The Gentle Art of Making Enemies was first published by William Heinemann on 12 June 1890 and a second expanded edition (to include the catalogue of his landmark retrospective exhibition Nocturnes, Marines and Chevalet Pieces) was published two years later. The second edition is now regarded as the standard text.
Its initial publication in 1890 took place amidst much background drama: Whistler began the venture in the summer of 1889 in collaboration with the American journalist and art agent Sheridan Ford in the summer of 1889. But he quarrelled with Ford and tried to pay him off and to delay publication. Ford's reaction, however, was to publish his own 'unauthorised' edition during the spring of 1890. Whistler made strenuous efforts to prevent its publication with the aid of his lawyer George Lewis, but they achieved only limited success and Ford managed to pre-empt Whistler’s edition, albeit with a hastily executed version of cheap design.
The University of Glasgow’s Whistler Archive holds examples of both editions and they make for interesting comparison. The threat that Ford’s edition would overshadow his own (especially as the story was being closely followed by the press during the Spring of 1890) was a clear motivation to Whistler to produce a distinctive volume that replicated in essence the character of his previous publications with their plain brown paper wrappers and asymmetrical design and correlated with the reductive qualities of his art. It also provoked him in the text to distance his Gentle Art from its commercial and opportunistic beginnings – to imply that the authorship of the book had always been his alone while also prefacing it with an account of what he referred to as Ford’s ‘piratical plot.’
Like its forerunner, the Ten O’Clock Lecture, the Gentle Art was read widely not only in Britain and America, but across continental Europe: A German edition was, for example, published in 1909, translated by Margarete Mauthner. Indeed it is, to date, the only complete German translation of the volume. Since then, numerous hard copy editions have been (and continue to be) produced - a paperback Dover edition has, for example, been reprinted many times since it first appeared in 1967.
Part journalistic anthology, part aesthetic manifesto, part self-vindication, Whistler's Gentle Art continues to fascinate 21st century readers, offering us a window not only on his remarkable artistic career but the shifting tectonic plates beneath late 19th century debates around aestheticism and the artist’s role in society.
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