Whistler’s revisions and the imaginary changing sitter
Whistler used to make many rapid studies of a sitter; it did not matter if he tore up twenty portraits.
Whistler’s habit of undoing his own work gives this illustration a historical foothold. The Pennells’ biography describes repeated erasure in portraiture and recalls seeing him scrape down the neck and bust of Miss Kinsella’s portrait because its hand did not harmonize with the rest. Their account supports drastic revision, rather than the literal destruction of twenty separate portraits. The inspected witness is the revised sixth edition, with a preface dated 1919; the biography first appeared in October 1908. It therefore supplies corroboration, not an established source for Orthodoxy (1908). Pennells, chapters XIV and XXXVII.
The changing sitter is Chesterton’s counterfactual. Its point is that a stable object makes successive attempts comparable: failure can teach the painter something. Changing the object destroys that particular continuity. This illustrates the proposed condition for cumulative reform; it does not independently prove that every revision of a moral ideal makes earlier experience useless.
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