Whistler was, when he liked, in the front rank as a designer of forms. From the severe, painfully upright school of Gleyre he went forth a master of drawing, as of the outline of corporeality of three dimensions seen stereoscopically. One glance at his wonderfully plastic portraits, especially of his first period, teaches this irrefutably; but, on the whole, as his individuality made itself felt, he neglected form and became more engrossed in colour. In the second half of his life the outlines of subjects hardly any longer interested him at all; he only dwelt on their appearances in colour, on the harmony or discord of their tones. That means that his optical centres were much more sensitive to the differences of undulations than to those of the intensity of light. From this there necessarily resulted a contradiction between him and the average individuals which was not to be got over, since it originated in differences in the constitution of the brain. He who has not Whistler’s special hyper-sensitiveness to colour is simply unable to see things as the latter saw them. He can just as little imagine the impressions that Whistler feels through his sense of sight as perhaps those which are supplied to a hound by his nose. When the blissfully but painfully supersensitive appreciator of colour and the dull seer of outline, _i.e._, the perceiver of light, sought to explain themselves to each other, inexplicable misunderstandings were bound to arise, which make his celebrated law-suit with Ruskin an excruciatingly comic jest. Ruskin appreciated only draughtsmanship, his mind never went beyond contour. For him a picture was a writing that should express thoughts and feelings in the most concrete form. He demanded that it should be a definite communication, reducible to plain words, as of a narrative, a record of travel, or a treatise on natural science. A picture that differed from an exact representation, just as music differs from articulate speech—a picture that attempted to convey only a general, not a concrete stimulation of the sight-centre sensitive to colour, and the pleasurable feeling accompanying and emphasising it, not only was to him necessarily incomprehensible, but, as he was a dogmatist of strong feelings, seemed to him an impertinence—nay, a profligacy and personal insult. Ruskin’s criticism of a “Nocturne in Black and Gold” was a new version of the fable of the stork and the fox who invited each other in turn to dinner, improved to the point of libel. It was childish of Whistler to bring an action against the angry-minded art-inquisitor who required, as the first duty of a painter, the accuracy of a geologist, botanist, or engineer. He should not have expected justice from judges who saw and felt, not like himself, but like Ruskin. Judge Huddleston was of good faith when, in the immortal trial—which Whistler himself has preserved for posterity in his charming book, “The Gentle Art