The Street of Wonderful Possibilities

Whistler, Wilde and Sargent in Tite Street

Devon Cox

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780711274525
• eBook ISBN: 9780711274532
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs
• Index: History

A beautifully illustrated art history and cultural biography, The Street of Wonderful Possibilities focuses on one of the most influential artistic quarters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – London's Tite Street, where a staggering amount of talent thrived, including James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde and John Singer Sargent. 

For Wilde, the street was full of 'wonderful possibilities', while for Whistler it was 'the birthplace of art', where a new brand of aestheticism was nurtured in his controversial White House. Modern masterpieces in art and literature flowed from the studios and houses of Tite Street, but this bohemian enclave had a dark side as well. Here Whistler was bankrupted, Frank Miles was sent to an asylum, Wilde was imprisoned, and Peter Warlock was gassed to death.

Throughout its turbulent existence, Tite Street mirrored the world around it. From the Aesthetic movement and its challenge to Victorian values, through the Edwardian struggle for women's suffrage, to the bombs of the Blitz in the 1940s, it remained home to innumerable artists and writers, socialites and suffragettes, musicians and madmen. The Street of Wonderful Possibilities reveals this complex history, tying together private and professional lives to form a colourful tapestry of art and intrigue, illuminating their relationships to each other, to Tite Street and to a rapidly modernising London at the fin de siècle.

1.

VISIONARY & UNREAL

Art alone remains the fact. All the rest is anecdote.

– James Abbott McNeill Whistler

22 July 1903 – the genteel Chelsea riverfront sat under a sky of heavy grey clouds. At 74 Cheyne Walk, a small crowd had gathered as a coffin draped in purple cloth passed out of the front door and into the attending funeral carriage. A ring of pallbearers accompanied the sombre procession as the coffin containing the body of James Abbott McNeill Whistler was solemnly marched to the nearby Old Church for a brief funeral service.

After the service, and under looming storm clouds, Whistler’s coffin was conveyed to Chiswick Cemetery where the artist’s beloved mother and his wife Beatrice were already buried beneath a wall of fragrant clematis, only a stone’s throw from the former home and grave of Whistler’s favourite British artist, William Hogarth. It was a simple plot adorned with flowers as Whistler had wished. Later, the family erected a bronze monument designed by the artist’s stepson, Edward Godwin.

Police had arrived to control the crowds, but just a small group of mourners assembled from Whistler’s once-thriving circle of friends – artists and aristocrats, collectors, new world millionaires, models and mistresses. Of this latter group Maud Franklin trembled and nearly fainted as she approached the coffin of the once vibrant, outspoken man who had fathered her children. Among the other familiar faces were Charles Freer, Theodore Duret, Sir John Lavery, George Vanderbilt and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. But the list of people not present was far more revealing.

In his life Whistler made many friends, recruited countless followers, but had also mastered what he liked to call ‘the gentle art of making enemies’. From this vast circle of artists, writers and bohemians only a handful of them were still on friendly terms, and out of that dwindling group only a few were still living. Oscar Wilde, who had revered Whistler in his youth, was already dead, and Walter Sickert, another devoted pupil, had abandoned Chelsea for the northern suburb of Camden Town. Of all the absentees and apologies, however, there was one that stood out as particularly poignant. The United States Embassy in London had failed to send an emissary to commemorate the influential American who Wilde had applauded as ‘the first British artist’.¹

This was a disappointing dénouement for a man who prided himself on causing so much controversy during his lifetime. The hurricane of a life that was James Abbott McNeil Whistler’s began in the small New England town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Childhood photographs of the artist show a prim-faced boy, smartly dressed and confidently poised with a head full of rich, coal-black curls and dark, mischievous eyes. As a young man Whistler demonstrated a precocious talent for drawing but his razor-sharp tongue and acutely insubordinate nature eventually saw him expelled from West Point Military Academy by Robert E. Lee, later to become General of the Confederate Army in the American Civil War.

After a brief flirtation with a military career, in late 1855 Whistler found himself in Paris. It was a pivotal moment, when the Parisian art world was the scene of a fierce war of aesthetics. Entrenched in the cafes and ateliers of the Rive Gauche, the Parisian avant-garde fought to breach the ramparts of the highly selective annual Salon. The twenty-one-year-old aspiring artist, sporting a beret and fashionable moustache, soon found himself in the company of artists like Henri Fantin-Latour swearing allegiance to Gustav Courbet.

A generation prior, the famous Hernani riots had signalled a rift in Paris between romantic bohemians and conservative classicists, a rift that was still festering when Whistler arrived. From this clash emerged the foundations of what, in Britain, would be called the aesthetic movement, and literary castles were being built upon it – Théophile Gautier’s novel Mademoiselle Maupin and later Baudelaire’s poems Les Fleurs du Mal are but two examples. ‘L’art pour l’art’ had already become the banner for a very different brand of Parisian artist. They inhabited a world of lead-based paints, absinthe and loose women, so colourfully brought to life in Murger’s Scenes de la Vie Bohème and later in George du Maurier’s Trilby. In this bohemian circle young Whistler cut his teeth as an artist.²

By the early 1860s, however, Whistler had migrated across the Channel where his half-sister, Deborah, and brother-in-law, Francis Seymour-Haden were living in Sloane Street, Knightsbridge. The London in which he arrived could not have been more different from the bohemian world of Paris. There was no café culture, no artistic quarter, no friendly exchange of ideas. In Paris, studios had been open as ateliers and salons where fellow artists were free to come and go at will, inspecting their work, and engaging in discussion. But in London artists ‘locked themselves up in their studios’ and only ‘opened the doors on the chain’.³ In matters of art, sentimental tableaus and historical narrative painting were the hot items of the day, and the century-old Royal Academy had the final word on British artistic taste.

In these early years, Whistler found himself on the right side of the British art establishment. For the first ten years or so in London his work garnered institutional attention, and he found a position at the fringes of critical acclaim at the Academy. One of his earliest paintings, At the Piano, had been rejected from the Paris Salon, but was warmly accepted by the Royal Academy in 1860, who placed it in a prime viewing position. Sir Charles Eastlake, President of the Royal Academy, was so enthusiastic about the picture he steered patrons like the Duchess of Sutherland to the painting, saying it was ‘the finest piece’ on show.⁴ At the Piano was a reflection of Whistler’s early tendency towards realism, but it does demonstrate a promising eye for colour with its bold but well-balanced palate of mid-tones and form that would develop and sharpen in the years to come. Even eminent Academicians like John Everett Millais conceded it was ‘the finest piece of colour that has been on the walls of the Royal Academy for years.’⁵

However, the Academy was not prepared to accept a complete departure from tradition. There were certain boundaries that could not be crossed. So it came as little surprise when Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, submitted for the 1862 exhibition, was rejected. The painting featured the first of several lovers who would double as Whistler’s model and live-in secretary. In this case the soft Celtic face was that of Joanna Hifferman, or Jo, a pale skinned, auburn-haired model dressed in a flowing white muslin dress, standing in front of a slightly off-white curtain.

Painted in full-length, the seven-foot tall White Girl demonstrates a mastery of colour manipulation, with subtle tonalities and inflections – the use of varying shades of white-on-white was difficult to achieve effectively and required a sensitive eye. While At the Piano burst with reds, blacks and yellows, The White Girl looked almost sickly with the pale, virginal Jo standing upon a ruggedly masculine wolf skin, with its fierce teeth projecting out of the frame. To some contemporaries, the lines were rough and the painting looked incomplete. ‘He is a sort of Wagner in painting,’ one critic later wrote, ‘a Wagner who is always composing beautiful themes, exquisite conceptions of harmony, and leaving them unfinished.’⁶

With The White Girl, Whistler took his first decisive step out of the orbit of the Royal Academy circle and began to align himself with the somewhat fragmented English avant-garde, formerly represented by the short-lived but highly influential Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Founded in 1848 by a group of young painters including John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, the early Pre-Raphaelites relished the purity and simplicity of medieval art. The perceived radicalism of these early Victorian avant-garde artists lay ‘in a refusal to accept the conventions revered by their teachers and society at large’.⁷

Within a decade of its inception, the young fraternity, based in Gower Street, had fizzled out with each artist pursuing his own independent aims. But in 1859 Dante Gabriel Rossetti re-emerged onto the art scene with Bocca Baciata, a half-length portrait of his new model, mistress and muse, Fanny Cornforth. The painting is dedicated, in both composition and style, to the celebration of beauty as an end in itself.⁸ The poet Algernon Swinburne considered the painting to be ‘more stunning than can be decently expressed’⁹ while fellow Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt found it ‘remarkable for gross sensuality of a revolting kind’.¹⁰ Whether stunning or revolting, Bocca Baciata raised more than a few eyebrows as the meaty figure of its subject fills the frame, leaving the eye no choice but to dwell upon her warm skin, thick lips and liquid eyes in a manner that was far from decent in a high-Victorian art gallery.

After his wife died from a laudanum overdose in 1862, Rossetti relocated to Tudor House, a comfortable if eccentric Georgian dwelling on Cheyne Walk on the rustic Chelsea riverfront. The lease was taken along with Algernon Swinburne and, for a time, the poet and novelist George Meredith rented rooms, as did Rossetti’s brother William. The calm, placid figure of Meredith was contrasted by the petite, hyperactive Swinburne. A highly excitable alcoholic, prone to bouts of extreme depression, Swinburne proved to be quite a handful. For the other residents, getting work done was a challenge with the animated poet dancing around the house nude and taking turns with openly homosexual artist Simeon Solomon sliding down the handrail naked. Although unpredictable, Swinburne did manage to write as well, and in 1865 he composed a poem ‘Before the Mirror’ inspired by Whistler’s new Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl, a follow-up to the previous painting featuring Jo once again in her white dress.

Unlike its predecessor, The Little White Girl was accepted at the Royal Academy where an extract of Swinburne’s poem appeared in the catalogue and a few lines were printed on the picture frame. The poem was, wrote Whistler, ‘a rare and graceful tribute from the poet to the painter – a noble recognition of work by the production of a nobler one’.¹¹ Swinburne’s greatest work was just on the horizon. The year after Whistler’s White Girl was shown, Swinburne published the same poem in his canonical volume, Poems and Ballads, which was met with deeply divided reviews, mostly negative. The poems were a revelation and a shock to Victorian sensibilities dealing as they did with erotic lesbian love and with a fixation on flagellation and ‘filth’. One critic dismissed them as ‘unclean for the sake of uncleanness’.¹²

In this milieu, Whistler ripened as an artist. He shared a temporary residence nearby on Queen’s Road with his ‘White Girl’ until they could settle into their own home just a few minutes away from Rossetti’s at Lindsey House. Although smaller, it soon rivalled Rossetti’s house in Cheyne Walk as a buzzing hive of artists, writers and intellectuals; his collection of porcelain also grew to rival that of his neighbour, and he instigated a new ritual that would become a staple of social life amongst the bohemian clique. Perhaps in an attempt to make Chelsea slightly more Parisian, Whistler flung open his doors on Sundays to his friends and neighbours. His raucous Sunday brunches soon became a Chelsea institution. To Whistler’s dining room flocked the greatest figures of the day, invited to a home-cooked meal and an afternoon of conversation and painting in the studio.

With Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata, Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads and Whistler’s White Girl ‘symphonies’, the Chelsea set were well on the way to establishing a new aesthetic school – the ‘fleshly school’ as they were called – prized for their use of colour and ‘harmonious sensuality’ over narrative functionality. They presented some of the earliest examples in England of a new breed of art that, first conceived in Paris, was finally being given credence in London. This ‘fleshly’ art and poetry would soon dominate the studios and salons of Chelsea as a variant of a broader aesthetic movement in British art. As the chief proponents of this new school of thought lived in Chelsea, this tiny village along the Thames became its default headquarters. Down by the river, artists lived in rented accommodation, in dilapidated old houses, with models and mistresses out of wedlock. None of them had enough money or esteem to build exotic palaces as celebrity artists Val Princeps, Marcus Stone, Lord Leighton and Luke Fildes were doing further north in Kensington.

This decadent charm led Chelsea to become one of the first quarters of London to be referred to as ‘bohemian’. At Cheyne Walk, visitors found dark rooms full of dusty old books and paintings, sketches and prints alongside shelves full of the best porcelain and Japanese pottery. At nearby Lindsey House, Whistler’s love of Japanese art and design, developed while in Paris, had flowered into an obsession whose flames were fanned by competition with Rossetti, also an avid collector. At Cheyne Walk there was a noisy dining room peopled by Swinburne, Solomon, Meredith, Whistler, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Venturing into the rear garden they would find a menagerie of exotic plants and animals – kangaroos, raccoons, peacocks, wallabies, chameleons, gazelles, woodcocks, monkeys and parakeets, a raven, an armadillo and (until it died after eating Rossetti’s cigars) a wombat.

The etcher Alphonse Legros, a friend of Whistler’s in Paris, had come to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Visionary & Unreal
• 2. Paradise Lost
• 3. The Wicked Earl & the Butterfly
• 4. The White House
• 5. Archie & Ape
• 6. Aesthetes & Dandies
• 7. Between the Brush & the Pen
• 8. Frank Miles, Oscar Wilde & Keats House
• 9. Parasite in Tite Street
• 10. All the Fashionables
• 11. Masquerading
• 12. Two Ladies
• 13. Shelley Theatre
• 14. John Collier & the Wild Women
• 15. Love Locked Out
• 16. Wilde’s Closet
• 17. A Prince in Piccadilly
• 18. Aesthetic Rivalries
• 19. Dorian Gray & Tite Street
• 20. The Charmed Circle
• 21. Plays, Panthers & Prison
• 22. Abbey & the Lodge
• 23. The Van Dyck of Tite Street
• 24. Queer Street
• 25. Twilight in Tite Street
• 26. Last of the Titans
• Tite Street Map
• Key
• Tite Street Chronology 1875–1950
• Notes
• Picture Credits
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright