high, almost an unattainable standard, toward which he worked with
varying success. His emotions must have been constantly swinging between
the greatest heights of joy and the abyss of despair.

The numerous Whistlers in this gallery show him in many periods and many
styles. On wall D, at the lower right, a portrait of an auburn girl, one
of his many fascinating models, shows Whistler more as a pure painter
than any of the other canvases. This doubtless belongs to the period
when he was under Courbet's influence. The richness of pure paint,
dexterously applied, is scarcely found in the many portraits on the same
wall, in which a certain thinness of paint is too much in evidence, no
matter how distinguished and suggestive these canvases are. His sense of
composition, of the placing of areas of different tones and colour, is
markedly evident in all of his work, no matter how experimental and
casual it may be. The "Falling Rocket" is the most wonderful example of
this quality of design. If it is true that it hung for weeks upside down
in the present owner's house, then most decidedly this fact speaks well
for its excellent quality of design, irrespective of its pictorial
meaning. The many small sparks descending rhythmically from an
impenetrable sky are carefully considered in their relative position and
size so as to insure that feeling of pattern which he almost
instinctively gave to everything he did. This picture of the "Falling
Rocket" is of particular interest as the picture which made John Ruskin,
the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, accuse Whistler of flinging a pot
of paint at the face of the public and having the impudence of a coxcomb
to ask two hundred guineas for it. Surely this carefully and cleanly
painted picture shows Whistler as hardly a flinger of paint, and we can
only rejoice over the kind fate which saved Mr. Ruskin from extending
his career into the present age of paint flingers, who, had they lived
in his day, would have proved fatal to the learned professor. The