Whistler and Sherlock Holmes

DANIEL E. SUTHERLAND - LETTERS FROM AMERICA

At this festive time of the year (I am writing in mid-December), I always enjoy reading two Christmas classics: Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Blue Carbuncle.”  Yes, the latter really is a Christmas tale, celebrating, as Sherlock Holmes himself reminds us, “the season of forgiveness.”  It also reminds me of the many similarities between Holmes and James Whistler.  Naturally, they differ in some ways.  Whistler, an American, was born in July 1834; the Englishman Holmes was twenty years younger, born in June 1854 (even though his literary life did not begin until December 1887).  They had contrasting personalities, the stoic, highly rational, emotionally detached consulting detective having little in common with the effervescent, boisterous, uninhibited artist.  Both men craved tobacco, but while Holmes preferred his meerschaum pipe, Whistler smoked cigarettes almost exclusively.  While Whistler enjoyed good wine and an occasional glass of absinthe, Holmes sometimes resorted to a seven-per-cent solution of cocaine.

     But what of the similarities?  Let’s start with the people they knew or admired.  Edgar Allen Poe offers a good example of the latter.  I have written before about how Poe influenced Whistler’s artistic theories.  Holmes likewise profited from reading Poe, although, while Whistler gained most from his essays, Holmes derived important principles of detection from Poe’s stories of mystery and intrigue.  He was especially impressed by Poe’s fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin.  Holmes was reluctant to acknowledge that debt, always insisting (like Whistler) that his ideas were unique unto himself; but the line between his and Dupin’s innovations and methods are indisputable.

Oscar Wilde provides another notable link, although in Holmes’ case, it comes through his collaborator Conan Doyle.  Whistler’s association with Wilde is well documented.  The witty exchanges between the two men, both in the press and personal meetings, regaled London society in the early and mid-1880s.  Doyle first met Wilde when they were wined and dined by the publisher of Lippincott’s Monthly at a sumptuous dinner in 1889.  Both men agreed over cigars to write a serial novel for the magazine.  As a result, Wilde produced The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Doyle contributed The Sign of Four, one of Holmes’ most intriguing cases.  Doyle, recalling the meeting as “a golden evening,” said Wilde left “an indelible impression” on him.  “He towered above us all,” Doyle explained, “and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say. He had delicacy of feeling and tact.”

     Dorian Gray ultimately involved Whistler, too.  Their friendship being in taters by this time, Wilde, reportedly presented the character of Basil Hallward, the artist so chillingly stabbed to death by Dorian, as a thinly disguised version of Whistler in an early draft of the novel.   He eventually altered his description of Hayward, possibly, being aware of Whistler’s litigious nature, wishing to avoid any legal difficulties.

Whistler and Holmes also knew Charles Augustus Howell.  Acclaimed as a charming art dealer and collector with an uncanny eye for a bargain and unparalleled knowledge of the market, Howell was also one of history’s minor villains, with a reputation for shady dealing and deception.  Whistler initially finding him both useful and enjoyable company, Whistler eventually parted ways with Howell.  Holmes encountered the connoisseur when Howell stooped to blackmail.  Holmes’ biographer, Dr. John Watson, recounted the episode in “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.”  By then, Howell had been dead for more than a decade, but no one was fooled by the altered surname.

     Pablo de Sarasate y Navascues offers another connection between Whistler and Holmes.  The acclaimed violinist posed for one of Whistler’s most famous portraits, after which he described himself as the artist’s “devoted friend and ardent admirer.”  Holmes did not enjoy such a personal bond with Sarasate, but he, unlike Whistler, whose musical training was limited to boyhood piano lessons, was a skilled violinist and composer “of no ordinary merit,” and he was enthralled by the Spaniard’s virtuoso playing.  Both men attended Sarasate concerts at St. James’s Hall.  For Holmes, the occasion served as a necessary diversion when investigating “The Red-Headed League,” in 1890.  The detective had already found the case to be a “three pipe problem” when he dragged Dr. Watson off to the concert hall for a spot of repose.  “All the afternoon he sat in the stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness,” Watson observed, “gently waving his long, thin fingers in time to the music.”

     St. James’s Hall itself played a further role in Whistler’s life.  While the main auditorium was justly famous for its musical contributions to Victorian London, two smaller halls hosted notable lecturers.  Charles Dickens gave his final public reading there in 1870, and Whistler took to the stage in 1885 for the premier of his “Ten O’Clock” lecture.   Sadly, this venerable landmark, once wedged between Regent Street and Piccadilly, was torn down in 1905, its site now occupied by Le Meridien Piccadilly Hotel.

     Holmes never mentions Whistler in his surviving correspondence.  Nor does his name pop up in Watson’s catalogue of Holmes’ cases.  However, the detective did recognize Whistler’s influence on the art world, and in one notable instance seemed to endorse it.  Holmes pronounced the crime scene of his very first case, in 1881, as “a study in scarlet,” a description subsequently used by Watson as a title for the case.  Evidently influenced by Whistler’s use of  “arrangements” and “harmonies” to describe his work, Holmes advised Watson, “Why shouldn’t we use a little art jargon? There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein if life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

     Holmes would not have known that fourteen years earlier, Whistler had told Henri Fantin-Latour that his approach to composition in painting was to have “the same colour reappearing continually here and there like the same thread . . .   the whole forming in this way an harmonious pattern.”  A remark Holmes made in 1888, when investigating the case of “The Greek Interpreter,” suggests that he would have enjoyed knowing that Whistler borrowed the  metaphor at least  partly from Poe. “Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms,” he told Watson.

     Whistler mentions Holmes only once in his correspondence.  In 1902, in reviling art critic Frederick Wedmore, Whistler proudly offered evidence of Wedmore’s literary “crimes” and “depraved state” in the manner of Poe and “the startling . . . Sherlock Holmes.”  Certainly, there is little doubt that Whistler shared Holmes’ general approach to life: “I play the game for the game’s own sake.”