Whistler told us that he worked about three weeks on each of the Thames plates. He therefore must have spent on dated plates alone thirty-six weeks in 1861, leaving but fourteen weeks for other work and for play. Some of them are much less elaborate than the Drouet, which, Drouet said, was done in five hours, so that it seems difficult to reconcile the two statements. But it was about the Black Lion Wharf, one of the fullest of detail, that we asked Whistler. We had many discussions with him about them. Whistler maintained that they were youthful performances, and J. as strongly maintained that that had nothing to do with the matter; that he never surpassed the wonderful drawing and composition and biting. He insisted that his later work in Venice and in Holland was a great development, a great advance, and his final answer was: "Well, you like them more than I do!" But there is no doubt that the Thames plates, notably the Black Lion Wharf, have, for artistic rendering of inartistic subjects and for perfect biting, never been approached. Another thing that astonished J. was that he could see such detail and put it on a copper-plate. "H'm," was Whistler's comment, "that's what they all say."
Whistler got to know the Upper Thames when he stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Edwards at Sunbury. Edwards figures in his dry-point Encamping with M. W. Ridley, who was Whistler's first pupil, and Traer, Haden's assistant, not "Freer," as he has long masqueraded in Mr. Wedmore's catalogue. Ridley also is in The Storm and The Guitar-Player. To these visits we owe an etching of Whistler at Moulsey, by Edwards. Whistler introduced Fantin, who, in a note for 1861, refers to the "jolies journées chez Edwards à Sunbury." Mrs. Edwards wrote us shortly before her death:
"Whistler often came to see me, turning up always when least expected, perhaps driving down in a hansom cab from London. At that time there was no railway at Sunbury; Hampton Court three miles distant. He might send a line to be met by boat at Hampton Court. He was always very eccentric."
Doubtless the driving down was an eccentricity. But Whistler knew he might see some "foolish sunset," or a Nocturne, on the way. "We had a large boat with waterproof cover," Mrs. Edwards added; "my husband and friends several times went up the river and slept in the boat. Whistler went once," when he did the plate Encamping and possibly Sketching and The Punt, and in Mrs. Edwards' words, "got rheumatism." It had been his trouble since St. Petersburg. He could not risk exposure.
Whistler, though not settled in London, sent work regularly to the Academy, where it was an unfailing shock to the critics. He showed his Mère Gérard in 1861. The Athenæum described the picture as "a fine, powerful-toned, and eminently characteristic study." The Daily Telegraph thought it "far fitter hung over the stove in the studio than exhibited at the Royal Academy, though it is replete with evidence of genius and study. If Mr. Whistler would leave off using mud and clay on his palette and paint cleanly, like a gentleman, we should be happy to bestow any amount of praise on him, for he has all the elements of a great artist in his composition. But we must protest against his soiled and miry ways." It seemed a good, serious study of an old woman and nothing more, when we saw it in the London Memorial Exhibition, and the appallingly low level of the Academy alone can explain the attention it attracted.
Whistler was in France in the summer of 1861, painting The Coast of Brittany, or Alone with the Tide, which might have been signed by Courbet—an arrangement in brown under a cloudy sky, a stretch of sand at low tide in the foreground, water-washed rocks against which a peasant girl sleeps, a deep blue sea beyond. It was "a beautiful thing," Whistler said years afterwards. At Perros Guirec he made his splendid dry-point The Forge. Another print of this year is the rare dry-point of Jo, who, for awhile, appeared in Whistler's work as often as Saskia in Rembrandt's. She was Irish. Her father has been described to us as a sort of Captain Costigan, and Jo—Joanna Heffernan, Mrs. Abbott—as a woman of next to no education, but of keen intelligence, who, before she had ceased to sit to Whistler, knew more about painting than many painters, had become well read, and had great charm. Her value to Whistler as a model was enormous, and she was an important element in his life during the first London years. She was with him in France in 1861–2, going to Paris in the winter to give him sittings for the big White Girl, which he painted in a studio in the Boulevard des Batignolles hung all in white. There Courbet met her, and, looking at the copper-coloured hair, saw beauty in the beautiful. He painted her, though perhaps not that winter, as La Belle Irlandaise, and as Jo, femme d'Irlande. Whistler's study of Jo, Note Blanche, lent by Mrs. Sickert to the Paris Memorial Exhibition, was doubtless done in 1861, for the technique is like Courbet's. Drouet remembered breakfasts in the studio which Whistler cooked.
He fell ill before the end of the winter. Miss Chapman says he was poisoned by the white lead used in the picture. Her brother, a doctor, recommended a journey to the Pyrenees. At Guéthary Whistler was nearly drowned when bathing. He wrote to Fantin:
"It was sunset, the sea was very rough, I was caught in the huge waves, swallowing gallons of salt water. I swam and I swam, and the more I swam the less near I came to the shore. Ah! my dear Fantin, to feel my efforts useless and to know people were looking on saying, 'But the Monsieur amuses himself, he must be strong!' I cry, I scream in despair—I disappear three, four times. At last they understand. A brave railroad man rushes to me, and is rolled over twice on the sands. My model hears the call, arrives at a gallop, jumps in the sea like a Newfoundland, manages to catch me by the foot, and the two pull me out."[2]
At Biarritz he painted The Blue Wave, a great sea rolling in and breaking on the shore under a fine sky, but quite unlike the Coast of Brittany. Whistler painted few pictures in which the composition, the arrangement, is more obvious. It is an extraordinary piece of work. It has lately been said that he painted this picture after he had seen Courbet's Vague, now in the Louvre. But the Vague was not shown until 1870. If there was any influence, it was all the other way. At Fuenterrabia Whistler was in Spain, for the only time; "Spaniards from the Opéra-Comique in the street, men in bérets and red blouses, children like little Turks." He wanted to go farther, to Madrid, and he urged Fantin to join him. Together they would look at The Lances and The Spinners as together they had studied at the Louvre. In another letter he promised to describe Velasquez to Fantin, to bring back photographs. Such "glorious painting" should be copied. "Ah! mon cher, comme il a du travailler," he winds up in his enthusiasm. But the journey ended at Fuenterrabia. Fantin could not join him. Madrid was put off for another spring, for ever, though the journey was for ever being planned anew.
[Pg 68a]
THE MUSIC ROOM
HARMONY IN GREEN AND ROSE
OIL
In the possession of Colonel F. Hecker
[Pg 68b]
ANNIE HADEN
DRY-POINT.