as an active social
and artistic influence to the day of his death. As an artist, he lacked
training, and remained to the end an amateur of great promise, which was
never quite fulfilled.

And this brings us to the most eccentric, the most striking, and in some
respects the greatest artist of his time--James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
Whistler was born at Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834. His grandfather, of
an English family long settled in Ireland, had been a member of
Burgoyne's invading army, but afterwards joined the American service,
and, after the close of the Revolution, settled at Lowell. His father
was a distinguished engineer, and major in the army, and after his death
in 1849, it was natural that young Whistler should turn to the army as a
career. He entered West Point in 1851, remained there three years, and
was finally dropped for deficiency in chemistry.

There was one study, however, in which he had distinguished himself, and
that was drawing; and after his dismissal he went to Paris, where he
studied for two or three years. Then he removed to London, where most of
the remainder of his life was spent. His work, striking and original,
was at first utterly misunderstood by the public. The most famous piece
of hostile criticism to which he was subjected was Ruskin's remark,
after looking at "The Falling Rocket" in 1877, that here was a fellow
with the effrontery to charge a hundred guineas for flinging a pot of
paint in the public's face. Some further years of abuse followed, and
then the pendulum swung the other way, and the eccentric artist became a
sort of cult. In the end, he won a wide reputation, and before his death
was recognized as one of the leading painters of his time.

And this reputation was deserved, for his work possesses a rare and
delicate beauty, individual to it. His portraits of his mother and of
Thomas Carlyle are admirable in their simplicity and quiet dignity; and
many of his "harmonies," as he liked to call them, are so complete and
flawless that they are works of pure delight. Whistler always declared
that he had no desire to reproduce external nature, but only beautiful
combinations of pattern, and tone; what he meant, probably, was that he
sought, not external realities, but the spirit which underlies them.
That, of course, has been the quest of every great painter.

If Whistler was a law unto himself, so, in another sense, is Winslow
Homer, who has worked out for himself an indiv