The Influence Of The Far East

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Among the artists of the nineteenth century Whistler holds a unique position. He was the first great painter of American birth to win universal renown. His life was a long struggle against hostile criticism and misunderstanding, and he defended his art and his ideals with the pungent brilliancy of a wit and with the undaunted pugnacity of a soldier. By example and precept he eventually revolutionized English ideas about art and interior decoration. He compelled people who stubbornly repeated ‘Every Picture tells a Story,’ to realize at long last that every picture ought to sing a tune, that is to say, it ought to utter forth a melody of line and harmony of color; in a word, he compelled all England and the United States to recognize the decorative as well as the illustrative element in painting. More than any other English-speaking man Whistler opened our eyes to the true value of Velazquez and Hokusai, and he invented a new style of portraiture in which Spanish realism was exquisitely wedded to a Japanese sense of decoration. A stranger within our gates, he revealed England to the English and recorded both in his etchings and in his paintings poetic aspects of London’s riverside, aspects to which hitherto all artists had been blind, aspects the beauty of which all can now see.

Whistler was born on July 10, 1834, at Lowell, in Massachusetts, and was baptized there with the Christian names of James Abbott. This second name he dropped in later life and substituted for it his mother’s maiden name, McNeill. His father, Major George Washington Whistler, after leaving the United States army, became a railway engineer, and in 1842 journeyed to Russia with his wife and family: he had been appointed chief adviser of the railway under construction between Moscow and Petrograd. The most important consequence to James Whistler of this boyhood stay in Russia was that in Petrograd he learnt to speak French fluently. His father died in 1849, when the widow returned with her children to the United States.

Following in his father’s footsteps, James Whistler in 1851 entered the military college of West Point, but after three years of desultory study he was dismissed, chiefly owing to his deplorable failure in chemistry. The first question in his oral examination floored him completely, and later in life Whistler humorously said, ‘If silicon had been a gas I might have become a general in the United States army.’ Even from his Russian days Whistler had shown a remarkable capacity for drawing, and his delight in sketching prompted his relatives, after his West Point failure, to obtain for him a post as draughtsman in the Government Coast Survey Department at Washington, thinking that this occupation might be more congenial to him. To some extent it was, for here he learnt to engrave and etch, and he executed an excellent plate of a view taken from the sea, of cliffs along the coast; but the fancy heads and figures which he irrelevantly added in the margin showed that he could not take his topographical studies seriously as a preliminary to map-making, but only as an excuse for sketching. In February 1855 he resigned his position, and the end of the year found him an art student in Paris.

Many painters have spent joyous student-days in Paris, but few of them bear the traces of it in their lives as Whistler did. He had barely turned twenty-one when he arrived in Paris, and his high-spirited temperament and sense of fun delighted in all the antics which then distinguished the Bohemians of the Latin Quarter. In those days the art students lived a life apart, making themselves noticed by wearing unorthodox clothes, playing all sorts of practical jokes, affecting to despise the common mortal, and never so happy as when they succeeded in shocking and bewildering what they called the ‘bourgeois’. Whistler plunged hot-foot into this way of life, and, as the distinguished French critic M Théodore Duret, who knew him well, has remarked, there was grafted on him ‘the habit of a separate pose, whimsical attire, a way of despising and setting at defiance the ‘vulgur herd’ incapable of seeing and feeling like an artist. This combination of the distinctive chaaracteristics of a French art student and the manner of an American gentleman, in a man otherwise full of life, spirit, and individuality, made of Whistler a quaint original who could not fail to be remarked everywhere.’

The Influence Of The Far East (continued)