Whistler, James Abbott McNeill

Autograph manuscript signed twice with his butterfly monogram, 53 pp. rectos only (including autograph title-page) in black ink, (7 7/8 x 6 1/4 in.; 200 x 159 mm), London 1888, being a fair copy (with a few ink corrections) of his "Ten O'Clock" lecture of 1885. Bound in green buckram, marbled endpapers; some wear at spine ends and edges.

As described in catalogue entry.
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Whistler's autograph fair copy of his most celebrated statement on art, used by Chatto and Windus to set and print the first edition in 1888.  This remarkable manuscript includes a title-page by Whistler including butterfly monogram, demonstrating how the artist would like the wrapper and title-page laid out.  It was the artist himself who gave the lecture the title Mr. Whistler's "Ten O'Clock".  After the pamphlet appeared, it was translated in to French by Mallarmé as Le Ten O'Clock, also 1888.  It was first collected in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1892), pp. 135-159.

The lecture was first delivered on the evening of 20 February 1885 at Princes' Hall, Piccadilly, with Oscar Wilde, George Moore, Walter Sickert, and other notables in attendance. It was also delivered in Cambridge in March and Oxford in April. Whistler's aim in writing and delivering the lecture seems to have been to make clear his animosity toward Oscar Wilde. As Stanley Weintraub has written, "Whistler might never have been provoked to the production of his Ten O'Clock credo had he not felt that Wilde was poaching dangerously upon his own intellectual preserve." Aiming a barb at his chosen target, he said, "… the Dilettante stalks abroad. The amateur is loosed. the voice of the aesthete is heard in the land, and the catastrophe is upon us."  

In one of the lecture's most celebrated passages, Whistler make the case for the artist—and not nature—creating harmony by means of the transforming imagination: "… 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 campanilli, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us …. Nature, who for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master …."

Wilde reviewed the lecture for the Pall Mall Gazette on 21 February, calling Whistler "a miniature Mephistoles, mocking the majority." It goes without saying that an acrimonious correspondence between artist and writer ensued.

Whistler manuscripts are rare at auction. Although the artist's letters do appear with some frequency in the sales rooms, manuscripts are seldom seen.  The last manuscript recorded by ABPC is the 3 pp. manuscript for "The Commercial Travellers of Art" sold in the Doheny sale (Christie's New York, 18 October 1988, lot 1644).