Very often the faces in
Mr. Whistler's portraits are the least interesting part of the
picture; his sitter's face does not seem to interest him more than the
cuffs, the carpet, the butterfly, which hovers about the screen. After
this admission, it will seem to many that it is waste of time to
consider further Mr. Whistler's claim to portraiture. This is not so.
Mr. Whistler is a great portrait painter, though he cannot take
measurements or follow an outline like Holbein.
Like most great painters, he has known how to introduce harmonious
variation into his style by taking from others just as much of their
sense of beauty as his own nature might successfully assimilate. I
have spoken of his assimilation and combination of the art of
Velasquez, and the entire art of Japan, but a still more striking
instance of the power of assimilation, which, strange as it may seem,
only the most original natures possess, is to hand in the early but
extremely beautiful picture, _La femme en blanc_. In the Chelsea
period of his life Mr. Whistler saw a great deal of that singular man,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Intensely Italian, though he had never 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.
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