America was blind to his merits until long after he achieved fame in every country of Europe; and it is undeniably true that the press here truculently echoed the slurs of the critics on the other side throughout that long period of controversy. It is a lamentable fact that up to the day of his death he was misunderstood, or accepted as an eccentric in many quarters of the land that now claims him as her bright particular star in the firmament of art. Notwithstanding all these things, he remained so conspicuously an American that every Englishman and every Frenchman with whom he came in contact recognized him as a foreigner; neither would have thought of mistaking him for a fellow-countryman; he was as un-English and un-French as an Italian, or a Spaniard, or--better--as an American. * * * * * The “White Girl” was rejected at the Salon in 1863; the “Portrait of my Mother” was accepted by the Royal Academy and obscurely hung in 1871, only after a bitter discussion, in which the one member of the committee who favored it, Sir William Boxall, a friend of Whistler’s family, threatened to resign unless it was accepted. This same great portrait--it is said on good authority--was offered in New York for twelve hundred dollars and found no buyer. When exhibited in London, language failed to express the full measure of the scorn and contempt the English press--from the ponderous _Times_ down to the most insignificant fly-sheet--had for this wonderful picture; but no sooner had the French government purchased it for the Luxembourg than all was changed, and with delightful effrontery the _Illustrated London News_ said: “Modern _British_ (!) art will now be represented in the National Gallery of the Luxembourg by one of the finest paintings due to the brush of an _English_ (!) artist,--namely, Mr. Whistler’s portrait of his mother.” The italics and exclamation marks are Whistler’s own, and his denial of British complicity is complete. * * * * * Aside from Whistler’s personality, his art finds its only congenial place in the midst of American art. That his pictures will not hang in any conceivable exhibition of British art without the incongruity being painfully perceptible goes without saying, and none knows this better than English painters themselves. Of all the various manifestations of art with which Whistler’s has come in sharp contrast, English painting has been the slowest and most stubborn in yielding to influences from the far East; whereas of all painters of the nineteenth century Whistler was the very first to recognize the wondrous qualities of Chinese and Japanese art and absorb what those countries had to teach concerning line and color; and in so far as the painters of England, and more conspicuously those of Scotland, have learned aught of the subtleties and refinements of the East, they have learned it _through Whistler_, and not direct.