Modern Painting | Page 6

ever of the primary importance of
selection. In Velasquez, too, there is selection, and very often it is in
the same direction as Mr. Whistler's, but the selection is never, I think,
so much insisted upon; and sometimes in Velasquez there is, as in the
portrait of the Admiral in the National Gallery, hardly any selection--I
mean, of course, conscious selection. Velasquez sometimes brutally
accepted Nature for what she was worth; this Mr. Whistler never does.
But it was Velasquez that gave consistency and strength to what in Mr.
Whistler might have run into an art of trivial but exquisite decoration.
Velasquez, too, had a voice in the composition of the palette generally,
so sober, so grave. The palette of Velasquez is the opposite of the
palette of Rubens; the fantasy of Rubens' palette created the art of
Watteau, Turner, Gainsborough; it obtained throughout the eighteenth
century in England and in France. Chardin was the one exception.
Alone amid the eighteenth century painters he chose the palette of
Velasquez in preference to that of Rubens, and in the nineteenth
century Whistler too has chosen it. It was Velasquez who taught Mr.
Whistler that flowing, limpid execution. In the painting of that blonde
hair there is something more than a souvenir of the blonde hair of the
Infante in the _salle carrée_ in the Louvre. There is also something of

Velasquez in the black notes of the shoes. Those blacks--are they not
perfectly observed? How light and dry the colour is! How heavy and
shiny it would have become in other hands! Notice, too, that in the
frock nowhere is there a single touch of pure white, and yet it is all
white--a rich, luminous white that makes every other white in the
gallery seem either chalky or dirty. What an enchantment and a delight
the handling is! How flowing, how supple, infinitely and beautifully
sure, the music of perfect accomplishment! In the portrait of the mother
the execution seems slower, hardly so spontaneous. For this, no doubt,
the subject is accountable. But this little girl is the very finest flower,
and the culminating point of Mr. Whistler's art. The eye travels over the
canvas seeking a fault. In vain; nothing has been omitted that might
have been included, nothing has been included that might have been
omitted. There is much in Velasquez that is stronger, but nothing in this
world ever seemed to me so perfect as this picture.
The portrait of Carlyle has been painted about an arabesque similar, I
might almost say identical, to that of the portrait of the mother. But as
is usually the case, the attempt to repeat a success has resulted a failure.
Mr. Whistler has sought to vary the arabesque in the direction of
greater naturalness. He has broken the severity of the line, which the
lace handkerchief and the hands scarcely stayed in the first picture, by
placing the philosopher's hat upon his knees, he has attenuated the
symmetry of the picture-frames on the walls, and has omitted the black
curtain which drops through the earlier picture. And all these alterations
seemed to me like so many leaks through which the eternal something
of the first design has run out. A pattern like that of the egg and dart
cannot be disturbed, and Columbus himself cannot rediscover America.
And, turning from the arabesque to the painting, we notice at once that
the balance of colour, held with such exquisite grace by the curtain on
one side and the dress on the other, is absent in the later work; and if
we examine the colours separately we cannot fail to apprehend the fact
that the blacks in the later are not nearly so beautiful as those in the
earlier picture. The blacks of the philosopher's coat and rug are neither
as rich, not as rare, nor as deep as the blacks of the mother's gown.
Never have the vital differences and the beauty of this colour been
brought out as in that gown and that curtain, never even in Hals, who
excels all other painters in this use of black. Mr. Whistler's failure with

the first colour, when we compare the two pictures, is exceeded by his
failure with the second colour. We miss the beauty of those
extraordinary and exquisite high notes--the cap and cuffs; and the place
of the rich, palpitating greys, so tremulous in the background of the
earlier picture, is taken by an insignificant grey that hardly seems
necessary or helpful to the coat and rug, and is only just raised out of
the commonplace by the dim yellow of two picture-frames. It must be
admitted, however, that the yellow is perfectly successful; it may be
almost said to be what is most attractive in the picture. The greys in
chin,