“I never was born, my child; I came from on high.”

The model retorted: 

“Now that shows how easily we deceive ourselves in this world, for I should say you came from below!”

* * * * *

Invited once to dine with some eminences, the dinner-hour found him busy with his brush and engrossed in his subject.  A friend who was to accompany him to the feast urged that it was frightfully late.  “Don’t you think you had better stop?” he asked.

“Stop?” shrieked Whistler.  “Stop when everything is going so beautifully?  Go and stuff myself with food when I can paint like this?  Never!  Never!  Besides, they won’t do anything until I get there.  They never do.”

* * * * *

Whistler was in a London shop one day when a customer came in who mistook him for a clerk.

“I say, this ’at doesn’t fit!”

“Neither does your coat,” observed the painter, after eying him critically.

* * * * *

A young woman student protested under criticism, “Mr. Whistler, is there any reason why I shouldn’t paint things as I see them?”

“Well, really, there is no statute against it; but the dreadful moment will be when you see things as you painted them!”

“Britain’s Realm,” by John Brett, R.A., now in the National Gallery at Millbank, made a stir when first exhibited at the Academy.  It shows the sea.  Whistler walked into a wave of adulation one day during the exhibition, and, affecting to “knock” with his knuckles, said sardonically:  “Ha!  Ha!  Tin!  If you threw a stone on to this it would make a rumbling noise!”

* * * * *

His early price for the use of one of his lithographs by a magazine was ten guineas.  Later he charged twenty, either sum being petty enough.  To one editor who tendered ten pounds he wrote: 

“Guineas, M. le Rédacteur; guineas, not pounds!”

* * * * *

At a reception one evening in Prince’s Hall he was introduced to Henrietta Rae, whose painting “Psyche Before the Throne of Venus” had made her notable.  She had been described to him in advance as rather weighty in figure.

“I don’t think you’re a bit too fat,” was his encouraging greeting.

* * * * *

“Why have you withered people and stung them all your life?” asked a lady.

“My dear,” he said, “I will tell you a secret.  Early in life I made the discovery that I was charming; and if one is delightful, one has to thrust the world away to keep from being bored to death.”

* * * * *

During the Boxer troubles, when Pekin was under siege to rescue the legations, he remarked: 

“Dear! dear!  I hope they will save the palace.  All the Englishmen in the world are not worth one blue china vase.”