“I’m very sorry about your canvases.  Are they valuable?”

“Not yet!” screeched Whistler.  “Not yet!”

“I only know of two painters in the world,” said a newly introduced feminine enthusiast to Whistler, “yourself and Velasquez.”

“Why,” answered Whistler, in dulcet tones, “why drag in Velasquez?”

Mr. Chase once asked him if he really said this seriously.

“No, of course not,” he replied.  “You don’t suppose I couple myself with Velasquez, do you?  I simply wanted to take her down.”

* * * * *

Sir John E. Millais, walking through the Grosvenor Gallery with Archibald Stuart Wortley, stopped longer than usual before the shadowy, graceful portrait of a lady, “an arrangement in gray, rose, and silver,” and then broke out:  “It’s damned clever!  It’s a damned sight too clever!”

This was his verdict on Whistler’s portrait of Lady Meux.  Millais contended that Whistler “never learned the grammar of his art,” that “his drawing is as faulty as it can be,” and that “he thought nothing” of depicting “a woman all out of proportion, with impossible legs and arms!”

* * * * *

In 1874 there was a suggestion that Whistler’s portrait of Carlyle should be bought for the National Gallery.  Sir George Scharf, then curator of that institution, came to Mr. Graves’s show-rooms in Pall Mall to take a look at it.

When Mr. Graves produced the painting he observed, icily: 

“Well, and has painting come to this?”

“I told Mr. Graves,” said Whistler, “that he should have said,’ No, it hasn’t."’

It was nearly twenty years after when Glasgow finally bought the masterpiece.  Indeed, Whistler had little market for his works until 1892.

He often found, as he said, “a long face and a short account at the bank.”  Complaining to Sidney Starr one day of the sums earned by a certain eminent “R.A.,” while he received little or nothing, Starr reminded him that R.A.’s painted to please the public and so reaped their reward.

“I don’t think they do,” demurred Whistler; “I think they paint as well as they can.”

Of Alma-Tadema’s work he observed, “My only objection to Tadema’s pictures is that they are unfinished.”

Starr spoke approvingly of the promising work of some of the younger artists.  “They are all tarred with the same brush,” said Whistler.  “They are of the schools!” Of one particular rising star Whistler remarked:  “He’s clever, but there’s something common in everything he does.  So what’s the use of it?”

Starr indicated a distinguishing difference between the work of a certain R.A. and another.  “Well,” he replied, “it’s a nasty difference.”

* * * * *

M.H.  Spielmann, the art-critic, spoke of “Ten o’Clock " as “smart but misleading.”  Whistler retorted, “If the lecture had not seemed misleading to him, it surely would not have been worth uttering at all!”