The numerous Whistlers in this gallery show him in many periods and many styles.  On wall D, at the lower right, a portrait of an auburn girl, one of his many fascinating models, shows Whistler more as a pure painter than any of the other canvases.  This doubtless belongs to the period when he was under Courbet’s influence.  The richness of pure paint, dexterously applied, is scarcely found in the many portraits on the same wall, in which a certain thinness of paint is too much in evidence, no matter how distinguished and suggestive these canvases are.  His sense of composition, of the placing of areas of different tones and colour, is markedly evident in all of his work, no matter how experimental and casual it may be.  The “Falling Rocket” is the most wonderful example of this quality of design.  If it is true that it hung for weeks upside down in the present owner’s house, then most decidedly this fact speaks well for its excellent quality of design, irrespective of its pictorial meaning.  The many small sparks descending rhythmically from an impenetrable sky are carefully considered in their relative position and size so as to insure that feeling of pattern which he almost instinctively gave to everything he did.  This picture of the “Falling Rocket” is of particular interest as the picture which made John Ruskin, the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, accuse Whistler of flinging a pot of paint at the face of the public and having the impudence of a coxcomb to ask two hundred guineas for it.  Surely this carefully and cleanly painted picture shows Whistler as hardly a flinger of paint, and we can only rejoice over the kind fate which saved Mr. Ruskin from extending his career into the present age of paint flingers, who, had they lived in his day, would have proved fatal to the learned professor.  The farthing damages which Whistler received in a mock trial were scarcely as valuable as the universal admiration this picture receives.

There never was a painter who manipulated paint with more regard for the medium than did Whistler.  His portrait of Mrs. Milicent Cobden has a noble beauty of restraint.  It is very sensitively painted, and tender almost to the point of thinness.  It fascinates in its subtle appeal, which the observer is induced to supplement by his own emotion.  This quality of subtlety is the one attribute which makes his work so beloved by the artist and so difficult of understanding for the layman, who, try as he may, is not equipped with sufficient technical insight to do Whistler’s paintings full justice.  Uneven as his work is, as every painter admits, it will always be more and more cherished by the profession and remain more or less of a mystery to the puzzled public, who would like to follow this painter into the realm of his interests.