It was this critic who pronounced a water-color drawing of Ruskin by Herkomer the best oil portrait the painter had ever done,--a mistake Whistler never let the unlucky writer forget. * * * * * In those days he exhibited quite frequently at the Royal Academy. Among the earliest pictures exhibited was “At the Piano.” It attracted the attention of the Scotch painter John Phillip, who wished to buy it. Whistler left the price to him, and Phillip sent a check for thirty guineas, which was entirely satisfactory, so far as any one knows. Thirty thousand dollars has already been paid for one of his very early pictures, and for any one of a [Illustration] half-dozen of his important canvases a bid of fifty thousand dollars may be had any day. It is a question of only a few years when Whistler’s paintings will sell as high as Rembrandt’s. The great galleries of Europe have not yet entered the field, and many of the great private collections have no example of his work. A few Americans, but not many out of the large number of those who buy pictures regardless of cost, are already inquiring. When all these factors come into competition, as they will soon or late, prices will be realized that will make the dearest of English or French painters seem cheap. * * * * * In 1872 the portrait of his mother, an “Arrangement in Gray and Black,” was sent in to the Academy, and accepted only after a sharp controversy, wherein Sir William Boxall, R.A., gave the committee their choice between hanging the picture and accepting his own resignation as one of their number. “For,” said he, “it shall never be told of me that I served on a committee which refused such a work as that.” The picture was eventually placed with the “black-and-white” exhibit, drawings, engravings, etc., and apparently only the critics saw it. What they said Whistler has himself recorded. Somebody has asked, Suppose Whistler had been taken up and made an A.R.A., and in due course an R.A.--what then? The thing is well-nigh inconceivable; and even if an A.R.A., his innate dislike for sham and pretension in art and his sense of humor would have prevented him from becoming a full-fledged academician in a body wherein, as in all similar bodies, mutual appreciation, or at least mutual restraint from honest depreciation, is essential to existence. Whistler would probably have accepted the first degree, the A.R.A., of the fraternity,--for all his life he was personally, but not in his art, singularly susceptible to the praise of his fellow-men; but he would have remained in the Academy about as long as he remained president of the British Society of Painters,--just long enough to overturn things generally, and then get out. Once, when taken to task for referring to a painter who was only an A.R.A. as an R.A., he retorted that it was a difference without a distinction.