Art: Pleasures of the Iron Butterfly

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In the last years of his life (he died in 1903, just outliving Beardsley and Wilde, who owed so much to his ideas and style), Whistler was seen as an honored veteran and not an avant-garde figure; his paintings had lost whatever experimental look they once had, and were surpassed by impressionism. Curiously, his biggest influence was on writing. Poets Stéphane Mallarmé found their own cult of the indeterminate, the penumbra of experience, confirmed in his work. The Whistlerian landscape of Thames kept turning up in English poetry for another generation—not least in The Waste Land, with its "brown fog of a winter dawn" lying on London Bridge. Marcel Proust so adored him that he purloined one of his gloves, as a souvenir, at a reception. Meanwhile, the paintings have beautifully survived: strict in taste, limited in range, precise in key, and never, ever, cloying.

—By Robert Hughes