Once again, then, in all these pictures, it is the essence or innermost significance of the theme that Whistler treats; itself a quality so immaterial that he shrinks from expressing even matter in too distinct or tangible a form, enveloping it in a shrouded light, representing it as a concord of coloured masses with a preference for delicate monotony of hues and soft accentuations, seeking by all means to spiritualize the material. And this without loss of stateliness; he has learned the dignity of the great line from Velasquez, and from him, too, the magisterial use of blacks and grays. Nor with the wild irrelevance of the visionary; there are piquancy and virility in all his pictures, not of lively colour and rampageous brush work, but attained through subtle surprises of detail and decorative originality--qualities gleaned from the Japanese. Again, in the trancelike intensity of Rossetti’s figures, he may have found a quality akin to his own spirituality of sentiment, just as his love of light and of delicate discrimination of values links his art to that of the impressionists. And out of these various influences, his own personality, irresistibly original, at once fanciful and penetrating, serene and nervous, permeated with the quintessence of sensuous refinement, he has fashioned for himself a language “faithful to the colouring of his own spirit,” in the strictest sense original and stamped with style--a style that is simple, earnest, grand. [Illustration: From the collection of Charles L. Feer, Esq. THE BALCONY. By James A. McNeill Whistler.] And even closer precision of personal expression appears in Whistler’s etchings. For to one who seeks to render, not the facts, but his sense of the facts, etching offers greater freedom than painting. It is the art of all others which permits an artist to be recognized by what he _omits_, the one in which the means employed may be most pregnant of suggestion and in closest accord with the personal idiosyncrasy of the man. To Whistler, therefore, with his intense individuality, his discerning search for the significance of beauty and his instinct for simplicity and economy of means which will yet yield a full complexity of meaning, etching early became a cherished form of expression. In the “Little French Series” (1858), the “Thames Series” (1871), the “First Venice Series” (1880), and the “Second Venice Series” (1887), as well as in other plates etched in France, Holland, and Belgium, he has proved himself the greatest master of the needle since Rembrandt. Indeed, the eminent painter-etcher and connoisseur, Sir Francis Seymour Haden, is credited with the assertion that, if he had to dispose of either his Rembrandts or his Whistlers, it would be the former that he would relinquish.