‘If I Could Only Draw Like That’

P.N. Furbank

• The Gentle Art of Making Enemies by James McNeill Whistler
  Heinemann, 338 pp, £20.00, October 1994, ISBN 0 434 20166 9
• James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth by Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval
  Murray, 544 pp, £25.00, October 1994, ISBN 0 7195 5027 0

There is a curious little circumstance about the painter Whistler which catches at one’s imagination. It concerns his draughtsmanship. William Rothenstein recalls Whistler talking to him contemptuously of Oscar Wilde’s house in Tite Street and doing him a little drawing of it, to illustrate the monotony of such a terrace house. ‘I noticed then,’ says Rothenstein, ‘how childishly Whistler drew when drawing out of his head.’ One might think there was nothing to this, for evidently Whistler was not at that moment trying to create a work of art. But it is reinforced by an anecdote related by Henry Savage Landor. Landor was dining with Whistler (it was in 1896, towards the end of the painter’s life), and in the drawing-room, after dinner, his eye was caught by a skull and a lamp on the grand piano and he suggested that Whistler should sketch this little ‘still-life’. Whistler agreed, produced a large-size visiting card from his pocket, and for an hour drew and re-drew and rubbed out a hundred times what he had drawn, tearing up one card after another in frustration.