At any rate, the painter’s fortunes now began to mend. He joined the Society of British Artists, and two years later became its president. In 1888 he was married to Beatrix Godwin, widow of E. B. Godwin, the architect, afterward moving to No. 21 Cheyne Walk, where many orders for portraits came to him. Success and honors came also. France gave him the Legion of Honor, Bavaria made him an academician, he had the Cross of St. Michael, and later on Glasgow University gave him an LL.D. His pictures at auction increased in price five and ten fold; his commission prices were in proportion. He grew so affluent that he could even decline to paint a ceiling for the Boston Public Library. At last the light was beginning to dawn--a trifle late, to be sure, but nevertheless it was welcomed by the painter. [Illustration: “The Yellow Buskin,” by James A. McNeill Whistler. In the W. P. Wilstach Collection, Fairmount Park Gallery.] The rest is soon told. In 1892 he moved to Paris and lived in the rue du Bac. A studio was opened for pupils in Paris at which he agreed to give lessons. It was popular at first, but did not last long. He travelled back and forth to London a good deal, and finally returned to England to live. Quarrels had followed him to Paris and the Eden trial had taken place there. It was unfortunate. _Trilby_ had been written and Whistler was parodied in it, which caused another tempest in a teapot. Then Mrs. Whistler died, and that was not only a great shock but a lasting grief. He never quite got over it. He wandered to Paris and Rome, but he cared little for them; he kept at work with feverish energy, but he accomplished little. He was evidently broken, not only in spirit but in body; and his death in July, 1903, was hardly a surprise to his more intimate friends. The overstrung bow at last had snapped. For many years Whistler had been wrongly estimated alike by friend and foe. That one admired and the other condemned did not change the measure of extravagance. There was exaggeration on both sides. Since his death his critics have held their tongues, but many of his admirers have burst into print with impressions and reminiscences that are quite out of proportion and give a misleading idea of the man and the painter. The best account of him is that of the Pennells. They were devoted to him and wrote enthusiastically about him, as they should; but they did not fail to give the pros and cons in parallel columns. Moreover, they did not make him out a jester with cap and bells, a poseur, a wit, and a fop, but a very sincere and serious artist stung to resentment by the stupidity and studied insults of a perverse generation. That is precisely the right point of view, but unfortunately the Pennells are about the only ones who have consistently held it. The other accounts, for the most part, deal with his personal appearance, his witticisms, his eccentricities, his quarrels, and let his art go with a few rhapsodic generalities.