For none but a man of peculiar sweetness of mind could have conceived that masterpiece in the Luxembourg, “The Portrait of My Mother.” Garbed in black, as you will remember, she sits in profile, with her feet upon a footstool and her hands laid peacefully and elegantly on her lap; the lawn and lace of her cap delicately silhouetted against the gray wall. She gazes with tranquil intensity beyond the limit of our comprehension along the vista of memories, leading back through maternity to a beautiful youth. Nor is there any cynicism in “The White Girl,” that symphony in white, rejected at the Salon of 1863, when the artist was twenty-nine years old, but conspicuous in the _Salon des Refusés_. The girl stands mysteriously aloof from all contact with, or suggestion of, the world, her dark eyes staring with a troubled, wistful look, as if she had been surprised in her maiden meditation and were apprehensive of something she cannot fathom, and is too reliant upon herself to wholly fear. The picture is no brilliant epitome of shallowness, but an almost reverential conception, in exquisitely idealized degree, of the poetry of maidenhood, maturing normally. In both these pictures, which come as near as anything which Whistler has done to the generally accepted idea of a subject, it is the significance, in the one case of motherhood, in the other of maidenhood, that he has dwelt upon, and in both with the fullest reliance upon the æsthetic suggestion to the sense, respectively, of black and gray, and of white, elaborated to an extreme of subtlety. It would be impossible, I mean, that the colour schemes, for example, could be reversed; each is so intentionally and conclusively the language fitted to the idea, that one might as well try to put the words of Juliet into the mouth of Volumnia.