James and Whistler at the Grosvenor Gallery

Abstract

THUS sang Gilbert and Sullivan's Bunthorne at the Savoy Theatre in 1881. The Intense Young Man had, of course, been ridiculed before. For instance, Henry James's friend George Du Maurier had been poking fun at him in Punch. As everyone who read that magazine knew, the Young Man's talk was affected, his dress was ridiculous, and his art was suspect. Now he was being linked with the new art museum Sir Coutts Lindsay had established in Grosvenor Square, a sort of Salon des Refuses for those who could not get into the Royal Academy. The Grosvenor Gallery was the place to go to find paintings which were simply-funny. The whole colorful period, with its follies and its solid contributions, has been amply chronicled by the historians of art and literature, but the curious interrelation of Henry James and James Abbott McNeill Whistler in the cultural currents of the time has never, it seems, been adequately treated. Both Americans were living in London at the time; both pioneered in their respective arts; both enunciated new theories in the mid-eighties; and both suffered attack by the conservative press. One might expect that because of these similarities there would be some professional respect, if not friendship, between the two; that at least there would be from James, the American art critic and innovator in fiction, a sympathetic attitude toward Whistler, the American innovator in painting. Surprisingly, one finds on James's part no such attitude. To him, as to the crowd, Whistler was the buffoon