Whistler’s Effort, Ruskin’s Finish

James McNeill Whistler may not have started the fight with Ruskinism, but he did return to it, over and over again, even if neither conclusively finished it. Having seen several paintings by Whistler at the newly opened Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1877, the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) declared of the artist’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket 1875 (YMSM 170; fig.1), hereafter The Falling Rocket: ‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’.1 Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, claiming £1,000 in damages as a result of the critic’s public condemnation. The case went to trial in November the following year, but Ruskin was too ill to appear in court. The jury gave the verdict in Whistler’s favour but he was awarded only a farthing in damages.

Ruskin’s instigating aesthetic complaint was, as Linda Merrill notes in her critical study and reconstruction of the trial, ‘subsumed … by the larger and more urgent issue of the integrity of the artist’s labour’.2 Ruskin’s image of Whistler ‘flinging a pot of paint’ at the public suggests an uncontrolled physical gesture, one not directed by ideas or by the dexterity of a learned skill. Furthermore, his choice of the word ‘pot’ evokes materials used by a decorator, not an artist and oil painter. The classist figure of speech recalls the passages of paint flecks in The Falling Rocket, but it also expresses the critic’s contempt for the lack of effort he perceived in Whistler’s work. Implicit in Ruskin’s way of reading the effort involved in the creation of art is an argument for the visible signs of labour in the surface of a painting.

A lot of ink has been spilled critically relitigating the terms of the dispute. Whistler continually returned to the accusations that emerged during the trial to sharpen his own theory of art, even some fifteen years later.3 Ruskin’s comments and the totality of Whistler’s response that it occasioned – the suit he brought, the trial and the copious amounts of published and unpublished art writing that followed – show how Whistler was able to articulate and develop his ideas in the many productive years afterwards because of the trial.  It is tempting to imagine, through their works, the meeting of minds that the trial could have been, had Ruskin been well and had Whistler performed the views he refined later on, such as in his account of the trial, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890).4 But even his earlier pamphlet Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics, published  after the trial in 1878, reflects a developed manifesto on the authority of the art critic and mounts an argument against Ruskin’s right to his criticism, upon which the legal issue of libel rested. Tracing where Whistler’s and Ruskin’s views productively clash and productively dovetail reveals what is at stake for the debates about finish in the nineteenth century and points towards surprisingly common, albeit unsteady, ground.

What the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898) had to say in his statement to Ruskin’s defence counsel had more to do with Whistler’s finish than paint flinging.  A close friend and something of a pupil of Ruskin’s, Burne-Jones volunteered to help Ruskin upon hearing about Whistler’s intention to seek legal action, but did not initially expect the critic to take up his offer. Sixteen months later he was named the chief witness for the defence in Ruskin’s stead.5 In his pre-trial statement to Ruskin’s lawyers, Burne-Jones introduced the issue of finish as the foundation of his objections to Whistler’s art, such that the question of ‘whether Whistler’s works were finished pictures’ became one ‘that arose persistently from the defence’.6 He disparaged the artist and his supporters by stating that Whistler had ‘succeeded in a measure amongst the semi-artistic part of the public’ but that his ‘vanities and eccentricities’ were a longstanding joke among artists, hence drawing a cutting distinction that Whistler was not taken seriously by artistic circles that excluded, by implication, those who admired Whistler’s work.7 His language of limited extent (Whistler succeeding ‘in a measure’, among ‘the semi-artistic part of the public’) develops into a yet more critical judgment of Whistler’s artistic inadequacy. Whistler had at first showed ‘sufficient excellence in his work’, enough for people to ‘look forward to his future with some interest’ – having ‘exhausted’ such potential, there was no longer ‘any expectation of further fulfilment’, ‘the deficiency is insuperable’.8 Burne-Jones maintains that Whistler ‘has never yet produced anything but sketches … Not once has he committed himself to the peril of completing anything’.9 For Burne-Jones, the ‘test’ of the artist lay in the ability to take on that risk:

The lack of finish he perceived in Whistler’s work was not just proof of insufficient skill, it was a moral deficiency – Whistler was, to Burne-Jones, ‘an incomplete artist’ whose plan was ‘to found a school of incapacity, to declare loudly that no picture is of value for the qualities that all mankind, ancients and moderns, have striven for and demanded’.11 Burne-Jones insisted upon a fixed point of finish that all artists should aspire to. As he was of the opinion that Whistler had fallen short of such standards, Whistler was to be regarded as a threat to his closely held beliefs.

These are high standards for finish, but they cut both ways. Burne-Jones’s vehemence may have stemmed in part from defensiveness. Ruskin’s remarks about Burne-Jones’s own works shown at the same exhibition had been included in the original libel claim submitted by Whistler’s solicitor.12 Testifying for Whistler, the painter Albert Joseph Moore (1841–1893) ventured that ‘People abroad charge us [British artists] with finishing our pictures too much’.13 This had indeed been the case for Burne-Jones’s painting The Mirror of Venus 1873–7 (fig.2), an unintended counterpoint to Whistler’s indistinctness that was displayed in the Grosvenor’s West Gallery, where Whistler’s Falling Rocket also hung.14 Oscar Wilde’s assessment of the picture registered the sharply detailed quality of the figures’ reflections in the clear pool, which was more like ‘a mirror of polished steel’ than water.15 English reviewers  were even more unconvinced by Burne-Jones’s depiction of the pond, with a particularly hostile critic for the Morning Post noting that ‘the shadows are to the full as strong as the substances, so that it would matter very little, if at all, though the painting were turned upside down’.16 Evidently disturbed by the uncanny clarity of the figures’ reflections in the pond’s unnatural stillness, the sceptical responses to Burne-Jones’s odd visual logic suggest that there may be such a thing as too much finish.

Burne-Jones reiterated his views on Whistler’s finish when testifying in court. When asked by Charles Synge Christopher Bowen, junior counsel for Ruskin, ‘what part … finish and completeness bear to the merit of a painting’, Burne-Jones maintained that ‘complete finish ought to be the object of all artists’.17 In collapsing the distinction Ruskin’s lawyer had made, Burne-Jones framed the two qualities as inextricable; the completion of a picture was contingent on its degree of finish and the value of a picture contingent on the effort that had gone into making it. He admitted to seeing ‘marks of great labour and artistic skill’ in Whistler’s pictures but distinguished this labour from effort in his suggestion that the artist had ‘evaded the great difficulty of painting by not carrying his pictures far enough’.18 Completion, for Burne-Jones, required the marks on the surface of the canvas to be worked up into sufficiently mimetic detail – anything less made the pictures, in his words, merely ‘sketches’. The abstraction of a painting such as The Falling Rocket signalled to him that the artist had avoided the difficult and necessary part of finishing. As Merrill observes, ‘Burne-Jones took seriously Whistler’s egotistical boasts: he seems to have believed that Whistler really did consider himself the only artist who ever lived’.19 To have someone whom he regarded as shirking the challenges of painting claim that his was not only the best way but the only way represented a threat to Burne-Jones’s moral integrity as an artist.

The irony, of course, is that Whistler’s technique posed great difficulties of its own. Technical studies by conservation scientists such as Stephen Hackney and Joyce Townsend have revealed that the highly viscous paint medium that Whistler called his ‘sauce’ was very difficult to control and left him little margin for error.20 In a long, journal-like letter to his fellow artist Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904), written over the course of a month in 1864, Whistler chronicles the frustrating pace of his work: ‘I am so slow! – When will my execution get quicker when I say execution I mean something quite different – you understand – I produce very little, because I scrape off so much’.21 Whistler’s complaint about his unproductiveness is indicative of the way his exacting process became an impediment to the completion of paintings. Merrill likewise observes that Whistler completed only ‘about two dozen full-length portraits, because at every small dissatisfaction he would scrape the painting down and begin anew, covering his tracks so that the production appeared effortless’.22 The appearance of effortlessness in Whistler’s art is the result of great pains to attain it.

In 1911 his friends and biographers Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell loyally defended him by redressing the perception that his nocturnes were easy work, quoting (not verbatim) his letters to Fantin-Latour:

The accusation by Attorney General John Holker, Ruskin’s lead counsel during the trial, that Whistler ‘knocked off’ his nocturnes clearly remained a particularly sore point for the Pennells, who were keen on repudiating the notion and objecting to Holker’s turn of phrase. When the Pennells’ biography was first published in October 1908, they had instead rebuffed ‘a public trained by the Pre-Raphaelites’ that believed that the nocturnes ‘seemed mere sketches, unfinished, as Burne-Jones said’.24 By repositioning the public as Ruskin trained in the 1911 edition, the Pennells made it clear where they placed the blame for the negative reception Whistler’s work received. That they were still parroting Holker’s phrase in an edition published thirty-three years after the trial is a testament to the seriousness of its implied criticism of Whistler’s artistic efforts.

Whistler justifies the pains he took to achieve this effortlessness in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies by outlining his aphoristic ‘Propositions—No. 2’, a manifesto on artistic labour first published as ‘L’Envoie’ in 1884:

Whistler inverts the relationship Burne-Jones establishes between detailed mimetic finish and the visible signs of effort, the latter of which Whistler deems to be ‘proof … of absolutely insufficient work’. ‘The work of the master reeks not of the sweat of the brow,’ Whistler continues, it ‘suggests no effort’.26 But as Burne-Jones conceded during the trial to seeing in Whistler’s pictures ‘marks of great labour and artistic skill’, Whistler may have been able to make his art seem effortless but he could not render it labour-less; despite his bold posturing in ‘Propositions—No.2’, work cannot efface the footsteps of work, only the quality of the artist’s effort.

In his Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea 1871 (YMSM 103; Tate T01571; fig.3), evidence of Whistler’s labours is more prominent precisely because the tracks of the brushstrokes are still visible. The art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn observes how the ‘measurable width of the river’ is ‘economically indicated’ by the fluid sauce applied in sweeping brushstrokes that span the picture from edge to edge.27 Here, Whistler eschews detailed finish and mimetic representation of the river to emphasise instead textures of his brushstrokes that bear the signs of his physical mark-making. Burne-Jones’s expectations of the nineteenth-century idea of ‘finish’ in art as the degree to which a picture is worked up into representational detail is bound up with a moral demand for the artist’s visible effort. Commenting on The Falling Rocket, the painting that provoked Ruskin’s outburst, the art historian Tim Barringer remarks that in many areas of the painting, ‘the paint could not … be identified as representing an object beyond the canvas … In these passages, the indexical quality is lost; the painting refers only to itself’.28 The prominent textures of the paint, not worked up into ‘finished’ detail, are visible signs of the act of painting itself – of laying paint on the surface. In realism-orientated art, the mediation of the medium is more unobtrusive, in that the subject is more immediately intelligible than evidence of the mark-making; but in forcing a direct confrontation of the paint on canvas, Whistler’s work indicates that his exigencies lie elsewhere.

When questioned in the more pressured setting of the courtroom, Burne-Jones tempered the censure of his written statement with limited praise for a couple of Whistler’s paintings. He even allowed that Nocturne in Blue and Silver 1871–2 (YMSM 113; fig.4), while having ‘no composition whatever’, has ‘distinct and high merit as far as colour goes’. Of The Falling Rocket, however, he was unwavering in his opinion that ‘It would be impossible to call it a serious work of art.’ He reasoned that,

Burne-Jones’s preference for the ‘other two paintings’ – by which he meant the blue-tinted Nocturne in Blue and Silver and Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge 1872–5 (YMSM 140; Tate N01959; fig.5), in which still recognisable forms can be discerned in the dusk or fast-fading twilight – over the relative darkness of the late night evoked in The Falling Rocket – betrays Burne-Jones’s opinion that an artist’s faithful representation of their subject demanded clear intelligible detail. Burne-Jones had expressed the opinion that The Falling Rocket was not worth its price ‘seeing how much careful work men do for much less’.30 What Whistler intended as masterful effortlessness was perceived to be carelessness by Burne-Jones.

Burne-Jones may have been thinking about his own attempts at painting night as he expounded upon (as a somewhat conciliatory gesture) its difficulty generally to soften his appraisal of the nocturnes specifically. In the second summer exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, held the year after the one that gave rise to the libel suit, Burne-Jones exhibited two night-time pictures, the oil painting Luna c.1872–5 and the watercolour Night 1870 (fig.6). Burne-Jones’s affinity for the blue nocturnes is instantiated in the latter, which features its titular personification in a flowing blue dress, standing against a twilight sky of gradated blues and an expanse of blue sea. While it was painted some years earlier, Burne-Jones might have had this recently exhibited picture in mind as he reflected on the stand the representational challenges posed by night subjects a few months later.

Whistler intuited Burne-Jones’s discomfort with perceptive clarity in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, his retrospective account of and response to the trial. Next to an inaccurate transcript of the portion of Burne-Jones’s testimony (conflating several of his answers to different questions) in which he concedes limited praise for Old Battersea Bridge while wholly censuring The Falling Rocket, Whistler included a marginal note scorning Burne-Jones’s criticism of his black nocturne (fig.7):

As a creative print feature that allowed Whistler to recap the trial while reflecting on what was said in court, his marginal annotations act as snide retrospective remarks on Burne-Jones’s testimony where Whistler would have had to listen respectfully during the trial. The Pennells praised what they regarded as his underappreciated book design in a feature-length article ‘Whistler as Decorator’ (1912): ‘He added to the impression of lightness, of gaiety, by the spacing, the punctuation, the butterflies’.32 The conspiratorial intimacy of these comments invite the reader to share in Whistler’s droll caricature. His riposte mocks Burne-Jones for equating apparent detail with a painting’s monetary value. The humorous image of an artist who insists on going out in the glaring daylight of noon, when the sun is at its highest, before painting a nocturne in turn asserts an alternative mode of representational fidelity to the one Burne-Jones advances in his dismissive judgements of Whistler’s paintings as mere sketches: Whistler argues that to demand a detailed finish in a nocturne is to misrepresent what night is actually like.

Elsewhere, Ruskin used a surprisingly similar figurative image, except that he recommended that the attentive work of painting from observation should appear as though it had been done in the light of day. In his 1883 Oxford lecture series, published as The Art of England, he explains the effectiveness of the ‘material veracity’ of the Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) and William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), that their painted subjects are so vivid as to seem real:

‘Moonlight’, in Ruskin’s metaphor, represents the antithesis of open and direct examination of the subject in daylight. Although he does not demand a highly detailed finish – allowing that this need not be ‘necessarily close or minute’ – he does insist on a wholeness of representation, one ‘necessarily complete, substantial and emphatic’.34

Even among the more abstract nocturnes, the apparent formlessness of The Falling Rocket made it difficult to recognise the Cremorne Gardens in the picture. Comparison with other similar works suggests that Whistler did push the limits of indistinctness in the painting. Nocturne: Black and Gold – The Fire Wheel 1875 (YMSM 169; Tate N03419; fig.8), hereafter The Fire Wheel, for instance, painted the same year, shares many of its more infamous counterpart’s stylistic elements: a smoky atmosphere consisting of layered, dark tones; passages of freely applied flecked paint representing showers of sparks; pinpricks of light denoting vague objects in the distance.35 But even in representing the same subject – a fireworks display at Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea, London – The Fire Wheel is markedly more detailed in parts than The Falling Rocket. A later, smaller watercolour version of The Fire Wheel 1893 (M.1359; fig.9) gives a clearer sense of the composition of the original oil, which has darkened considerably, but it does not capture the effect of the earlier oil painting like-for-like.36 Plumes of gunpowder smoke and general smog are indicated by textural washes in greys and browns of varying translucency, with small areas left bare to create light.37 While the contours of the Catherine wheel – a spinning firework – on the right-hand side of the painting are discernible in the watercolour, it lacks the depth of detail present in the oil and the subtle atmospheric chiaroscuro that conveys the way the spiralling firework illuminates the silhouettes of the crowd against a lighter cloud of smoke.

The Falling Rocket is considerably less detailed in comparison to the oil version of The Fire Wheel. Prettejohn points out that it is no surprise that Ruskin’s attack had singled out the work as Ruskin had ‘a long-standing antipathy to dusk or night scenes’.38 He had counselled the watercolourist George Price Boyce (1826–1897) against subjects set during sunset and twilight as they were easier to realise than sunlight effects because less light was required for them, and correspondingly required less effort to represent the details that are visible. ‘Dim light for Ruskin was not, then, simply a question of taste,’ Prettejohn argues, ‘it was a moral matter, implying the evasion of labour on the artist’s part’.39 Bright daylight, for Ruskin, represented ‘a commitment to open and honest representation’, where ‘Whistler’s aesthetic was one of concealment and mystification’.40 The observation Prettejohn makes about the moral dimension of Ruskin’s preference for well-lit subjects demonstrates his preoccupation with the artist’s effort that has gone into the making of a painting. Art, for Ruskin, was a moral index.

As suggested earlier, Merrill ascribes the question of finish as discussed in the trial to Burne-Jones, writing that Ruskin’s original comments ‘had not made that particular accusation’ and noting that ‘Ruskin did not consider unfinished pictures unconditionally culpable’.41 Ruskin’s objections to The Falling Rocket may have been on moral grounds bound up with issues of artistic taste, but the critic’s views on finish were more complicated. Burne-Jones’s criticism of Whistler partially misreads Ruskin’s more slippery ideas about finish and effort, but his misreading is a productive one: it offers an insight into Ruskin’s influence on the artistic public’s idea of finish in the nineteenth century against which Whistler’s work was judged in the trial. But Ruskin’s views were in fact more complex. Referencing his chapter ‘Of Finish’ in volume three of Modern Painters (1856), Ruskin cautions in a note in volume five (1860) that ‘The imperative demand for finish is ruinous, because it refuses better things than finish’.42 On the other extreme, he explains, ‘The stopping short of the finish, which is honourably possible to human energy, is destructive … and not in less degree. Err, or [sic: read ‘of’] the two, on the side of completion’.43

The comments regarding Whistler later judged to be libellous – that his works ought not be admitted into the Grosvenor, that Whistler’s ill-educated conceit approached the aspect of wilful imposture, that in his Cockney impudence he had charged two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face – were preceded by a defence of the ‘mannerisms and errors’ of the Burne-Jones paintings exhibited alongside Whistler’s. Ruskin contended that, ‘however strange to us … however far, to his own or our desire, the result may be incomplete’, Burne-Jones’s art is ‘wrought with the utmost conscience of care’.44 Although his backhanded praise of Burne-Jones alludes to the criticisms his work had already received from the periodical press, Ruskin suggests that the artist’s effort can act as a remedy for any sense of incompletion or eccentricity. For Ruskin, a painter’s effort did not rest solely on the appearance of detailed finish – a rare opinion shared by Whistler. When asked during the trial if he was aware of Ruskin’s view ‘that an artist should not allow a picture to leave his hands when, by any labour he can bestow upon it, he can improve it’, Whistler concurred that it was ‘the correct view’.45 Although Whistler notoriously believed that ‘a picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared’, Ruskin’s emphasis on the effort made during the painting process, rather than on the effort visible in the finish of the picture, represented for Whistler a rare convergence of their views, even if that effort was directed towards drastically different ends.46

Ruskin’s position on finish was more nuanced. In his idealisation of artistic effort, believing that it is ‘the effort that deserves praise, not the success’, Ruskin advocated for a moderate notion of finish.47 In volume one of Modern Painters (1843), he insists that both finish and incompletion – respectively defined as ‘specific minuteness and large abstraction’ – are ‘right when they are signs of passion or of thought, and both are wrong, and I think the finish the more contemptible of the two, when they cease to be so’.48 As with so much of his thinking about the conditions of artistic labour, Ruskin qualifies his views on finish: despite his conviction that great men complete their work thoroughly, he concedes that ‘the extremes of good and evil lie with the finishers’.49 While he disdains the ‘modern Italians’ who will paint every minute leaf without passion for the ‘beauty and character’ of the laurel or rosebush, he accepts that ‘the highest schools do the same thing’.50 Ruskin differentiates laborious detail from the effort of attentive representation. The efforts of the modern Italian painters and the best schools are alike in degree, not kind: great men such as Tintoretto ‘do the same thing … but with totally different motives and perceptions’ – this finish is ‘divine’ because it is a sign of their care for ‘anything, however small, of God’s making’.51 Ruskin would expand on this conception of finish later, insisting in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) on the ‘right place’ of finish and  counselling in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (1853) ‘never to demand exact finish, when it does not lead to a noble end’.52

Taking it upon himself to furnish Ruskin’s conception of finish in his absence during the trial, Whistler again turns to his innovative and sly use of marginal annotations in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Thinking he knows what Ruskin means by finish, Whistler appends to a section of reproduced court proceedings where the defence attempted to illustrate what was meant by finish an illustrative gloss taken from Ruskin’s own writing (fig.10). In the quotation from the second volume of Modern Painters (1846), Ruskin admires how the dog in William Mulready’s painting The Butt: Shooting a Cherry 1822–48 displays ‘perhaps the most wonderful, because the most dignified, finish’ (fig.11). Mulready’s skilful rendering of the dense pile of the dog’s mottled fur is an impressive, if oddly specific, example of detailed finish (fig.11b). Quoted without comment, Whistler’s citation seems intended to be unkind to the writer rather than genuinely helpful to his reader; Whistler appears to have deliberately bypassed examples of Ruskin’s more searching, sustained discourse on the notion of finish discussed earlier (including the indicatively titled chapter ‘Of Finish’), opting instead for an instance of Ruskin’s description at its most hyperbolic. Ruskin declares the dog in Mulready’s picture ‘assuredly the most perfect unity of drawing and colour, which the entire range of ancient and modern art can exhibit’, one rivalled only by Albrecht Dürer.53 For all his spite, Whistler’s identification of this incidental reference to the term ‘finish’ betrays his obsessive and rigorous examination of Ruskin’s writings in search of disparaging fodder.

Whistler made copious notes on Ruskin, conscientiously copying out lengthy passages from his writings. These notes, held at the University of Glasgow, often transcribed without much, if any, comment, are easily overlooked, and have hitherto not been published or the object of study. Yet they reveal Whistler to be a careful though acerbic reader of Ruskin and are useful in clarifying what Whistler found most objectionable and compelling in his ideas. The effusive comment about Mulready’s dog can be traced to a handwritten list of quotations, which the catalogue dates to September 1878, that Whistler had compiled for possible inclusion in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (fig.12), with Whistler ruling out excerpts with a cross and admitting other candidates with either a tick or a single strikethrough in pencil (possibly to indicate which passages he had already used).

Where the references to Ruskin in the published volume have been refined into parodic citations, the vitriol behind Whistler’s assemblage of Ruskin’s own words, with which he was to beat him or expose his hypocrisy, is less diluted in Whistler’s personal notes. For each entry lifted from Ruskin’s various writings, Whistler takes particular pleasure in devising  a new appellation for Ruskin for each individual excerpt. Some are mocking, others exaggerated, but every one is meant sarcastically: ‘Mr. Ruskin. Slade Prof.’; ‘Ruskin. Art Authority.’; ‘J.R. Art Critic. Professor.’; ‘Prof John Ruskin.’; ‘John Ruskin. Prof. of colour. Oxford.’; ‘Mr. Ruskin Teacher’. A precursor for this disdain for Ruskin’s professional standing is apparent in his earlier Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics. Whistler reflects on his cross-examination by Holker, whom he ventriloquises as asking: ‘What is to become of painting if the critics withhold their lash?’54 Unable to summon a satisfactory response or bon mot at the time, Whistler remedies this in his pamphlet by offering what he wishes could have been his answer: ‘We are told that Mr Ruskin has devoted his long life to art, and as a result – is Slade Professor at Oxford. In the same sentence, we have thus his position and its worth’.55 Scorning Ruskin’s professional title, Whistler retorts that ‘a life passed among pictures makes not a painter – else the policeman in the National Gallery might assert himself’.56 If Ruskin’s image of Whistler wielding a pot of paint implied that he was not a skilled artist, this was Whistler returning the favour by suggesting that Ruskin, being a critic and not a painter, had no right to his opinion.

Whistler might have disparaged Ruskin’s authority as an art critic, but he did not dismiss his art criticism – in fact, quite the opposite. Whistler was a more discriminating reader of Ruskin than one might expect of a self-styled ‘enemy’, although his critical attention was motivated by an ongoing project to build a resounding and thorough reply to Ruskin’s inciting comments that would last more than fifteen years after the critic had made them. But Whistler, like Burne-Jones, was liable to misread Ruskin’s views on finish and assume that he advocated only for minute verisimilitude. Ruskin would articulate his shifting views on finish in ‘The Black Arts: A Reverie in the Strand’ (1887), when he admitted that he no longer demanded exacting detail, even confessing his change of heart on the matter: ‘No one has pleaded more for finish than I in past time, or oftener, or perhaps so strongly … that a good picture should look like a mirror of the thing itself’. Ruskin concedes that, with the rise of mechanical forms of reproduction such as photography and engraving, ‘now that everybody can mirror the thing itself … I begin to wish for a little less to look at’.57 Ruskin may have thought he was changing his mind on the matter, but already as early on in his writings as the third volume of Modern Painters was the kernel of this eventual opinion when he reasoned that because the finished picture ‘excite[s] the imagination less … like nature itself, it taxes more’.58 It is surprising, given our assumptions about Ruskinian truthfulness to nature, to see finish described as taxing. But this reversal again suggests that it is not finish itself that Ruskin privileges, but the effort that it expresses.

Ruskin had previously delineated the limits of finish in painting, which he teaches should correspond to the limits of visible detail. In volume one of Modern Painters, Ruskin explained, by way of illustration, that until an object is so far from the eye that ‘it becomes itself a mere spot, there is always something in it you can see’.59 By encouraging attention to what is visible, Ruskin was already establishing what needed to be represented in painting. The object’s ‘shadow and lines and local colours’ do not disappear as it recedes; ‘they get mixed and indistinguishable, but they are still there’.60 Truth, in Ruskin’s philosophy, is epistemologically derived from vision, which is why his realism is organised empirically around the limits of sight. In art, then, ‘nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant,’ Ruskin declares, ‘every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing’.61 Artists should represent what they are able to see, the way they see it – as Ruskin later writes, ‘the limit of detail is – visibility – and no other’.62

Although distorted, Ruskin’s ideas about finish and effort informed Burne-Jones’s criticism of Whistler. Understood in Ruskin’s system, nature is infinite, even if our perception of it is not, but finish should present nothing more nor less than the perfect medium of sight. This was the basis of Ruskin’s complaint when he wrote of Pierre Édouard Frère’s The Gleaner Boy, shown at the so-called ‘French Exhibition’ at the French Gallery, London, in 1858 (no.62), that ‘the painter ought not only to have seen more in the grass than this, but ought to be able to paint more, without hurting his general effect’.63 For Ruskin, there was a threshold of visible detail that, if not reached, would render a picture insufficient. Anticipating Burne-Jones’s assessment that Whistler’s nocturnes were ‘sketches’, Ruskin concludes that Frère’s pictures at the exhibition are not ‘finished pictures’ but ‘sketches of expression. In a finished picture all must be finished; and in a sketch all must be sketched, up to a harmonious point – nothing beyond that point’.64 The picture may stand as a sketch, but to Ruskin, it is not a finished painting. The critic writes as though his assessment is plainly obvious, but its simplicity belies the carefully demarcated conditions he demands of finish.

Ruskin recognises that absolute finish is not always the aim. Outlining ‘The Law of Perfectness’ in the fifth volume of Modern Painters, he shows an appreciation for ‘reserve’ as a characteristic of great treatment, as it speaks to ‘the power which a great painter exercises over himself in fixing certain limits, either of force, of colour, or of quantity of work’. This introduces a more intangible standard of finish, one that is not dictated by a fixed level of detail but is instead set by the great artist’s judgement. These limits, Ruskin writes, the great artist ‘will not transgress in any part of his picture, even though here and there a painful sense of incompletion may exist … and might tempt an inferior workman to infringe them’.65 Ruskin here defines perfectness as ‘doing our work thoroughly … carrying the whole of it up to a degree determined upon’, as opposed to ‘carrying it up to any constant and established degree of finish’.66 Although the latter foreshadows Burne-Jones’s complaint that Whistler was shirking the work of ‘carrying his pictures far enough’, this distinction, written some eighteen years earlier, better elucidates Ruskin’s condemnation in his 1877 review of what he perceived as the lack of effort on Whistler’s part to observe and represent his subject. Read alongside Ruskin’s comments on Frère, we might view Ruskin’s criticism as arising from his belief that Whistler ought to have ‘seen more’ and thus have been able to ‘paint more’. In indicting the supposedly careless quality of Whistler’s painting style and insufficient degree of detail, Ruskin’s reductive image of paint flinging is also a comment on the impressionist qualities of Whistler’s painting. For Ruskin, that Whistler’s technique gave the appearance of gestural speed rather than notational observation suggested an unwillingness to work harder at seeing ‘more’.

The Pennells surmised that this presumption of Whistler’s negligence stemmed from his indistinct style and set to work protecting his legacy by attempting to disprove such a view. In the fifth edition of The Life of James McNeill Whistler (1911), the Pennells tell of the story of Whistler’s method for ‘develop[ing] his powers of observation’, which they say contributed to ‘the knowledge of a lifetime that enabled him to paint the Nocturnes’.67 Whistler, they write, would go out at night, ‘stand before his subject and look at it, then turn his back on it and repeat to whoever was with him the arrangement, the scheme of colour, and as much of the detail as he wanted’.68 The next day, if he could see ‘upon the untouched canvas the completed picture, he painted it’, or else ‘he passed another night in looking at the subject’.69 The Pennells’ second-hand report depicts Whistler’s monk-like devotion to honing his skills of observation in opposition to the perception of him held by Ruskin and Ruskin’s followers, but they were also keen to distinguish his singular style and exceptional skill: ‘This power to see a finished picture on a bare canvas is possessed by all great artists. But the greater the artist the more he sees and the better he presents it’.70 Where, for Ruskin, ‘All great art is praise’, and the greatest praise is that of Nature as God’s creation, ‘“Nature put [Whistler] out”’ because, as the Pennells argue of Whistler, ‘the arrangement as he found it put him out; Nature is never right’.71 For Whistler, nature needed to be improved in representation. His idiosyncratic practice of describing a scene with his back turned served as a kind of strange memory test that aimed to preserve a degree of accuracy – as Whistler recalled the scene, his companion ‘corrected errors when they occurred’ – while resisting mimetic likeness.72 It was with this method that Whistler achieved the impressionistic effects he intended in place of detailed finish and, in his own way, conveyed what he saw though not in the mimetic way that Ruskin had meant.

It is unexpected, then, to see Whistler fixate on a different mode of observation in Ruskin’s writing, this time on the part of the viewer in a gallery. In his notes on Ruskin’s Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice (1877), also held at the University of Glasgow Library’s Special Collections, made around the time of the trial, Whistler takes particular interest in  how the critic recommends walking through the exhibition.73 Whistler singles out a particularly immersive passage in which Ruskin recommends that the viewer retrace their steps and ‘go back into the great room’ with ‘the Veronese at the end of it’ (fig.13). These notes differ from the earlier ones in that they lack the disdain that accompanies those excerpts. They do not appear to be copied down because Whistler found them objectionable or because they revealed parts of Ruskin’s judgment that were flawed, incorrect or arrogant (or any combination of the three), but rather suggest Whistler’s genuine interest. Written around the time of the trial like the previous list of quotations, they are likely to have been research either for Whistler’s lawyer or in preparation for writing Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics. It is possible that they are Whistler’s means of trying to discern, from Ruskin’s account of the Academy at Venice, how the critic moved about an exhibition space and viewed artworks, perhaps to better understand how Ruskin might have studied Whistler’s own work at the Grosvenor. The passages from Ruskin emphasise attentiveness to and contemplation of Veronese’s picture and ‘what all its shows and dexterities at last came to’ – a sentiment that Whistler underlines in his notes.74

Misunderstood as an ‘incomplete artist’ whose art flew in the face of many of his peers in the nineteenth century, Whistler set his own standards by which he completed his paintings, even if Ruskin saw the effortlessness he strove towards as ‘wilful imposture’. At stake in the differences of opinion in and around ideas of labour was the concern about whether art was to be understood (the way Whistler saw it) as the articulation of ideas or as an expression of the artist’s work. In Art and Art Critics Whistler may have scorned ‘Ruskin, whose writing is art, and whose art is unworthy his writing’, but rather than turning away from his supposedly unworthy writing, Whistler had instead turned his attention towards Ruskin’s work. His initial estimate of the ‘littérateur’ as an incomplete art critic was born from his own reading of Ruskin and he would return to take on Ruskin’s ideas in various forms in the years following the trial – suggesting that Whistler’s fin mot is perhaps not the final word.75