[Illustration: VIEW OF AMSTERDAM (ETCHING).]
Whistler gave etching a new impetus, and a new significance in the use of line; even as Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer has so well expressed it: "in telling use of a line he has no superior among the modern and few equals in any age."
His work is never dull, nor cold, nor commonplace. It is always fascinating and capable of provoking æsthetic sentiments. At times it is of "slight constitution," a mere passing fancy, leaving many objects in the stage of mere suggestion, but it always has a finished look. And finish, as he understood it, meant the carrying on of a technical process until it had fulfilled to the utmost its mission and explanation, until not a touch more was needed to make clear the intention which the picture embodied.
Grey is the colour of modern life. There is some truth in the statement. Modern civilization shuns the slashed doublet and purple cloak. Beauty of colour, as a Titian and Veronese understood it, belongs to the past. The brilliancy and splendour has faded out of it. The modern painter uses a more limited scale of colour, and the tendency is toward grey.
Man's garb is monotone, and the life in large cities devoid of the rich colour-bursts of mediæval life. The contrasts are all in lower, paler and murkier tones, and grey, in most instances, furnishes the keynote and general harmonizer. All the artists who have a fine feeling for the arrangement of colours have realized that harmonies of red, green and violet, which shone so resplendently from the warm brown tones of the Old Masters, are the dreams of another age. Even the impressionists, by the very character of their technical innovations, notably the abolition of browns, the struggle for a higher pitch of light by the interaction of purely applied colours and the exaggeration of the transparency of shadows, are pursuing the grey phantom of modern art. Their ambition is no longer a combination of bright colours, as in Veronese's "Marriage of Cana," but a tonality of dull yellow or green, which pervades the whole surface of the pictures. The flowing robes, flowers and gold ornaments, once so radiant on the canvases of the Renaissance, have turned as pale as ashes.