A practical painter drawn from an earlier adversary
How can we keep the artist discontented with his pictures while preventing him from being vitally discontented with his art?
The useful example here is not an uncomplicated endorsement of Whistler. In Heretics (first published 1905), chapter XVII, Chesterton attacks Whistler’s self-conscious artistic personality while conceding his ability to produce art. He distinguishes the work from the temperament: Whistler’s defect, in this polemical portrait, is that he cannot forget art and return to ordinary human life. See the sequence beginning ‘He was not a great personality’ in the Project Gutenberg text inspected.
That earlier distinction helps specify the present question. Dissatisfaction with a particular picture can sustain activity; alienation from the activity itself threatens to end it. The earlier essay asks whether an artist can put art aside; this paragraph asks whether he can keep faith with it while rejecting its products. These are different questions, but both refuse to identify the worth of a practice with the success or emotional intensity of each performance. Whistler functions here as a recognizable working painter, not as Chesterton’s ideal personality. The comparison also gives the final joke a sharper edge: the object of judgment should be the attempted portrait, rather than the sitter whose continued presence makes correction possible.
Sources
Revision 1 of 1 · 2026-11-07 · Suggest an edit