"When the evening mist clothes the riverside with 'poetry' as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky and the tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and the fairy land is before us--then the wayfarer hastens home, the workman and the cultured one, the wise and the one of pleasures cease to understand as they have ceased to see, and nature, who for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master; her son in that he loves her, and her master in that he knows her."
A man who wrote like that surely received his inspirations from nature, and was dependent on the incident as much as anybody else. No, the true significance of his nocturne, as remarked before, lies in the original intention, not in the final effect of the subject he wished to produce. For conventionalist and impressionist alike, nature is the source of symbols for their mood. With them the standpoint is remarkably different from that of the superficial realists, who imagine that the mere copy of a scene must give the emotion that the scene itself arouses; who forget that the artist's emotion is as much a selective factor as his vision of the objective signs needful for the communication of his feeling to his public.
He probably wished to remain under cover, and not come out boldly and say: "This is the Japanese way of doing things. I disengage the poetical significance from an object or fact in Eastern fashion. I have learned this from the Hiroshige prints."
Few artists are willing to lay bare the mechanism of their individual way of interpretation. They would be misunderstood anyhow. Painters would have rejoiced to call him a downright imitator. And that is just the point where he differed from the average artist who followed the Eastern trail of art. He succeeded in combining the two great art elements of the world, those of the East and the West. In the sixties he was interested merely in a phase of Japanese art, that of colour. Hiroshige prints were hung on the wall or scattered on the floor of his studio, as can be noted in several of his earlier paintings. The Japanese artists were virtuosos of colour. They combined the most contradictory colours into a harmony, nuances which for centuries had escaped the appreciation of the European eye. After many experiments Whistler realized that this refined sense of colour was only one of the external accomplishments of Japanese art, that its true soul was revealed in its suggestive quality.