"Whistler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Whistler refers to Velasquez as "a painter's painter." John Wesley said, "No man is worthy to be called a teacher, unless he be a teacher of teachers." The great writer is the one who inspires writers. And in this book I will not refer to a man as a philosopher ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... school, and yet belong to it as much as to any school. They are cosmopolitan in their art, and reside in Paris, Munich, London, or elsewhere, as the spirit moves them. Sargent, the portrait-painter, really belongs to this group, as does also Whistler (1834-[23]), one of the most artistic of all the moderns. Whistler was long resident in London, but has now removed to Paris. He belongs to no school, and such art as he produces is peculiarly his own, save a leaven of influences ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... milkmen, (bakers before 10 and after 4,) boat houses, livery stables, ferry boats, and street cars. But to catch a fish or fire a pistol on Sunday is a $10 offense, and to look on at a game of chess is a $50 crime. However, the law does not punish whistling on Sunday, unless the whistler has spectators, then it is a $50 business for all concerned. To read Longfellow's Excelsior on Sunday to a parlor of company is a $50 crime. Reading Milton's Paradise Lost, or the American Declaration of Independence would ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... thousand — or ten thousand — years had brought England to stuff which Palgrave and Woolner brayed in their mortars; derided, tore in tatters, growled at, and howled at, and treated in terms beyond literary usage. Whistler had not yet made his appearance in London, but the others did quite as well. What result could a student reach from it? Once, on returning to London, dining with Stopford Brooke, some one asked Adams what impression the Royal Academy Exhibition ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... is competent to produce a work of art as satisfying and as great as one whose inspiration was drawn from a nation's life, reflecting its highest moments, and its most universal aspirations and ideals; so that, for example, a butterfly drawn by Mr. Whistler would rank as high, say, as the Parthenon. And in the second place, in this view of art, the subject is a matter of absolute indifference. The standards of ordinary life, ethical or other, do not apply; there is ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Whistler's case were these: Mrs. Whistler has singular absence of mind, and on the last Sunday she attended church Dr. Dox began to read from the Scriptures the account of the Deluge. Mrs. Whistler was deeply attentive; and when the doctor came to the story of ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... upon him by the sudden onslaught of the hairy brute, tusks erect and mouth wide open, a perfect glimpse of elephantine fury. It forms a capital example of early impressionism, respectfully recommended to the favourable attention of Mr. J.M. Whistler. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... room in that curious little hotel opposite the Cafe du Dome, in Paris (the hotel in which it is said Whistler stayed when he was a student), which almost exactly resembled my room at Antoine's, even to the dust which was under the bed—until 'Genie got to work with broom and brush. Moreover, connected with my room there ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... line and mass. The great things to be done with composition may as well be done in portrait as elsewhere. If you would see what may be done with a single figure, study the Portrait of his Mother, by Whistler. You could not have a better example. It is one of the greatest portraits of the world. Notice the character which is shown in every line and plane in the figure. The very pose speaks of the individuality. Notice the grace and repose of line, and the relations of mass to mass and ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... an evangelical, somewhat old-fashioned for so late a date; and fairly early in her volume she warns us of what we may expect. She is anxious to damp any undue optimism as to the lightness of her muse. When worldly, foolish people like Whistler and Pater were talking 'art for art's sake,' she could strike a ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... puts the question she stands still and gazes at him;— her voice is no longer mocking: it has taken another tone,—a tone soft as the long golden note of the little brown bird they call the siffleur-de-montagne, the mountain-whistler.... Yet Fafa hesitates. He hears the clear clang of the plantation bell recalling him to duty;—he sees far down the road—(Ouill! how fast they have been walking!)—a white and black speck in the sun: Gabou, uttering through his joined hollowed hands, as through a horn, the oukl, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... Photographs in silver frames also stood there, of female relatives in court dress and of male relatives in uniform. Behind the photographs were pots of growing flowers; and on the walls etchings and engravings after well-known landscapes. It was the room of a young man uninfluenced by Whistler, unaware of Chinese screens and indifferent to the rival claims of Jacobean and Chippendale furniture. It was civilised, not cultivated; and it ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... turned backward over the sleeves, and had begun to dress very carefully in the fashion of the moment. He lived in a little house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance that owed something to Whistler. There was nothing mediaeval, nor Pre-Raphaelite, no cupboard door with figures upon flat gold, no peacock blue, no dark background. I remember vaguely a white drawing room with Whistler etchings, 'let in' to white panels, and a dining room all white: ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... each time he must surely get it right; but no, it was always wrong, and always wrong the same way. Yet he seemed proud of his song, delivered it with execution and a manner of his own, and was charming to his mate. A very incorrect, incessant human whistler had thus a chance of knowing how his own music pleased the world. Two great birds—eagles, we thought—dwelt at the top of the canyon, among the crags that were printed on the sky. Now and again, but very rarely, they wheeled high over our ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... endeavored to rehabilitate himself. But his hands had slipped on the handle of the audience, and the forensic rosin of Demosthenes would not have enabled him to regain his grip. He was cruelly assured of the fact by the hostile and ready-witted whistler. Again Mr. Bispham absurded. This time the tune broke out in all parts of the hall and was itself punctuated by catcalls and sotto-voce insults delivered with terrific shouts. Mr. Bispham's speech was hurriedly finished, and the peroration ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... and corrections, are not all entirely or directly concerned with art; but even the last one—Waste or Creation?—does bear on the question, How are we to improve the art of our own time? After years of criticism I am more interested in this question than in any other that concerns the arts. Whistler said that we could not improve it; the best we could do for it was not to think about it. I have discussed that opinion, as also the contrary opinion of Tolstoy, and the truth that seems to me to lie between them. If these essays have any ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... one or two bars of a rag-time melody, and the air was immediately taken up, and then quickly ended with a peculiar run. The first whistler walked confidently up to the fire. The fat man looked up, and spake in ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... these Pre-Raphaelite landscapes, let us imagine ourselves straightway turning to one of the numerous scenes by Whistler of the Thames at twilight, with its glimmering lights and ghostly shapes of bridges and hulks of steamers. Nothing is outlined, nothing is clearly defined, but the mystery of London's river is caught and pictured for ever. Let us look, too, at his 'Valparaiso,' bathed in a brilliant ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... each other's hands. The mystery of the fairy piping they had heard in the woods that first afternoon was solved. The same clear, sweet notes came thrilling out between her fingers, alluring as the pipes of Pan. The whistler was a girl named Noel Carrington; she was one of the younger girls whom nobody had noticed particularly before. Her whistling brought wild applause which was perfectly sincere; her performance delighted the audience beyond measure. She was called back again and again until at last, quite out ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... Sonata.' This message was accompanied by a curious little device like the letter C with a line drawn through it, and I said to myself: 'If this should prove to be a mark which "Ernest" used in signing his manuscript, something like Whistler's butterfly, I shall have a ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... nearer came the whistler; until the crunching of his feet could be heard upon the dead leaves. Rolf pushed the hair out of his eyes, and settled himself to watch with a ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... could see was the dirty face of that guide. Rembrandt's Night Watch made me forget the creature for a moment, but when he began to describe it I fled in horror. We finished up in the modern section, and as I looked at van Gogh and Cezanne and Whistler's Effie Deans his squeaky voice kept up a running commentary. I rushed from the building after a ten minutes' tour, paid the worm his three guilden . . . and then went back and enjoyed the gallery. But I nearly committed murder in the Rijks Museum that day. If ever I am hanged it will ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... occasionally the fancy of artists or young girls to adopt some especial symbol associated with themselves. The "butterfly" of Whistler for instance is as well-known as his name. A painter of marines has the small outline of a ship stamped on his writing paper, and a New York architect the capital of an Ionic column. A generation ago young women used to fancy such an intriguing symbol as a mask, a sphinx, a question ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... The repetition of the same space-form in architecture, like the round arch and window in the Roman style; the recurrence of the same motive in music; the use of a single hue to color the different objects in a painting, as in a nocturne of Whistler: these are simple illustrations of harmony. An almost equally simple case is gradation or lawful change of quality in space and time—the increase or decrease of loudness in music of saturation or brightness of hue in painting, the gentle change ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... critical souls, James McNeill Whistler for one, who had no patience with other English resorts. It pleased us, ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... be learnt. They constrained themselves, with considerable creative fatigue, to find the exact adjectives which might parallel in English prose what has been clone in Italian painting. The same is true of Whistler and R. A. M. Stevenson and many others in the exposition of Velasquez. They had something to say about the pictures; they knew it was unworthy of the pictures, ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... him in good stead now, though the stern and watchful Miss Hall put a quick stop to a certain tendency toward shoulder work. Tyler possessed what is known as a rhythm sense. An expert whistler is generally a natural dancer. Stella Kamps had always waited for the sound of his cheerful whistle as he turned the corner of Vernon Street. High, clear, sweet, true, he would approach his top note like a Tettrazini until, just when you thought he could not possibly reach ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... got a popper gun, A reg'lar one that shoots, And Teddy's got an engine With a whistler that toots. But I've got something finer yet— A pair of rubber boots. Oh, it's boots, boots, boots, A pair of rubber boots! I could walk from here to China In a pair of ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... to light a pipe preparatory to filling this column, we were reminded of Whistler's remark to a student who was smoking: "You should be very careful. You know you might get interested in your work and let your pipe ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... had proceeded down the stream about twenty miles when it was met by another boat on its way up the river, having on board General Whistler and some fresh troops for General Terry's command. Both boats landed, and almost the first person I met was my old friend and partner, Texas Jack, who had been sent out as a dispatch carrier for the New ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... emotionally affectionate, interesting, uncommon. He had a knack of saying as much in one page as most people did in five. Her imagination was not great, but he stimulated it. If he wrote a pungent line on Daudet or Whistler, on Montaigne or Fielding, she was stimulated to know them. One day he sent her Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which he had picked up in New York on his way to England. This startled her. She had never heard of Whitman. To her he seemed coarse, incomprehensible, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... one should ask you which are the most famous American game birds, you may answer without hesitation, 'Bob White, Ruffed Grouse, and Woodcock'—the whistler, the drummer, and the sky dancer—all three good ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... How Whistler, the author of Ten O'Clock and the creator of exquisitely lovely things, must have loathed that final line! But Bosanquet's carefully framed definition of the beautiful, in his History of Aesthetic, endeavors, like Browning, to adjust the different claims of form and significance: ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... claim to having more than their share of whim, but the musical profession has no reason to be abashed, for it is a good second. However, the actor's and the musician's art are often not far separated. In speaking to James McNeil Whistler of a certain versatile musician, a lady once said, "I believe he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard |
