Modern Painting | Page 8

seen Italy; and though writing no language but
ours, still writing it with a strange hybrid grace, bringing into it the rich
and voluptuous colour and fragrance of the south, expressing in picture
and poem nothing but an uneasy haunting sense of Italy--opulence of
women, not of the south, nor yet of the north, Italian celebration,
mystic altar linen, and pomp of gold vestment and legendary pane. Of
such hauntings Rossetti's life and art were made.
His hold on poetic form was surer than his hold on pictorial form,
wherein his art is hardly more than poetic reminiscence of Italian
missal and window pane. Yet even as a painter his attractiveness cannot
be denied, nor yet the influence he has exercised on English art.
Though he took nothing from his contemporaries, all took from him,
poets and painters alike. Not even Mr. Whistler could refrain, and in La
femme en blanc he took from Rossetti his manner of feeling and seeing.
The type of woman is the same--beauty of dreaming eyes and abundant
hair. And in this picture we find a poetic interest, a moral sense, if I
may so phrase it, nowhere else to be detected, though you search Mr.
Whistler's work from end to end. The woman stands idly dreaming by
her mirror. She is what is her image in the glass, an appearance that has
come, and that will go leaving no more trace than her reflection on the
glass when she herself has moved away. She sees in her dream the
world like passing shadows thrown on an illuminated cloth. She thinks
of her soft, white, and opulent beauty which fills her white dress; her
chin is lifted, and above her face shines the golden tumult of her hair.
The picture is one of the most perfect that Mr. Whistler has painted; it
is as perfect as the mother or Miss Alexander, and though it has not the
beautiful, flowing, supple execution of the "symphony in white", I
prefer it for sake of its sheer perfection. It is more perfect than the
symphony in white, though there is nothing in it quite so extraordinary
as the loving gaiety of the young girl's face. The execution of that face
is as flowing, as spontaneous, and as bright as the most beautiful day of
May. The white drapery clings like haze about the edge of the woods,
and the flesh tints are pearly and evanescent as dew, and soft as the
colour of a flowering mead. But the kneeling figure is not so perfect,
and that is why I reluctantly give my preference to the woman by the
mirror. Turning again to this picture, I would fain call attention to the

azalias, which, in irresponsible decorative fashion, come into the
right-hand corner. The delicate flowers show bright and clear on the
black-leaded fire-grate; and it is in the painting of such detail that Mr.
Whistler exceeds all painters. For purity of colour and the beauty of
pattern, these flowers are surely as beautiful as anything that man's
hand has ever accomplished.
Mr. Whistler has never tried to be original. He has never attempted to
reproduce on canvas the discordant and discrepant extravagancies of
Nature as M. Besnard and Mr. John Sargent have done. His style has
always been marked by such extreme reserve that the critical must have
sometimes inclined to reproach him with want of daring, and ask
themselves where was the innovator in this calculated reduction of
tones, in these formal harmonies, in this constant synthesis, sought with
far more disregard for superfluous detail than Hals, for instance, had
ever dared to show. The still more critical, while admitting the beauty
and the grace of this art, must have often asked themselves what, after
all, has this painter invented, what new subject-matter has he
introduced into art?
It was with the night that Mr. Whistler set his seal and sign-manual
upon art; above all others he is surely the interpreter of the night. Until
he came the night of the painter was as ugly and insignificant as any
pitch barrel; it was he who first transferred to canvas the blue
transparent darkness which folds the world from sunset to sunrise. The
purple hollow, and all the illusive distances of the gas-lit river, are Mr.
Whistler's own. It was not the unhabited night of lonely plain and
desolate tarn that he chose to interpret, but the difficult populous city
night--the night of tall bridges and vast water rained through with lights
red and grey, the shores lined with the lamps of the watching city. Mr.
Whistler's night is the vast blue and golden caravanry, where the jaded
and the hungry and the heavy-hearted lay down their burdens, and the
contemplative freed from the deceptive reality of the day