Part 11

After these books of bickerings one comes back to Whistler’s pictures with relief, for they at least are serious. That is not, however, to say that they are the greatest this, or the most wonderful that, in all painting. They are far from being impeccable, but they are not the wherewithal to suckle fools and chronicle small beer. No competent person nowadays thinks them other than very sincere art. His brothers of the craft have, indeed, so elevated them and him, so pedestalled and niched them both, that it is very doubtful if they can long hold out in their rarefied atmosphere. Again and again has the world been told that he was a faultless draftsman, that his brush was equal to that of Velasquez, and that his needle outdid Rembrandt. He did not believe so himself, nor, soberly considered, does his art affirm it.

The Pennell book contains photographs of a number of pictures labelled “destroyed,” and there were scores of canvases that never got so far as even to be photographed. Many of the pictures that escaped destruction are faulty in drawing, lacking in construction, out of proportion, or smitten with stiffness in the joints. Connie Gilchrist on the stage skipped the rope delightfully, but in Whistler’s portrait called “The Gold Girl” she is petrified. The “Sarasate” seems pinched in scale, the “Irving as Philip” is unbelievable in construction, the “Leyland” legs had to be redrawn from a model. Whistler glorified the people of Velasquez because “they stand upon their legs.” In his studio, showing his own portraits, his first question about each figure was: “How does it stand?” And then: “Does it stand easily, stand firm, stand in? Is it placed right on the canvas, has it enough body, enough atmospheric setting?” These were questions that had to do with realistic or representative appearance. Again and again he rubbed out the whole day’s work or destroyed the picture entirely. And he could write of himself to his printer in the severest terms, thus: “No, my drawing or sketch or whatever you choose, is damnable and no more like the superb original than if it had been done by the worst and most incompetent enemy.... There must be no record of this abomination.”

This, in measure, is the experience of every artist. He produces with difficulty and has scores of failures. It was not to Whistler’s discredit that he was so severe a judge of himself, but perhaps it dispels the delusion of his being an impeccable craftsman. Besides, there was an unusual reason for his lack of success with many pictures. It has been already suggested that he strove to harmonize the conflicting traditions of the West and the East. He was born and bred to the realism of the third dimension--to the protrusion or recession in space of planes, figures, lights, and colors. Midway in his career he took up with the decorative in Eastern art and strove to show the representative figure of the French with the flattened formula of the Japanese.

Whistler was thus on a seesaw the greater part of his artistic life, trying to maintain a balance between these two formulas. With almost every picture it was too much realism or too much decoration. To make the union more perfect he began the remorseless cutting down of the subject, reaching a limit in his nocturnes which were finally reduced to little more than night-sky effects. He cut out modelling and outline until the portrait of “Mrs. Leyland” became a mere tonal scheme, as flat almost as the wall at the back. Light, too, was dimmed and color lost its brilliancy in a prevailing harmony of low tones. Finally, the brush which had been heavily loaded in his Courbet days and ran freely (as witness the dress patterns even in the later “Lange Leizen”) became thin, watery, absorbent, almost diaphanous in its feathery imperceptible touch. On top of all this, and to further blend the representative into the decorative and draw the picture together, there occasionally came a thin wash of transparent gray or brown, covering the whole canvas and binding the drawing, the light, the color into one tonal envelope. In the final analysis, the canvas was rightly enough called an arrangement, a harmony, a symphony, a nocturne--what you will. Anything else was merely suggestion.

The etchings were not so amenable to Japanese pattern as the paintings, water-colors, and pastels, yet even in them there was the disposition, not so much toward flattening the planes as eliminating details, making suggestion answer for realization, and, later on, the further attempt to produce a tone effect by small scratchings and hatchings on the plate. The inclination is perhaps better shown in his lithotints, such as that of “The Thames” (Lithotint W. 125), than in the etchings.

The decorative arrangement was his view of what art should be and was more or less manifested in everything he did. Even the _Ten O’Clock_ is more decorative than realistic. The arrangement of the sentences and paragraphs is charming, and whether they mean anything or not is of small importance. Of course Whistler would have objected to being thus hung by his own rope, but he deliberately subordinated the sense of his sentences to their rhythm and tone. People who write (even art critics) are aware of what constitutes pattern and color in words and they are well pleased that the _Ten O’Clock_ was not representative but just as it is--that is, decorative and delightful. The painter people, however, seem to regard it as the inspired gospel of art and every word of it true. From which one may infer that the artist, when outside of his _métier_, can look at the wrong thing with that persistence sometimes thought peculiar to the unattached writer.

In the final analysis Whistler’s fame must rest upon his pictures, though a certain amount of notoriety will probably always be given his sayings and a proper admiration accompany his writings. As a painter and an etcher he has a now-unquestioned place and he will hold it. Nothing in nineteenth-century art is quite of a kind with his. It stands alone in its aim and purpose, belongs to no art movement of the time, proclaims the ideals of no race or people. As for the usual motives of painting, Whistler scorned them or denied them. He cared nothing about classicism or romanticism, nothing about sentiment, feeling, passion, or action. The dramatic, the tragic, the domestic, the illustrative were foreign to him. Even nature put him out. The country bored him, and the sea was only so much blue paint in a pattern. He was a maker of beautiful schemes of color and line, with just enough of human interest about them to lend a meaning and occasionally a touch of intimacy.

That seems like reducing his art to a very simple affair, but, on the contrary, within the self-imposed limitations there was room for the greatest variety. He did portraits, figures, genre pieces, sea-pieces, river-views; he worked in oils, water-colors, pastels; he etched many plates that are to-day the joy of connoisseurs, and he vastly improved the almost forgotten art of lithography. The breadth of his accomplishment was wide and the excellence of it high. Nothing that he ever did but has some note of color, some wave of line, some fastidious arrangement or grouping that serves as a mark of distinction. He did hundreds of pastels and water-colors no larger than one’s hand, that contain lovely figures and draperies, as, for example, the “Annabel Lee”; or gave suggestions of the sea or shore akin to “The Blue Wave,” or spread sky patterns comparable to the “Battersea Bridge.” These pictures are now widely scattered, and one does not realize how truly decorative their planning until he meets them to-day, hanging singly or in pairs, in some drawing-room. There they put other modern work out of countenance by the way they do not “break through the wall” but enhance and beautify it. It is household art of a most distinguished character in that it goes in the household and takes its place without quarrelling with everything about it. I have already quoted La Farge to the effect that in using the word “decorative” he was saying the best thing he could about a picture. There he and Whistler were in perfect agreement.

The deriding of Whistler was not indulged in by press and public alone. The painter people--the inspired ones, who by reason of their calling are the only ones competent to judge of art--stoned him, too. Royal academicians dealt him harder knocks than plebeian critics. But he always had a following of his own, and before he died the following had grown into a procession. Since his death his influence has been more far-reaching than that of any modern. His pictures were not only adopted, assimilated, imitated in England and France but all over Europe. Here in America the exhibitions still show his color schemes and arrangements as comprehended by his admiring young converts. Without taking on pupils, as Couture and Gleyre had done, he nevertheless became far more of a _chef d’Ecole_ than either of them. That is what he would have called perhaps handing on the tradition. He believed that he himself was an inheritor and a transmitter--one of the links in the great art chain.

But it was not the American tradition that Whistler handed on. We claim him as one of us because he was born here, but his art does not represent us in any way. His Thames nocturnes are not those of the Hudson, his portraits are not of our people, and his decorative patterns never were seen in American life or art. He handed on the blended traditions of Gleyre and Hiroshige, not the legend of Copley and Stuart and Durand. That may be matter for regret in history but it surely is not to be regretted in art. For Whistler gave us a new and a beautiful point of view in painting. Realist, idealist, impressionist, cubist, futurist--none of the terms describe him or even suggest his work. As an artist he was unique, and his art, instead of reproducing a species, stemmed out into a new variety of surpassing loveliness and beauty. We would not be without it. We are not sure that its “name and fame will live forever,” as the Pennells put it, but it will live.

VIII

WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE

A distribution and pigeonholing of our nine American painters as regards aim and tendency would perhaps place Inness, Wyant, and Martin among the most intelligent and sympathetic of the earlier men; Homer, La Farge, and Whistler the most detached and self-sufficient of the middle men, and Chase, Alexander, and Sargent the most facile and best trained of the younger men. The last three may, indeed, stand as epitomizing the art movement which took form and gave tongue in the Society of American Artists.

That movement was epoch-making. There was awakening to the fact that painting in America as a craft was not technically understood, that it was not properly taught--could not be taught in America. With that came the departure for Europe of many young students and their training in the studios of Munich and Paris. When the Society of American Artists finally got under way in the early eighties its initial reason for existence was that its members at least knew how to paint. They had been abroad and learned the grammar of their art and were now returned to show their countrymen the finished craftsman. Sargent’s influence was largely through the example of his portraits and Alexander’s vogue was to come a little later; but Chase was the one that arrived early in the day, carried the banner, and announced that art had come to town.

All three of these men grounded themselves in technical method which seemed the necessity of the hour, and all three of them have remained so bedded in method that their art has rarely risen above it or beyond it. Chase, more radical than the others, proclaimed his belief that method was art itself and that a brilliant, dashing manner took precedence over matter. He would not admit that art was more than a surface expression. His belief was, of course, properly adjusted to his own mental equipment. He and Whistler, with many another artist, could cleverly compound for qualities

“they were inclined to By damning those they had no mind to.”

Unconsciously, no doubt, every one’s tendency is to regard his own limitations as self-imposed and his work right in kind if not in degree. Perhaps that is what Chase meant in a talk at the National Arts Club some years ago when he said: “They say I am conceited. I don’t deny it. I believe in myself. I do and I must.” As philosophy that may not be very profound but as a working faith, paint-brush in hand, it is superb. With such faith and purpose Chase produced scores of pictures that showed his declared point of view, and trained hundreds of pupils not only in his enthusiasm but in his own crisp, clean handling. He was a painter from beginning to end, and exemplified the aim and carry of the Society of American Artists better than any one artist of his time.

He came out of the near West, having been born in Williamsburg, Indiana, in 1849. The village was a small one, less than two hundred inhabitants when Chase was a boy, and what elementary schooling he received there may be imagined. His parents were Indiana people, and the home influence probably did not incline him to art. He saw illustrations in magazines and books and that put the childish wish in his head to “make pictures for books.” He drew with colored pencils, had the little water-color cubes known to all children, and soon made a local reputation among schoolmates and family friends for drawing portraits. At twelve his parents moved to Indianapolis, and at sixteen he entered his father’s shoe-store as a clerk. The biographies of painters[12] almost always afford such incidents as these. They are supposed to indicate genius trying to orient itself, but perhaps they are no more than vacillations of the youthful mind. At that time Chase had not definitely decided upon art as a career. At nineteen he thought to be some day a naval officer. As a preliminary step he enlisted as a sailor at Annapolis, and was assigned to the training-ship _Portsmouth_. He probably did not know what else to do and it was an adventure at least; but he soon discovered that it was also a mistake. His father got him out of it and together they went back to the family shoe-shop in Indianapolis.

[12] There is an excellent biography of Chase--_The Life and Art of William Merritt Chase_, by Katharine Metcalf Roof, New York, 1917.

There was some more experimental portraiture, with members of the household and the family calf as models, and then Chase was sent to a local painter by the name of Benjamin Hayes, who accepted him as a pupil. Art definitely began for him then and there. He was with Hayes several months--long enough to take a studio and set up as a painter on his own account. At twenty he went to New York with a letter to J. O. Eaton, whose pupil he became and with whom he remained for two years. He seems to have had an early liking for independent quarters, for while a student in New York he set up another studio in Twenty-third Street. After his two years with Eaton he once more went back to the paternal roof, then in St. Louis. Here he occupied a studio with J. W. Pattison, and for a year painted pictures, principally pictures of still-life. Then he happened to see a picture by John Mulvaney, and that gave him the idea of going abroad for study.

Some St. Louis patrons advanced money to him and he went to Munich--a city at that time perhaps more frequented by art students than Paris. Duveneck, Dielman, Currier, Shirlaw were there, and Chase at once entered into the student life of the city. He was enrolled in the school of the Munich Royal Academy, with Kaulbach at its head, and he was also a student under Piloty; but the outside influence of Leibl was potent upon all the Munich students at that time, Chase included. In addition he studied to his profit the old masters in the Alte Pinacothek, especially Van Dyck, and was susceptible to impressions from Duveneck and perhaps Habermann, a German student friend. Some years ago in a European retrospective exhibition I was struck by a Habermann portrait that was practically a duplicate of Chase’s “Ready for the Ride,” but whether it was Chase following Habermann or Habermann following Chase, I could not determine.

With his various activities Chase cut quite a figure in the student world of Munich and was regarded as a coming man. He won competitions, painted Piloty’s children, painted “The Turkish Page,” the Duveneck portrait called “The Smoker,” “The Jester,” “The Dowager,” “The Apprentice Boy,” “The Broken Jug,” and other works. A chance to review some of these pictures was recently afforded at the Panama-Pacific Exposition at San Francisco, where Chase was represented by a roomful of pictures, and many people were astonished to find how very solidly and beautifully painted were these early examples. They were, of course, dark in illumination with some bitumen in the shadows. It was studio light, not _plein air_ that Munich taught. It took Chase a number of years to arrive at a higher key of light, but in other matters of technique he had become something of a master before leaving Munich--so much so that he was asked to remain as an instructor in the Bavarian Academy. He declined, however, and in 1877 went to Venice, where he joined Duveneck and Twachtman and remained for nearly a year.

Venice meant not a great deal to Chase. He painted it, but in the formal Munich manner, and with little of the local light or color of the place. While there he fell upon hard times, was in financial straits, and became ill, possibly as the result of privations. But he continued painting, and, what is more astonishing, while in dire poverty he began collecting all sorts of artistic plunder. This was the beginning of a taste that he indulged in all his life. He bought pictures, rugs, brocades, silks, brass, guns, swords, jewels, rings--anything that was beautiful or artistic in design or color. At different times he had large collections of antiquities, and was ever hunting for more. At Venice he added two monkeys to his possessions, and when a few months later he returned to New York and took his Tenth Street studio he had several strange parrots and odd dogs as adjuncts to the place. The high walls of the big studio were hung with bits of tapestries, old velvets, pictures; the floor was covered with Oriental rugs; the tables were littered with clocks, pistols, old books, brass bowls; and the screens were draped with silks and brocades. It was the first “artistic” studio in New York.

This was in 1877 and Chase had returned to New York to become a teacher in the newly established Art Students League. That was the beginning of his long and very useful career as a teacher. The Art Students League and the Society of American Artists were started about the same time, the Metropolitan Museum having preceded them by a few years. The movement for art was under way and Chase had arrived at the psychological moment. Associated with Beckwith, Blum, Shirlaw, and others he immediately took a positive interest in current art matters. The big studio became the gathering-place of the young men, where resolutions were passed and committees were set in motion. Society also found its way there, for Chase gave Saturday receptions when the door with the vibrating lyre on the back of it was swung open by a colored servant in fez and gown, and pictures and antiquities were displayed and talked about by the painter himself. At other times dinners and dances were given there, to which came many notables. People from the opera sang, Carmencita danced, and society people posed in picture-frames for the characters of Titian and Van Dyck. Chase had a decided vogue, social as well as artistic, almost from the very start.

As a painter he was taken seriously and received his meed of praise with few dissenting voices. Almost every one in the press and magazines hailed him as the much-needed person--the man who technically knew how to paint. His pictures at no time ever sold very well, but that was for the reason perhaps that they never possessed an intimate human interest, not because they were indifferently painted. On the whole, though some of the elders looked askance at his broad brushing, or thought his themes somewhat material and superficial, he had no grievance of a Whistler kind against either critic or public. The art clubs elected him to membership, he spent his first summer after his return in a trip through the Erie Canal with the Tile Club, in 1880 he became a member of the Society of American Artists, and in 1883 its president. The same year he had organized and sent to Munich the first group of American pictures for exhibition there.

A curiosity as to how art had been produced by other people, in other times and countries as well as our own, was always with Chase. He was a great traveller, a great student of art, a great haunter of galleries and museums. In the thirty or more years that I knew him I had met him at different times in almost every gallery of Europe. Only a year or so before the Great War I was working in the Uffizi one hot July afternoon after every one had left the place. I had been alone for several hours when I heard steps approaching me down the long corridor. It was late and one of the attendants was probably coming to tell me it was time to close. But no; instead of that I heard in very good English:

“At it again, I see! At it again!”

I turned around to find Chase standing there. He, too, had stayed on in the heat after the crowd had gone, and had no doubt been prying into some Titian or questioning some Rembrandt or Rubens!

For many years he kept voyaging to Europe summer after summer. I never chanced to cross with him, but one spring, while bidding farewell to some friends who were sailing, I saw Chase jump out of a cab and scramble up the landing-stage--the last man to arrive--and still giving some directions over his shoulder to his colored man, who remained on the dock. On every steamer he sailed in he organized art, painted the cabin or smoke-room panels, sketched the captain, and made a portrait of the ship’s beauty. Arrived in Europe, he went to see not only exhibitions and museums but brothers of the craft in their studios. He spoke no French, Spanish, or Italian, and had only a limited vocabulary in German, but that made no difference. He got on better with Boldini and Alfred Stevens in Paris using the sign language than with Whistler in London exchanging biting English. Everywhere he was welcomed and treated as a man of distinction in his profession, and everywhere he saw something new and was perhaps influenced thereby.