human
Where it required accuracy he was minute. He used his needle with the ease of a draughtsman with a pen. He grouped his lines in an easy, playful way that was fascinating. They would often group themselves as tones, a difficult thing to get in an etching. He used line and dot in all its phases with certainty. Sometimes the lines formed a dark shadow of a passage through a house, with figures in the darkness so beautifully drawn that they looked far away from the spectator. These shadows which so beautifully defined darkness were made only by many lines carefully welded together and made vague as the shadows became faint in the distance or contrasted with some light object. He made his etched lines feel like air against solids.... If he etched a doorway, he played with the lines and allowed them to jumble themselves into beautiful forms and contrasts, but was always very careful of the general direction they should run as a whole. Bacher saw a good deal of Whistler in Venice, perhaps more so than any one else, and his observations on Whistler's etching tools, how he ground and bit his plates, are extremely interesting.
gpt
In grounding plates Whistler used the old-fashioned ground, composed of white wax, bitumen, pitch and rosin. He heated the plates with an ordinary alcohol flame, holding the plate in a small hand vise. The silk covered dabber that spread the ground over the plate was fascinatingly managed by Whistler.... When he came to smoking the plate he preferred the old wax taper made for that purpose. He kept his two etching needles, very sharp ordinary dentist tools, in cork, to preserve their fine points. Whistler always had his stopping-out varnish with him in a small bottle, applying it with a brush in a most delicate manner. He did not make use of any mirror but preferred the old negative process. When he bit a plate he put it on the corner of a kitchen table, with his retouching varnish, etching needle, feather and bottle of nitric acid, at hand, ready for instant use. Taking a feather, he would place it at the mouth of the bottle of acid, tipping bottle and allowing acid to run down the feather and drip on plate. He moved bottle and feather always in the same position around the edges until plate was covered,--would use feather continually to wash acid backward and forward upon the plate, keeping parts equally covered, and blowing away air bubbles.
human
Annual Review at Spithead, in 1887, show his uncommon facility as a sketch artist. He was the champion of dry point. Already during the Leyland period he selected dry point as a favourite medium. And in this, to my notion, lies the strength of Whistler as an etcher.
gpt
Whistler added, as Joseph Pennell has so beautifully said,