skin upon skin. Regarded merely as brushwork, the face of the sage
could hardly be surpassed; the modelling is that beautiful flat
modelling, of which none except Mr. Whistler possesses the secrets.
What the painter saw he rendered with incomparable skill. The vision
of the rugged pensiveness of the old philosophers is as beautiful and
as shallow as a page of De Quincey. We are carried away in a flow of
exquisite eloquence, but the painter has not told us one significant
fact about his model, his nationality, his temperament, his rank, his
manner of life. We learn in a general way that he was a thinker; but
it would have been impossible to draw the head at all and conceal so
salient a characteristic. Mr. Whistler's portrait reveals certain
general observations of life; but has he given one single touch
intimately characteristic of his model?

But if the portrait of Carlyle, when looked at from a certain side,
must be admitted to be not wholly satisfactory, what shall be said of
the portrait of Lady Meux? The dress is a luminous and harmonious
piece of colouring, the material has its weight and its texture and
its character of fold; but of the face it is difficult to say more
than that it keeps its place in the picture. Very often the faces in
Mr. Whistler's portraits are the least interesting part of the
picture; his sitter's face does not seem to interest him more than the
cuffs, the carpet, the butterfly, which hovers about the screen. After
this admission, it will seem to many that it is waste of time to
consider further Mr. Whistler's claim to portraiture. This is not so.
Mr. Whistler is a great portrait painter, though he cannot take
measurements or follow an outline like Holbein.

Like most great painters, he has known how to introduce harmonious
variation into his style by taking from others just as much of their