Ruskin versus Whistler

Some quarrels between an age and its own arriving sensibility are settled in the studios, in the journals, in the slow attrition of taste. Others are dragged, by one side or the other, into a panelled room in Westminster where twelve grocers and bookbinders are asked to weigh in pounds and farthings what a painter's hand is worth. The man whose name is fixed to the case is rarely the man in the witness-box. He is the absent one, the moralist at home with the curtains drawn, whose printed sentence has outrun him into a court he cannot enter.

THE CRITIC AND HIS PAMPHLET

John Ruskin is fifty-nine years old in the summer of 1877, Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, the most-read English critic of his century. He has written Modern Painters over seventeen years in defence of Turner; he has written The Stones of Venice and Unto This Last; he has, since 1871, been issuing month by month his pamphlet Fors Clavigera, the Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, in which he sets out a single man's moral economy against the cash-nexus of the industrial age. He is, by his own description in those Letters, a writer who believes the price of a thing is bound to the labour and the conscience that produced it. In the July number of 1877 he visits the new Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street, stands before a six-foot canvas of fireworks dissolving into the night over Cremorne, and writes the sentence that will be read into the record at Westminster sixteen months later: he has never expected, he says, to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. He puts the pamphlet in the post. He goes back to Brantwood above Coniston Water. By the following spring his mind has begun to give way; he lies for weeks under the care of Dr Parsons, refusing food, hearing voices in the wainscot.

THE GROSVENOR GALLERY, JULY 1877

The painting in question hangs on the east wall of the West Gallery. Its title is Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. The painter is an American of forty-three, trained at the Imperial Academy in St Petersburg, the École Impériale and the Académie Suisse in Paris, who has lived in Chelsea for thirteen years and signs his canvases with a butterfly. He has priced the Nocturne at two hundred guineas. He paints the river at night, the gardens at Cremorne lit by rocket-fall, the smoke and the gold spark of cordite over black water; he paints the way music is written, by arrangement and harmony rather than by record of fact. To the eye of a critic raised on Turner's storms and on the patient finish of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, the Nocturne is not a picture, it is a discourtesy. To the painter, it is the work of a lifetime brought to a particular surface.

THE MORNING OF THE TWENTY-SIXTH

Court Three of the Court of Common Pleas, Westminster, the second day of trial, twenty minutes past ten. Pale autumn light comes through the high east windows and falls on the bench of Baron Huddleston, on the wig of Sir John Holker QC, Attorney-General, here for the absent defendant, on the twelve jurymen ranged along the box, on the prosecutor in his long black frock-coat and his yellow waistcoat. The prosecutor is James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In his hand is the July 1877 number of Fors Clavigera, the offending paragraph scored in pencil. He has been on his feet, off and on, since the previous morning. He has watched his own Nocturnes carried into court, set on easels, examined and laughed at by men who cannot tell their right way up. He has heard William Powell Frith give evidence that the Falling Rocket is not a serious work of art. He has not lost his composure. He has been waiting, since the moment Holker rose to cross-examine him, for the question that is now coming.

THE ANSWER

Holker holds the canvas of the Falling Rocket in mind and approaches by the route he has prepared. How long, Mr Whistler, did it take you to knock off that nocturne? I beg your pardon? The question is repeated and amended. How long did you take to paint it? One day in the doing, replies Whistler, and the touches given the morning after; two days in all. There is a pause. Holker leans forward and the question that will be reported by The Times the next morning settles in the still air of Court Three: the labour of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas? The painter feels the weight of the moment as a man feels the weight of an empty room before he speaks into it. He has thirteen years of Chelsea behind him, the Peacock Room finished only last winter, his mother's portrait hung and named Arrangement in Grey and Black; he has the Russian drawing-school and the Paris ateliers and every wet night on the Thames embankment with a sketchbook; he has the butterfly that signs the canvas and the conviction, formed slowly and against the grain of his century, that a picture is the residue of a whole life, not the wages of an afternoon. He has, also, the awareness that the court is laughing at him, and that the laughter will turn on a single sentence, his or Holker's, in the next half-breath. He answers. No. I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime. The court applauds. Baron Huddleston threatens to clear it. The shorthand-writer in the well of the court writes the sentence down and underlines it, by some instinct, twice.

THE VERDICT

The jury retire at four. They come back at a little after nine, having spent five hours on a question that was not, in the end, about painting. They find for the plaintiff: the paragraph in Fors Clavigera is a libel. They award one farthing in damages, the smallest coin of the realm, a quarter of a penny. The judge awards no costs to either side. Whistler walks out of Westminster a vindicated man and a ruined one. His own bill of costs runs to about fifteen hundred pounds. The White House at Tite Street, designed for him in 1877 by Edward Godwin, is sold at auction the following May; the painter sails for Venice with a commission for a set of etchings, and stays away fourteen months.

BRANTWOOD

At Brantwood above Coniston Water the verdict is brought by letter. Ruskin is well enough to read it; he is not well enough, by his own admission in the letter to Henry Acland of December 1878, to have stood in the box himself. On the eighteenth of December he writes to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford resigning the Slade Professorship. He says, in the formal sentence that has been quoted ever since, that he cannot hold a chair from which he has no power of expressing judgement without being taken before the magistrates. He returns to political economy, to the geology of the Lakes, to the long unfinished autobiography Praeterita. He does not write again as a public art critic. The mind that closed on him in the spring of 1878 closes more often, and at last entirely; he lives at Brantwood until his death in 1900, mostly in silence.

THE LONG VIEW

The case enters the law reports as Whistler v. Ruskin and into the histories of art as the first occasion on which an English court was asked to rule on the price a painter may set on his own canvas. The principle that was uttered in the witness-box, that a work of art is the deposit of a life and not the tally of an afternoon's labour, did not need the verdict to survive; it survived the verdict, and the farthing, and the bankruptcy. Whistler wore the farthing on his watch-chain. He published the trial transcript, with annotations, in a small book called Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics, and afterwards, in 1885, delivered the Ten O'Clock Lecture, which is in its quiet way the reply to every sentence the critic ever wrote about him. The Falling Rocket itself, the painting that started the action, was bought in 1892 by Samuel Untermyer and passed in 1946 to the Detroit Institute of Arts, where it hangs now in a room hung dark to take its light. It is the size, still, of a casement window opened onto a river at night. It is not signed in the corner with a name. It is signed with a butterfly.

An age does not always know, on the morning it sits down to its business, which of its arguments will outlast it. The hinge of Whistler v. Ruskin turned on a single sentence delivered into the well of a Westminster court, against the laughter of the gallery and the threat of the bench; the man whose name the case bears was at home with the curtains drawn, and never knew, in the working part of his mind, that he had presided over the founding moment of a discipline. What survives is small and exact: a farthing on a watch-chain, a dark canvas in Detroit, and a sentence first written down by a shorthand-writer who underlined it twice.