VII Supreme as a Colorist — Color and Music — His Susceptibility to Color — Ruskin and Color — Art and Nature
Supreme as a colorist, Whistler achieved fame as an etcher long before the world acknowledged his greatness as a painter. Even now it is the fashion to exalt his etchings to the depreciation of his paintings,—to say that he was a great artist in the one medium but unsuccessful in the other.
The following is a fair illustration of this sort of comment:
“Cool-headed conservatism should clarify the halo which encircles Whistler’s portraits. The periodic ‘symphonies,’ ‘harmonies,’ and ‘arrangements,’ in gray and green, green and rose, purple and gold, or brown and black, have, or had, novelty to recommend them,—more novelty, however, than psychology. Apart from one or two, they are little beyond essays in subdued Japonisme with subtle dashes of Velasquez. The portrait of his mother alone shows adequate depth, for the overlauded Carlyle is merely a male replica of the single canvas wherein the artist seemed to lose—and to find—himself. It is not in portraiture, but in etching and lithography, that Whistler has disclosed the validity of his talent.”31
To which may be added the following comments since his death from leading American papers:
“Whistler in earlier life was a real etcher, easily the first of the nineteenth century. The number of his plates of the best quality is comparatively small. He soon lost his power or the incentive to execute it. His hand degenerated, his work became trivial and insincere. As a painter none of his pictures will ever explain to posterity the reputation, or the apparent reputation, that he enjoyed during his lifetime.”
“It is, however, as an etcher rather than as a painter that Whistler will be remembered.”
“Thus, setting aside the portraits of his mother, of Thomas Carlyle, Lady Campbell, and Miss Alexander, and the startling ‘Nocturne in Blue and Silver,’ and the ‘Arrangement in Black,’ it might be possible to count upon the fingers of one hand the finest examples of his brush.”
Many others of similar import might be gathered, but the foregoing suffice. In reading them it should not be forgotten that the etchings, which are now praised without reserve, passed through the same stages of depreciation through which the paintings are passing; so that, guided by the parallel, it is reasonable to expect the complete acceptance of the latter as masterpieces in the near future.
Broadly speaking, the order of acceptance has been:
First. Etchings and lithographs.
Second. Portraits.
Third. Color harmonies,—such as many of his figure-pieces, marines, nocturnes, and pure color compositions generally, none of which is fully accepted, some of which are scarcely known, and all of which are misunderstood, in spite of his many explicit words of explanation.
Such has been the order of general acceptance of his work; but the order of real merit is almost precisely reversed.
Whistler stands supreme,—
First as a colorist.
Secondly as a painter of portraits.
Thirdly as an etcher and lithographer.
As an etcher comparisons are drawn between him and Rembrandt.
As a painter of portraits comparisons are drawn between him and Velasquez.
As a colorist he is beyond comparison save with the masters of the far East.
In etching and lithography and the painting of portraits he, at most, simply did as well or better what others have done before; but in the composition of harmonies of color to please the eye, as harmonies of sound please the ear, he accomplished results which are unique.
What he did with the needle is not so wholly and absolutely unlike all that had been done before as to render comparisons impossible; whereas with the brush in his domain of color Whistler stands alone. His art was his own; he painted like no other man dead or living.
His etchings were so fine, so subtle, that the world had difficulty in comprehending them; but it did learn to like them, and that, too, at a comparatively early date. But even now his pictures are fully understood by no one; and yet they have had a profounder influence upon the art of to-day than those of any other master.
He opened the door of the East to the painters of the West and showed them how they might paint after the manner of the best there is in the Oriental world, and not only retain, but accentuate their own individuality.
The secret of Whistler’s art, as of all great art, is that it was the absolutely true and unaffected expression of his convictions and of his impressions of the life and world about him; and his impressions and convictions in the domain of color, like those of Beethoven in the world of sound, were worth recording.
He is to color what Beethoven is to sound, and his distinguishing merit is that of all the men of his century or of many preceding centuries he was the only one to treat color as a composer of music treats sound,—as material for the arrangement of harmonies to please the eye as music pleases the ear.
When Burne-Jones, in the Ruskin suit, was asked if he saw any art quality in “The Falling Rocket,” he apologetically said, “I must speak the truth, you know,” and then testified: “It has fine color and atmosphere,” but of detail and composition “absolutely none.”
As if the shower of fire of a falling rocket against the blackness of night could have sharp detail and composition; as if anything were possible beyond “fine color and atmosphere;” and color and atmosphere are all Whistler intended. “My whole scheme,” he himself testified, “was only to bring about a certain harmony of color,” and, according to the only decently qualified witness for the other side, he succeeded.
Even Frith, the painter of “Derby Day” and the “Rake’s Progress,” said, “There is a pretty color which pleases the eye, but there is nothing more.”
Why should there be anything more, if to please the eye were the painter’s sole intention? Is it not as legitimate to please the eye with compositions of color, otherwise meaningless, as it is to please the ear with compositions of sound?
Profoundly speaking, color has no other object than to please the eye. The story should be told, the moral pointed, in black and white. The use of color imitatively, or to accentuate the characterization, is as base as the use of sound imitatively.
Color is to the eye precisely what sound is to the ear, and the highest use to which either can be put is the production of pure, not to say abstract, harmonies for the satisfaction of its respective sense.
As long ago as 1868 Swinburne, in a pamphlet on the Royal Academy exhibition of that year, said:
“No task is harder than this translation from color into speech, when the speech must be so hoarse and feeble, when the color is so subtle and sublime. Music and verse might strike some string accordant in sound to such painting, but a version such as this is a psalm of Tate’s to a psalm of David’s. In all of the main strings touched are certain varying chords of blue and white, not without interludes of the bright and tender tones of floral purple or red. They all have immediate beauty, they all give the delight of natural things; they seem to have grown as a flower grows, not in any forcing house of ingenious and laborious cunning. This is, in my eyes, a special quality of Mr. Whistler’s genius; a freshness and fulness of the loveliest life of things, with a high, clear power upon them which seems to educe a picture as the sun does a blossom or a fruit.”
In language too plain for the slightest misunderstanding he has himself told the world precisely what he meant his pictures to be, but the world will not take him at his word.
Nearly thirty years ago, when the people wondered at his calling his works “symphonies,” “arrangements,” “harmonies,” and “nocturnes,” he wrote:
“The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.
“My picture of a ‘Harmony in Gray and Gold’ is an illustration of my meaning,—a snow-scene with a single black figure and a lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. All that I know is that my combination of gray and gold is the basis of the picture. Now, this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp.
“They say, ‘Why not call it “Trotty Veck,” and sell it for a round harmony of golden guineas?’ naively acknowledging that without baptism there is no... market!’”32
And farther on he said:
“As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or color.
“The great musicians knew this. Beethoven and the rest wrote music,—simply music; symphony in this key, concerto or sonata in that.
“On F or G they constructed celestial harmonies,—as harmonies,—combinations evolved from the chorus of F or G and their minor correlatives.
“This is pure music as distinguished from airs,—commonplace and vulgar in themselves, but interesting from their associations,—as, for instance, ‘Yankee Doodle’, or ‘Partant pour la Syrie.’
“Art should be independent of all clap-trap, should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or er, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies.’”33
And concerning the portrait of his mother, which nearly every one admires for the subject while few pause to consider the color, he wrote:
“Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an ‘Arrangement in Gray and Black.’ Now, that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?”34
Within these few lines are contained Whistler’s whole philosophy of art, his convictions and his intentions; the words are so plain a child may read and comprehend their meaning, and yet people will not understand him.
Whistler’s art was purely sensuous, as the finest music is sensuous. He had no interest whatsoever in the many problems of life and death, in the story of any person or the traditions of any place.
He had less interest in the associations connected with Old Battersea Bridge than the boatman lazily floating by; but at certain hours and under certain conditions, at twilight or at dusk, or in the fog, it made a long, tremulous line which pleased him, and he painted it.
The fact that the Thames bounds English history was of no consequence to him; but the muddy river between lines of buildings and wharves and shipping, and covered by boats and crossed by bridges, furnished him endless compositions in line and color.
The glory and the romance of Venice made no impression on his art; but in out-of-the-way places, where others saw nothing, he found scenes which inspired his etchings.
As an etcher and a lithographer Whistler played with the mystery of line, as in painting he played with the mystery of color.
There is an art of pure line as there is an art of pure form and of pure color. It is just as possible to make a lot of meaningless lines which please the eye in their curves and endless variety as it is to please the eye with combinations of colors.
Decorative patterns and designs, aside from color, are simply line harmonies.
A child loves to make straight and round and curved lines upon slate or paper.
The eye follows lines with a delight akin to that taken in form and color.
When the Savoy Hotel was in process of construction, and the great steel beams thrust themselves upward towards the sky, and there was a lattice-work of girders and a veritable song of line, Whistler, seeing it one day from a neighboring window, exclaimed:
“Hurry; where are my things? I must catch that now, for it will never again be so beautiful.”
High buildings, mechanical processes, modern costumes had no terrors for him, simply because he had no sentiment concerning them; if they furnished him beauties of line or color he cared not whether they were new or old.
Whistler’s art was as devoid of sentiment as that of a Japanese.
To our Western notions the everlasting convention that serves for a face in Japanese art seems hopelessly monotonous. To them our painstaking characterization of the features and peculiarities of each person is no art at all, but grotesque caricature; it is the subordination of art which is of universal interest to the eccentricities of the individual which are of local interest.
In Whistler’s art one must not look for any solution of the problems of life, for any sign of the emotions which control human conduct,—for love and hate and fear, for hope and ambition, for the tortures of jealousy or the bitterness of despair,—these are all absent; his art is pure and serene. His works are to painting what the “Ode to a Grecian Urn” or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is to poetry, and hence in human interest they fall far short of the tragedies, the epics, the romances of literature and art, and they must not be judged by standards he did not seek to emulate. He could no more have painted a “Crucifixion” or a “Last Judgment” than he could have carved the “Moses” or written “Hamlet.” In every sense, save that of abstract beauty of line and color, other painters have excelled Whistler, but as the master of pure line and color harmonies he is supreme.
Whistler’s etchings and photographs were simply compositions in line, delightful harmonies in black and white. It is too bad to preserve their names or identify them with any locality, for their exquisite art is better appreciated if no distracting consideration is aroused. But, oddly enough, he occasionally made concessions in the naming of these that he did not in the naming of his paintings.
Take, for instance, that charming lithograph, “Confidences in the Garden,”—two ladies walking in the corner of an old garden. The garden is in the rear of his Paris home on the Rue du Bac. The ladies are probably Mrs. Whistler and her sister. But what does it add to the print to call it “Confidences in the Garden”? Nothing at all. On the contrary, the title at once suggests a host of considerations which conflict with the abstract enjoyment of the composition.
That sort of a title is precisely what he condemns for his paintings. It is, however, one of the very few instances where his titles suggest anything more than the obvious subject. For the most part he was consistent in choosing names that do not distract.
Even the portraits he did not care to have known as “Portrait of Mr. A——,” or “Portrait of Lady C——,” thereby catering first to the vanity of a sitter, then to the idle curiosity of the multitude. His portraits were compositions in line and color, and, as such, were artistic creations. That they happened also to be portraits of certain individuals was a mere coincidence. The portrait feature, upon which people lay so much stress, was of the least consequence to him; and just because he did not permit the photographic element to move him, he secured results which are far beyond the art of the “portrait-painter.”
The sense of color is so lost to painters, as well as to laymen, that to talk of color compositions as one speaks of sound compositions is to challenge doubt and occasion surprise. And yet there is a music of color even as there is a music of sound, and there should be a delight in color composition even as there is a delight in sound composition; and this delight should be something fundamentally distinct from any interest in the subject of the composition. The subject may be a man, or a woman, or a field, or a tree, or a wave, or a cloud, or just nothing at all—mere masses or streaks of color; the perfection or the imperfection of the color arrangement remains the same.
That the color-sense is lost to laymen, critics, and painters is evidenced by the ridicule that for thirty years was heaped upon Whistler for calling his pictures “harmonies,” “symphonies,” “nocturnes,” etc.; for adopting the more or less abstract nomenclature of sound compositions—music—to describe color compositions.
One paper described them as “some figure pieces, which this artist exhibits as ‘harmonies’ in this, that, or the other, being, as they are, mere rubs-in of color, have no claims to be regarded as pictures.” Another says, “A dark bluish surface, with dots on it, and the faintest adumbrations of shape under the darkness, is gravely called a ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold.’” Again, “Two of Mr. Whistler’s ‘color-symphonies,’ a ‘Nocturne in Blue and Gold,’ and a ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold.’ If he did not exhibit these as pictures under peculiar and, what seems to most people, pretentious titles they would be entitled to their due meed of admiration. But they only come one step nearer pictures than delicately graduated tints on a wall-paper do.”
And so in endless iteration and reiteration.
It never occurred to either painters or critics to judge the pictures as if they were in reality so many “delicately graduated tints on a wall-paper.” The color-sense was deficient. The pictures were judged by their composition, their subjects,—or, rather, not appreciated at all, but condemned, on account of their titles, which expressed exactly what the painter desired to convey,—namely, his attempts to produce harmonies in color independently of subject.
So far from Whistler’s titles being absurd, they were so many frank attempts to tell the public what the painter was really trying to do. He might have been more obscure, like many a composer of music, and simply said, “Opus I.,” or “Opus XX.,” and so on. He did call three of his early pictures “Symphony in White, No. I.,” “Symphony in White, No. II.,” and “Symphony in White, No. III.;” but the first, a full-length figure, was also known as the “White Girl” of the “Salon des Refusés,” 1863; the second, a three-quarter length of a young girl in white, standing by a mantel, as “The Little White Girl;” while the third, with no other title, is of two girls in white.
But for the most part he chose to describe each particular work as an arrangement of blue and silver, or black and gray, or flesh-color and brown, according to the predominating tones of the composition, thereby aiding the eye of the observer.
There are beauties of form devoid of color;
There are beauties of color devoid of form;
There are beauties of form and color combined.
Of the foregoing the first is familiar in sculpture, and the third is familiar in painting, but the second is scarcely observed at all, though color without form is found wherever color is used decoratively.
The ordinary house-painter endeavors to secure agreeable effects by the mere arrangement of colors. The interior-decorator endeavors—for the most part with disastrous results—to secure agreeable effects by the mere distribution of color. In a crude way the house-painter, the sign-painter, the decorator, the dyer, the dress-maker, are all color-composers, their object being to produce harmonies in color quite irrespective of line and form. They know nothing about drawing, they know nothing about modelling, but they try to please the eye by color arrangements.
To rightly understand the color-sense let us briefly consider the matter from its scientific side.
The ear has a range of musical sounds of from sixteen and one-half air-vibrations per second—the note of the lowest pipe of the great organ—to four thousand seven hundred and fifty-two vibrations per second, the highest note of the piccolo of the orchestra,—a range of about eight octaves.
Below sixteen and one-half vibrations per second, and above four thousand seven hundred and fifty-two,—as high, in fact, as forty thousand,—sounds are audible, but not musical, being either too low and throbbing or two high and piercing to be agreeable.
In all countries this range of musical sounds is divided into octaves,—the octave of any given note having simply double the number of air-vibrations.
At the present time, in the Western world, each octave is divided, as every one knows, into twelve notes, indicated on the piano by the seven white keys and the five black.
For instance, the middle C of the piano has two hundred and sixty-four vibrations per second, the C above has, of course, just double, or five hundred and twenty-eight vibrations per second. In the chromatic scale these two hundred and sixty-four vibrations, which make the octave, are divided into only twelve intervals, an average of twenty-two vibrations to the interval. In the octavo above the average would be twice that, or forty-four, and so on doubling to the end.
There is a change in pitch with the addition of so much as a fraction of a vibration per second. As a matter of fact, musicians can detect the variation of pitch caused by the difference of half a vibration per second in the middle octaves; the power to detect changes in pitch due to fractional changes in vibrations decreasing towards the bass and treble.
With this power of discriminating a thousand degrees of pitch in a single octave the Western world is content to arbitrarily and mechanically divide the octave into but twelve tones and semi-tones.
The Arabic octave contains twenty-four quarter-tones, and Oriental nations generally take cognizance of intervals so small they seem to us discords.
Helmholtz requested a distinguished musician to investigate this matter in Cairo, and this is the report:
“This evening I have been listening attentively to the song on the minarets, to try to appreciate the quarter-tones, which I had not supposed to exist, as I had thought that the Arabs sang out of tune. But to-day as I was with the dervishes I became certain that such quarter-tones existed, and for the following reasons: Many passages in litanies of this kind end with a tone which was at first the quarter-tone and ended in the pure tone. As the passage was frequently repeated, I was able to observe this every time, and I found the intonation invariable.”35
All of which goes to show how susceptible the highly-trained ear is to fine gradations and combinations of sound and how easy it is to become accustomed to coarse intervals when the finer are no longer used.
The various notes as sounded by a great variety of musical instruments constitute the raw material from which the composer and performer produce melodies and harmonies absolutely unknown to nature, and which—judged by the only possible standard, their emotional and intellectual effects—are incomparably finer than any sounds in nature, finer because a human utterance, the play of soul upon soul.
The eye has a range of color-notes from four hundred millions of millions of ether-vibrations per second, the rate of the deepest red of the spectrum, to seven hundred and fifty millions of millions, the rate of the violet rays. The following table of vibration rates of the colors of the spectrum shows the vibration intervals which divide the pronounced colors:36
| Color-sensation. | Ether-vibrations per second. | |||
| Deep red | 400 | millions | of | millions. |
| Red-orange | 437 | “ | “ | |
| Yellow-orange | 457 | “ | “ | |
| Yellow | 509 | “ | “ | |
| Green | 570 | “ | “ | |
| Blue-green | 617 | “ | “ | |
| Blue-violet | 696 | “ | “ | |
| Violet | 750 | “ | “ | |
This color-scale, as produced by a great variety of agents,—such as colored lights, glass, stones, metals, fabrics, dyes, stains, pigments, etc.,—constitutes the raw material from which the color-composer, painter, and decorator produce melodies and harmonies absolutely unknown to nature, and, judged as musical sounds are judged, are incomparably finer than effects in nature, because essentially human, because produced by man for their emotional and intellectual effect upon man.
Theoretically the variation of a single ether-vibration per second changes the shade of the color; but while the trained ear can detect the variation in pitch due to a half-vibration of air per second more or less, ether-vibrations are so incomparably more rapid that the best the trained eye can do is detect about one thousand different tints in the spectrum. In other words, there must be an increase or decrease of three hundred and fifty thousand millions of ether-vibrations before even the practised eye is consciously affected.
It is, however, altogether likely that while the eye is not consciously affected without these great variations in frequency, it is unconsciously affected, and susceptibility to and skill in handling color depend upon this unconscious susceptibility.
It is pretty well established that the range of color-vision cannot be materially extended below the red or above the violet by practice, but susceptibility to color variations and the ability to distinguish gradations of tone within the scale can be increased almost indefinitely.
Education of the color-sense is the development of this unconscious susceptibility,—of the feeling for, as distinguished from a knowledge of, color.
A man may know all about color and have no feeling for it. On the other hand, a man may be singularly susceptible to color-effects without being able to name correctly a dozen shades.
Nothing educates the color-sense so much as steady contemplation of color-harmonies in nature and art. But unless a man possesses an instinctive feeling for color he will never select the best examples; whereas if his eye is exceedingly susceptible he will intuitively cling to the best the world affords.
Whistler was gifted with susceptibility to color in an extraordinary degree. Where, by way of illustration, the untrained eye can distinguish one or two hundred shades of color in the spectrum and the highly-trained eye a thousand, Whistler could probably distinguish two thousand, and possibly feel as many more.
In fact, so keen was his susceptibility to color that intervals—to use, very legitimately, the musical term—quite imperceptible to others affected him greatly.
The neck-tie of a sitter once caused him no end of trouble.
The suit the sitter was wearing was of a light-brown tone; the ulster was of a darker Scotch plaid,—all softened in tone by time and wear. In so many shades of brown it certainly seemed to the casual eye that the shade of the brown silk tie the sitter had on found a place. But, no; to Whistler it was a discordant note, though half hidden by the garments. All available ties were exhausted,—even those of friends and neighboring artists were levied upon. Others could see nothing inharmonious in many of the ties that were tried; but they made Whistler positively uncomfortable,—just as uncomfortable as the leader of an orchestra is when an instrument plays a discord; and it was not until the “Bon Marché” had been ransacked—for, not ties, but simply fabrics in shades of brown—that a piece was found that would answer.
Then, mark you, the brown of the tie was by no means reproduced in the portrait, but the brown as modified by all the browns and notes of the entire costume, and as still further modified by all the browns and all the notes and shades and lights of the studio.
During this search for a note of brown—a search which seemed to the sitter, and even to artist friends, finical in the extreme—the great painter one afternoon justified himself by showing some little pastel sketches of a model with bits of transparent drapery floating about her. The sketches were on coarse brown board, and about ten or twelve inches high by five or six wide, and there were just a few strokes of almost imperceptible color to indicate the flesh tones and the draperies, all so slight as to scarce attract notice; and yet each of the filmy bits of drapery had been dyed by the painter with as much care to secure the desired notes as he would take in painting a portrait.
No one who has not seen him at work can form any adequate notion of his extreme susceptibility to infinitesimal variations of color; it exceeded that of any painter of whom the Western world has sufficient record for comparison.
A Frenchman has said:
“Whistler’s works are dreams of color. The gray of them is unique. It is made of white, blue, green, of all the tints. It is the tender gray of England’s coasts, of the North Sea, and of the sky that in summer is above it; the horizon gray where the pale blue of the sky and the pale green of the sea unite and form one.
“It is a subtle shade, in accord with the penumbras in which he delighted. He was the musician of the rainbow. No one understood as well as he the mysterious relations of painting and of music, the seven notes and the seven colors, and the way to play these with the sharps and flats of the prism. Even as a symphony is in D or a sonata is in A, his pictures were orchestrated according to a tone,—the ‘Lady with the Iris,’ for example, a mauve flower placed in the hand of the figure, as a note and signifying that the portrait was to be a colored polyphony of lilac and of violets.
“More precision is lent to this curious æsthetic by the titles that he gave to certain small canvases representing twilights of Venice and of London, which he entitled ‘Nocturnes,’ in a parallel with those of Chopin, but of a Chopin serene and who dreams instead of a Chopin ill and who weeps. There, as in portraits, the gray of England’s coasts appears, but bluer. It has in portraits the tints of twilight in ashes. In all his works he reveals the land of his origin, the land that has produced Edgar Allan Poe.”
Many stories are told illustrating his susceptibility to color. Some of them are pointless; but the fact they are told at all shows how this trait impressed both the artists and the public.
“One morning he had an engagement at a banker’s, where he was to receive a large sum of money for a set of etchings, a sum that he happened to need very much at that time. He was busy chatting and showing some of his things to an appreciative visitor, who happened to know the circumstances, and considerately reminded him that he had far to go and that the American would probably be in a hurry and would not wait.
“‘Yes,’ said Whistler; ‘but just look at this now,’ pulling forward another canvas. And so it went on, until his friend said: ‘Whistler, you really must go! That man will never wait for you.’
“‘What a nuisance you are!’ he exclaimed; but he got ready, and they started.
“They were tearing down the street at a great rate, when Whistler suddenly stopped the cab and made the driver go back to a certain spot,—and they had to go backwards and forwards for quite a while before they found the exact place,—in order to get a view of a certain little green-grocer’s shop, with his fruit and vegetables outside, striped awnings, etc.
“Whistler put up his hands for a frame, squinted and twisted. ‘Beautiful!’ he exclaimed. ‘Lovely! I’m going to do that; but I think I’ll have him move the oranges over to the right more, and that green, now—let me see——’
“‘Whistler!’ cried his friend, ‘do come along! That man will be home in New York before we get there!’
“‘What a nuisance you are!’ declared Whistler, and was sulky the rest of the way.
“It was not a pose. The painter was so enchanted by what he saw that banker and money were nothing to him at that moment.”
And it is said a visitor once found him at work in his studio.
“The furniture was of a pale gray; the hangings were of the same color; the window shades were of gray; the model a woman with gray eyes, wearing a gray costume; and the costume of the painter was also of the same prevailing color.
“Whistler refused to talk with his visitor until he had removed his flaming red cravat; and, after a few minutes’ conversation, commented upon the fact that the tone values of his coat and trousers were out of harmony.”
An exaggeration, but it all might have occurred; for has he not himself described, in “Gentle Art,” how the loud dress of a critic destroyed his exhibition. “To have seen him, O, my wise Atlas, was my privilege and my misery,—for he stood under one of my own ‘harmonies,’ already with difficulty gasping its gentle breath, himself an amazing ’arrangement’ in strong mustard-and-cress, with bird’s-eye belcher of Reckitt’s blue, and then and there destroyed absolutely, unintentionally, and once for all, my year’s work!”
The analogy between the musical scale and the color scale has been many times noted.
Helmholtz37 draws the following analogy:
| F ♯ | End of the red. |
| G | Red. |
| G ♯ | Red. |
| A | Red. |
| A ♯ | Orange-red. |
| B | Orange. |
| c | Yellow. |
| c ♯ | Green. |
| d | Greenish-blue. |
| d ♯ | Cyanogen-blue. |
| e | Indigo-blue. |
| f | Violet. |
| f ♯ | Violet. |
| g | Ultra-violet. |
| g ♯ | Ultra-violet. |
| a | Ultra-violet. |
| a ♯ | Ultra-violet. |
| b | End of the solar spectrum. |
There is, of course, this fundamental difference between the two senses: the action of air-waves upon the ear is mechanical, simply a succession of beats, while the action of ether-waves upon the retina is chemical in its character.
The true analogy lies in the simple fact that the ear is susceptible to certain sounds produced by air-waves of certain frequencies, while the eye is susceptible to certain colors produced by ether-waves of certain frequencies, and it is possible to mechanically combine in one case the sounds so as to produce harmonies that please the ear, and in the other case the colors so as to produce harmonies that please the eye; and so far as pure sound and pure color is concerned, the harmonious compositions need have no relation, imitative or otherwise, to anything in nature.
The uneducated ear prefers melodies which are more or less suggestive of sounds heard in nature,—more or less realistic imitations of songs of birds, rippling of waters, falling of rain, rustling of leaves, crashing of thunder, etc.; or if familiar sounds are not imitated, the title of the composition must suggest some incident, place, or scene more or less familiar, so the deficient ear may be helped out by the imagination.
The highly-trained ear, on the other hand, delights in abstract compositions of sound, in harmonies which have no perceptible relation to any sound in nature, and which do not suggest any person, scene, or incident in literature or history.
The purer the taste in music the more abstract the compositions that satisfy.
So far as the appreciation of color harmonies is concerned, the taste of the Western world is like unto that of the uneducated ear in music.
We are not content with pure color compositions as we are with pure sound, but we demand either imitations of natural objects or representations of historical, literary, religious, or emotional subjects. We must have something besides pure line and color.
A musician may strike a succession of notes, or a chord, and we are pleased, the ear is satisfied; but if the painter simply sweeps his brush several times across the canvas, we are not satisfied, though the combination of colors be something more beautiful and harmonious than anything ever seen. It is not a “picture” to us; it lacks the “subject” to which we are accustomed.
And yet there are in existence certain canvases by Whistler which are little more than color-schemes, and which in color-effects are among the most beautiful things he ever painted; and in all the galleries of Europe there is nothing to compare with them in pure joyousness of color.
As children and men we enjoy the color-effects of fireworks against the blackness of night, and we enjoy the darkness and the shadows about us, the sudden light upon expectant faces, the dark-moving figures in the intervals. All this is delight in color,—color without sentiment, color without story, color without other thought or reflection than pure sensuous enjoyment; and we even feel the tawdry cheapness of the attempt when by set arrangement the features of some local or national celebrity are presented. But when an artist who sees such a night-scene and paints it in such manner that the color-scheme is preserved and its beauty enhanced in translation, we demand something more. We demand, as did Burne-Jones, “detail and composition,”—in short, we demand the features of our local celebrity.
Until we learn to love color, as we love music, for its own sake, there will never be any decorations of homes and public buildings that will be worth while.
In days long gone by, in Italy during the Renaissance and before, in Greece during the Golden Age, color was enjoyed for the sake of color, regardless of the dictates of nature. If an Italian felt like making a background of blue or gold, he did so; if a Greek felt like painting and gilding his sculpture, he did so, until the Parthenon and its contents must have been gorgeous with color, laid on, not after the precepts of nature, but for the most part arbitrarily, to please the eye.
All decoration begins with nature and ends in convention.
In this progress from birth in the imitation of natural forms and colors to death in the rigidity of a hard and lifeless convention there is a maturity wherein lines and contours and colors play with perfect freedom, original forms and models being absorbed in the finer creations of the imagination.
Ruskin habitually confused the use of color with the painting of light; while in truth there is no necessary connection at all between colorists and lightists,—to coin a word that will very legitimately mark a distinction.
The painting of light is the distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century art, and Turner was the apostle crying in the wilderness of darkness; he was the first to successfully attempt the realization of sunlight. He keyed his palette up with the sun as the objective point, while the Italians who had influenced him had keyed theirs up simply to produce color-effects. They decorated walls and altars and painted pictures—as a potter decorates his earthen bowl—to please the eye.
Although Ruskin habitually speaks of Turner as a colorist, and undoubtedly says a great many fine things concerning color, he did not care at all for color apart from the delineation of form. To him color was useful only as a mode of drawing; in itself it was as nothing at all.
Speaking of his so-called “truths” of color, he says:
“All truths of color sink at once into the second rank. He, therefore, who has neglected a truth of form for a truth of color has neglected a great truth for a less one.
“That color is indeed a most unimportant characteristic of objects will be farther evident on the slightest consideration. The color of plants is constantly changing with the season, and of everything with the quality of light falling on it; but the nature and essence of the thing are independent of these changes. An oak is an oak, whether green with spring or red with winter; a dahlia is a dahlia, whether it be yellow or crimson; and if some monster-hunting botanist should ever frighten the flower blue, still it will be a dahlia; but let one curve of the petals, one groove of the stamens, be wanting, and the flower ceases to be the same.”38
“The most convincing proof of the unimportance of color lies in the accurate observation of the way in which any material object impresses itself on the mind. If we look at nature carefully we shall find that her colors are in a state of perpetual confusion and indistinctness, while her forms, as told by light and shade, are invariably clear, distinct, and speaking. The stones and gravel of the bank catch green reflections from the boughs above; the bushes receive grays and yellows from the ground; every hairbreadth of polished surface gives a little bit of the blue sky or the gold of the sun, like a star upon the local color; this local color, changeful and uncertain in itself, is again disguised and modified by the hue of the light or quenched in the gray of the shadow; and the confusion and blending of tint is altogether so great that were we left to find out what objects were by their colors only, we would scarcely in places distinguish the boughs of a tree from the air beyond them or the ground beneath them.”
“We shall see hereafter, in considering ideas of beauty, that color, even as a source of pleasure, is feeble compared to form. But this we cannot insist upon at present,—we have only to do with simple truth; and the observations we have made are sufficient to prove that the artist who sacrifices or forgets a truth of form in the pursuit of a truth of color sacrifices what is definite to what is uncertain and what is essential to what is accidental.”39
“It is, indeed, by this that the works of Turner are peculiarly distinguished from those of all other colorists,—by the dazzling intensity, namely, of the light which he sheds through every hue, and which, far more than their brilliant color, is the real source of their overpowering effect upon the eye, an effect so reasonably made the subject of perpetual animadversion, as if the sun which they represent were a quiet, and subdued, and gentle, and manageable luminary, and never dazzled anybody, under any circumstances whatsoever. I am fond of standing by a bright Turner in the Academy, to listen to the unintentional compliments of the crowd,—‘What a glaring thing!’ ‘I declare I can’t look at it!’ ‘Don’t it hurt your eyes?’—expressed as if they were in the constant habit of looking the sun full in the face with the most perfect comfort and entire facility of vision. It is curious after hearing people malign some of Turner’s noble passages of light to pass to some really ungrammatical and false pictures of the old masters in which we have color given without light.”40
“What I am next about to say with respect to Turner’s color I should wish to be received with caution, as it admits of dispute. I think that the first approach to viciousness of color in any master is commonly indicated chiefly by a prevalence of purple and an absence of yellow. I think nature mixes yellow with almost every one of her hues, never, or very rarely, using red without it, but frequently using yellow with scarcely any red; and I believe it will be in consequence found that her favorite opposition, that which generally characterizes and gives tone to her color, is yellow and black, passing, as it retires, into white and blue. It is beyond dispute that the great fundamental opposition of Rubens is yellow and black, and that on this, concentrated in one part of the picture and modified in various grays throughout, chiefly depend the tones of all his finest works. And in Titian, though there is a far greater tendency to the purple than in Rubens, I believe no red is ever mixed with the pure blue, or glazed over it, which has not in it a modifying quantity of yellow. At all events, I am nearly certain that whatever rich and pure purples are introduced locally by the great colorists nothing is so destructive of all fine color as the slightest tendency to purple in general tone; and I am equally certain that Turner is distinguished from all the vicious colorists of the present day by the foundation of all his tones being black, yellow, and the intermediate grays, while the tendency of our common glare-seekers is invariably to pure, cold, impossible purples.”
“Powerful and captivating and faithful as his color is, it is the least important of all his excellences, because it is the least important feature of nature. He paints in color, but he thinks in light and shade; and, were it necessary, rather than lose one line of his forms or one ray of his sunshine, would, I apprehend, be content to paint in black and white to the end of his life.”41
For practical purposes truths of form are more essential than ‘truths’ of color; to mistake the size, shape, solidity, and texture of anything is far more disastrous than to mistake its color. The color-blind get on very well in the world, often without knowing their defect; but a person who was form-blind would not get on at all.
The correct appreciation of form is of such vital importance that two senses are brought to bear,—the sense of touch—the parent sense—as well as the sense of sight; and without the co-operation of the sense of touch, sight would be comparatively helpless in recognizing solidity, texture, contours, etc. In the appreciation of form touch gets on very well without sight, while sight could not get on at all without touch; but, happily, a sense so precious is never completely lost.
Ruskin constantly uses the phrases, “truths of form,” “truths of color,” and it is apparent that by these phrases he really means fidelity to natural effects. With him a drawing, be it of a stone, a leaf, a tree, a mountain, is not true unless it corresponds to the thing in nature; nor is a light or a shadow or a color true unless it corresponds to the effect in nature.
Now, so far as art is concerned, those so-called “truths” are of the least importance.
Suppose a musician were to talk of “truths of sound,” meaning thereby the more or less faithful imitation of the songs of birds, the rippling of waters, the roll of thunder. Every one would know that his art was of the most primitive character.
“Truths of sound,” in the sense that Ruskin speaks of “truths of form” and “truths of color,” are not tolerated in music. To attain certain effects, dramatic in character, imitations of sounds in nature are sometimes introduced, but sparingly, and unless with great skill the effect is disagreeable to even the uneducated ear, and if pressed too far it becomes grotesque.
One art is like unto another, and what are really “truths” in one are “truths” in another. It is immaterial whether the sense of hearing, sight, or touch is appealed to; it does not matter whether it is a composition of sound, of color, of line, or of form that is under consideration, the fundamental principles of the art are the same; and one of the fundamental propositions is: imitation is fatal to pure art.
It is the business of art to improve on nature, to take the raw materials nature furnishes—her forces, her forms, her lines, her colors, her lights and shadows, her sounds, her odors, her flavors—and produce from them harmonious and agreeable effects unknown to nature.
Whistler has said:
“The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the tree or flower or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait-painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day,—to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; in arrangement of colors to treat a flower as his key, not as his model.”42
Art begins with “truths,” in the Ruskin sense, and flowers in “harmonies,” in the Whistler sense. It begins with the concrete, with imitation, with fidelity to natural effects, and it develops by a process of abstraction until it attains the chaste perfection of a Greek temple or a Beethoven symphony.
Nature is never left entirely behind, and some arts are more dependent upon her than others; but, generally speaking, the more abstract the art the higher it is; the purer and freer it is from imitation or suggestion of natural effects, the nobler its attainment. Because poetry and music are almost entirely independent of nature and natural effects, do they as arts, from one point of view, outrank sculpture and painting.
Ruskin, of course, was by no means blind to these considerations, and when he talked of “truths of form” and “truths of color” he did not mean literal imitation, but he did mean the fidelity of a draughtsman, of a man whose eye and mind were on the thing or effect before him; and his great work is one long attempt to show that Turner in his brilliant and fanciful compositions was still clinging close to nature, that he painted rocks and trees and clouds and sunlight as they really were, and more beautifully than any man before or since.
All of which goes to show that Turner was not a colorist in the sense Whistler was.
The one used color as a means, the other as an end. To the one color, like line, or like black and white, was incidental to his composition—the composition, the conception, the dream, the fancy,—in short, the subject, being all important. To the other harmonies in color was the end in view, almost to the exclusion in some of the nocturnes of line and of form.
To Ruskin, even more than with Turner, color was simply a means to an end,—the more perfect imitation of nature; hence his utter lack of sympathy for Whistler’s work.
To pure color arrangements Ruskin was blind. He demanded a relation and significance beyond the mere color harmony. Lines or waves of color placed side by side arbitrarily, and with no more relation to nature than so many notes of music, had no meaning for him, whereas for Whistler they meant practically all there is to the science and art of color.
To Ruskin the blue hair of a Greek statue would have seemed absurd and childish; to the Greek it would have been simply a color-note in the place where it was needed to perfect the color-scheme.
So utterly wanting is the sense of color-music in the modern world that we like our sculpture in either ghastly marble, or, still more perversely, with the yellow hues and dirt and dinginess wrought by time and the elements, whereas those who created the greatest sculpture known subdued all garish qualities by the use of gold and bronze and color, not imitatively, but arbitrarily, to please a highly cultivated fancy.
From descriptions of Ruskin’s home, “Brantwood,” it is clear that he had no craving for harmonious effects about him. Discords did not disturb him; he could return with no sensations of discomfort from the keen appreciation of natural beauties to rooms which would be intolerable to any one like Whistler with an instinct for proportion and color.
The house had “a stucco classic portico in the corner, painted and grained and heaped around with lucky horseshoes, highly black-leaded.” The incongruity of the painting and graining—so contrary to all Ruskin’s teachings—and black-leaded horseshoes surprised even his friendly biographer.
His own room “he papered with naturalistic fancies to his own taste,” and on the walls were “a Dürer engraving, some Prouts and Turners, a couple of old Venetian heads, and Meissonier’s ‘Napoleon,’”—a typical collector’s conglomeration.
The walls of the dining-room were painted “duck-egg,” whatever that color may be, and covered with an even more heterogeneous collection of pictures,—“the ‘Doge of Gritta,’ a bit saved from the great Titian that was burnt in the fire at the Ducal Palace in 1574; a couple of Tintorets; Turner and Reynolds, each painted by himself in youth; Raphael, by a pupil, so it is said; portraits of old Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin and little John and his ‘boo hills.’”
His study was “papered with a pattern specially copied from Marco Marziali’s ‘Circumcision’ in the National Gallery, and hung with Turners.” There was a crimson arm-chair and a “polished-steel fender, very unartistic,” his biographer remarks; “red mahogany furniture, with startling shiny emerald leather chair-cushions; red carpet and green curtains.” This is the sort of room wherein Ruskin worked and wrote. It simply illustrates the truth that it is one thing to write and talk about color and a far different thing to really feel color.
It is the custom to call every man who paints in high key or uses brilliant colors a colorist, as Ruskin called Turner and Rubens colorists; but it is not the mere use of color that makes a man a colorist, but the use he makes of it, the object he has in mind in using it.
The mechanical draughtsman and the architect may use on their plans and designs all the known colors, but no one would think of calling either a colorist.
In painting still-life a man may exhaust the palette and yet be no colorist. In painting portraits one man may require his sitters to dress in bright colors, another in sober blacks, grays, or browns, with the result that one set of portraits fairly dazzle the beholder, while the other scarce attracts attention; and yet the former may not be the work of a colorist while the latter may.
The determining factor is the attitude of the painter towards color. If he uses color imitatively, or as incidental to drawing, or as a means to some end other than the production of color harmonies, he is not a colorist; but if his delight is in color, if he uses color for the sake of color, for the sake of charming the eye, as the ear is charmed by music, then he is a colorist.
No hard and fast line of demarcation can be drawn, since every painter is something of a colorist; but between the two extremes of the painter on one hand who uses color imitatively or as incidental to drawing and the colorist who produces and delights in pure color schemes and harmonies there is a wide interval.
Whistler, in his love of color, approached the latter extreme; but it was only when he practised decoration that he could indulge his fancy without limitations. When he brought the Leyland dining-room into harmony with his “Princess of the Land of Porcelain” by the use of blue and gold, line and form—though somewhat apparent—were virtually negligible quantities; and when he arranged the reception-room of the house in Rue du Bac, and his own studio, the only considerations were the color-effects.
In his “White Girl” of 1863 Whistler began in a large way his symphonies in color; and while in pictures like the “Thames in Ice,” “The Music Room,” and “At the Piano” he painted along more conventional lines, these departures were infrequent and in themselves exhibited his predilection for color. It was simply impossible for him to paint any picture without making the color harmony a prime object.
Not long after the “White Girl,” which was “Symphony in White, No. I.,” followed the other experiments in white, known as Symphonies Nos. II. and III.
Then came—the chronological order is not important—the Japanese group, “The Princess of the Land of Porcelain,” “The Gold Screen,” “The Balcony,” the “Lange Leizen,” and others, in which the figures and accessories, though still prominent, were made subordinate to the brilliant color schemes. The compositions were still obvious, but the color incomparably more so.
Then the “Nocturnes,” in which detail and composition were refined away, and little remained but color-effects so exquisite that they seemed, and still seem, beyond the power of brush, and more like some thin glazes and enamels than paintings on canvas.
As music in color the “Nocturnes” and certain of the “Harmonies” and “Symphonies,” wherein detail is as nothing and the color everything, are Whistler’s most exquisite—the word is used advisedly—achievements. Others will equal his portraits before they equal his “Nocturnes.”
As a still further step towards pure color composition he had in mind for years a series of pictures, pure creations of fancy, somewhat suggestive of the Japanese group, but less realistic—just color-music. Happily, the sketches are in existence, and afford some indication of the color-dreams that floated through the great painter’s imagination. They show how musical color is when freed from entangling associations and used broadly and decoratively.
We have, then, the following phases, rather than “periods,” in his mastery of color:
1. That wherein composition and detail predominate, though color is the motive.
2. That wherein composition and detail are still conspicuous, but are subordinate to the color scheme.
3. That wherein composition and detail are practically lost in the effort to produce subtle color harmonies.
4. That wherein the sole object is color-music, quite regardless of other considerations.
This progress from the, so to speak, tentative use of color in connection with more or less conventional composition to the triumph of color and suppression of composition is abundantly illustrated in his works. It would not be difficult to arrange an exhibition of four groups of about three canvases each, which would illustrate each phase. Such an exhibition would do more to enlighten the public regarding his work than any number of exhibitions of a large number of pictures gathered and grouped in the usual way.
Regarding the use of flat tones he is reported to have once said:
“House-painters have the right idea about painting, God bless them.”
How far removed from Ruskin, who said:
“Hence, wherever in a painting we have unvaried color extended even over a small space, there is falsehood. Nothing can be natural which is monotonous; nothing true which only tells one story.”
To Ruskin nature was all in all; to Whistler color was of first consideration. The one looked at color to find natural effects; the other looked at nature to find color-effects.
Whistler chose intuitively those scenes and those hours of the day when he would be least hampered by rigid requirements of line and form.
He frequently painted the sea under strong light; but under any light water presents itself in broken lines and large masses.
He was a master of line in the high sense that with a few lines he could render not only the character but the characteristics of whatever was before him. He was a master of form,—even as Ruskin uses the term,—since he could, when the conditions required it, express the most subtle contours in terms of light and shade and color; but he cared less for the bald realities of sunlight than for the shadows of dusk and the mysteries of night.
He has himself said:
“The sun blares, the wind blows from the east, the sky is bereft of cloud, and without all is of iron. The windows of the Crystal Palace are seen from all points of London. The holiday-maker rejoices in the glorious day, and the painter turns aside to shut his eyes.
“How little this is understood, and how dutifully the casual in nature is accepted as sublime, may be gathered from the unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset.
“The dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in distinctness, but the joy of the tourist is to recognize the traveller on the top. The desire to see for the sake of seeing is, with the mass, alone the one to be gratified, hence the delight in detail.
“And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us,—then the wayfarer hastens home; the working-man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure cease to understand, as they have ceased to see; and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master,—her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.”43
And it was his habit to paint when the studio was filled with gloom and lengthening shadows crept across the floor; when it was so dark the dull eye of sitter or chance visitor could scarce distinguish the figure on the canvas.
This “painting in the dark,” as some have called it, was a singular trait. He would paint with increasing force and effect as the room became darker and darker, until it seemed as if the falling of night was an inspiration.
Once a sitter asked him how it was possible to paint when it was so dark.
“As the light fades and the shadows deepen all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great strong masses: the buttons are lost, but the garment remains; the garment is lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that night cannot efface from the painter’s imagination.”
People never could understand his attitude towards nature. When he spoke of the “unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset,” and how “the dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in distinctness, but the joy of the tourist is to recognize the traveller on the top,” he at once puzzled and irritated the lay mind, for is not the sunset beautiful? and the traveller on the highest peak of greater interest than the mountain?
When a lady one day rushed up to him and enthusiastically exclaimed:
“Oh, Mr. Whistler, I have just been up the river, and it reminded me so much of your pictures.”
And he replied:
“Indeed! Then, Nature is looking up,”—people resented it as vanity.
But it was not vanity. It was simply his attitude towards nature and art.
If some one had said to Mendelssohn, “I have just been in the woods and heard sounds that were just like some of your “Songs without Words,” Mendelssohn would have been surprised, and might well have replied, “Then, the birds are doing better.”
Concerning nature, Whistler said:
“That nature is always right is an assertion artistically as untrue as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right; to such an extent, even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong. That is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all.
“This would seem, to even the most intelligent, a doctrine almost blasphemous. So incorporated with our education has the supposed aphorism become, that its belief is held to be part of our moral being; and the words themselves have, in our ear, the ring of religion. Still, seldom does nature succeed in producing a picture.”44
One should never confound art with nature; they are antithetical terms. There is no art in nature; there should be no nature in art. And what is art is not nature, and what is nature is not art.
Nature is the raw material, art is the finished product; and art should no more resemble nature than a cave resembles a house. And to the extent that art slavishly imitates nature is it of the cave-dwelling variety.
There is no color that is not found in nature. There is no combination of colors a hint of which cannot be found in nature. But it is the business of art to take the colors, accept the hints, and produce combinations and effects not found in nature.
It is not the business of the artist to paint anything as it is, but everything as he sees it.
Yet the public demand that a tree shall be reproduced as they see it,—that the picture shall be a substitute for the reality. Why not go to the window and look at the tree? For, as a tree, with its quivering leaves and the infinite play of light and shadow, it is more beautiful than any realistic photograph, drawing, or painting possibly could be. But to see the reflection of the tree in the depths of a human soul one must turn to art, to poetry, to music, or to painting. The reflection may not at all resemble the reality any more than Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” resembles the bird or the song of the bird; but it will be far more interesting and far more beautiful because a human expression.
The child’s mud-house and the boy’s snow-man are of greater concern to humankind than all the plains and mountains of the earth.