We talk of progress, improvement, and advance; but when I think of Henry
Irving's Philip, I begin to wonder if Oscar Wilde was not profound as
well as witty when he said that a great artist moves in a cycle of
masterpieces, of which the last is no more perfect than the first. Only
Irving's Petruchio stops me. But, then, he had not found himself. He was
not an artist.

"Why did Whistler paint him as Philip?" some one once asked me. How
dangerous to "ask why" about anyone so freakish as Jimmy Whistler. But I
answered then, and would answer now, that it was because, as Philip,
Henry, in his dress without much color (from the common point of view),
his long, gray legs, and Velasquez-like attitudes, looked like the kind
of thing which Whistler loved to paint. Velasquez had painted a real
Philip of the same race. Whistler would paint the actor who had created
the Philip of the stage.

I have a note from Whistler written to Henry at a later date which
refers to the picture, and suggests portraying him in all his
characters. It is common knowledge that the sitter never cared much
about the portrait. Henry had a strange affection for the wrong picture
of himself. He disliked the Bastien Lepage, the Whistler, and the
Sargent, which never even saw the light. He adored the weak, handsome
picture by Millais, which I must admit, all the same, held the mirror up
to one of the characteristics of Henry's face--its extreme refinement.
Whistler's Philip probably seemed to him not nearly showy enough.

Whistler I knew long before he painted the Philip. He gave me the most
lovely dinner-set of blue and white Nanking that any woman ever
possessed, and a set of Venetian glass, too good for a world where glass