the prints. So far as we know, he scarcely ever made a preliminary sketch. We can recall none of his etchings at any period that might have been done from memory or sketches, except the Street at Saverne, the Venetian Nocturnes, the Nocturne, Dance House, Amsterdam, Weary, and Fanny Leyland portraits.
His first commissions in Paris were, he told us, copies made in the Louvre. They were for Captain Williams, a Stonington man, familiarly known as "Stonington Bill," whose portrait he had painted before leaving home. "Stonington Bill" must have liked it, for when he came to Paris shortly afterwards he gave Whistler a commission to paint as many copies at the Louvre as he chose for twenty-five dollars apiece. Whistler said he copied a snow scene with a horse and soldier standing by and another at its feet, and never afterwards could remember who was the painter; the busy picture detective may run it to ground for the edification of posterity. There was a St. Luke with a halo and draperies; a woman holding up a child towards a barred window beyond which, seen dimly, was the face of a man; and an inundation, no doubt The Deluge or The Wreck. He was sure he must have made something interesting out of them, he knew there were wonderful things even then—the beginnings of harmonies and of purple schemes—he supposed it must have been intuitive. Another Stonington man commissioned him to paint Ingres' Andromeda chained to the rock—probably the Angelina of Ingres which he and Tissot are said to have copied side by side, though a copy of an Andromeda by him has been shown in New York, and other alleged copies are now turning up. All, he said, might be still at Stonington,