Mr. Percy Thomas, a younger son, has told us that, as a little fellow, he often went with his father by boat to Wapping, and that his father and brother posed for two of the figures—the third is Whistler—in The Little Pool, used as an invitation card. He has also told us that much of the printing was done at 39 Old Bond Street, where the family lived in the upper part of the house. A press was in one of the small rooms, and Whistler would come in the evening, when he happened to be in town, to bite and prove his plates. Sometimes he would not get to work until half-past ten or eleven. In those days he put his plate in a deep bath of acid, keeping to the technical methods of the Coast Survey, though it is said that the Coast Survey plates were banked up with wax and the acid poured over them. This is supposed to have been the method of Rembrandt. Serjeant Thomas, in his son's words, was "great for port wine," and he would fill a glass for Whistler, and Whistler would place the glass by the bath, and then work a little on the plate and then stop to sip the port, and he would say, "Excellent! Very good indeed!" and they never knew whether he meant the wine or the work. And the charm of his manner and his courtesy made it delightful to do anything for him. Serjeant Thomas brought Delâtre from Paris, the only man, he thought, who could print Whistler's etchings as the artist would have printed them himself. "Nobody," Ralph Thomas wrote, "has ever printed Mr. Whistler's etchings with success except himself and M. Delâtre," and to-day many people are of the same opinion. Whistler's relations with the firm were pleasant while they lasted. But they did not last long. Edmund Thomas cared less for art than the law, and in the shop he would sit at his desk reading his law books, never looking up nor leaving them, unless someone asked the price of a print or drawing. A successful business is not run on those lines, and in a few years he gave up art for the law, to his great advantage.
CHAPTER IX: THE BEGINNINGS IN LONDON.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN FIFTY-NINE TO EIGHTEEN SIXTY-THREE CONTINUED.
Whistler, in 1860, devoted more time to painting on the river and less to etching, though the Rotherhithe belongs to this year. One picture he described in a letter to Fantin. "Chut! n'en parle pas à Courbet" was his warning, as if afraid to trust so good a subject to anyone. It was to be a masterpiece, he had painted it three times, and he sent a sketch which M. Duret reproduced in his Whistler. M. Duret, unable to trace the picture, thought he might never have carried it beyond the sketch. But it was finished: the Wapping shown in the Academy of 1864, a proof how long Whistler kept his pictures before exhibiting them. In 1867 he sent it to the Paris Exhibition. It was bought by Mr. Thomas Winans, taken to Baltimore, where it has remained. Whistler wanted to exhibit it at Goupil's in 1892, but could not get it. Never seen in Europe since 1867, it has been forgotten. It was painted from an inn, probably The Angel on the water-side at Cherry Gardens which exists to-day, one of a row of old houses with overhanging balconies. In the foreground, in a shadowy corner of the inn balcony, is a sailor for whom a workman from Greaves' boat-building yard, Chelsea, sat; next, M. Legros; and on the other side of M. Legros, with her back turned to the river, the girl with copper-coloured hair, Jo, the model for The White Girl and The Little White Girl. On the river are the little square-rigged ships that still anchor there; on the opposite side is the long line of Wapping warehouses, which give the name. Artists feared Jo's slightly open bodice would prevent the picture being hung in the Royal Academy. But Whistler insisted, if it was rejected on that account, he would open the bodice more and more every year until he was elected and hung it himself.
He painted The Thames in Ice this year (1860) from the same inn. It was called, when first exhibited, The Twenty-fifth of December, 1860, on the Thames. For an idle apprentice it was a strange way of spending Christmas. Whistler told us that Haden bought it for ten pounds—ample pay, Haden said: three pounds for each of the three days he spent painting it, and a pound over. To Whistler the pay seemed anything but ample. "You know, my sister was in the house, and women have their ideas about things, and I did what she wanted, to please her!"
Two other pictures of 1860 are the portrait of Mr. Luke Ionides and The Music Room. In both the influence of Courbet is evident. The portrait, painted in the Newman Street studio, has the heavy handling of The Piano, though much more brilliant. But the other picture is a tremendous advance.
Fantin could not have been more conscientious in rendering the life about him as he found it than Whistler in The Music Room; only, the room in the London house, with its gay chintz curtains, has none of the sombre simplicity of the interior where Fantin's sisters sit. Fantin's home had an austerity he made beautiful; the Haden's house had colour—Harmony in Green and Rose was Whistler's later title for the picture. He emphasised the gaiety by introducing a strong black note in the standing figure, Miss Boot, while the cool light from the window falls on "wonderful little Annie," in the same white frock she wears in The Piano Picture. Mrs. Thynne (Annie Haden) says:
"I was very young when The Music Room was painted, and beyond the fact of not minding sitting, in spite of the interminable length of time, I do not know that I can say more. It was a distinctly amusing time for me. He was always so delightful and enjoyed the 'no lessons' as much as I did. One day in The Morning Call (the first name of The Music Room) I did get tired without knowing it, and suddenly dissolved into tears, whereupon he was full of the most tender remorse, and rushed out and bought me a lovely Russia leather writing set, which I am using at this very moment! The actual music-room still exists in Sloane Street, though the present owners have enlarged it, and the date of the picture must have been '60 or '61, after his return from Paris. It was then he gave me the pencil sketches I lent to the London Memorial Exhibition. I had kept them in an album he had also brought me from Paris, with my name in gold stamped outside, of which I was very proud. We were always good friends, and I have nothing all through those early days but the most delightful remembrance of him."
This picture is described under three titles: The Morning Call, The Music Room, and Harmony in Green and Rose, The Music Room; the present confusion in Whistler's titles is usually the result of his own vagueness. It became the property of Mrs. Réveillon, George Whistler's daughter, and was carried off to St. Petersburg, never to return to London until the exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1892.
It has become the fashion to say that Whistler had not mastered his trade and could not use oil paint. These early pictures are technically as accomplished as the work of any of his contemporaries. He never was taught, few artists are, the elements of his trade, and some of his paintings have suffered. The Music Room and The Thames in Ice, so far as we can remember, are wonderfully fresh. They were painted more directly, more thinly, than the Wapping, in which the paint is thickly piled, as in the Piano Picture, which has cracked, no doubt the result of his working over it probably on a bad ground. Of two pictures painted at the same period, the Wapping is badly cracked, and the Thames in Ice is in perfect condition. But this is due to his want of knowledge of the chemical properties of paints and mediums. Later, he gave great attention to these matters. He kept the Wapping four years before he showed it. Though started down the river in 1860, it contains a portrait of Greaves' man, whom he did not see for two or three years after. Walter Greaves stated, or allowed to be stated, in a preface to the catalogue of his exhibition in May 1911, that he met Whistler in the late fifties when Whistler lived in Chelsea and made the Thames series of etchings. But the statement was proved to be inaccurate, and the preface was withdrawn. We have quoted Greaves on several occasions, but, before doing so, we have verified every statement of importance he made to us, and we first met him some few years ago when his memory was clearer and more reliable, and when he possessed letters from Whistler which we have seen.
Mr. Thynne stood in 1860 for the beautiful dry-point Annie Haden, in big crinoline and soup-plate hat, the print Whistler told Mr. E. G. Kennedy he