Turning from the easel in front of which we were standing, Whistler lifted a book from the table with a quick, almost nervous action, and as he opened it said with a quizzical expression, “It is all in here.” The book was the “Gentle Art of Making Enemies.” Tuning quickly to the paragraph he had in mind, he read, “Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful.” He continued to read for a good part of an hour. Whistler by Whistler was an inimitable and rare treat. The slightest shade of meaning was expressed with great delicacy, by inflection and gesture. At the end of very many years of study and observation, Whistler’s sensitive appreciation and power of selection were extraordinary. The most subtle and harmonious qualities in nature made an irresistible appeal to him. He has described this faculty as the power to pick and choose. By the very choice of many of his subjects he was enabled to eliminate all insignificant details and thereby to render the harmonies of nature as they appeared to him. He described his method or mental attitude with reference to nature when he said: “As the light fades and the shadows deepen all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are, in great strong masses.” This represents Whistler in the presence of subdued and gentle qualities in nature, but it was the same Whistler, without modification or change in his attitude with respect to nature, who rendered with such startling realism and absolute fidelity to truth in his marvellous etchings the shipping, the city, and the river Thames. Under the blazing light of noonday the masts and rigging of the ships, the forms and details of the hulls, even the tile upon the roofs of the city houses were distinctly seen. He recorded his impressions manifestly without the slightest deviation from the simple truth of form and value. No one who has studied Whistler’s set of the Thames etchings will for an instant dispute this statement. The quality of simple truth is so astonishingly present in every line and form in these works that no argument is needed touching this point. The Whistler who made these etchings, the Whistler who painted the “White Girl” and the “Girl at the Piano,” must be reconciled with the Whistler who painted the evening symphonies representing the river, the “Portrait of Sarasate,” and other works of subdued and gentle qualities. The simple truth is that Whistler was as faithful and scientific in the one case as in the other, and that the result depended upon his choice of subject, and the time, and effect observed. I am told that in his later period he sought after and discovered means of securing the more gentle aspects of nature; that he toned and diffused the light in his studio