Poetry in Colour By Colm Tóibín

The most vivid early account of James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) is by the French critic Théodore Duret, whose book on the painter was published in English in 1917. ‘The portraits of Whistler,’ Duret wrote, ‘show us beings absolutely characterised and shown in their essence.’ He described an encounter in Paris in 1914 with someone who had recognised Duret from his portrait, painted by Whistler in his Tite Street studio in London three decades earlier in 1883. ‘To recognise at first sight,’ Duret wrote, ‘under these conditions, the original of a portrait proves that the salient features have been absolutely disengaged. Only by this means can be obtained that kind of resemblance which is capable of surviving the changes brought about by the years.’ Duret goes on to extol Whistler’s skill at creating or exploring the ‘essence’ of a character. Whistler, he wrote, ‘has everywhere and at all times known how to throw in relief the essential feature while eliminating the details that would weaken it. It is an axiom which artists who wish to leave immortal works should meditate on and appropriate.’ The implication was that Whistler’s art did not merely represent a scene or a sitter, but that it sought something both ineffable and concrete, both psychological and spiritual, that would defy time or call it into question.

But Whistler and his supporters, in fact, proposed an art that was not satisfied with scene-setting and less concerned with likeness, but instead pursued a kind of painting that had the autonomy, immediacy and sense of pattern and arrangement of music. Whistler was influenced by an essay written in 1846 by Edgar Allen Poe called ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, which dealt with literary harmony, proposing that rather than reflect or depict reality, the task of literary fiction was to work with repetition and variation to create an effect that was mysterious and haunting, avoiding easy meaning and facile interpretation. If this idea could be applied to painting, then it would privilege structure and harmony. It would unsettle anyone who wanted to judge a portrait by the quality of its likeness to his subject.

Before Whistler’s contemporary and sometime friend and neighbour, Oscar Wilde, explored and ironised these ideas in his novel The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890), the writer tried them out in a lecture, ‘The Value of Art in Modern Life’ (1884). In his address, Wilde suggested that Whistler’s concern was not to illustrate but to make the tone and texture created by the paint the real subject of the picture. Wilde liked the fact that Whistler used titles such as ‘Arrangement in Yellow and Grey’ and ‘Harmony in Grey and Green’ and, as Wilde wrote, ‘rejected all literary titles for his pictures; indeed, none of his works bore any name but that which signified their tone, and colour, and method of treatment. This, of course, was what painting set out to be; no man ought to show that he was merely the illustrator of history.’

Art, then, took precedence over Nature. Whistler’s feud with Wilde, which was played out publicly in newspapers, began not because they disagreed on this matter, but because their views were so similar that Whistler was sure that Wilde was plagiarising him. In his essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), Wilde wrote: ‘My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.’

A year earlier, Whistler seemed to have agreed, so to speak, with Wilde: ‘That Nature is always right, is an assertion, artistically, as untrue, as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong: that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy of a picture is rare, and not common at all.’

Whistler settled permanently in London in 1859, and five years later his formidable mother arrived in England to join him. She was fresh from the American Civil War, where she had supported the Confederate side. As her visit loomed, Whistler, who loved a feud and specialised in losing friends, was having a row with his brother-in-law, the artist Francis Seymour Haden. It began as a dinner-party argument about art, Whistler dismissing realism and Academicians in a way that his brother-in-law found insulting.

After this, Haden took it out on Whistler by refusing to dine with him if his Irish mistress Joanna Hiffernan was also present. Whistler, in any case, had to find alternate accommodation for Hiffernan, since his mother was to lodge with him. In his biography of Whistler, Daniel E. Sutherland describes the mother’s presence: ‘she was content to live with her son. Whistler subscribed to The Times for her sake and read to her every evening, as she had done to him as a child. He escorted her on Sundays to Chelsea Old Church.’ His mother enjoyed the company of her son’s somewhat disreputable friends, including Algernon Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti who were on their best behaviour for her. Thus, Whistler moved between the two households, at home and under pressure in each.

His first portrait of his mother had to be abandoned. The second, to be titled Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 was painted in 1871, when Whistler was 37 and his mother was 67. It is clear from contemporary photographs that she usually wore her hair neatly coiffed, as the portrait suggests, and also that she tended to look severe, as though she had learned from life not to be too easily pleased by anything much. If she looks fearful and intimidating, however, she seems also oddly vulnerable.

The portrait enacts the drama taking place in Whistler’s own sensibility. His main medium was etching, and that involved precise imaging and precise line. His other medium was painting, in which arrangement, tone, restraint, paleness, spareness and the use of a single colour set down flat, combined to create an image that transcended mere representation.

In his portrait of his mother, he captures her in time. He gives her an aura of austerity and also a kind of glow. Between the painter and the subject, there is an emotion all the more powerful for its restraint. The painting exemplifies what Duret noted in Whistler – his ability to make an uncanny and durable likeness in his portraits – but it also captures what Edgar Allan Poe and Wilde would have appreciated: the idea that subject matter is banal and that painting is poetry in colour. In the portrait, certain colours such as grey and silver, and washed tones, are used as motifs might be used in music; they are repeated and put into a pattern. At the centre of the arrangement is the black of the sitter’s dress, the same black that is used in At the Piano 1858–9.

The bareness and starkness in the style matches the sitter herself, not only her pose or the expression on her face, but some sense of her as a vivid, living presence. It is as though Whistler has failed in his aim to make a painting that is pure, and to hit the nervous system of the viewer only because of the way that colour has been patterned. Instead, the emotion around the figure, and the sense of the figure as someone real in the world, have broken through. In losing the battle to keep his paintings pure and ethereal, Whistler won the right to create feeling around character, while also producing a work that was composed, arranged and distilled.

This tension between Whistler’s theories and the work itself occurs also in Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl 1864. It was painted at a time when the mouse was away – Mrs Whistler had gone to Torquay for her health – and Hiffernan could return to Whistler’s house. In the painting she is there and not there, or doubly and strangely there. She appears in profile, and then, startlingly, her full face is caught in the mirror over a mantelpiece. The face in reflection seems different to the face as caught singly and directly.

At the centre of The Little White Girl is whiteness, the white dress. Even though it comes alive with its tufts and shadows and folds, it is mostly pure and luminous, playing with light and pulling light in towards it. Swinburne, who wrote a poem inspired by the painting, wrote of ‘the notion of sad and glad mystery in the face languidly contemplative of its own phantom and all other things seen by their phantoms.’

The tension here is between the notion of a settled image – the face in repose – and the idea that an image becomes more powerful when it is less definable and more fluid. Whistler gives Hiffernan the kind of double artificiality that would have delighted Wilde. Her double face is a game, a way of disrupting portraiture. But her face is also tenderly made in both of its guises. Her expression is serious, meditative, melancholy, more so when reflected in the mirror. The act of creating her in a symphony of white has allowed her to come alive. Once more, as with the portrait of his mother, Whistler has taken energy from his theories, but that is only a way of beginning. He gets even more energy when he cannot sustain the severe distance from the image that his theory required.

Once he had set about transforming both mother and mistress in paintings, he also had another subject, a subject far more mysterious and fascinating to Whistler than either of them. And that was Whistler himself, in all his ambiguity and emotional restlessness. In the mid-1890s, when he had reached the age of 60, Whistler painted two self-portraits: Brown and Gold: Self-Portrait 1895–1900 and Gold and Brown: Self-Portrait c.1896–8. At its most obvious, the difference between the two is that in the first the subject is ageing; in the second he appears much younger. In the first he is quizzical and almost weary. His age is more apparent because he is standing and the air around him in brown and gold makes him look fragile. The second is half-length; the subject fills the space in a way that is natural and relaxed. But it is the complex expression on his face that does the work. He is quizzical here too, but also amused and engaging. His gaze is sensual and sensuous.

This is another version of what The Little White Girl did with mirrors, except it is two paintings of the same figure rather than one, reflected. If these are portraits, then they are concerned to show likeness, but also to interrogate the very idea of an image as a single and solid phenomenon. The image is there to be doubled, just as the gold and brown are. But the doubling is playful; it turns time around.

It also pays homage to the spirit of the age. These last two decades of the 19th century, when Whistler flourished, were the years, as Karl Miller has written in his book Doubles (1985), when ‘a hunger for pseudonyms, masks, new identities, new conceptions of human nature, declared itself.’ Thus, Dr Jekyll could announce with full conviction: ‘This, too, was myself ’ as he became ‘a stranger in his own house’. Jekyll ‘learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man … if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.’ London was the site where many writers, including W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad and Henry James allowed their doubled selves, and their works full of masked selves, to flourish and further duplicate.

In 1909, Joseph Conrad wrote his story The Secret Sharer, in which the captain of a ship is confronted with his precise double. No self in these years was stable. In August 1891, as he stayed at the Marine Hotel in Kingstown in Ireland, Henry James had the idea for his story The Private Life (1893) in which the sociable writer in the drawing room could at the same moment be found alone with his other self in his study.

In those years the artist was either two people, or he was nobody. In his two late self-portraits, Whistler managed to recreate himself by using an image of his face and then unsettling the image, thus inscribing himself, in all his doubleness, in the spirit of the age.

^{James McNeill Whistler, Tate Britain, 21 May – 27 September}

^{Colm Tóibín is an Irish writer who lives in New York. His latest book is The News from Dublin, a collection of short stories published by Pan Macmillan.}

^{Supported by the James McNeill Whistler Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate Patrons, Tate Members and Tate Americas Foundation. The Whistler’s Finish Research and Conservation Project was supported by The Lunder Foundation. Associated research supported by the Manton Historic British Art Scholarship Fund. The media partner is The Times and The Sunday Times.}