The 'Ten O'Clock Lecture' represents Whistler’s most coherent public statement of his aesthetic ideas. It was first delivered in London on 20 February 1885 at the Prince's Hall, Piccadilly with many of his friends, patrons and rivals in attendance, including Oscar Wilde. Soon afterwards, he arranged with his printer Thomas Way to publish a small edition of twenty-five copies of the lecture in pamphlet form.
Whistler repeated his performance - at Oxford, Cambridge and on a number of occasions, at private houses. This may have prompted the idea of a lecture tour of America that was to be overseen by the actress-manager Helen Lenoir (who had helped stage the event at Prince’s Hall). However, Whistler seems to have been preoccupied with exhibition commitments and the Society of British Artists (of which he was elected President on 1 June 1886) and the trip never materialised. His growing rivalry with Wilde, once a regular presence in his studio, may also have been a factor, especially as Wilde had already been on highly publicised lecture tour of America and Canada in 1882.
By 1888, having given up the idea of a lecture tour, Whistler turned his attention to larger-scale publication. New editions of the lecture pamphlet were published by Chatto & Windus in London, Houghton Mifflin in Boston and the Librairie Academique Didier in Paris. They were published in a distinctive format using wide print margins and brown wrappers that Whistler would later develop in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. The French translation was undertaken by Whistler’s friend, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé.
The published Ten O’Clock Lecture went on to be read widely not only in Britain and America but across continental Europe. In their 1986 bibliography, Robert Getscher and Paul Marks list numerous translated editions of the Ten O’Clock that, as well as Mallarmé’s translation into French, include Theodor Knorr’s 1904 translation for the first German edition, published in Strasbourg.
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