Whistler in Dublin, 1884

Irish Arts Review

Whistler in Dublin, 1884Author(s): Ronald AndersonSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 3, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 45-51Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491906 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

WHISTLER IN DUBLIN, 1884

Traditionally, the history of art in Ireland, particularly in the latter

half of the nineteenth century, is seen and accepted to be the sum total of two fundamental themes: those artists who stayed at home in Ireland and established themselves with the Royal Hibernian

Academy, and those who left to seek fame and fortune elsewhere.1 When viewed from this dual perspective, how ever, there is a tendency to get a some

what distorted assessment of the growth and development of Irish art as a whole in this period. All too often the role and achievement of the numerous 'pri vate' art clubs and societies is dismissed as unimportant, or indeed, simply unknown; one such club in the nine teenth century was The Dublin Sketch ing Club.

In 1884, despite the internal dissen sion it would cause, the Club was to stake its place firmly in the history of Irish art by bringing to Dublin the first truly 'modern' loan exhibition of paint ings by that most controversial of artists, James McNeill Whistler (1834 1903). Indeed the enormity of the Club's achievement can be gauged from the fact that along with Whistler's work the

Club was a 'hair's breadth' from staging in Dublin undoubtedly the biggest coup in British art in the nineteenth century

- Whistler's legendary 10 o'clock Lec ture. But, as this article will describe, unforeseen circumstances in the shape of Oscar Wilde, would intervene. Notwith standing, the 1884 exhibition of Whistler paintings would in consequence, " . set Dublin by the ears . . . 11.2

The Club under whose auspices the exhibition was held was formed on

October 20th, 1874, when, " . . . a dozen good gentlemen of Dublin met in the Westland Row home of Dr. Tod hunter and decided to form the Dublin Sketching Club ... ".3 Among the founder members was Bram Stoker, bet ter known today as the author of

Dracula. For the first year of the existence of

the club, membership was restricted to founder members, and from the archive

material of this period it can be fairly deduced that it was a rather mundane affair. The members, perhaps realizing this, unanimously agreed the following year to make the membership open,

"..to the genltlemen painters of the city."4 Among those who then joined

Ronald Anderson, a research scholar in the Department of Art History, University of

St. Andrews, Scotland, recalls the exhibition of Whistler's work

brought to Ireland in 1884 by The Dublin Sketching Club and

explains its importance in the development of art appreciation

in Ireland.

DU BLI N

SKETCHING CLUB.

1 X 11 I I; 1 'L I () N

SKETCHES, PICTURES, AND PHOTOGRAPHY,

HELI) .,T

THE LEINSTEIt HALL,

:35 if1OLES 301SRT1I STR/;ElT,

On the lst December and following day

A LOAN COLLECTION

oF

PICTURES BY MR. WHISTLER IS ALSO ON VIEW.

DUBLIN: R. D. WEBB & SON, PRINTERS, ABBEY STRM.

1884.

The front-piece of the Dublin Sketching Club's exhibition catalogue of 1884.

and participated in the weekly 'sketch ing outings' was Nathaniel Hone (183 1 1917), who had recently returned to Ireland after working in the Barbizon

with Jean-Francois Millet and Henry Harpignies.

The next year, 1876, the Club accept ed the membership of such notable local painters as the gifted Belfast amateur, Dr. James Moore, a future Pre sident of the Royal Hibernian Academy, Sir Thomas Jones, and John Butler Yeats. Between 1876 and 1884 the club membership continued to rise and among the more notable painters who join ed (and interestingly enough, those of the younger generation) were Richard

Orpen, older brother of William, Walter Osborne, Percy French and Sarah Purser.

By 1884, the Club was sufficiently well established in Dublin to merit a weekly paragraph about its activities in

the widely read Freeman's Journal. Indeed, such was the reputation of the club that in one of the Joumal's notices it ranked the Club as, ".... next to the

Royal Hibernian Academy in the art world of Dublin ... ".5 In retrospect, however, and as the catalogues and reviews of the Club's annual exhibitions

make clear, while the Club was fairly adventurous in the works of such mem bers as Hone, Yeats, Osborne and Pur ser (all of whom had trained to various degrees outside Ireland) it was in all reality, rather conservative.

This apparently inbuilt conservatism, which was to run through almost every stratum of native Irish art in the nineteenth century, was rather aptly summed up by one of the Club's found ing members, Dr. Todhunter, who,

whilst never holding office in the Club, clearly exercised a considerable influence over its artistic direction. In 1876, Todhunter, Professor of English at Trinity College, gave a lecture entitled, "The Theory of the Beautiful".6 Of the essential difference between true and false beauty, he wrote, " ... any French sensation picture - such as the one of the slave exhibited last year in London

- will serve as an example of the horr ible . . . ". It was, therefore, perhaps no surprise that when the Whistler paint ings came to Dublin in 1884, one of the loudest objectors to their presence was

Dr. Todhunter. The key figure in the initial idea of

the Whistler exhibition and lecture was the Hon. Frederick Lawless, an Irish sculptor now hardly remembered. Dur ing a period in London in the 1880's,

Lawless became a close associate of Whistler's before returning to Dublin in February, 1884. The other organizers with Lawless were John Butler Yeats and William Booth-Pearsall, a Dublin dental surgeon.

On Wednesday, November 1 Oth, 1884, an 'official' invitation was sent to Whist ler in London. The artist responded immediately with a generosity which surprised even the organizers. Writing to William Booth-Pearsall before the opening of the exhibition on December 1st, Whistler explained that the twenty six paintings he sent to Dublin repre sented:

". ... the largest collection I have sent to any gallery in the United Kingdom, out of London ... " 7

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

V8HSTE IN D'ULIN -1884l\

The generosity of Whistler's response must, however, be viewed within the context of his close affinity with the Irish. To the man who claimed through out his life that "on his father's side he was Irish, a Highlander on his mother's, and had not a drop of Anglo-Saxon blood in his veins" the idea of an exhibition in Ireland was immensely appealing.8

Of the twenty-six paintings which left London for Dublin on November 17th,9 eight were small water-colours remain ing from Whistler's one-man exhibition in London earlier that year;10 the other eighteen included such specific requests as Whistler's famous pair of portraits, 'The Artist's Mother' and 'Thomas Car lyle', called Arrangements in Grey and

Black No. 1 and No. 2 respectively. At one point it appears that Whistler had thought seriously of sending across his recently finished portrait of 'Sefior Pablo de Sarasate'll but evidently decided against it, and instead sent his 'Portrait of Lady Meux'.

By the 21st of November, all the Whistler exhibits had arrived safely in Dublin; in fact, they had arrived four days early thus allowing Lawless, Yeats and Booth-Pearsall to hang them long before the Club members could hang their own, a point that became an issue of serious internal contention before the exhibition closed some three weeks later.

As to the actual hanging of his work, Whistler left the trio in total control. In

an undated letter, he informed Booth Pearsall:

"... the arrangement and hanging of the pictures, I am sure you can manage perfectly - and upon the whole it is just as well that I could not find the drapery from Bond St. (where it is still in use at Messrs. Dowdeswells) for it might have only inter fered with the assembly of your room too

much . . . "12

The three large portraits, Mother, No. 244, Carlyle, No. 242, and Lady Meux, No. 243, occupied the central position on what was considered the most prestigious wall; on either side were the smaller works: 231 to 241 on the right, and 245 to 256 on the left.

Thus, the twenty-six works by Whistler took up a full wall normally reserved for a section of Club work entitled: "Pictures and Studies from Nature", adjudged by the Club's Hanging Com

mittee as "especially meritorious"

VJ4e Aet i ,

(LeCa ~ ej S"LV

t1Aw vtl') 1 4/t -0S

i b 49 Y tb leS a

The letter from the Dublin Sketching Club

inforing Whistler that he had been elected an Honorary Member. The letter

was found in Whistler's studio on his death,

,nearly twenty years later in 1903.

(Letter by kind permission of Glasgow University).

The exhibition hail in Molesworth Street opened on the evening of November 23rd to receive the work of the Club members. By the'end of the evening the Dublin Sketching Club

membership was divided for the first time in its ten year history. On the one side, irate members led by Dr. Todhunter, demanded that the Whistler paintings should be taken down, or at least," ... the eccentricities should be

hung in a less conspicuous area On the other, rooth-Pearsall, Lawless and Yeats, together with unidentified

members, replied that as members and supporters of the Hanging Committee their decision, as laid down by the Club rules, was final.'4

Despite the brewing internal trouble the 'Private View' day went ahead on Saturday, November, 29th. On Monday, even before the Dublin public had a chance to see for themselves what all the fuss was about, the first public broadsides were fired in the first editions of the Dublin newspapers. The Irish Times began by attacking the very idea of the 'loan exhibition':

...it may be somewhat surprising", the

reviewer wrote, "that a notice under this

aintgle should de chief with c r and

sntudes bytAericns1 Boftmorearal orwless

repute in the world of art, but the blame, or, if you will, the credit, for this belongs entirely to those who have wandered so far afield in the search for works to fill up the blank spaces upon the walls of the exhibition . . . It ought to be a loan collection pure and simple, or, an exhibi tion of the year's club work, and it is not an encouraging sign to discover a tendency to merge the usefulness of the latter in the attractiveness of the former . . . ".16

The Dublin Daily Express of the same day, however, maintained no such caution. Under the title, "The Private View at the Dublin Sketching Club", the reviewer launched into a whole hearted defence of the exhibition and the artist, noting that the View was "wonderfully successful" and that "the audience was larger than anything he had ever seen before ... "17. The author went on:

Mr. Whistler's pictures were, as might be expected, the chief centre of interest, and it was highly amusing to hear the different opinions passed upon them, ranging from the philistines (the untuned and uninstructed in art) to the more generous and appreciative estimates of his admirers and devotees. The freshness and originality was as startling as it was novel. On the small drawings - caprices, nocturnes, notes in pink and red - the critical wrath of the uneducated and inexperienced waxed hot, and such complimentary remarks as "rubbish", "daubs", "unfinished", "has to be looked at from a long way off", were as plentiful as blackberries, but as time passed on and the real skill and genius of the painter

were pointed out ... . the ferocity -abated and a more generous and rational estimate was taken. The fact is Mr. Whistler sees nature in his own way . .. Those interested in this exciting art must go to

Molesworth Street, and judge for them selves ... "18

The following day the implications of the Whistler exhibition moved to the editorial of The Irish Times, in which, the editor was to note:

". . . We publish today a letter from Dr. William Booth-Pearsall in which he angrily complains of our critic's recent comments upon the Dublin Sketching Club's exhibition. In that criticism, it will be remembered, a most friendly spirit was

manifested towards the club, and there was sufficient recognition of its enterprises in affording lo-cal artists, and the public at large, an opportunity of studying some of the masterpieces of English and American

workers . . .There was no suggestion that a loan collection should be made, but, on

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW


the contrary . . . To call such criticisms "iscoffing" is a mischievous misrepresenta tion of candid and honest opinion. . ."19

Pearsall's lengthy letter to The Irish Times was a strenuous defence of the Club's (or, rather the Hanging Com mittee's) decision to bring the Whistler paintings to Dublin. It was also an equally staunch defence of Whistler's art. As he pointed out in his letter;

".. . no other club or society, except the Dublin Sketching Club, takes any trouble to show their members and the public any of the current art of the day ... And in regard to the merits of the paintings themselves ... I have received many letters of thanks and congratulations from artists, literary men, musicians, and others in Dublin, from whom commendation is an honour at any success in affording them an opportunity of enjoying this great artist's work in Dublin.... 20

Soon after Booth-Pearsall's letter appeared in The Irish Times, he wrote to

Whistler in London to report upon the controversy in Dublin and his part in

Whistler's defence. Whistler wrote back to Booth-Pearsall with a word of caution;

It ... I fear Mr. Pearsall that if you once take up the cudgels for Whistler, you will spend the rest of your days in STRIFE! I LIKE FIGHTING - but do not wish to involve all my friends, among whom I trust I may count you - in my battles . .. ". 21

Nevertheless, Whistler, it appears was enjoying every moment of this, yet another, controversy. And, as he was to point out to Booth-Pearsall, he was keen to read for himself all the reviews;

". . . I should very much like to see all the articles that have been written about my paintings - especially the scurrilous ones, for it is a joy to me to see the loutish underbred method of mine enemies, who tare (sic) their hair and blunder ... and touch me never. It is my pleasure to watch them in their agonies of infectious daze.

Do send me at once all that they have said, these gentlemen (and your own

members?), I should be so pleased . . .}22

Despite the public furore being caused by the Whistler exhibits, the private dissent within the Club soon too be came a public affair. On December 3rd an anonymous member of the Club voiced his opinion in The Irish Times.

He did not, as he pointed out, "... want to enter into the relative merits of Whistler's work, but to endeavour to support your art critic who has been most injudiciously found fault with for the remarks he thought it his duty to make in his critique of the exhibition . . . ". "Surely", he went on;

". . . when we have in our midst the Royal Hibernian Academy and its members willing and anxious to exhibit current art of the day upon its walls, it might be safely left to the members of that institution, to place there, ... work by

greater and more artistic minds than our own ... "23

Apart from The Irish Times, Booth Pearsall, Lawless and Yeats continued to receive public support in the sympathetic

Dublin Daily Express and Freeman's Joumal. Indeed, this line was followed by the Dublin press in general. On December 3rd the Dublin Evening Mail concluded its review of the exhibition in praise of Whistler's work because;

It... he had struck a path for himself wider and broader than that which convention allows without resentment . . . His pictures

Photograph of James McNeill Whistler (sitting back, right) and the Hon. Frederick Lawless (standing, back) taken in Whistler's studio in 1881.

Original photograph in the Pennell Collection, Library of Congress, Washingtion.

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW


came at the beginning of the aesthetic craze and augmented it. As Edison and Fulton experimented in the sciences, so

Whistler does in painting. His method is strange and new ... His effects are con sequently striking, and arrest attention . . . His tones are delicate"24

The anger felt by some Club members had not abated. On Thursday, Decem ber 4th, another anonymous letter appeared in The Irish Times. While the earlier letter from "a club member" had obviously been written in a tone of restraint and reason, this letter went straight to the heart of the matter, "... the manner, by which the members'

work has been sacrificed to make room for Mr. Whistler's unintelligible repro ductions . .. ."25

The letter, in effect, set the tone for a confrontation in the exhibition hall, in

Molesworth Street, on the evening of Monday, December 8th, when a group of dissident members, led by Todhunter, drew up a resolution calling for the resignation of Pearsall, Yeats and Law less. As part of their evidence they attempted to photograph the Whistler paintings in the context of the room. At this point several members, including at least Lawless and Booth-Pearsall, inter vened and attempted to remove them. As Booth-Pearsall was to inform the Pennells, Whistler's biographers, some twenty years later, "... a terrible convulsion (then) took place.. ".26

As a result of "the terrible convul sion", an emergency meeting was arrang ed for the following Wednesday. At that

meeting a motion of "no confidence" in the Hanging Committee was put to the members. The motion was defeat ed. Booth-Pearsall then proposed the

motion, seconded by Lawless, ".... that Mr. Whistler should be made an Hon orary Member of the Dublin Sketching Club". This was carried despite resist ance from the dissidents. On hearing the news from Dublin a few days later,

Whistler informed Booth-Pearsall that he was, ".... greatly pleased with my elevation in the Club . . . "27

The 1884 Dublin Sketching Club exhibition was unique, in that it was the first one-man-loan-exhibition of "modern" paintings to be staged in Dublin in the nineteenth century. It is more difficult to put into perspective its broader significance. On one level, local reviews, apart from the inherently conservative rish Times, are ind icative

of the fact that despite the traditional belief that the substance and circum stance of Irish art in this period was

merely "a mirror image" of its English counterpart, the evidence tends to suggest otherwise. Unlike the English press in general, the Irish media con sistently, throughout the three-week exhibition, presented a receptive and enlightened case for the controversial

Whistler. On another level, the circumstances

of the exhibition almost certainly high lighted, perhaps for the first time, the serious structural defects in the accessi bility and display of art in Ireland in the nineteenth century. The "official" structure was archaic, making no allow ance for what was happening outside of the United Kingdom, a situation unfor tunately not remedied by the Whistler show of 1884. Indeed, as long after the exhibition as 1904, Sir Hugh Lane, the

man behind the creation of a gallery of Modern Art, in Dublin, was still able to lament the fact that;

.... even if our students are expected to work without ever seeing or being stimul ated by the sight of a Corot, a Watts, a

Whistler or a Sargent we still allow the pictures of men who belong to us by birth or blood to be hung everywhere but in Ireland - it is an injustice that must be done away with . ... 28

In more immediate terms, the 1884 exhibition made the young William Butler Yeats, ". . . happy for days ... "29 The attraction of Whistler to the young poet derived from the fact that, like the artist, Yeats did not care for the "repre sentation of mere reality" but favoured instead deliberate and artistic creation. Indeed, as Yeats refined his poetic symbolism in the years following the 1884 exhibition, he would always acknowledge the part he perceived

Whistler as playing in the emergence of "symbolic" art. In 1895, the poet wrote,

"... Pattern and rhythm are the roads to open Symbolism, and the arts have already become full of pattern and rhythm. Subject pictures no longer interest us, while pictures with pattern and rhythm, . .. like Mr. Whistler's ... interest us greatly. Mr. Whistler has sometimes thought so greatly of these patterns and rhythms, that the images of human life have faded almost perfectly, and yet we have not lost interest .. .".3

The 1884 exhibition also allowed many young Irish artists and students

the opportunity to examine 'modern' art at close quarters, many of them, for the first time.31 One young Dublin painter, Walter Osborne (1859-1903), certainly took full advantage of his recently acquired membership of the

Club to examine the exhibits in depth.32 Years later, Osborne gave his lifelong friend, Stephen Gwynn, a copy, perhaps made in 1884, of Whistler's 'Carlyle', saying, "... it was a picture he loved ... ".33

Financially, the exhibition was a resounding success for the Dublin Sketching Club. So much so, in fact, that the prestigious Pall Mall Gazette

which normally only reported on the Royal Hibernian Academy in Ireland was moved to remark, ". . . the Sketching Club exhibition was a great success and a very credible enterprise . . . ". The report continued, ". .. the numbers to the exhibition was unusually large, and the sales amounted to ?224, nearly double of last year. This state of affairs speaks well for the educated taste of the city ... 9.34

However, despite his precise instruct ions to Booth-Pearsall as to how any potential sale should be conducted,

Whistler made little financial gain from the exhibition.35 An offer was made by a Club member, the Rt. Hon. Jonathan Hogg, for the purchase of 'Arrangement in Grey and Black - Portrait of the

Painter's Mother', but Whistler ada mantly refused to sell.36 The painting is now in the Louvre, Paris. Instead, however, Hogg purchased two small water-colours, 'Yellow and Grey' (No. 233), and 'Nocturne in Grey and Gold, Piccadilly' (No. 251). Both paintings, the only two sold by Whistler at the exhibition, were bequeathed by Hogg to the National Gallery of Ireland in 1930.37 What would have been the crowning

glory in the club's achievement, Whist ler's first public lecture on his art, was finally lost to the opportunism of Oscar

Wilde. Whistler, who had been invited by the organizers to come to Dublin and lecture on his art, was initially uncertain;

.... as to the lecture question I must think it over and I will write soon for I am not sure if I have time for engagements ... "38

Before long, however, the artist consented; it is possible that he wanted to be in Dublin to welcome home from

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW


exile his good friend, the Fenian leader, John O'Leary. Whistler wrote to Booth Pearsall that he might then undertake to give one or maybe two lectures.39

As the subsequent letters between London and Dublin indicate, Whistler was very keen to give a lecture, not merely to the club members, but to the general public. In the meantime he insisted that the plan should be kept private, writing

". . . Tell Lawless to say nothing about the possible lectures ... ".40

However, before the first week of January, 1885, was over there was no need for Whistler to bother. Oscar

Wilde got there first. On the afternoon of Tuesday, January 6th, before "a scant audience"41 in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, Wilde gave a lecture on 'The Value of Art in Modern Life', subtitled, 'The Meaning of the Aesthetic Move

ment'. That hitherto undocumented lecture

in Dublin42 is not only interesting in its

relation to the contentious plagiarism charge made against each man by the other, but also in the extent of Wilde's apparent audacity. Despite his "friend ship" with Whistler, and the fact that he was from Dublin, Wilde was not in volved in any way with the organization of the Whistler Loan exhibition, though he was almost certainly aware of it. Likewise, Whistler's planned lecture in Dublin was certainly known to Wilde. But the conspicuous absence of any notice in the Dublin press about

Wilde's lecture (which is accounted for by "the scant audience" as reported by The Irish Times) gives rise to the strong suspicion that his lecture was not planned in advance. It appears to have been a case of one-up-man-ship on

Wilde's part. Returning to Ireland after Christmas, and hearing of the contro versy caused by the Whistler paintings a few weeks earlier, Wilde took it upon himself to deliver the lecture. His audacity in speaking on behalf of

Whistler's art was unforgiveable. When, on February 20th, 1885 Whistler finally gave his first public lecture to a packed audience at the Prince's Hall, Piccadilly, with Wilde in attendance, his anger and frustration towards the "amateur" aes thete was obvious. Whistler's sheer vehemence and blatant reference to

Wilde's plagiarism, - "... nothing have they invented ... " almost certainly

marked Dublin as the final straw. Nothing of a comparable nature to

the 1884 exhibition was to take place in Ireland for nearly fifteen years. Then, and only with the combined institutional weight of many interested parties and the driving force of Hugh Percy Lane, the process to create a gallery of

modern art in Ireland, initiated in 1899, an exhibition entitled, "A Loan Collec tion of Modern Paintings". Like the 'trail-blazer' all those years before, it too

"... set Dublin by the ears . . . ".

Ronald Anderson

_NOTES_

1. The duality apparent in Irish art in the latter half of the nineteenth century is high-lighted in Julian Campbell's Ph.D. thesis: Irish Artists in France and Belgium 1850-1914, Trinity

College, Dublin, 1980; see also Campbell's exhibition catalogue, The Irish Impressionists,

Dublin 1984; see also Jeanne Sheehy's article, 'Irish Painters in France', Hibemia, 14th July, 1972.

2. The quote is Jeanne Sheehy's: see

her excellent exhibition catalogue, Walter

Osborne, National Gallery of Ireland, 1983, p. 27.

3. Unless otherwise specified, material relating to

the chronology of the Dublin Sketching Club, is by courtesy of the Club. The archival

material is in the possession of the Club's President. At this point I would like to extend

my grateful thanks to Mr. Bill Spencer. 4. op. cit., Dublin Sketching Club assorted

archive material (hereafter DSC arch.). 5. Freeman's Journal, 16th July, 1881.

6. The Theory of the Beautiful - A Saturday

Lecture, by Professor John Todhunter,

(Reprinted Transcript, National Library of

Ireland). 7. Letter in the Whistler/Pennell Collection,

Library of Congress, Washington DC, Ref. No. 2/1186-7, (hereafter, W/P,LC).

8. For Whistler's "Irish Connection" see the

author's article, "Whistler: An Irish Rebel and Ireland -

Implications of an Undocumented

Friendship". Apollo Magazine, April, 1986. 9. Confirmed in a letter written by Whistler to

Walter Graves: ms. Birnie-Philip Collection,

Glasgow University Library, Ref. No. G183

(hereafter, BP/GUL).

10. The exhibition was entitled; Notes, Harmonies ?

Nocturnes, and opened on 17th May, 1884. 11. Confirmed in an undated letter from Whistler

to Graves: ms. Harvard University. 12. From a letter written between 26th-30th

November, 1884, W/P, LC Ref. No. 2/1185.

13. Described by William Booth-Pearsall in a

letter dated 4th September, 1907 to Whist

ler's biographers, the Pennells, W/P,LC. 14. op. cit above. 15. Along with Whistler's exhibits there were

three other examples of work by American artists. All three were lent to the exhibition by Lawless. They were; 'The Sevres Bridge, nr.

Paris', by Julian Story (No. 206); 'Bead

Stringers of Venice', by John Singer Sargent (No. 226); 'Venezia', by Ralph Curtis (No.

257). 16. The Irish Times, 1st December, 1884.

17. Dublin Daily Express, 1st December, 1884. 18. op. cit. above. 19. The Irish Times, 2nd December, 1884. 20. op. cit. above. 21. Undated letter, Ref. No. 2/1192-3, W/P, LC.

22. op. cit. above. 23. The Irish Times, 3rd December, 1884.

24. Dublin Evening Mail, 3rd December, 1884. 25. The Irish Times, 4th December, 1884. 26. From a letter to the Pennells from Booth

Pearsall and reprinted in The Life of James McNeill Whistler (2 vols) by E.R. & J. Pennell,

Philadelphia and London, 1908, p. 36.

Original letter in W/P, LC.

27. Undated letter, Ref. No. 2/1190-1, W/P, LC.

28. From the introduction to an exhibition

catalogue, Irish Painting, Guildhall, London, 1904.

29. Autobiographies, William Butler Yeats, London (1955), p. 81.

30. A Symbolic Artist and the coming of Symbolic Art, William Butler Yeats, The Dome, (New

series), Vol. I, December, 1898, pp. 233-7. 31. So great was the interest in the exhibition a

morning was set aside for students from The

Metropolitan School of Art to visit the

Exhibition privately; DSC arch. 32. Osborne was admitted to the Club as a

member in January, 1884, DSC arch. 33. Quote from Stephen Gwynn's Garden

Wisdom, Dublin, 1921, p. 33.

34. Pall Mall Gazette, 20th December, 1884. 35. The instructions to Booth-Pearsall are con

tained in a letter, Ref. No. 2/1192, W/P, LC. 36. In reply to the request for the sale of the

'Mother' portrait, Whistler commented, "... it was never other than lent!". Letter Ref. No. 2/1193 W/P, LC.

37. 'Yellow and Grey', is now known as 'Evening' (Nat. Gallery of Ireland, Acquisition No.

2915). 'Nocturne in Grey and Gold, Picca

dilly,' is now known as 'Piccadilly in a Fog' (Nat. Gallery of Ireland, Acquisition No.

2916). 38. Undated letter, Ref. No. 2/1193 W/P, LC. 39. Undated letter, Ref. No. 2/1186-7, W/P, LC.

40. Undated letter, Ref. No. 2/1194, W/P, LC.

41. Quote from The Irish Times, 7th January, 1885.

42. None of the Wilde literature appears to

include the Dublin lecture of 1885, though he

himself mentions it in a letter: see, The Letters

of Oscar Wilde, Hart-Davis, ed, London, 1962.

43. Mr. Whistler's 10 o'Clock Lecture, reprinted in, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, Dover

Edition, London, 1967, pp. 135-159.

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Documents

Whistler in Dublin, 1884