Recollections and impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler — Inside the Classic

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Authors: Eddy, Arthur Jerome, 1859-1920 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2022 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Whistler, James McNeill, 1834-1903; Painters -- United States -- 19th century -- Biography Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 73,660

Reading time 321 min

Text sections 11

Recollections and impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler — Inside the Classic can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 73,660 words, 5 hr 21 min estimated reading time, and 11 detected text sections.

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Source: Project Gutenberg record #68447

Arthur Jerome Eddy's personal recollections of James McNeill Whistler, drawn from watching him work and from interviews, offer a close-up view of the artist's methods, wit, and battles with critics, particularly John Ruskin. The narrative weaves anecdote with analysis of Whistler's color theory and his defiant public persona.

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re not admitted free. The law reads, the works of American artists “residing _temporarily_ abroad” shall be admitted free, etc.

Some department at Washington made an off-hand ruling that if an American artist had resided more than five years abroad his works would be subject to duty as those of a foreigner, thereby expatriating with a stroke of the pen four-fifths of the Americans who are working like dogs--but as artists--to make the world beautiful.

To Whistler, Sargent, and the many prosperous ones the ruling did not greatly matter, but to the younger men who could not earn money enough to get home it did matter, and for a time it looked as if American art in Europe would be obliterated,--for American art in Europe depends for its support and aggressiveness on the American artists over there. Drive these men home, or expatriate them, so as to compel them to cast their lots with France, or England, or Italy, and what would become of those American sections in foreign exhibitions which for at least a dozen years past have commanded the serious consideration of all thoughtful observers as containing elements of strength, sobriety, and promise found nowhere else in the entire world of art?

Happily an appeal to the Secretary of the Treasury--a man interested in art--resulted in an immediate reversal of the ruling, and the works of American artists come in free unless the artist declares his intention of residing abroad permanently.

But while the ban on American painting is lifted, sculpture is in a bad way. Under the law only sculpture “wrought by hand” from marble or metal by the sculptor is to be classed as art. Inasmuch as the sculptor never did work bronze by hand, and nowadays very rarely touches the marble, there is no sculpture which comes within the law. The federal courts of New York, high and low, have soberly held that unless it is shown that bronzes are “wrought by hand” by the sculptor, instead of cast from plaster, which in turn is made from the clay, they are commercial products and classed with bronze cooking utensils at forty-five per cent. duty. However, a federal judge in Chicago, somewhat more familiar with art processes, has held that the New York decisions are arrant nonsense, and original bronzes by Rodin, St. Gaudens, and other sculptors, made in the only known way of producing bronzes, should be classed as art. What other federal courts may hold--each, under our wonderful system, having the right to its opinion until the Supreme Court is called upon to finally end the differences--Heaven alone knows; but for the present it behooves lovers of art to bring in their original bronzes and marbles by way of Chicago.

These were some of the things Whistler--in common with many an ordinary man--could not understand.

A few years ago an effort was made to have an exhibition of his pictures in Boston. He was appealed to, but refused:

“God bless me, why should you hold an exhibition of pictures in America? The people do not care for art.”

“How do you know? You have not been there for many years.”

“How do I know! Why, haven’t you a law to keep out pictures and statues? Is it not in black and white that the works of the great masters must not enter America, that they are not wanted----”

“There are no ‘buts’ about it except the fool who butts his head against the barrier you have erected. A people that tolerates such a law has no love for art,--their protestation is mere pretence.”

That a great nation should deliberately discourage the importation of beautiful things, should wallow in the mire of ugliness and refuse to be cleansed by art, was to him a mystery,--for what difference does it make whether painting, poetry, and music come out of the East or out of the West, so long as they add to the happiness of a people? And why should painting and sculpture find the gate closed when poetry and music are admitted?

He did not know the petty commercial considerations which control certain of the painters and sculptors and some of the institutions supposed to be devoted to art.

For is not art the most “infant” of all the “infant industries” of this great commercial nation? And should not the brush-worker at home be given his meed of protection against the pauper brush-workers of Europe--even against Rembrandt and Velasquez and all the glorious Italians?

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Arthur Jerome Eddy first encountered James McNeill Whistler in the 1890s, and over the next decade he assembled the notes that became this book. Eddy writes in the foreword that the reminiscences are “mostly personal,” many anecdotes coming “from the artist’s own lips.” He is careful to distinguish his own views from Whistler’s, insisting that “not so much as a thought must be attributed to him unless expressly quoted.” The result is a hybrid work: part memoir, part art criticism, part compilation of press clippings. Eddy’s voice is that of an admiring but not uncritical observer, and the book’s structure—eleven chapters moving from biography to aesthetic disputes—reflects his dual interest in the man and the work.

Eddy’s Method of Observation

Eddy’s account is built from direct observation. He watched Whistler paint “day after day” and conducted “many interviews” in which the artist would “speak plainly concerning art.” This proximity gives the book its texture: small details of Whistler’s working habits, his choice of pigments, his reactions to sitters. Eddy does not claim to be a biographer; he calls the biographical data “just sufficient to furnish a connecting thread.” Instead, he foregrounds his own role as a witness. The reader is always aware that these are recollections, filtered through a single consciousness. Eddy’s prose is plain, even lawyerly, but it gains authority from its specificity. He notes, for instance, that Whistler’s 1892 exhibition catalogue reprinted hostile press comments under the heading “The Voice of a People,” and he quotes the Merrie England jibe that Whistler “paints in soot colors and mud colors.” Such citations anchor Eddy’s narrative in documented exchanges.

The Ruskin Debate as a Structural Core

Eddy devotes considerable space to the Ruskin libel suit and its aftermath. He reproduces Ruskin’s own words on color—grouping Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Raphael as painters “irrespective of color”—and then dissects the statement. Eddy argues that “no man with any sense of color whatsoever would group” those artists together, and he contrasts their approach with that of Veronese, Titian, and Turner. This is not mere polemic; it is a close reading of Ruskin’s prose, complete with italics preserved from the original. Eddy’s own position emerges clearly: he believes Ruskin valued light over color, and that Whistler’s art was a corrective. The chapter becomes a miniature essay on art theory, but it remains tethered to the specific quarrel. Eddy also notes the repetition of critical tropes—the “kitchen stuff” criticism of Turner in 1842 reappearing as “mud and soot” for Whistler fifty years later—and asks, with dry irony, “Are we to linger forever about the cook-stove in the depreciation of art?”

Voice and Pace: From Anecdote to Analysis

The book’s rhythm shifts between conversational anecdote and sustained argument. Early chapters move quickly through Whistler’s American origins, his time at West Point, and his early days in Paris and Venice. Later chapters slow down for extended treatments of color theory, the “Peacock Room,” and the Royal Society of British Artists. Eddy’s own voice is most present in the analytical passages, where he uses the first person sparingly but effectively. He writes, for example, that “in all but color Rembrandt forgot more than most of the Italians ever knew,” a judgment that is personal but grounded in the evidence he has just presented. The pacing mirrors the process of getting to know an artist: first the outline of a life, then the deepening engagement with the work. Eddy’s decision to include entire press clippings and catalogue notes gives the reader a sense of the public noise surrounding Whistler, while his own commentary provides a quieter counterpoint.

Eddy’s book is best read as a companion to Whistler’s own writings, especially The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Where Whistler was epigrammatic and combative, Eddy is deliberate and explanatory. He does not try to replicate the artist’s wit; instead, he builds a case for Whistler’s seriousness. Readers interested in the social history of art criticism will find the documented exchanges with Ruskin and the press particularly valuable. Those seeking a straightforward biography should look elsewhere—Eddy’s account is partial, personal, and deliberately incomplete. But as a record of one intelligent observer’s encounter with a difficult genius, it has a quiet authority of its own.

Reading Eddy’s account of Whistler’s quiet insistence on his own color sense, I recalled a rainy afternoon spent with Armor and Arms An elementary handbook and guide to the collection in the City Art Museum of St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A. — Themes and Context. Both books made me feel the patient weight of a maker’s hand, and how a collection can hold a person’s stubborn devotion.