The Painter's Music

Whistler's patronage of the performing arts was very eclectic, indicative of the flexibility of his social position - as an artist and an American in London and Paris - and the wide spectrum of events and genres that coexisted during the late nineteenth century. As the Reverend Hugh Haweis (a musician, preacher, writer and lecturer on music and theology, who was known to Whistler in the 1870s) explained: 'We seem, as a people, to be musically many-sided…We pay our shilling to hear the 'Messiah' at the Agricultural Palace, then go home and sing Glover. We sit for two hours in St James's Hall to hear Beethoven's or Spohr's quartets, and the next day we buy 'God bless the Prince of Wales.'.' ^[1]

Whistler facilitated music making in his own home and studio, and he patronised smoking concerts and soirées; music-hall and cabaret; concert music; opera and operetta; popular solo entertainers; blackface minstrelsy; puppet shows; military bands; can-can, ballet and the beginnings of modern dance; historical drama; burlesque and comic drama; and outdoor Wild West shows. His musical friends ranged from the popular entertainers George Grossmith and Corney Grain; to the composer Franco Paulo Tosti; the concert violinist Pablo de Sarasate (immortalised in Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate); the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte; and the pianist, baritone and conductor George Henschel.

Whistler's interest in music had an immense impact on his art. Throughout his life, he clearly referenced this interest through images of music making, and also of dance – itself a physical and aesthetic response to music. In these works he frequently suggests his own presence, insisting upon the interrelationship of the arts and the similarities between his activity as an artist, and that of the musician. Additionally, from 1867 onwards he employed musical nomenclature – often affixing titles layered with musical associations, to images devoid of musical subject matter. Symphony appeared in 1867; Harmony and Variations in 1871; Nocturne, Arrangement, and Note in 1872; Scherzo in 1882; and Bravura and Caprice in 1884. By the mid 1880s, all titles were in place.

Whistler used this musical nomenclature to indicate his artistic intent: as 'keys' to his art, the titles guide the viewer's manner of visual engagement by referencing musical forms, processes, elements, and modes of expression. They draw our attention to colours and processes that are not always immediately apparent, and they provide a means of navigating pictorial operations that are frequently geared towards abstraction. Whistler wished that the viewer might read and respond to his artworks like a listener receives and appreciates pure music. His writings, and those of his contemporaries, indicate that in the language and processes of music he found a framework for exploring and justifying his belief that the sophisticated and sensitive treatment of line, form and colour, was the highest aim of visual art.

Whistler repeatedly explained that he used musical titles as a means of communicating his interest in the formal properties of his pictures and, simultaneously, his disinterest in narrative or emotional associations. In an article for The World in 1878, which he later published in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies as 'The Red Rag', Whistler explained that his use of certain titles indicated an artistic interest in the arrangement and harmony of colour, in a similar manner to the way in which sound is manipulated by composers of pure instrumental music.

In this text, Whistler wrote of the harmonic palette explored in pure tonal music. His statement – 'On F or G they constructed celestial harmonies - as harmonies - as combinations, evolved from the chords of F or G and their minor correlatives' - indicates that he had a basic understanding of musical tonality. Within this system, chords are designated as primary or secondary, according to their relationship to the tonic key (such as 'F or G'). In his art, Whistler translated the concept of a tonic key, by basing a picture on 'a limited number of colours'. He explored the 'infinite tones and variations' of his selected colours, just as a composer explores the harmonies relating to their tonic key. ^[2] The colours that formed the basis of his chosen harmony were then acknowledged in the title. Whistler explained this framework in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies in his response to P.G. Hamerton's criticism of 1867 that Symphony in White, No. 3 was 'not precisely a symphony in white' due to the inclusion of other colours. Whistler wrote, probably at the later date of 1878, 'does he then...believe that a symphony in F contains no other note, but shall be a continued repetition of F, F, F?...Fool!'

To fully understand Whistler's intentions, we need to distinguish between narrative and subject matter, and between literary associations and the 'poetry' of artistic expression. Whistler was passionate about the beauty of his chosen subject matter, even though he insisted in 'The Red Rag' that 'the picture should have its own merit, and not depend upon dramatic, or legendary, or local interest'. Indeed, in 1886 the Sunday Times noted that every subject Whistler selected was 'artistic'. ^[3] However, it was by interpreting rather than imitating the subject that artistic expression occurred. In 'The Red Rag' Whistler stated that it was the artist's role to go beyond imitation – 'in arrangement of colours to treat a flower as a key, not as a model'. Expanding upon this, he referred to Meyerbeer's operas Les Huguenots (1836) and Le Prophète (1849): 'This is now understood indifferently well – at least by dressmakers. In every costume you see attention is paid to the key-note of colour which runs through the composition, as the chant of the Anabaptists through the Prophète, or the Huguenot's hymn in the opera of that name'.

In his Ten O'Clock (delivered in 1885 and published in 1888), Whistler again used musical analogy to explain his process of selecting and refining visual source material. To the artist, nature was a sourcebook providing material that could be selected and arranged to form a pleasing artistic arrangement.

By using musical references to explain his approach, Whistler was participating in an ongoing discourse. During the nineteenth century, painting looked to music as a paradigm for the beauty and expressive value of self-sufficient artistic technique. As Andrew Kagan has explained, in 1859 – the year that Whistler completed his oil painting At the Piano - the critic Louis Viardot wrote in his article 'Ut Pictura Musica' of 'the dawning of a new era in which the actual means of creating visual art would henceforth receive primary emphasis, and the symbolic, allusive, evocative content of art would be relegated to a position of secondary concern'. ^[4]

A few years earlier, in On the Beautiful in Music (1854), Eduard Hanslick defended formalism in music, which, at that time, was threatened by Richard Wagner's unification of music and drama. On the Beautiful in Music was highly influential and provocative, for it attacked widespread Romantic notions about the purpose and nature of music. Hanslick refuted the assumption that the aim of music is to excite emotion, and that emotions provide music with subject matter. Rather, he argued, the value and beauty of music is 'specifically musical', and 'consists wholly of sounds artistically combined'. ^[5] Hanslick viewed music as an autonomous language, whose beauty is founded on an intellectual moulding of acoustic material. His defence of musical autonomy was crucial to the adoption of the musical model by visual artists. For instance, in 1855, Eugène Delacroix wrote in his journal: what 'places music higher than the other arts (with many reservations in favour of painting precisely because it resembles music in so many ways), is that although completely in a convention of its own, it is also a complete language'. ^[6]

Wagnerism and Beethovenism were two of the major movements fuelling musical modelling in the nineteenth century, and Whistler engaged with both. He mixed with Wagner enthusiasts from the 1850s until at least the 1890s; was closely aligned with artists who were significantly influenced by Wagner; exhibited with the group Les XX, whose exhibitions were modelled on Wagner's concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk; and was familiar with Wagner's music. However, Whistler preferred the music of Beethoven. In 1880 Whistler and Otto Bacher listened to a Venetian military band perform excerpts from Wagner's Lohengrin in the presence of the composer. Afterwards, Bacher recalled:

Whistler had ample opportunity to hear Beethoven's music performed in private and public situations, and was acquainted with professional musicians who championed Beethoven's music, such as Sir Julius Benedict, Edward Dannreuther, Sir Charles Hallé, Joseph Joachim and Sarasate. Furthermore, Whistler clearly aligned himself with Beethovenism in his theoretical statements.

In 'The Red Rag,' Whistler declared that 'Beethoven and the rest wrote music – simply music; symphony in this key, concerto or sonata in that.' Later, in his Ten O'Clock Whistler referred to Beethoven's 'C minor Symphony' as the musical equivalent of Rembrandt's etchings – both being examples of high art in contrast to 'popular print' and 'songs of the hall'. Finally, Bacher recalled Whistler saying: 'If I can find the right kind of thing I will produce a harmony in color corresponding to Beethoven's harmonies in sound'. ^[8] Upon Whistler's death, Arthur Eddy reinforced Whistler's self-declared alliance with Beethoven: