Documents associated with: 104th Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Academy, London, 1872
Record 13 of 17
System Number: 13153
Date: [22 May 1878][1]
Author: JW
Place: [London]
Recipient: The World[2]
Place: [London]
Repository: [Published][3]
Document Type: PD
The Red Rag
Why should not I call my works "symphonies," "arrangements," "harmonies," and "nocturnes"? I know that many good people think my nomenclature funny and myself "eccentric." Yes, "eccentric" is the adjective they find for me.
The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.
My picture of a "Harmony in Grey and Gold[4]" is an illustration of my meaning - a snow scene with a single black figure and a lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. All that I know is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture. Now this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp.
They say, "Why not call it 'Trotty Veck[5],' and sell it for a round harmony of golden guineas?" - naïvely acknowledging that, without baptism, there is no ... market! But even commercially this stocking of your shop with the goods of another would be indecent - custom alone has made it dignified. Not even the popularity of Dickens should be invoked to lend an adventititous [sic] aid to art of another kind from his. I should hold it a vulgar and meretricious trick to excite people about Trotty Veck when, if they really could care for pictorial art at all, they would know that the picture should have its own merit, and not depend upon dramatic, or legendary, or local interest.
As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject - matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour.
The great musicians knew this. Beethoven[6] and the rest wrote music - simply music: symphony in this key, concerto or sonata in that.
On F or G they constructed celestial harmonies - as harmonies - as combinations, evolved from the chords of F or G and their minor correlatives.
This is pure music as distinguished from airs - commonplace and vulgar in themselves, but interesting from their associations, as, for instance, "Yankee Doodle," or "Partant pour la Syrie."
Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it, and that is why I insist on calling my works "arrangements" and "harmonies."
Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an "Arrangement in Grey and Black[7]." Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?
The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; in arrangement of colours to treat a flower as his key, not as his model.
This is now understood indifferently well - at least by dressmakers. In every costume you see attention is paid to the key-note of colour which runs through the composition, as the chant of the Anabaptists through the Prophète, or the Huguenots' hymn in the opera[8] of that name.
[butterfly signature]
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Notes:
1. [22 May 1878]
Dated from day of publication (see below).
2. The World
A London society paper.
3. [Published]
The whole document is printed text. Published in Whistler, James McNeill, 'The Red Rag,' in 'Celebrities at Home. No. XCII. Mr Whistler at Cheyne-Walk,' The World, 22 May 1878, pp. 4-5 [GM, A.2]. Reproduced in Whistler, James McNeill, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 2nd ed., London and New York, 1892, pp. 126-8.
4. Harmony in Grey and Gold
Nocturne: Grey and Gold - Chelsea Snow (YMSM 174).
5. Trotty Veck
A character in The Chimes (first published 1844) by Charles Dickens (1812-1870), novelist, journalist and essayist [more]; 'though they chose to call him Trotty Veck, his name was Toby' (from chapter 1, 'First Quarter').
6. Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), composer [more].
7. Arrangement in Grey and Black
Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother (YMSM 101).
8. opera
'Les Huguenots', an opera in five acts; music by Giacomo Meyerbeer, libretto by Eugène Scribe and Emile Deschamps. Its first performance was in Paris on 29 February 1836. When Meyerbeer's opera Le Prophète was performed in London on 24 July 1849, the Times reported on the following day, 'Meyerbeer has always been careful to distinguish the various personages of his operas by contrasting the music they have to sing, but he has never, perhaps, been so successful in this particular as in the present work. The individuality of each character is preserved in the most elaborate concerted pieces as strongly as in the isolated songs, duets, and trios. The fragments of chant and the short solemn rhythm of the phrases allotted to the three Anabaptists are happily illustrative of those profound impostors, and even in the buffo trio, where two of them, Jonas and Zachariah, unwittingly enlist the Count d'Oberthal under their banner, and give way to the excitement of the goblet, as a mask to their sinister intentions, the characteristic quality of their music is but half concealed under the veil of boisterous hilarity in which the poet has represented them as indulging.'