The Whistler book Author:Sadakichi Hartmann Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: just the right thing." And so he worked, day after day and year after year, on his pictures, until every trace of labour was obliterated and the picture had beco... more »me a masterpiece. " A masterpiece that would appear as a flower " to the painter — perfect in its bud as in its bloom — with no reason to explain its presence, no mission to fulfil; a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist — a puzzle to the botanist — an accident of sentiment to the literary man." This flatly contradicts the general idea rampant among painters that he furnished his paintings au premier coup. His friends endorse the denial. Mr. R. A. Canfield has seen not less than sixteen changes of background to one portrait, " and heaven knows how many more that were not counted." Whenever he was dissatisfied with a painting, he started a new canvas until he finally realized the task he had attempted. In that sense his colleagues are right, his pictures look as if they were painted au premier coup, but it was a roundabout way. It is impossible to advance any theory about his technique. All his pictures are painted in varying thicknesses of paint, in varying degrees of liquidity of paint, in varying smoothness and roughness, in few or many sittings, in fact, in the varying technique which alonecan correspond to moods of so great a painter and the circumstances of each picture. The only thing which has any semblance to a constant method is a moderate adherence, in his portraits at least, to the old way of painting from dark to light which, in the final painting, in overlapping pieces of paint, as in the case of most oil paintings until recently, results in the thickening of the paint towards the light. There are scarcely more than sixteen finished nocturnes on record. Of these, most are masterpiece...« less