She
sits facing Mr. James's water-colour. She is looking at it, she does
not see it; her thoughts are far away, and their importance is slight.
THE WHISTLER ALBUM.
The photograph of the portrait of Miss Alexander is as suggestive of
the colour as a pianoforte arrangement of _Tristan_ is of the
orchestration. The sounds of the different instruments come through
the thin tinkle of the piano just as the colour of the blond hair, the
delicate passages of green-grey and green, come through the black and
white of the photograph. Truly a beautiful thing! But "Before the
Mirror" reflects perhaps a deeper beauty. The influence of that
strange man, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is sufficiently plain in this
picture. He who could execute hardly at all in paint, and whose verse
is Italian, though the author wrote and spoke no language but English,
foisted the character of his genius upon all the poetry and painting
of his generation. It is as present in this picture as it is in
Swinburne's first volume of Poems and Ballads. Mr. Whistler took the
type of woman and the sentiment of the picture from Rossetti; he saw
that even in painting Rossetti had something to say, and, lest an
artistic thought should be lost to the world through inadequate
expression, he painted this picture. He did not go on painting
pictures in the Rossetti sentiment, because he thought he had
exhausted Rossetti in one picture.
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