Word: whistlerisms
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...Whistler, by Hesketh Pearson. A brisk, anecdotal portrait of the 19th century painter and eccentric (TIME, March...
...episode foreshadowed more than a bon mot. When Whistler died (in 1903), his famed Mother was almost the only solid which he had not defined gaseously. Like rebellious painters of every era, he believed that his contemporaries never painted what they saw-only what professors had bullied them into believing they saw. In Whistler's magical eyes, all natural objects appeared to be misty, intangible "arrangements," "harmonies" and "symphonies" constructed of overlapping tones of light & shade-which may be why he crept up on an artist absorbed in painting a stone-for-stone facsimile of St. Mark...
Correcting Nature. Author Hesketh Pearson has proved his skill as an anecdotal biographer before this, e.g., in G.B.S., Disraeli, Dickens, Oscar Wilde. In The Man, Whistler, he does a similarly deft job on an expatriate Yankee who was not only the most uncrushable wit of his day but an artist who believed he existed to correct and perfect Nature itself...
...Whistler's first corrections concerned his registered birthplace, Lowell, Mass. "I shall be born when and where I want," said Whistler, "and I do not choose to be born at Lowell." He was not averse to Baltimore, or even St. Petersburg, where his father had lived when building railroads for Czar Nicholas I, and occasionally accepted one of them as his birthplace...
Courtly Bows. Whistler's professional "mission" was "revealing the Thames to the people who lived on it but had previously only seen it as a stretch of water." His avocation was what he called "the gentle art of making enemies." A lady who asked him if he thought a certain sketch indecent was told, "No, madam, but your question is." When one of his students who had painted a "red elbow with green shadows" argued, "I am sure I just paint what I see," the Master answered, "Ah, but the shock will come when you see what you paint...