"Perhaps not," replied the painter, "but then you can't call yourself
a great work of nature!"

* * * * *

The artist and a friend strolled along the Thames Embankment one
wonderfully starry night. Whistler was in a discontented mood and
found fault with everything. The houses were ugly, the river not what
it might have been, the lights hard and glaring. The friend pointed
out several things that appealed to him as beautiful, but the master
would not give in.

"No," he said, "nature is only sometimes beautiful--only
sometimes--very, very seldom indeed; and to-night she is, as so often,
positively ugly."

"But the stars! Surely they are fine to-night," urged the other.

Whistler looked up at the sky.

"Yes," he drawled, "they're not bad, perhaps, but, my dear fellow,
there's too many of them."

A sitter asked him how it was possible to paint in the growing dusk,
as he often did. The reply was:

"As the light fades and the shadows deepen, all the petty and exacting
details vanish; everything trivial disappears, and I see things as
they are, in great, strong masses; the buttons are lost, but the
garment remains; the garment is lost, but the sitter remains; the