The Influence Of The Far East

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The year after Whistler met with his rebuff in Lodon, he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, which showed the esteem in which he was now held in France, and in 1892 he took a house at Paris in the Rue de Bac. He can hardly be said to have settled there, however, for he returned several times to London. In 1890 he had published a collection of letters and various controversial matter, including a report, with his own marginal comments, of the Ruskin trial, under the title of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and this publication not only increased his reputation as wit but showed that he possessed a distinct literary style of his own. This was followed some years later by The Baronet and the Butterfly, a pamphlet giving the artist’s version of a quarrel and lawsuit with Sir William Eden over a portrait of Lady Eden. Whistler had early adopted the device of a butterfly as his sign-manual and signature, but he was a butterfly with a sting, as he confessed himself to be in the little drawings with which he decorated his publications.

All the quarrels and encounters of his stormy life cannot be recounted here, but in the end he was victorious in London as in Paris. The purchase of his ‘Mother’ by the French Government helped to turn the scale in England. A new generation of artists gave Whislter a banquet in Lodon to celebrate the event, and in the same year (1892) the most important one-man show of his pictures yet held anywhere was opened in the old Goupil Gallery in Bond Street. This included nearly all his most famous works, among them the disgraced nocturnes, but now only a minority objected to his pictures or his titles, and the success of the exhibition revealed the change which the course of years had brought about in London opinion. The Royal Academy was no longer the power it had been in his earlier days; its prestige had declined, and there was now a powerful body of outside artists who admired Whistler. In 1898 the most eminent of these formed the ‘International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers,’ and invited Whistler to become its first President, a position he held till his death on July 17, 1903. The exhibition of this new Society proved that Whistler was not only respected by artists, but had become fashionable with all persons of taste.

To sum up, it may be said that after forty years of incessant battling, Whistler enjoyed a decade of tranquil success, but his last years were saddened by private trouble. In 1888 he had marrired the widow of E W Godwin, an architect, and his wife’s death in 1896 was a great blow to the artist. With his loneliness he grew restless, and though his continued devotion to his work saved him from melancholy, he traveled about a good deal. He was visiting Holland in the summer of 1902 when he was seized with a heart attack, and though he gained enough strength to return to London, and even to begin working again in the winter, a relapse in the following June prostrated him, and on Friday, July 17, after conversing good-humouredly during lunch, he was seized wtih syncope at 3 p.m and died without suffering. France, Italy, Bavaria, and Dresden had all conferred distinctions on him; but in America, his birthplace, and in England, where he lived and worked for the greater part of his life, Whistler received no official recognition.

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