* * * * *

Walter Sickert, then a pupil of Whistler’s, praised Lord Leighton’s “Harvest Moon” in an article on the Manchester Art Treasure Exhibition.  Whistler telegraphed him at Hampstead: 

“The Harvest Moon rises at Hampstead and the cocks of Chelsea crow!”

* * * * *

Apropos of his spats with Sickert he remarked, “Yes, we are always forgiving Walter.”

Another pupil, foreseeing the end of Whistler as president of the Royal Society of British Artists, resigned some months before the time.  “The early rat,” said Whistler, grimly, “the first to leave the sinking ship.”

* * * * *

In the Fine Art Society’s gallery one day he spoke to a knighted R.A.  “Who was that?” Starr asked.

“Really, now, I forget,” was the reply.  “But whoever it was it’s some one of no importance, you know, no importance whatever.”

* * * * *

At an exhibition of Doré’s pictures Whistler asked an attendant if a certain academician’s large religious picture was not on view.

“No,” said the man; “it’s much lower down!”

“Impossible!” replied Whistler, gleefully.

Sidney Starr relates that Whistler was asked one year to “hang” the exhibits in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool.  In the center of one wall he placed Luke Fildes’s “Doctor,” and surrounded it with all the pictures he could find of dying people, convalescents, still-life medicine bottles, and the like.  This caused comment.  “But,” said Whistler, “I told them I wished to emphasize that particular school.”

“And what did you put on the opposite wall?” Starr asked.

“Oh, Leighton’s—­I really forget what it was.”

“But that is different, you know,” said Starr.

“No,” rejoined Whistler; “it’s really the same thing!”

* * * * *

Having seen a picture of Starr’s in Liverpool, which he amiably, termed “a picture among paint,” he observed to him on the occasion of their first meeting:  “Paint things exactly as they are.  I always do.  Young men think they should paint like this or that painter.  Be quite simple; no fussy foolishness, you know; and don’t try to be what they call ‘strong.’  When a picture ‘smells of paint,’” he said slowly, “it’s what they call ‘strong.’”

* * * * *

Riding once with Starr to dine at the Café Royal, Whistler leaned forward in the hansom and looked at the green park in the dusk, fresh and sweet after the rain; at the long line of light reflected, shimmering, in the wet Piccadilly pavement, and said: 

“Starr, I have not dined, as you know, so you need not think I say this in anything but a cold and careful spirit:  it is better to live on bread and cheese and paint beautiful things than to live like Dives and paint pot-boilers.  But a painter really should not have to worry about—­’various,’ you know.  Poverty may induce industry, but it does not produce the fine flower of painting.  The test is not poverty; it’s money.  Give a painter money and see what he’ll do.  If he does not paint, his work is well lost to the world.  If I had had, say, three thousand pounds a year, what beautiful things I could have done!”