Art: Expatriates in Chicago

CHICAGO, business capital of the Midwest, is each year becoming more of a cultural center as well. Next week the Chicago Art Institute will stage a show unrivaled among the new year's exhibitions for size and sophistication: 120 pictures by three extraordinary American expatriates—John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and James McNeill Whistler. All three made their fame in the Victorian and Edwardian eras; after their deaths, the reputations of all three declined. Perhaps because they were restless folk, who elected to live abroad, none of the three ever quite matched the greatness of their deep-rooted contemporaries, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. But Chicago's show should do much to restore them to their proper places in the ranks of American artists.

James McNeill Whistler's monogram was a butterfly, which appears in medallion form in his portrait of Thomas Carlyle (see spread). In his landscapes, Whistler was a butterfly, gently sipping the sweetness of nature and making it the subject of canvases so subtle and thinly brushed as to seem evanescent. He lived in London, made his mission "revealing the Thames to the people who lived on it but had previously only seen it as a stretch of water."

In his life, Whistler was part scorpion (and sometimes attached a scorpion's tail to the butterfly in his monogram), a terror of the drawing rooms. He had a bit of a beard beneath his lower lip, which he used to tug at for inspiration when cornered. Then he would open his mouth and paralyze the opposition with a quip. When Critic John Ruskin dared criticize Whistler's paintings too harshly, the devilish dandy sued him for libel. Among the evidence presented at the trial was Whistler's Batter sea Bridge (opposite). Looking at it. the judge made the mistake of using sarcasm—Whistler's favorite weapon. The following dialogue took place:

His Honor: "Are those figures on the top of the bridge intended for people?"

Whistler: "They are just what you like."

His Honor: "That is a barge beneath?"

Whistler: "Yes. I am very much flattered at your seeing that . . ."

In the end, Whistler won his case, but the judge awarded him damages of just one farthing and, by making him pay the court costs, helped force the painter into bankruptcy.

John Singer Sargent, standing at the easel in his studio on London's Tite Street, used to mutter, "Gainsborough would have done it!" But in his heart he knew he was no Gainsborough. What Sargent had in abundance was a capacity for flattering his sitters in paint, and naturally they flocked to him. He complained that "portrait painting is a pimp's profession," and late in life he swore off it. "No more paughtraits," he wrote triumphantly to a friend. "I abhor and abjure them and hope never to do another, especially of the Upper Classes."