Into this riot of subject, to the Academy of 1860, At the Piano was sent, with five prints: Monsieur Astruc, Rédacteur du Journal 'L'Artiste,' portrait, and three of the Thames Set. Whistler had given At the Piano, the portrait of his sister and niece, to Seymour Haden, "in a way," he said:
"Well, you know, it was hanging there, but I had no particular satisfaction in that. Haden just then was playing the authority on art, and he could never look at it without pointing out its faults and telling me it never would get into the Academy—that was certain."
However, at the Academy it was accepted, Whistler's first picture in an English exhibition. The Salon was not held then every year, and he could not hope to repeat his success in Paris. But in London At the Piano was as much talked about as at Bonvin's. It was bought by John Phillip, the Academician (no relation to the family into which Whistler afterwards married). Phillip had just returned from Spain with, "well, you know, Spanish notions about things, and he asked who had painted the picture, and they told him a youth no one knew about, who had appeared from no one knew where. Phillip looked up my address in the catalogue and wrote to me at once to say he would like to buy it, and what was its price? I answered in a letter which, I am sure, must have been very beautiful. I said that, in my youth and inexperience, I did not know about these things, and I would leave to him the question of price. Phillip sent me thirty pounds; when the picture was last sold, to Edmund Davis, it brought two thousand eight hundred!"
Thackeray, Lady Ritchie tells us, "went to see the picture of Annie Haden standing by the piano, and admired it beyond words, and stood looking at it with real delight and appreciation." It was the only thing George Boughton brought vividly away in his memories of the Academy. The critics could not ignore it. "It at once made an impression," Mr. W. M. Rossetti wrote. As "an eccentric, uncouth, smudgy, phantom-like picture of a lady at a pianoforte, with a ghostly-looking child in a white frock looking on," it struck the Daily Telegraph. But the Athenæum, having discovered the "admirable etchings" in the octagon room, managed to see in the "Piano Picture, despite a recklessly bold manner and sketchiness of the wildest and roughest kind, a genuine feeling for colour and a splendid power of composition and design, which evince a just appreciation of nature very rare among artists. If the observer will look for a little while at this singular production, he will perceive that it 'opens out' just as a stereoscopic view will—an excellent quality due to the artist's feeling for atmosphere and judicious gradation of light."
We quote these criticisms because the general idea is that Whistler waited long for notice. He was always noticed, praised or blamed, never ignored, after 1859.
Whistler went back to Paris late in that year. December 1859 is the date of his Isle de la Cité, etched from the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre, with Notre Dame in the distance and the Seine and its bridges between. It was his only attempt to rival Méryon, and he succeeded badly. The fact that he gave it up when half done shows that he thought so and was too big an artist to be an imitator, especially of a "little man like Méryon." Besides, he was much less in Paris now, for, though he preferred life there, he found his subjects in London, which he soon made his home, as it continued to be, except for a few intervals, until his death. It was not the people he cared for, nor the customs. He was drawn by the beauty that no one had felt with the same intensity and understanding.
He went to work on the river. In these first years he dated his prints and pictures, as he seldom did later, and 1859 is bitten on many of the Thames plates. He saw the river as no one had seen it before, in its grime and glitter, with its forest of shipping, its endless procession of barges, its grim warehouses, its huge docks, its little water-side inns. And as he saw it so he rendered it, as no one ever had before—as it is. It was left to the American youth to do for London what Rembrandt had done for Amsterdam. There were eleven plates on the Thames during this year. To make them he wandered from Greenwich to Westminster; they included Black Lion Wharf, Tyzac, Whiteley and Co., which he never excelled at any period; and in each the warehouses or bridges, the docks or ships, are worked out with a mass and marvel of detail. The Pre-Raphaelites were not so faithful to Nature, so minute in their rendering. The series was a wonderful achievement for the young man of twenty-five never known to work by his English fellow students, a wonderful achievement for an artist of any age.
[Pg 60a]
THE THAMES IN ICE
OIL
In the Charles L. Freer Collection, National Gallery of American Art
[Pg 60b]
ROTHERHITHE
ETCHING. G. 66
Those who thought he idled in Paris were as sure of his application in London. "On the Thames he worked tremendously," Armstrong said, "not caring then to have people about or to let anyone see too much of his methods." He stayed for months at Wapping to be near his subjects, though not cutting himself off entirely from his friends. Sir Edward Poynter, Mr. Ionides, M. Legros, Du Maurier visited him. Mr. Ionides recalls long drives down by the Tower and the London Docks to get to the place, as out of the way now as then. He says Whistler lived in a little inn, rather rough, frequented by skippers and bargees, close to Wapping steamboat pier. But there is no doubt that much of his work was done from Cherry Gardens, on the other side of the river. Unfortunately it was not until after his death that we looked into this matter. At any rate, if he lived at Wapping, he worked a great deal at Cherry Gardens, also often from boats and barges, he told us, and this one can see in the prints. Sometimes he would get stranded in the mud, and at others cut off by the tide. "When his friends came," Armstrong wrote us, "they dined at an ordinary there used to be. People who had business at the wharves in the neighbourhood dined there, and Jimmie's descriptions of the company were always humorous." Mr. Ionides drove down once for a dinner-party Whistler gave at his inn:
"The landlord and several bargee guests were invited. Du Maurier was there also, and after dinner we had songs and sentiments. Jimmie proposed the landlord's health; he felt flattered, but we were in fits of laughter. The landlord was very jealous of his wife, who was rather inclined to flirt with Jimmie, and the whole speech was chaff of a soothing kind that he never suspected."
Another and more frequent visitor to Wapping was Serjeant Thomas, one of those patrons who recognise the young artist and appear when recognition is most needed. He bought drawings and prints from Holman Hunt and Legros when they were scarcely known, and he helped Millais through difficult days. Whistler had issued his French Set of etchings in London in 1859: Twelve Etchings from Nature by James Abbott Whistler, London. Published by J. A. Whistler, At No. 62 Sloane Street (Haden's house). The price, as in Paris, for Artist's Proofs on India, two guineas. Serjeant Thomas saw the prints, got to know Whistler, and