Summary
In Wilde's account Whistler speaks for more than an hour, with marvellous eloquence, on the uselessness of all such lectures. He begins with prehistory: the artist at home making cup and bowl for hunter and warrior, who use them without caring for their beauty, an attitude Whistler urges on his audience. The fashionable listeners, told that their joy in beautiful things is an impertinence to painters, seem aghast and amused, then delighted to be rid of the duty of admiring anything. Whistler shoots arrows at archaeologists, at critics who read a picture like a novel for its plot, at amateurs and, 'O mea culpa!', at dress reformers.
He turns next on nature, convicting her of Bank holidays and overcrowded detail, and speaks beautifully of dawns and dusks when warehouses become palaces and chimneys campaniles. He ends by protesting that only a painter may judge painting, and with a passage about Fusiyama on a fan.
Wilde disagrees on two points. An artist is 'the resultant of a certain milieu', and cannot be born of a nation without a sense of beauty; nor should charming people live with magenta ottomans so a painter may study them. And only an artist, not a painter, judges art: all the arts are one, and the poet is the supreme artist. Still he praises the lecture for the beauty of its passages as well as its wit, and calls Whistler one of the greatest painters, an opinion in which 'Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs.'