Looking through old issues of Leisure Painter and The Artist for articles for the Yesteryears features, I came across diary pages by Alfred Thornton, N.E.A.C. written as series in the 1930s. I thought they might form a good modern day blog so here is a copy of part VII: 1892 - 1903, about his dealings with Whistler! (we will have tickets to the forthcoming Whistler exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery to give away next month too) DIARY OF AN ART STUDENT OF THE NINETIES The continuation of this diary (the last installment of which appeared in the September issue 1935) contains a vast amount of historical information , and will be eagerly read by the thousands of readers who took so much pleasure in the earlier part – Ed. Part VII: 1892-1903 By Alfred Thornton, N.E.A.c. In resuming these recollections I am turning back a few years and writing in a lighter vein, before taking up the less personal and more general issues that presented themselves. In 1892 Whistler, really a great artist, was regarded very differently than he is at the present time, though he will come into his own when his work has been revised in the process of years - an event that invariably occurs with all good artists' pictures. He had considerable, though not very lasting, influence on the young men of his period, and it is to him that Sickert owes certain delicate tonal qualities in h is pictures. But fortunately for Sickert he was sent in 1883 to take Whistler's Portrait of the Artist's Mother to Paris, accompanied by a letter of introduction to Degas at his studio in the Rue Pigalle. From this sprang a friendship, which lasted until the death of Degas in 1917, the effect of which was happy, for the mordant severity of the French draughtsman counterbalanced the exquisite aerial sensibility of the American. Whistler was not by nature a draughtsman, and when taken unawares betrayed this. As is the case with most artists of real personality, he had to fight for success, and only at last came into his own at a one-man show in Bond Street in 1892. It was then that the witty and malicious ' Little Brown Catalogue ' was published in which he retaliated on the journalists by quoting their past criticisms in the catalogue, with an occasional sarcasm of his own thrown in. Degas, who regarded Whistler as a true artist and detested this sort of thing, considering the Press to be beyond the pale, used to say petulantly: ' Bah! Whistler goes on as if he were not a man of talent! ' \\'ith all Whistler's gibes at journalists , it is not difficult to find the critic of a daily paper tripping , since the conditions of his work demand haste, but it is remarkable how certain critics of sensibility on the weeklies, who had time to think, anticipated the discoveries of their juniors. I understood Whistler to have been much maligned artist as a young man, but a few hours spent in the British Museum amongst the copies of the great dailies published around 1863 led to a modification of this view. Had he been more conciliatory, no doubt he could have been an Academician; in fact a member named Boughton, who knew and liked Whistler and admired his work said: ‘If you had behaved yourself you might have been president’. But controversy was a tonic to him, so he was always at war, if not with a patron such as Sir William Eden - when he was in the wrong- it was sometimes with his best friends. The New English Art Club hung one of Eden’s watercolours after the quarrel. Sickert belonged to the club, but was not on the jury at the time, yet when Sickert criticized one of Pennell's auto-lithographs - the process was then a new on e-as not being a t rue lithograph, Wh istler made Pennell bring an action for libel made Pennell bring an action for libel against Sickert, one of his most faithful and loyal supporters. There was no real malice in Sickert's remark, for he said to me that perhaps it was a bit of purism, and laughed at his chastity in the matter. In 1892 Whistler came into his own with the press and intelligent public, but not with the buyers. However Marchant, who had just taken over the Goupil Galleries, had both the foresight and the courage of his opinion to stock Whistler's pictures. The best buyers were in Scotland in in the Midlands, so he took The Little White Girl and Nocturne in Blue and Silver, now at the National Gallery, to the North, and, failing purchasers there, came home weary and dispirited. Arthur Studd who had been over in Paris with Rothenstein for some time, had bought a Claude Monet (one of the rick series) and ade Chavannes, but had admired Nocturne and Little White Girl, asked me to go to the Goupil Gallery and buy them for him. It happened that that I chose the very day on which Marchant had returned, tired and depressed from the North to visit the Goupil Gallery. It was a dark March afternoon when Marchant was about to leave the gallery and I felt his depression. He knew me to be a penniless student – in fact he had some of my work on sale - and was bored at my insistence on seeing The Little White Girl and the Nocturne which he had hawked unsuccessfully down the length and breadth of England; so he showed me first one picture wearily and even more wearily the second. Then this penniless student asked the price of the two, which was given as £1,600, and, to Marchant’s utter surprise, at once made a firm offer of £1400 - £800 for the figure painting and £600 for the Nocturne. Marchant told me years after that I could have knocked him down. To me he seemed cool enough when he said he would reply in four days; but I noticed that the reply came in just two. I got nothing from the transaction – no ten per cent, of course – and Studd seemed to think I had been beating Whistler down, whereas the matter only concerned the man who had bought the pictures from the artist. MacColl, who met me a little while later, who wanted to know ‘what the devil I had been doing buying The Little White Girl, which he had been trying to procure for the nation at the exact price Studd had paid (£800) only he had persuaded Marchant to contribute £100 himself. However, the nation now possesses the pictures without cost, since Studd included them in his bequest as well as the second Nocturne – The Fire Wheel. With this I also had to do, for meeting Studd outside his house in Cheyne Walk one day, the question of this picture arose. It appeared that Whistler wanted to borrow £1000, and was willing to hand over a couple of pictures as a gurantee. By this time the two men had become close friends, Studd being fascinated by the other’s brilliance. I asked if Studd had the £1000 and could spare it. On his saying he could and knowing Whistler, I suggested his buying one of the pictures as in any case Whistler’s prices were rising rapidly, and he could, if necessary, easily recoup himself: but what mattered more to Studd was that if there were no debt between them there was no risk of his losing Whsitler’s friendship. Now the Nocture in Blue and Gold – The Fire Wheel hangs with its fellows in Trafalgar Square. Whistler had skimmed nature with such exquisite taste that there was little left for his followers. Some of his experiments in the use of dark grounds have proved ruinous to his pictures, but the solidly painted works, done under the influence of Courbet, such as The Piano Picture, hold their own in the face of time, as does the Portrait of Miss Alexander. After all, most men of character have a kink somewhere, even the greatest, and artists, from their temperament, show these kinks more evidently than others, yet even with them, where the man is really great, his work being based on some deep truth from the unconscious is wholesome enough when we come to understand it, as it possesses universal qualities. Even so balanced a writer as Roger Fry was, in his scholarship (and really in his various carefully thought out experiments in painting), occasionally went off at a tangent, as when he worried one of the editors of the Burlington Magazine for some six weeks to have it printed in Esperanto. His desire in life was to be a great painter rather than a good scholar, but our dearest wishes are often denied us, though we may succeed in other directions. Fry’s pictures looked too much pondered, and I suggested that he let himself go and allow his subconscious mind some freedom. His reply was that ‘if he did the damned thing would only produce a pastiche.’ Such was the penalty of being a good critic of the old masters and a good scholar. But the strangest of the artists whom I knew were Beardsley and Conder. Both were possessed of genius in some measure. Beardsley was from the first morbid, as was to be expected of a consumptive, and the feverishness of his career was a symbol of his bodily state. When he was dying at Mentone, Conder went to see him, and Beardsley said; ‘Here am I, a genius, dying, while you are going to live. If by any chance I do live, I shall destroy all my pornographic drawings and everything that is of that nature in my work, and devote my powers to the service of the Catholic Church. Not very long after telling me this, Conder fell victim to his own genius. Such men seem predestined to catastrophe. Yet one man of genius still with us has given up all for his painting and with calm serenity, to the benefit of himself and his generation – Wilson Steer. (To be continued)