No
Day Without A Line:
Whistler in the Archives
of American Art
Archives of American Art New York Regional Gallery
October 16, 2003 – January 9, 2004
Checklist of the Exhibition
Works of Art in the Exhibition
Items in the Cases
Introduction
In 1854 James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) inscribed on one of his sketches Nulla dies sine linea—“No day without a line”—an artist’s motto that first appeared in the pages of Pliny. For the next half century there was scarcely a day that the artist was without a line, either in drawings, paintings, watercolors, or prints, or through a stream of letters, pamphlets, and catalogs. Although he left the United States in 1855, he remained an influential presence in the American art world until his death in 1903.
Whistler was associated with the original generation of Impressionists, and he revolutionized the practice of etching. In his insistence on articulating meaning through formal structure, he helped lay the groundwork for a number of beliefs that were central to 20th-century painting.
Whistler was known for his feuds as much as his friendships. His stinging remarks made him the scourge of the British art establishment, but he was on excellent terms with Edgar Degas, Henri Fantin-Latour, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin. He encouraged other American artists abroad, most notably John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt.
Whistler is well-represented in the collections of the Archives of American Art. In 2003, the centennial of his death, a celebration of the artist seemed especially fitting. Also shaping the exhibition’s theme was the happy decision to honor three of the institution’s long-time friends and trustees, Rita Fraad and Margaret and Raymond Horowitz. Rita Fraad and her late husband, Daniel Fraad, as well as the Horowitzes, were discerning collectors of the work of Whistler, his contemporaries, and their artistic descendants. In exploring Whistler’s life and career and the general subject of American expatriation, we are pleased to pay tribute to their taste, astuteness, and generosity.
Avis Berman
Exhibition Curator
Works of Art in the Exhibition
Robert Frederick Blum (1857-1903). Geisha at Her Toilet. 1891-92.
Pastel on paper. 13 3/4 in. x 11 1/4 in.
Collection of Max and Heidi Berry
Whistler’s chief interests in Venice were pastels and etchings, and Robert Blum, one of Duveneck’s students, followed his example. After Blum returned to the United States, he and Chase emerged as prominent pastellists. In 1890 Blum became one of the earliest American artists to visit Japan. The subject and pose of this work are indebted to the Ukiyo-e prints of Kitagawa Utamaro.
Victor D. Brenner (1871-1924). Pair of James McNeill Whistler Plaques. 1905. Bronze bas-relief mounted on wood backing.
Portrait:
Bronze: 8 3/4 in. x 12 1/8 in. Frame: 10 x 13 1/2 inches.
Private collection, courtesy of Conner-Rosenkranz, New YorkPeacock and Butterfly:
Bronze 8 3/4 in. x 12 in.. Frame: 10 x 13 1/2 inches.
Private collection, courtesy of Conner-Rosenkranz, New York
Brenner created these bas-reliefs as a part of the widespread impulse to commemorate Whistler.
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). Mrs. Cassatt Reading to Her Grandchildren (No.1). Undated (ca. 1880). Soft-ground etching, with drypoint and aquatint.
Plate: 6 1/4 in. x 11 7.8 in. Sheet: 10 3/4 in. x 17 5/8 in.
Courtesy Adelson Galleries, Inc.
Whistler and Mary Cassatt were innovative American artists on parallel tracks. Both realized that to achieve their professional ambitions and enjoy personal freedom they needed to settle in Europe. Though they categorized themselves as independents, both were in the circle of the Impressionists. Cassatt and Whistler were prolific printmakers who enjoyed documenting the domestic activities of their families—they were intimistes for whom small incidents were subtle transmitters of deeper emotions. Cassatt visited Whistler’s studio in London in 1883, when he was working on a portrait of her sister-in-law. At that time, she may have met Maud Franklin, who modeled for Cassatt after Whistler left her for Beatrice Godwin.
In the late 1870s, Cassatt began experimenting with etching and drypoint.
In 1880, when this etching was made, she had just begun to investigate the subject
of mothers and children, a theme that would engage her for the rest of her career.
William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). A Lady in Black. 1883.
Pen and ink on paper. 9 1/2 in. x 7 3/4 in.
Courtesy of The Heckscher Museum of Art, Baker/Pisano Collection
The model for Chase’s drawing is Virginia Gerson, a writer and costume designer who became the artist’s sister-in-law when he married her younger sister, Alice, in 1886. Virginia Gerson was also the recipient of the illustrated letter from Robert Blum in the case below. All three Gerson sisters—Virginia, Minnie, and Alice—frequently posed for Chase, Blum, and their friends.
Frank Duveneck (1848-1919). The Stairway, Venice. Undated (ca. 1880).
Pencil on paper. 12 in. x 5 in.
Courtesy of The Heckscher Museum of Art, Baker/Pisano Collection
William Merritt Chase and the genre painter and portraitist Frank Duveneck were students together at the Royal Academy at Munich. In 1878 Duveneck opened his own school in Munich and in the Upper Bavarian village of Polling. Two years later, he took his pupils to Venice, where the group made Whistler’s acquaintance and Duveneck was introduced to etching. Indeed, when three of Duveneck’s etchings were exhibited in London in 1881, several critics mistook them for Whistler’s.
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). A Spanish Barracks. 1903.
Watercolor on paper. 11 7/8 in. x 17 7/8 in.
Collection of Rita and Daniel Fraad
Like Whistler and many other 19th-century artists, John Singer Sargent was captivated by the 17th-century Spanish master Diego Velázquez. Unlike Whistler, Sargent was also captivated by Spain itself and traveled there extensively. As the 1884 letter in this exhibition written by his father states, the country was a source of vibrant subject matter for him.
During the 1890s Sargent began to complain of the relentless demands that portrait painting made on him. By 1901 he was concentrating more on landscapes and scenes of local color, working his way through Spain, Italy, and the Middle East. He spent June and July 1903 in Spain. One of his destinations was Santiago de Compostella, where he painted groups of convalescent soldiers. A Spanish Barracks may have been painted there.
Sir Leslie Ward (“Spy”) (1851-1922). A Symphony. 1878.
Lithograph printed in color, 15 5/16 in. x 7 5/16 in.
Private collection, New York.
In the 1870s Whistler’s artistic achievements were overshadowed by his public quarrels. He broke with the industrialist Frederick Leyland, an important patron, over the size of the payment for the Peacock Room, the decorative environment he created for Leyland’s house in Kensington. Whistler made his predicament even worse by deciding to sue the art critic John Ruskin for libel in 1877. Ruskin had condemned Whistler’s paintings in the inaugural exhibition of London’s fashionable Grosvenor Gallery. Ruskin singled out Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (ca. 1875; Detroit Institute of Arts) for his scorn. “I have seen, and heard,” Ruskin thundered, “much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” The case of Whistler v. Ruskin was tried in November 1878. The uproar over the lawsuit and the Peacock Room contretemps made Whistler well-known outside artistic circles.
Vanity Fair included a portrait caricature in each weekly issue, and Whistler’s action against Ruskin attracted the magazine’s attention. This image appeared in the issue of January 12, 1878. Ward distills the best-known aspects of Whistler’s appearance and costume—the monocle, the white lock, the maulstick, the patent-leather shoes, and the long coat. He presents Whistler as defiant but amusing.
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). The Forge. 1861 . Etching and drypoint. Image: 7 3/8 in. x 12 1/4 in. Sheet: 9 1/2 in. x 14 in.
Courtesy Sylvan Cole Gallery, New York
Unsentimental portrayals of workers were at the heart of the Realist doctrine of Gustave Courbet, whom Whistler admired and emulated in the 1850s and early 1860s. Yet, in the words of Katharine A. Lochnan in The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), he treated the subject “in a new way. Gone were the straining, Vulcan-like muscles found in the work of his predecessors; Whistler’s smith stands like an alchemist before the forge, observing the glowing metal, while apprentices stand by watching the transformation take place. Whistler was not concerned with a social message; he was interested in the dramatic and shifting illumination inside the dusky room, and the way in which forms were rendered ambiguous and insubstantial by the blaze.” Indeed, this etching presages Whistler’s break from Realism.
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). The Toilet. 1878.
Lithotint with scraping and incising, on a prepared half-tint ground.
Image: 10.4 in. x 6.6 in.
The Margaret and Raymond Horowitz Collection
Whistler turned to lithography in 1878, at a critical moment in his career. He was in desperate financial straits: the expense of building his house in Chelsea was mounting; Frederick Leyland refused to honor his invoices for decorating the Peacock Room in 1877; and after he initiated his libel action against Ruskin, the market for his paintings plummeted. On the brink of bankruptcy, he hoped to earn money by producing lithographs, which could be printed in large editions.
But Whistler was also attracted to lithography for esthetic motivations. He enjoyed the freedom of execution that was similar to the spontaneity of drawing and exploited the wide range of tones and chiaroscuro effects that the lithographic crayon offered. The pearly tonality of The Toilet suited the subject, Maud Franklin—Whistler’s mistress and favorite model at the time. Forced to declare bankruptcy in 1879, Whistler went to Venice later that year, which ended his lithographic activity for nearly a decade.
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). Maunder’s Fish Shop, Chelsea. 1890. Lithograph. 11 in. x 8 3/4 in.
Courtesy Sylvan Cole Gallery, New York
For most of his life in London, Whistler lived in Chelsea, close by the Thames. He was devoted to the quaint shopfronts of family businesses, and he depicted this fish shop at least three other times in a painting and two etchings.
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). La Belle Dame Endormie. 1894.
Transfer lithograph, drawn on thin, transparent transfer paper.
Image: 8.08 in. x 6.24 in.
The Margaret and Raymond Horowitz Collection
Whistler returned to lithography in the late 1880s at the encouragement of his wife, Beatrice Philip Godwin Whistler. Beatrice was also a collaborator and a model, and this image, created in September 1894, records the sorrow to come. Beatrice appears tired and thin as she sleeps in an armchair in the Whistlers’ drawing room in their house in Paris. The Whistlers had only lived there for two years when she was diagnosed with cancer. At this moment, Whistler had not yet faced the fact that his wife—only 37 years old—was dying. Her illness and death, said the artist Walter Sickert, would be the ordeal that “robbed him in turn of his spirit, his strength, and his life.”
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). Steps in Algiers. 1900.
Pencil on crème wove paper. 5 1/8 in. x 3 5/8 in.
Courtesy of The Heckscher Museum of Art, Baker/Pisano Collection
In the autumn of 1900 Whistler was suffering from respiratory problems, and he was advised to spend the winter in a milder climate. Beatrice Whistler’s brother, Ronald Philip, accompanied him to Algiers, Marseilles, and Corsica in the winter of 1900-1901. The two men spent Christmas and New Year’s in Algiers and Tangiers, which Whistler found very cold and “entirely too Eastern.”
Palette and brushes, ca. 1888-1890. Leon Dabo papers. Archives of American Art.
Leon Dabo (1865-1960) was one of many painters whose style was shaped by Whistler’s ideas and methods. From about 1888 to 1890, he lived in London and met his hero. Dabo spent time in Whistler’s studio, where he probably acquired the brushes and palette on display here. Dabo’s widow identified the palette as being by Whistler; it strongly resembles one owned by the University of Glasgow, the repository of the artist’s papers. The 30-inch brushes, made specially for Whistler, were used to paint full-length portraits.
Postcard of Whistler’s painting equipment in the collection of the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow. Private collection, New York.
Whistler was one of the first Western artists to be transfixed by the art of Japan, and Hokusai was a printmaker whom he studied. By 1858 Whistler’s French printer, Jacques Delâtre, shared manga (Japanese picture books) such as these with his artist-friends. The illustrations show peacock and leaf-and-plant motifs, which were essential to Whistler’s own oeuvre. In such etchings as Swan and Iris, Whistler employed Japanese-inspired slanting lines as shorthand for suggesting water, light reflection, and weather conditions. It is no surprise that the American critic, painter, etcher, and dealer Walter Pach (1883-1958) owned manga. Treasured by Whistler and his French peers, the books were like bibles to two generations of American artists.
| Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Hokusai manga, undated (begun 1814). Walter Pach papers. Archives of American Art. | |
Photograph of Swan and Iris, 1883, an etching by Whistler, second state. Copy print. Private collection, New York.
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Hokusai manga, undated (begun 1814). Walter Pach papers. Archives of American Art.
Born in Lowell, Mass. on July 11, 1834, James Whistler was the son of a civil engineer. His father, a leading builder of this country’s railroads, was engaged by Czar Nicholas I to build the Moscow-St. Petersburg railroad in 1842. The Whistler family moved to St. Petersburg, where Whistler first studied art. When the elder Whistler died in 1849, the family returned to the United States. His father had been educated at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and James followed him there. He entered the Academy in 1851, but was dismissed in 1854 because of demerits for misconduct and poor grades.
James Whistler is on the left side. The double portrait was made in Russia.
Whistler standing next to the etching press in his Paris studio, 1899. Photograph by the Dornac Studio. Copy print. Private collection, New York.
U.S. Coast Survey. Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast Survey for 1854. Washington, D.C.: A.O.P. Nicholson, 1855. Irving F. Burton papers. Archives of American Art.
After Whistler was dismissed from West Point, he moved to Washington, D.C., and got a job in the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, a government bureau responsible for producing maps of the coastline. He was put in the engraving division, and as part of his training, he received technical instruction in etching. Against the wishes of his superiors, who instructed him to stick to topographical delineation, Whistler added a V-shaped flock of birds above the cliffs in this engraving.
| James McNeill Whistler, draft letter to George Washington Lee, undated (ca. 1879). James McNeill Whistler correspondence. Archives of American Art. |  |
After Robert E. Lee died in 1870, his eldest son, General George Washington Custis Lee, headed an effort to memorialize the Confederate military leader with an equestrian statue. Whistler drafted a letter to G.W. Lee recommending the sculptor Joseph Boehm for the commission. Whistler and G.W. Lee had been cadets at West Point when Robert E. Lee had been the Academy’s superintendent. In closing, Whistler wrote, “Let me recall myself to your recollection as an old West Point comrade who has never forgotten the high opinion all held of yourself and the veneration we had of your Father.”
In September 1855, within two months of turning 21, Whistler sailed for Europe to study in Paris and never returned to the United States. Through the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour, whom he met in 1857, Whistler joined the contingent of insurgent painters led by Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet. Although Whistler established a permanent residence in England in 1859, he stayed abreast of artistic developments in France.
James McNeill Whistler, letter to George Lucas, March 16 (1863). James McNeill Whistler correspondence. Archives of American Art.
Whistler writes to George Lucas, an American art dealer in Paris, that he plans to send Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) to the Paris Salon of 1863 because the Royal Academy of Arts in London had rejected the picture in 1862. Asking Lucas to deliver the painting for him, Whistler gleefully speculates that an acceptance by the Salon will be “a crusher for the Royal Academy.” Fortunately for Whistler, the Salon also turned down the painting. He showed it instead in the Salon de Refusés, an exhibition that became a landmark in the history of art.
Homage to Eugéne Delacroix (1864; Musée d’Orsay, Paris) by Henri Fantin-Latour. Copy print. Private collection, New York.
After the Salon de Refusés, Whistler’s status among the leading French artists and writers was unquestioned. He occupies a central place in Fantin-Latour’s painting, which consecrated the recently deceased Eugéne Delacroix as an icon of romantic individualism. Also pictured are Fantin (seated to Whistler’s left, in shirtsleeves), Manet (standing, near right of the image of Delacroix), and poet and critic Charles Baudelaire (seated, far right).
After successfully establishing himself in London in the 1870s, Whistler sued the critic John Ruskin for libel when Ruskin accused him “of flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” In 1878 Whistler won the case, but was awarded only a farthing in costs and damages and went bankrupt. When he was offered a commission to make etchings of Venice, he accepted and went to Italy in September 1879 with his mistress, Maud Franklin. They remained there for 14 months, during which time Whistler created about 50 etchings, 100 pastels, and seven or eight paintings.
James McNeill Whistler, letter to Katherine de Kay Bronson, undated (1880). James McNeill Whistler correspondence. Archives of American Art.
Katherine de Kay Bronson presided over the American expatriate community in Venice. The book of poems she gave Whistler may well have been by Robert Browning, another friend and frequent guest. In socializing with the Bronsons, Whistler would have understood that Maud could not be included among the party.
Typescript of interview with Elizabeth Alexander by DeWitt M. Lockman, January 24, 1928. John White Alexander papers. Archives of American Art.
In the spring of 1880 the American painter Frank Duveneck and his pupils arrived in Venice. They were a godsend to Whistler, who saw them as a willing audience and as soft touches for money. Among the students, were Otto Bacher, Robert Frederick Blum, and John White Alexander (1856–1915), painter, muralist, and future president of the National Academy of Design. In this interview, Alexander’s widow recalls how Whistler befriended her husband in Venice.
Robert Blum, letter to Virginia Gerson, September 22 (1885). Robert Blum illustrated letters. Archives of American Art.
Encouraged by Whistler while he was in Venice, Robert Blum (1857-1903) pursued etching and pastels. On his return to New York, he became close to William Merritt Chase, who married Alice Gerson in 1886. In this illustrated note, Blum teases Virginia Gerson, one of Alice’s sisters, about her future brother-in-law, who was subjecting himself to an intense period of intimacy with Whistler. Each artist had agreed to paint the other, and Blum joked that Chase “must be quite unbearable since Whistler painted his portrait.” But any preening was short-lived. Chase’s portrait of Whistler (1885) is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but because Chase dared to show Whistler as a self-advertising dandy, Whistler destroyed his likeness of Chase.
By the mid-1880s, Whistler felt that his ideas on esthetics were being appropriated and promoted more successfully by his former disciple Oscar Wilde. Partly in response, Whistler wrote the most sustained exposition of his theories on art in the “Ten O’Clock,” a lecture he first delivered to the public on February 20, 1885, at 10 P.M. Alluded to as an “amateur” and a “dilettante,” Wilde returned Whistler’s fire with his own graceful yet deadly retort.
Invitation to the “Ten O’Cock” lecture, February 20, 1885. Katherine Prince papers. Archives of American Art.
Caricatures of Oscar Wilde as a pig by Beatrice Whistler, undated. Copy print. Frederick A. Sweet papers. Archives of American Art.
For many years, these and other caricatures of Wilde were attributed to Whistler, but recent scholarship has assigned them to Beatrice Philip Godwin Whistler (1857-1896), an artist and designer whom Whistler married in August 1888.
Whereas most of the American artists Whistler knew in the early 1880s returned home after their studies, Whistler maintained significant relationships with two distinguished American artists who elected to remain abroad. Impressionist Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) first chose to live in France in 1866. Like Whistler, she had studied Spanish art and Japanese prints, and he respected her paintings and graphic work. In between 1883 and 1885, he painted a portrait of her sister-in-law, Lois Cassatt. Mary Cassatt wrote to her brother about the portrait, “I don’t think you could have done better, it is a work of art and as young Sargent said to Mother … it is a good thing to have a portrait by Whistler in the family.” “Young Sargent” was John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), who met Whistler in Venice. Whistler could not take issue with Sargent’s character, but he resented the latter’s ascent as a portraitist in the 1890s. However, Sargent never failed to treat the older man with kindness and deference.
Fitzwilliam Sargent, letter to Thomas Sargent, June 17, 1884. F.W. Sargent papers. Archives of American Art.
Dr. Fitzwilliam Sargent (1820-1889), the painter’s father, retired from his practice as a surgeon in Philadelphia to travel with his family throughout Europe. He steadily wrote to his brother, Thomas Sargent, and seldom failed to include reports about his son’s career. Here he writes that John “talks of going to Spain later on in the season, where he hopes to find some subjects for pictures. Spain affords more such suggestions than any other European country … and it is less visited than most countries and offers more that is novel and picturesque at the same time, baronial-looking beggars, weird-looking gipseys [sic] and smugglers and dancers and peasants, all in their quaint and old-time costumes, together with bull-fights and brigands.”
Fitzwilliam Sargent, letter to Thomas Sargent, May 13, 1886. F.W. Sargent papers. Archives of American Art.
Dr. Sargent explains that his son is moving from Paris to London.
John Singer Sargent, ca. 1884. Photographer unknown. Copy print. R.L. Ormond papers. Archives of American Art.
Sargent’s studio at 31 Tite Street, ca. 1920. Photographer unknown. Copy print. R.L. Ormond papers. Archives of American Art.
After Sargent relocated to England in 1886, he took this Tite Street studio recently vacated by Whistler.
Whistler in his studio in Paris, 110 rue du Bac, 1899. Photograph by the Dornac Studio. Copy print. Private collection, New York.
In 1892 the Whistlers moved to Paris, where Whistler was reunited with artists he had known since the 1860s and hobnobbed with important American collectors.
In 1889 American journalist Sheridan Ford approached Whistler about assembling his best letters and witticisms into a book. Whistler thought it was a capital idea, but shortly into the project, he dismissed Ford. Taking the compilation entirely into his own hands, he lavished as much care upon its production as he would have given to an exhibition. The result—The Gentle Art of Making Enemies—was a literary event. As the inaugural effort of the young firm of William Heinemann, the book launched the house as a publisher of the first rank. Ford naturally felt shortchanged, and put out a contraband edition of the anthology. Whistler successfully moved to have the pirated volume suppressed, pursuing Ford through the courts. Whistler may have been unduly harsh in his revenge, but Ford’s edition lacked the elegant layout and typography of the authorized version, so fastidiously designed by the artist.
Sheridan Ford, editor. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. New York: Frederick Stokes & Brother, 1890. Private collection, New York.
James McNeill Whistler. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. London: William Heinemann, 1890. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Libraries.
James McNeill Whistler, letter to C.B. Bigelow, October 5, 1891. James McNeill Whistler correspondence. Archives of American Art.
Whistler reports that Ford never returned the money he had been advanced for the book, and that on October 26, 1891, Ford will be prosecuted in Antwerp. Ford was tried in Belgium because he had the manuscript typeset there. He thought that he would be out of Whistler’s reach. Whistler’s lawyer was Albert Maeterlinck, brother of the playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck.
James McNeill Whistler, letter to Frederick H. Allen, June 6 (1892-1893). James McNeill Whistler correspondence. Archives of American Art.
Whistler reports that Ford left Paris for New York under an assumed name, and reviles him as “a shocking scoundrel.” He worries that Ford will “slip through the very clever fingers of the New York Police,” and hopes that Ford is sent to “Sing-Sing” or “The Tombs.”
After Whistler’s death in 1903, memorial exhibitions were held in Boston, London, and Paris. In conjunction with these tributes, Whistler’s acquaintances, both those in his favor and those he had excommunicated, rushed to publish reminiscences about him. A self-proclaimed “follower” of Whistler, the Australian-born painter Mortimer Menpes, to whom Whistler had not spoken since 1889, was the first to break into print with a significant memoir. His Whistler As I Knew Him appeared in 1904. Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell, American expatriates who moved to London in the 1880s, attached themselves to Whistler during his life and became his biographers after his death. Their controversial Life of James McNeill Whistler, initially published in 1908, went through six editions. Most of the books published immediately after Whistler’s death emulated the artist’s favored typography and color combinations and displayed the butterfly signature.
| St. Botolph Club. Etchings by James McNeill Whistler. Boston: St. Botolph Club, undated. Miscellaneous art exhibition catalog collection. Archives of American Art. |  |
| Wunderlich Gallery. Catalogue of a Collection of Etchings and Dry Points by Whistler. New York: H. Wunderlich & Co., 1905. Miscellaneous art exhibition catalog collection. Archives of American Art. |  |
E.R. and J. Pennell. The Life of James McNeill Whistler. Sixth edition. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1919. Private collection, New York.
E.R. and J. Pennell. The Whistler Journal. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1921. Private collection, New York.
Mortimer Menpes. Whistler As I Knew Him. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1904. Private collection, New York.
Otto H. Bacher. With Whistler In Venice. New York: The Century Co., 1908. Private collection, New York.
Sadakichi Hartmann. The Whistler Book. Boston: L.C. Page & Company, 1910. Private collection, New York.
Theodore Duret. Whistler. Translated by Frank Rutter. London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1917. Private collection, New York.
In 1891 the city of Glasgow acquired Whistler’s portrait of Thomas Carlyle and the French government bought the portrait of his mother. Seeing that the artist’s stock was rising, the Goupil Gallery in London offered him a retrospective exhibition. Nocturnes, Marines, & Chevalet Pieces opened in March 1892. Reprising the format of The Gentle Art, Whistler assembled a catalog of inane remarks that the critics had made about his work and subtitled it, “The Voice of a People.”
James McNeill Whistler. Nocturnes, Marines, & Chevalet Pieces. London: Goupil Gallery, 1892. Katherine Prince papers. Archives of American Art. James McNeill Whistler. Nocturnes, Marines, & Chevalet Pieces. London: Goupil Gallery, 1892.
On these pages, Whistler reprints negative comments about Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander.
Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (1872-1873; Tate Gallery, London) by James McNeill Whistler. Copy print.
James McNeill Whistler, draft letter to J.W. Beck, undated (July 1892). James McNeill Whistler correspondence. Archives of American Art.
After the Goupil show, British collectors put their paintings by Whistler up for sale and, to the artist’s disgust, reaped the profits. When Whistler was asked to exhibit with the English contingent at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he retaliated. Invoking past grudges of being “skied”—hung well above eye level—and insulting Sir Frederick Leighton, the Royal Academy’s president, he replied to the secretary of the organizing committee:
Pray convey my distinguished consideration to the President, and say that I have an undefined sense of something ominously flattering occurring—but that no previous desire on his part ever to deal with work of mine, has prepared me with the proper sort of acknowledgment.
No! no Mr. Beck— “Once hung—twice Sky!”
George Du Maurier. Trilby. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894. Private collection, New York.
In 1894 cartoonist and writer George Du Maurier published Trilby, an enormous bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. It is set in the bohemian Paris of his youth, where he and Whistler had been art students together. One of the minor characters, nicknamed “the idle apprentice,” was a caricature of Whistler, who was infuriated. Threatening to sue for libel, he waged a bitter campaign against Du Maurier. This American edition was issued before Whistler’s solicitor put a stop to any further printings with the offending passages and images. It was thought that Whistler attacked Du Maurier so viciously because of his anxieties over his wife’s health. His beloved Beatrice had become unwell.
Du Maurier’s illustration depicts a gathering in a Latin Quarter studio. Whistler is pictured in the background, to the right of the fencer with his left arm in the air.
James McNeill Whistler, card acknowledging condolences, 1896. James McNeill Whistler correspondence. Archives of American Art.
Beatrice Whistler died on May 10, 1896, two days short of her thirty-eighth birthday. Her illness was long, painful, and devastating for Whistler to witness. The couple spent two years fruitlessly seeking a cure for her cancer, which was then untreatable.
James McNeill Whistler, letter to John White Alexander, undated (1896-1901). John White Alexander papers. Archives of American Art.
James McNeill Whistler, letter to Susie Sutton, undated. Katherine Prince papers. Archives of American Art.
Whistler never stopped using mourning stationery. His correspondent was the descendant of a family he and his parents had known in Lowell. Whistler first leased the studio at 8 Fitzroy Street in March 1896, two months before Beatrice died. Earlier that year, Sargent had kindly lent his studio at 76 Fulham Road to the distraught Whistler.
| Walter Pach, diary, July 22-24, 1903. Walter Pach papers. Archives of American Art. |  |
During the summer of 1903, William Merritt Chase, by then a renowned teacher, took his class abroad. In this diary entry made by his student Walter Pach, Chase announces the death of Whistler to the group. Whistler died on July 17, 1903.
Last updated...October 29, 2003
