Patterns & Harmonies

James McNeill Whistler was really two people. He was a pugnacious little dandy in a wide-brimmed, flat hat, who sported a tuft of beard under his lip and tugged at it gently when he was thinking up malicious dodges to discomfit his enemies. Whistler fought the world from the day he was kicked out of West Point for flunking chemistry. ("Had silicon been a gas,'' he is reported to have said, "I would have been a major general.") Between rounds, Whistler became instead an immensely solemn, self-absorbed artist, who turned his friends and the London fog into dim, delicate patterns and close harmonies of color.

Whistler illustrated his own double nature by his signature: a butterfly with a stinger in its tail. Dante Gabriel Rossetti took note of the artist's duality in a limerick:

There is a young artist called Whistler, Who in every respect is a bristler: A tube of white lead Or a punch on the head Come equally handy to Whistler.

Last week, for the first time since 1910, Manhattan had a Whistler show. The 47 paintings, watercolors and pastels on exhibition were as soft and sure, and some of them, as beautiful, as a butterfly's landing. The terror of the drawing rooms had passed into history, and his trademark had lost its scorpion sting.

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