Excerpts from
To Seize the Passing Dream
A Novel of Whistler, His Women and His World

AS GENIUS AND LOVER, HE SCANDALIZED THE ART WORLD — THEN DEFINED AND DEFIED IT

The man on the tavern balcony overlooking the Thames was an arresting figure. From the fierce foxlike triangle of his face down to the astonishing pink bows on his shoes, everything about him crackled defiance. In 1875 he was at forty-one the most controversial painter in England, widely hated and as widely feared. A self-avowed "artistic pirate," he had lately been forced to the very edge of the gangplank, with a dozen hands struggling for the honor of tossing him to the sharks.

The door behind him opened, and a slender girl of about twenty appeared. "It's half after seven, Mr. Whistler. My man'll be wanting his dinner."

"Ah, the sturdy Briton and his sordid beef." The well-poised head turned around, thick black curls swinging like silent bells. Slight but gracefully proportioned, he had been described publicly as a "pocket Apollo"; for once he had not challenged the popular judgment. "It amazes me," he went on, "that a people with so little talent for preparing food should be so obsessive about consuming it on a regular schedule."

The light was dimming in swift, decisive stages. What had been a nostalgic sunset scene, blazing with color, gave way to a muted twilight, carving new patterns of cloud shadows on the water. A barge slipped silently upstream, its outlines receding to ghostly dimness. Oars splashed somewhere nearby, from a boat already half-lost in the gathering offshore mist. A skiff riding at anchor in the middle of the river bobbed abruptly into view, illuminated by the lanterns from a passing freighter, then vanished like a fragment of a dream.

The girl pointed to the drawing in his lap. "Is that supposed to be a buoy, on the right?"

"It's whatever you choose it to be. For me, it's a particular tone of gray, essential to the ultimate composition."

"But I don't see no buoy out there."

"An oversight of nature, my dear. It happens constantly."

Clattering down the weather-worn stairs, Jimmy Whistler had the light, perky step of a Viennese riding-master. The riverfront air was an appalling but bracing mixture of rotting fish, tar, turpentine, and fresh brine; of curing sheds, empty whisky kegs, and Chinese fried chicken, all overlaid with a pungent blanket of soft coal smoke. There was a vitality here, long since drained from the manicured squares of Mayfair.

This in particular was his favorite moment, when the world hung suspended between day and night. In all the world, and he had seen much of it, from semi-Asiatic Russia to the Andes, there was nothing to match this mellow blue-gray silence. The evening mist was like a veil over the riverside, clothing it with poetry.

It was this twilight landscape, of factory chimneys transformed to campaniles, that he had determined to capture on canvas; an absurd gamble, said the critics, on which he was throwing away his last hope of a respectable future. But these diagrams in dots of yellow, this memory of a memory in dusky blue, were the stuff of his Nocturnes. Let others trumpet the sunlit pomp of Empire; he would be content to seize the passing dream.

Raised by a fiercely pious mother, Whistler had been dismissed from West Point by Superintendent Robert E. Lee for racking up a record number of demerits. His next stop was Paris, mecca of Bohemian life in the mid-nineteenth century. Like his fellow art students Manet and Monet (but not the monastic Degas) he soon acquired a mistress.

Accepted in France only as an etcher (the competition in oils was formidable) Jimmy shifted to London, only to encounter the frozen conservatism of the Royal Academy. English painting stressed morality, propriety, comfortably flattering portraits. Recognition was sparse and grudging, even of his brilliant "White Girl," modeled by his new Irish sweetheart, Jo Heffernan. Jimmy turned to the Thames, and to flamboyant posturing. He sued the revered critic, John Ruskin, sparred in the press with Oscar Wilde, and covered the priceless leather walls of his patron Frederick Leyland with a swarm of dazzling peacocks that remain among the wonders of the art world; if he could make people look at him, they might take a closer look at his work.

And, although smoldering since childhood with resentment of Anna Whistler's loving tyranny ("you gave me the Bible when I longed for human affection!"), he painted his mother.

The setting for Anna Whistler would have to be simple, the tonal effects very subdued . . . a study in silver gray? Harmony in brown and silver?

Black. Gray and black. Yes, that was it: an Arrangement in Grey and Black.

"Would you mind standing over there, Mother?" He pointed toward the wall. Jimmy went to the single north-lighted window and lowered the shade carefully. "A little farther back, please, so that the light falls on you directly . . ."

"If I am going to stand for one of your patrons, I shall charge you regular model rates. Is it little Maggie I am posing for?"

"No. Yourself. Perhaps you could wear that other bonnet, the white lace with the longish streamers down the side?"

Jimmy set up his easel near the window, with the table palette on its left and the model about four feet away on the right, so that the light fell over his left shoulder, slanting onto the right of portrait and sitter. He moved lightly around the room, noting the juncture of neck and shoulder, the shadowed depth of an eye socket.

Anna Whistler was sixty-five, in a damp climate unfriendly to aging joints. She asked if she might pose leaning against the wall? Jimmy fetched a graceful, straight-backed ebony chair from the dining room, and his mother's fireside footstool. Now she was quite comfortable.

But Jimmy wasn't. The pose was too obvious, conventional. If he could only get a flat, clean profile effect la the Japanese woodblock master Utamaro, a kind of modified silhouette . . . Why not?

He swung the chair and stool around so that she would be at a right angle to him, the left side of her face exposed to the light. Jimmy rushed forward, whipping a white silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and placing it in her hands. This was it!

His colors would be absurdly simple in the telling, infinitely subtle in execution: gray on the wall and floor, whitish-gray for the bonnet and handkerchief, black in the dress and the drapery; with relief notes of gold dotting the drapes, pink flesh for the face, and chestnut in the headband and the Black Lion Wharf etching on the wall. The trick would be in the variations of tone within that narrow range, the discreet repetitions, the all-enveloping harmony of shadows and reflections.

Picking up two small round hog's-hair brushes with 3-foot handles, he loaded them with a brownish-black mixture and walked back to the far end of the room. For several seconds he stood still as a pointer, then he darted forward and started sketching his main outlines, figure, drapery and wall, using the broomlike handles to maintain a distance from the canvas that enabled him to shift his glance occasionally to the subject.

To fill in the surfaces, Jimmy changed to his short-tapered house-painter brushes, building up a broad map of light and dark areas until figure and background emerged in foggy grayish-brown shades. Now the stage was set for the first, tentative application of his prepared tones. He gave special attention to the crucial area where model sank into background, since the distance between the two could be created only by exact color values.

He was having trouble with the expression around Anna Whistler's mouth. "No, no, I can't get it right!" Anna heard a brush clatter to the floor, and her heart wept for him. "It is impossible to do it as it ought to be done, perfectly."

She gasped for breath. Jimmy rushed to her side. "Oh, this time I have really been neglectful! Let us go down to the river for some air."

Near the Battersea Bridge, they boarded a tuppence sidewheeler for a breezy cruise to Westminister half an hour away.

When Jimmy resumed work on the portrait the next morning, the confusions were gone. Within ten minutes after starting, he saw the transition from lip to creased cheek that had been evading him; five minutes more, and he had translated it into paint. No less than in the Nocturnes, he had achieved a universal statement, so poetic and diverse in its implications that for a century afterward, men and women of sensitivity would be stirred in a myriad of different ways.

Jo Heffernan, the mistress who loved Jimmy enough to raise a child he had carelessly conceived in a passing fling, died in obscurity. Anna Whistler, who replaced Jo in her son's household if not his heart, would live on canvas forever.

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