Themes
Beautiful surroundings
The real quarrel is over whether ugliness serves art. Whistler tells his audience that 'the only thing they should cultivate was ugliness', since a great painter can transform even hideous rooms by half closing his eyes at twilight. Wilde answers that an artist 'can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of any sense of beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn', and refuses to condemn people to 'magenta ottomans and Albert-blue curtains' for a painter's sake.
Painter and artist
Wilde turns Whistler's claim that only a painter may judge painting into a distinction of his own. A painter who is merely a painter should talk only of 'mediums and megilp', and even then hold his tongue; the artist knows that the arts, 'poem, picture and Parthenon', are one. Above all stands the poet, master of colour, form and music, so that Poe and Baudelaire, not Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche, know the secret laws of creation.
Praise with a sting
Wilde's admiration is real and teasing at once. He praises the lecture's wit, paradox and 'real eloquence', and the earnestness that amazed those who thought Whistler 'a master of persiflage merely'. Yet the compliments are barbed: Whistler speaks eloquently on the uselessness of lectures, and the last line, that Whistler concurs in thinking himself one of the greatest painters, turns the tribute into a joke at his expense.