Modern Painting | Page 3

the author of the "Butterfly
Letters", the defender of his little jokes against the plagiarising tongue,
should stimulate rather than interrupt our prostrations. I said that
Nature had dowered Mr. Whistler with every gift except that of
physical strength. If Mr. Whistler had the bull-like health of Michael
Angelo, Rubens, and Hals, the Letters would never have been written.
They were the safety-valve by which his strained nerves found relief
from the intolerable tension of the masterpiece. He has not the bodily
strength to pass from masterpiece to masterpiece, as did the great ones
of old time. In the completed picture slight traces of his agony remain.
But painting is the most indiscreet of all the arts, and here and there an
omission or a feeble indication reveal the painter to us in moments of
exasperated impotence. To understand Mr. Whistler's art you must
understand his body. I do not mean that Mr. Whistler has suffered from
bad health--his health has always been excellent; all great artists have
excellent health, but his constitution is more nervous than robust. He is
even a strong man, but he is lacking in weight. Were he six inches taller,
and his bulk proportionately increased, his art would be different.
Instead of having painted a dozen portraits, every one--even the mother
and Miss Alexander, which I personally take to be the two best--a little
febrile in its extreme beauty, whilst some, masterpieces though they be,
are clearly touched with weakness, and marked with hysteria--Mr.
Whistler would have painted a hundred portraits, as strong, as vigorous,
as decisive, and as easily accomplished as any by Velasquez or Hals.
But if Nature had willed him so, I do not think we should have had the
Nocturnes, which are clearly the outcome of a highly-strung, bloodless
nature whetted on the whetstone of its own weakness to an exasperated
sense of volatile colour and evanescent light. It is hardly possible to
doubt that this is so when we look on these canvases, where, in all the
stages of her repose, the night dozes and dreams upon our river--a
creole in Nocturne 34, upon whose trembling eyelids the lustral moon
is shining; a quadroon in Nocturne 17, who turns herself out of the light
anhungered and set upon some feast of dark slumber. And for the sake
of these gem-like pictures, whose blue serenities are comparable to the
white perfections of Athenian marbles, we should have done well to
yield a littlestrength in portraiture, if the distribution of Mr. Whistler's
genius had been left in our hands. So Nature has done her work well,

and we have no cause to regret the few pounds of flesh that she
withheld. A few pounds more of flesh and muscle, and we should have
had another Velasquez; but Nature shrinks from repetition, and at the
last moment she said, "The world has had Velasquez, another would be
superfluous: let there be Jimmy Whistler."
In the Nocturnes Mr. Whistler stands alone, withouta rival. In portraits
he is at his best when they are near to his Nocturnes in intention, when
the theme lends itself to an imaginative and decorative treatment; for
instance, as in the mother or Miss Alexander. Mr. Whistler is at his
worst when he is frankly realistic. I have seen pictures by Mr. Henry
Moore that I like better than "The Blue Wave". Nor does Mr. Whistler
seem to me to reach his highest level in any one of the three
portraits--Lady Archibald Campbell, Miss Rose Corder, and "the lady
in the fur jacket". I know that Mr. Walter Sickert considers the portrait
of Lady Archibald Campbell to be Mr. Whistler's finest portrait. I
submit, however, that the attitude is theatrical and not very explicit. It
is a movement that has not been frankly observed, nor is it a movement
that has been frankly imagined. It has none of the artless elegance of
Nature; it is full of studio combinations; and yet it is not a frankly
decorative arrangement, as the portrait of the mother or Miss Alexander.
When Hals painted his Burgomasters, he was careful to place them in
definite and comprehensible surroundings. He never left us in doubt
either as to the time or the place; and the same obligations of time and
place, which Hals never shirked, seem to me to rest on the painter, if he
elects to paint his sitter in any attitude except one of conventional
repose.
Lady Archibald Campbell is represented in violent movement, looking
backwards over her shoulder as she walks up the picture; yet there is
nothing to show that she is not standing on the low table on which the
model poses, and the few necessary indications are left out because
they would interfere with the general harmony of his picture; because,