The studio contained many an unfinished portrait, some of them works of great beauty, but of complete indifference to Whistler. He lost all interest in them when he lost interest in the sitters; and it mattered not to him that he had spent and lost days, and weeks, and months of precious time, nor did it matter to him that his sitters had exhausted themselves with numerous and long seances. * * * * * Childless, his paintings were his children, and to part with one was like the parting of mother and child. In these days, when the selling of pictures has become an essential part of the art of painting, it is difficult for people to comprehend the attitude of a man who really did not like to sell. “What are pictures painted for, if not to sell?” asks the spirit of the age. It does not seem quite so obvious that poems are written to sell and that music is composed to sell. Even the “practical man” feels that poems and music ought to be made for something more than to sell, and if they are not, they will be the worst for the narrow end in view; but paintings and sculpture, they are commercial products to be dealt in accordingly. When Whistler did part with a picture he had no faculty for getting a high price. His prices were very uncertain. To one person he might ask a round sum, to another small,--just as the mood seized him, the price having no particular relation to the painting. He never could see why paintings should be sold, like cloth, by the square yard; why a large picture should necessarily bring more than a small. To him perfection was perfection, whether large or small. What justifiable reason is there for the commercial schedule of so much for a head, so much for a half-length, so much for a full-length portrait? The one may, but does by no means necessarily, take a little more time; but, then, a painter does not value his work by the day. A perfect thing is a perfect thing, whether large or small, Whistler would frequently say. In the matter of prices he was obliged to yield somewhat to custom, and ask more for large pictures than for small, but he did so reluctantly and intermittently, with the natural result that dealers, who screen pictures as the plasterer does his gravel, could do nothing with him. * * * * * Of late years, with a demand far beyond any possible supply, his prices advanced; but where a Degas, for instance, would sell for five, ten, or fifteen thousand dollars, a Whistler of incomparably greater beauty would sell for a third or a fifth the amount,--proof of what the co-operation of the dealer can do. Some years ago he showed a visitor several heads of Italian children, each about ten or twelve, by sixteen or eighteen inches in size. With them was a three-quarter length of one of the children. They were all superb bits of portraiture, and akin to the “Little Rose, Lyme Regis,” in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.