Sir John E. Millais said to Whistler one day:  “Jimmy, why don’t you paint more pictures?  Put out more canvases!”

“I know better,” was the shrewd reply.  “The fool!” he muttered, as he entered his studio.  “He spreads himself on canvas on every possible occasion, and, do you know, he called me Jimmy!  Mind you, I don’t know the fellow well at all.”

* * * * *

His “Nocturne in Blue and Gold, Valparaiso,” was in the Hill collection at Brighton.  Whistler made Mr. Hill a visit which he thus described:  “I was shown into the galleries, and, of course, took a chair and sat looking at my beautiful ‘Nocturne’; then, as there was nothing else to do, I went to sleep.”

In this state Mr. Hill found him!

This sleeping habit was common with him when the company or the goings-on failed to interest him.  On one occasion his sweet snore alarmed his neighbor, who nudged him and whispered: 

“I say, Whistler, you must not sleep here!”

“Leave me alone!” commanded the artist, crossly.  “I’ve said all I wanted to.  I’ve no interest at all in what you and your friends have to say.”

* * * * *

He once slumbered through a dinner where Edwin A. Abbey was a fellow-guest.  The next morning he blandly asked Mr. Chase: 

“What did Abbey have to say last night?  Anything worth while?”

When Dan Smith was at the beginning of his career as an illustrator he was employed by an important lithographing house.  One day, while making a large picture of Antony and Cleopatra in the barge scene, which was to be used by Kyrle Bellew and Mrs. James Brown Potter as a poster for their joint starring tour, Whistler, accompanied by a friend, visited the studio: 

Whistler examined, with evident interest and approval, the canvas upon which the youthful artist was at work, holding his glass to his eyes; then, looking quizzically over it, remarked to his friend, “What a mercantile wretch it is!”

* * * * *

Whistler presented a copy of his edition of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies to “Theodore Watts, the Worldling.”

Asked why he started the unlucky school in the Latin Quarter, he answered: 

“It was for Carmen Rossi [long his model], poor little Carmen, who is a mere child and has no money, and is saddled with the usual Italian burden of a large, disreputable family—­banditti brothers, a trifling husband, and all the rest of it.”

“Carmen” was then thirty years old; weight, one hundred and ninety pounds.  But she once had been his child-model.

* * * * *

A Scotch student in the class had worked out the face of an old peasant woman illuminated by a candle.  “How beautifully you have painted the candle!” Whistler commended.  “Good morning, gentlemen!”

* * * * *