The Fall of the House of Wilde (39 page)

Where once fine houses and extensive collections had been seen as markers of wealth and social status, now the creation of a ‘house beautiful' came to be interpreted as the necessary expression of a sophisticated artistic nature. The way artists arranged their houses and displayed their collections was seen as indicative expressions of their artistic sensibilities – of their rarefied Paternian sensitivity. Mary Eliza Haweis, the self-proclaiming expert on being ‘artistic' in dress, comportment and home decoration, caught this crucial nuance when she spoke in her book of 1882,
Beautiful Houses
, of ‘houses . . . which are typical of certain minds, and arranged with exquisite feeling'.
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By no means all of Haweis's choices in her influential volume were the dwellings of artists – many belonged to rich collectors and connoisseurs – but all conformed to notions of aesthetic exquisiteness and individuality.

Oscar had first taken an interest in the potential of objects to create visual effect and poetic mood when he set up rooms in Oxford. On a shoestring budget, he decorated his rooms with a few choice objects. Among his first purchases were two large vases of blue china, which entered the annals of anecdote thanks to the denouncement of such worship by the vicar of St Mary's, Oxford: ‘These are the days, dear friends, when we hear men talk – not in polished banter, but in sober earnest, of living up to their blue china.'
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And in the stylish bohemia of Tite Street, where Oscar lived with Frank Miles from 1880 to 1881, he lavished a good chunk of his inheritance on the purchase of furnishings and prize objects. At Tite Street, he had lived opposite Whistler who, with Rossetti, had given this area of Chelsea its artistic reputation. But by 1884, when Oscar and Constance purchased the lease of 16 Tite Street, this once neglected area close to the Thames had lost some of its dilapidated charm.

When in 1863 Whistler took up residence in Cheyne Walk alongside Rossetti, Chelsea was a cheap run-down quarter. The charismatic Rossetti drew a bevy of painters and poets, including Swinburne, to his ramshackle Tudor house at 16 Cheyne Walk. Rossetti himself became enchanted by the house and tricked it out with outlandish furnishings, hanging countless mirrors on the walls. He kept an exotic menagerie of birds and animals corralled in the wildly overgrown garden. The opulence of Japanese prints, blue-and-white china, and Indian and Islamic brassware went against the grain of the bohemian artist living a half-starved existence in a run-down studio, a symbol of the price he or she had to pay for their dedication to art.

The Parisian model of austere studios, fictionalised in the 1840s by Henry Murger's
Scènes de la vie de bohème,
influenced Whistler's attitude to his surroundings. Plain painted walls in colours and tones mixed by himself with his masterly eye, choice oriental objects precisely placed, light and delicate pieces of furniture arranged sparingly: the Whistlerian manner of decoration was copied by few, partly because it was difficult to imitate, and partly because his ascetic aesthetic was alien to most tastes. Not until the twentieth century has the pared-down aesthetic he and the architect E.W. Godwin made famous come to be recognised as one of the earliest and most intelligent assimilations of Japanese ideas in the West. Whistler began his reign over Tite Street in 1877, but was forced to sell his White House to pay legal charges after court action against Ruskin left him bankrupt. Whistler remained in Tite Street, moving to a studio apartment a few doors away, ‘living next door to myself', as he put it.
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From his apartment he continued to host the breakfasts for which he was famous, eggs served on blue china with late-eighteenth-century silver, each piece engraved with the perfectly placed butterfly he had made his signature. In 1883, Whistler had hosted a breakfast ‘in honour' of ‘Oscar and the lady whom he has chosen to be the chatelaine of the House Beautiful'.
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Oscar's friendship with Whistler had blossomed since they'd crossed paths at the Grosvenor Gallery's opening exhibition in 1877. Frank Harris, who knew both men well, believed that ‘of all the personal influences which went to the moulding of Oscar Wilde's talent, that of Whistler . . . was the most important'. Harris exaggerates, but there is undeniably some truth to what he says. As he phrased it, ‘Oscar sat at his feet and imbibed as much as he could of the new aesthetic gospel.' Twenty years older than Oscar, ‘Whistler taught him that men of genius stand apart and are laws unto themselves; showed him, too, that all qualities – singularity of appearance, wit, rudeness even, count doubly in a democracy.'
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Whistler positioned the artist as exile and outsider, a position to which Oscar was no stranger by culture and temperament.

Whistler began a memoir he never completed by stating, ‘I am not an Englishman.'
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Nor was he identifiably an American, a Russian or a Frenchman, though he was born in America, brought up in Russia and studied art in France. Whistler was born to a father who graduated from the elite West Point military academy in New York state before leaving to work for Czar Nicholas I, for whom he supervised the construction of the Moscow–St Petersburg railway. Major Whistler's success in Russia allowed the family to live in noble splendour in St Petersburg, and the children to be educated in the nearby Imperial Academy. The life of privilege came to an abrupt end in 1849 when a cholera epidemic broke out, hastening Major Whistler's demise. Armed with her staunch religious faith, his wife Anna refused the Czar's offer to educate the major's two teenage sons at the school for court pages, and beat her own retreat from Russia.

Back in America, the family faced a more frugal life, a condition better suited to Anna Whistler's puritan instincts. Hoping young James would become a parson, she was not disappointed when a former classmate of the major's intervened to make his entry into West Point a formality. Thus did Whistler, who wanted to study art, find himself training to become a cadet, shadowing the ghost of his father. He hated the discipline, rules, uniform and just about everything West Point stood for. By the end of his third year he had amassed 218 demerits, eighteen more than the allowable annual limit of 200 – grounds for automatic expulsion. Releasing himself from conventional expectations, Whistler left America to lead the life of an artist in Paris. There he warmed to Gautier's belief that the artist had no business deferring to morality in his search for beauty, nor was the point Gautier made in 1852, in his collection of poems
Émaux et Camées
, about the need for impersonality in art lost on Whistler. After some years Whistler divided his time between Paris and London. In 1863, he established himself at 7 Lindsay Row (now 96 Cheyne Row), the first of his abodes in Chelsea, where he settled for most of his life, living with models-turned-mistresses when his mother, to whom he was devoted, did not reside with him.

Oscar was no exception in looking up to Whistler – many young artists dubbed him ‘the master'. Certainly by January 1883 Oscar had fallen under Whistler's spell, judging by the reverence with which he spoke of him in a letter to Waldo Story, a sculptor he had met in America.

I saw a great deal of Jimmy in London
en passant
. He has just finished a second series of Venice Etchings [some of these Etchings Oscar received as a wedding present from Whistler] – such water-painting as the gods never beheld. His exhibition opens in a fortnight in a yellow and white room (decorated by a master of colour) and with a catalogue which is amazing. He spoke of your art with more enthusiasm than I ever heard him speak of any modern work. For which accept my warm congratulations: praise from him is something.
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Whistler was probably the most talented artist then painting in the Anglo-American world, though was not yet recognised as such, except by himself. And his wit, which appeared often in print, was appreciated for its bitter piquancy. Verbal swordplay with Whistler was exhilarating for Oscar. Willie at the
World
recorded each thrust, giving both men the oxygen of publicity they craved. Publicity worked to their advantage, as they both attracted more attention together than either would have alone. Both held fast to the axiom that there was nothing worse than inconspicuousness. Or, as Oscar would put it in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, ‘there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about'.
¹⁰

Among other things, Oscar's consistent need to venerate an older man – as with Mahaffy, Ruskin and Pater – and Whistler's desire for a dazzling disciple who would aggrandise him made them companionable spirits, despite the age difference. Oscar would saunter in and out of Whistler's studio in Tite Street, amusing the master while he painted. What sounded like Whistler one day sounded like Oscar the next, prompting George du Maurier, writing in
Punch
, to ask both men, ‘I say, which one of you two invented the other, eh?'
¹¹
Du Maurier, who had briefly lived with Whistler in Paris in the 1850s, probably knew this would goad Whistler, who invariably felt his supremacy threatened at any suggestion that he imitated Oscar. Whistler's brittle ego meant he always had to be viewed as superior. In response to the publication in
Punch
of an alleged conversation, Oscar telegraphed Whistler: ‘Punch too ridiculous. When you and I are together we never talk about anything except
ourselves
.' To which Whistler replied: ‘No, no, Oscar, you forget. When you and I are together, we never talk about anything except
me
.'
¹²
Whistler, as was his habit, sent copies of the telegraphs to the
World
for publication. In the early 1880s, their raillery was the exchange of friends. But Whistler had no gene for friendship: ‘My nature needs enemies,' he once confessed.
¹³

Oscar and Constance chose Whistler and Godwin to remodel 16 Tite Street. The Whistler–Godwin aesthetic was most dominant on the ground floor, in the dining room. Gone were the deep colours and cluttered spaces the Victorians found so oddly irresistible. In their place was a symphony in white – walls, furniture and carpets all in one tone. On the same floor, facing the street, Oscar's study paid a nod to Whistler with its yellow walls, relieved by red woodwork. Across one wall of the first-floor drawing room ran a single frieze of etchings, including the Venetian ones given to the couple by Whistler. Two large Japanese vases, standing either side of the fireplace, might have provoked Whistler, as he was bizarrely possessive about a country that was as remote and unknowable to him as it was to any British Aesthete. Whistler's imprimatur was most visible on the ceiling in a fresco of dragons. In room after room, ascetic simplicity had been imposed on what might otherwise have been filled with encumbrances or the opulence of Morris's medievalism. But by temperament Oscar was a stranger to the restraint implied in the Whistlerian pared-down decor that came from the artist's puritan background. Only in the smoking room did Oscar omit the monkish yellow-white Whistler had established as a mark of respectability among his acolytes. Here Oscar indulged his fancy for oriental exoticism, and decked out the room with red and gold Morris wallpaper, furnished it with divans and ottomans, lit it with Moorish lanterns, and enclosed it with beaded curtains and latticed shutters. In this cocoon he kept alive the Orient, a scheme suggestive of memories from stories told by his father and the tales he read. This room, with its scent of oriental otherness, embodied his stagecraft. The decor of the room, with its subdued light and poetic allusiveness, has a literary analogue in the vision that inspired his fairy tales. The first volume,
The Happy Prince and other Tales
, would be published in May 1888.

With Oscar's subdued, elegant dress, and the beautiful Constance sporting Aesthetic costume by his side, the press found it difficult to keep up their barrage of ridicule. The couple entered the social arena as suave Aesthetes. Besides, the wider dissemination of Aesthetic values into the marketplace made it more difficult to dismiss it as the cult of a rebel coterie. Certainly by 1884, the Aesthetic Movement had permeated beyond the arty edges of metropolitan society. Oscar's lectures muddied the divide between high art and Aesthetic living. Indicative of this blurring was the invitation Oscar received to lecture to the Students' Club of the Royal Academy in 1883. As he was not a professional painter, Oscar turned to Whistler for assistance. Whistler duly obliged. But when Whistler attended the lecture, Oscar's delivery of his own ideas infuriated him. As Whistler recalled it:

At his earnest prayer I had, in good fellowship, crammed him, that he might not add deplorable failure to foolish appearance, in his anomalous position as art expounder, before his clear-headed audience. He went forth on that occasion as my St John – but forgetting that humility should be his chief characteristic.
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Whistler had a habit of condemning his followers while still needing them.

Oscar's talk to the Royal Academy students prompted Whistler to get on the podium and voice his own view on art and the deplorable state to which it had fallen with all this nonsense about Aestheticism. The famous ‘Ten O'Clock' lecture, delivered by Whistler on 20 February 1885 and proclaiming his artistic credo, was his strategic volley to regain pre-eminence, to recapture the territory he saw as rightfully his. There was one problem: Whistler had professed an aversion to preachers in matters of art. Whatever, Whistler prepared for the event with military precision. Everything about the lecture was planned so as to attract attention – the centrality of the old St James's Hall in Piccadilly for the venue, the unprecedented time of ten o'clock in the evening, the self-designed ticket and poster, the high cost of half a guinea for entry. If nothing else, the cost limited the audience to what one newspaper called the ‘eminently select'.
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With these tactics Whistler succeeded in getting the public chattering well in advance of the date. Little surprise, then, that the lions of London society turned up to hear Whistler, who walked on to the podium late, at 10.15, removed his hat, cane and gloves, and launched into his manifesto.