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Updated: June 29, 2025
There was nothing along the wall, as far as he could see, or upon its face, that excited Whistler's further suspicion. Just that little water wheel under the rock whirling and splashing by the power of the falling stream. It was perfectly innocent in itself; yet Philip Morgan had never been more excited and troubled in his life.
Having done its worst to them, it gave the unfortunate castaways a breathing spell. With the aid of their mates, Whistler Morgan and Torry were able to reach the keel of the overturned boat. There they perched, too, and, chattering in the cold wind, tried to look about them. Where was the raft? This question, first and foremost in Whistler's mind, troubled him intensely.
We learn in a general way that he was a thinker; but it would have been impossible to draw the head at all and conceal so salient a characteristic. Mr. Whistler's portrait reveals certain general observations of life; but has he given one single touch intimately characteristic of his model?
I mean that the execution is so strangely simple that the thought, "If I could only see the model like that, I think Icould do it myself", comes spontaneously into the mind. And this spontaneous thought is excellent criticism, for three-parts of Mr. Whistler's art lies in the seeing; no one ever saw Nature so artistically.
I never found any other book in the library that made me feel exactly like that, except Shakespeare and Grandma had all the Shakespeare volumes carted off to the garret after she came in one day when I was eleven, and found me reading 'Macbeth. As for the picture of Carlyle, it shows him, sitting in a chair, with a look on his face of a sad man alone in a gray world." "Whistler's portrait!
In his own version of the event given in the London Chronicle of March 29th, 1895, Mr. Moore laid his troubles to his efforts to aid the artist. Learning that Sir William Eden wished his wife's portrait painted, he "undertook a journey to Paris in the depth of winter, had two shocking passages across the Channel, and spent twenty-five pounds on Mr. Whistler's business."
It placed before the public, in sharp contrast, the final outcome of the Pre-Raphaelitism for which he had fought many a year before, and samples of the last new fashion from Paris. But in the same "Fors" he dismissed with half a paragraph of contempt Mr. Whistler's eccentric sketch of Fireworks at Cremorne.
According to Charles de Kay, Whistler once told him that he, James the Butterfly, began the movement; which is a capital and characteristic anecdote, especially if one recalls Whistler's boast made to a young etcher as to the initiative of Corot. Whistler practically said: "Before Corot was, I am!" And he adduced certain canvases painted with the misty-edged trees long before but why continue?
He has produced a series of works which run through the whole range of the art, from lowest relief to highest; from things of which the relief is so infinitesimal that they seem as if dreamed into existence rather than wrought in bronze or marble to things which are virtually engaged statues; from things which you fear a chance touch might brush away, like a pastel of Whistler's, to things as solid and enduring in appearance as in actual material.
The poet, the sculptor, the musician, the craftsman, the mechanic, are all striving for a more perfect expression, because perfection is the fundamental, eternal law of being. Wagner said: "The world will be redeemed through art," and if Whistler's definition be accepted he is not far from the truth.
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