United States or New Caledonia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Take a sketch-book and make much of the ties and angles and bolts; ask Whistler or Macbeth, or some one to etch them, get the Royal Antiquarian Society to pay a visit and issue a pamphlet; gaze at them reverently and earnestly, for they are not easily to be matched in London.

"There's something up besides the blue peter, just as sure as you're a foot high, Whistler," Al Torrance declared eagerly. "I'd give a punched nickel to know just what it is." Having nothing to occupy their time on the cutter, the four Navy boys naturally gave their attention to rumor and gossip. They believed the Kennebunk was no longer headed up the coast; but where she was going was a question.

Whistler noted the struggle an elderly Englishman was having to make himself understood. He politely volunteered to interpret. "Sir," said the person addressed, "I assure you, sir, I can give my order without assistance!" "Can you indeed?" quoth Whistler, airily. "I fancied the contrary just now, when I heard you desire the waiter to bring you a pair of stairs."

He was at Naples soon after the incident just related had gained wide circulation. A conspiracy was entered into whereby the Whistler worshipers there were to be unaware of his presence. He tried to play billiards with a company of young artists. They met his advance with a stony glare. "Oh, I say," persisted he, "I think I know something of that game. I'd like to play."

Among writers in the North Ibsen began to hold very much the position that Whistler was taking among painters and etchers in this country, that is to say the abuse and ridicule of his works by a dwindling group of elderly conventional critics merely stung into more frenzied laudation an ever-widening circle of youthful admirers.

After the publication of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies the writer who ventures to speak of art and literature in the same breath needs some courage. Since the death of Whistler, his opinions about the independence of art from the moral ideas with which literature is preoccupied have been generally accepted in the studios.

But if one could write a sonnet or a sonata or paint a picture That's where the real artist has the pull over us poor devils who can only feel things. He wouldn't just stand here. He'd get out his fountain pen or his paint-box and make it all his for ever and ever. Think of Whistler now what he would do with it." "I can't," Stonehouse said. "Who's Whistler?"

Oscar Wilde learned almost all he knew of art and of controversy from Whistler, but he was never more than a pupil in either field; for controversy in especial he was poorly equipped: he had neither the courage, nor the contempt, nor the joy in conflict of his great exemplar.

Well, a lot of us fellows used to dine there Whistler, Rico, Old Ziem, Roscoff, Fildes, Blaas, and the rest of the gang. We were an enthusiastic lot of Bohemians, each one with an opinion of his own about any subject he happened to be interested in, and ready to back it up if it took all night.

It is the more to his credit that as soon as he got a couple of hundred pounds ahead, he resolved to spend it in bettering his mind. His longing for wider culture, and perhaps in part, the example of Whistler, drove him to Paris.