STRANGE ECHO

In the first decade of the 20th century, a pathetic figure with a suggestion of dandyism about his shabby clothes, who must have been nearly sixty and yet whose hair remained jet-black, could often be seen standing on the pavement edge along the King’s Road, Chelsea, offering for sale, for a shilling or so, his watercolours of the locality. It was Walter Greaves. Long before this he had painted at least two pictures now acknowledged to be among the masterpieces of English painting of the late 19th century: “Hammersmith Bridge on Boat Race Day,” painted when he was sixteen, and now in the Tate Gallery, and “Chelsea Regatta,” now in the Manchester Gallery. But these were not isolated flashes of genius. There were indeed many others such as the full-length portrait of Tinnie, his sister, bought for the Johannesburg Gallery, “The Frozen Thames,” “Barges after a Snowstorm” and “Cremorne Gardens in the Evening.”

It might be said that it was his devotion to Whistler which had brought him so perilously near the gutter for, at this time, Greaves was living with Tinnie at Fulham in the direst want. And it was not as if he had been a spendthrift or a rake, for all his life he had been careful and abstemious. How had it all happened?

Walter Greaves was born on the 4^th July, 1846, at 321 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. He remembered “our house was so close to the water that when lying in bed at night we could hear the river’s wash beneath the walls.” His father, a boat builder, had established his business in 1818. There were five children, Walter, his elder brother Harry, and three sisters including Tinnie. Little is known of his early life, except that he and Harry used to play in a field at the back of Carlyle’s house and once Walter threw a stone through the great man’s study window. He was so scared that he ran home.

Carlyle was a well-known figure in the district. There were many others, some of them painters, and they interested the boy most, for he and Harry had a passion to draw and paint and already their talents were exceptional. Old Greaves had known one painter particularly: Walter was only vaguely to remember this friend of his father’s, an odd-looking figure dressed in a faded brown overcoat and with a topper on his head. Something about him suggested a seafaring man, and his habit of carrying a telescope had caused him to become known locally as “The Admiral.” He had come to live in Chelsea in his old age and went under the name of Booth, this taken from the name of the woman in whose house he lodged. Puggy, as he was also called, was rumoured to have papered one of its rooms with his drawings. The oddity’s real name was Joseph William Mallord Turner. He enjoyed chatting to the rivermen or drinking with them in the taverns along the waterside. Old Greaves told Walter that he often used to row Puggy and Mrs Booth across the river to picnic in the fields on the Battersea side. If the sky was overcast, Mrs Booth remained on the landing stage. “I shall not be long gone,” Puggy would call out to her, “ Greaves says the weather will be soupy.”

At fourteen, Walter had left school and was at work in his father’s boatyard, helping to paint the ceremonial barges then used by the Lord Mayor and the City Companies, lovely craft with elaborate carving on prow and stern and decorated with bright colours and heraldic devices. This was a fortunate apprenticeship for Walter as it enabled him to handle oil paint at an age when it is unusual to have begun work in the medium. He learned about oils and varnishes, their tricky properties and peculiarities, and about the mixing of colours. He could hardly have had a better beginning. John Martin, the famous artist who lived a few doors away, had begun by painting the armorial bearings on the doors of noblemen’s coaches, Turner by colouring architectural drawings. Walter and Harry were always drawing and painting. When they were not occupied on the boats, they sketched in the streets near their home and by the side of the river. They received no tuition, except for the help they gave each other, and they did a great number of drawings in collaboration. It was always Chelsea Walter wanted to paint, he seldom went further afield. “Chelsea was so beautiful,” he said in his old age, “that you couldn’t but help paint it.”

It was in these days that he put on canvas his picture of “Hammersmith Bridge on Boat Race Day.” It is a remarkable, perhaps unique work for a boy to have accomplished: disarming, unaffected, superb in design and craftsmanship. But it was not until he was an old man that he contrived to sell it to a junk shop dealer for £20. The dealer improved on this figure. He sold it for £500.

Now Whistler appears on the scene. Walter is seventeen, the year is 1863, the year of that memorable Salon des Refusés when an exhibition of works refused by the Salon had been held in the same building as those which had been accepted. There, Whistler’s full-length portrait, “The White Girl”, and Manet’s “Déjeuner sur L’herbe” had been laughed at and derided. Today these paintings take their places naturally enough besides the other masterpieces of the past but in 1863, Whistler and Manet had the epithets “madman” and “charlatan” hurled at them.

Whistler had come from Paris to settle in Chelsea and found a house in Lindsey Row, a bare two hundred yards from old Greaves’ boatyard. Walter and Harry had seen him at work, sitting in the front window of his house and painting a vista of the river. One day when the boys were sketching by the waterside, Whistler came sauntering along. He glanced at the work, walked on, hesitated, came back, told the boys who he was, and looked more intently at what they were doing. Then, abruptly, he said: “Come over to my house.” Walter and Harry followed him. Soon Whistler was showing them his paintings and the Japanese prints he had acquired in Paris, talking all the while. The boys were spellbound, nothing like this had ever happened before, and they didn’t know what to say as Whistler showed them painting after painting, and all so different to anything they had yet seen.

Walter was at that hero-worshipping age. In his own words he “went mad over Whistler.” Whistler, older that Walter by twelve years, was already assured of success. The meeting between the two was fateful, how fateful Walter could not have guessed, nor would he have cared. He was happy, and in no mind to think of anything but his new friend, this artist who praised his efforts. He wanted to put into practice all Whistler told him: there were too many details in his work, he must select, simplify, his colour was wrong and his edges too hard.

This Jimmy Whistler, Walter discovered, liked to have some people about him, and he had a way of making those people help him, finding them jobs to do and errands to run. Walter and Harry willingly obliged, proudly pleased at being asked to go to the other side of the river to buy colours or brushes, to learn to prime his canvases and prepare his panels. They even made his frames, copying his designs.

Whistler made etching, so Walter did the same. “It was Whistler who taught me to etch,” he told William Merchant in 19121, “and he would often take a needle from me and correct or touch up my work.” Like the drawings made jointly with his brother Harry, Walter’s etched subjects were of local interest. He persuaded some Chelsea shopkeepers to exhibit them and an occasional sale brought him a few shillings.

The intimacy between Whistler and the Greaves grew, the boys in and out of his studio or working there, and Whistler visiting the family in the evening, sometimes bringing his mother. He unloaded dessert from his pockets for them to eat. He liked to sit and talk and make sketches of Tinnie, Walter’s sister. She had a wonderfully shaped head, Whistler said. Walter watched him do many drawings of her in black and white chalks. Perhaps Jimmy was half in love with her, but then he always found time to flatter and flirt with a pretty girl. And, in those days, Tinni was a beautiful girl. But Mrs Greaves put a stop to the philandering, she said Tinnie was only a schoolgirl, far too young. But there was no unpleasantness and the families continued friends. Tinnie had plenty of chances but she never married.

Whistler, more often than not, was hard-up, but he was always happy and gay, and Mrs Greaves though him most entertaining, particularly when he danced and her Walter played the piano. He also possessed a life-size doll, dressed like a man, and with this he gave bizarre performances at friends’ houses. He rehearsed with it at the Greaves. Sometimes he would display the latest mechanical toy, such things fascinated him, a great favourite was a musical box shaped like a rattle that tinkled “Yankee Doodle.” “He was a rare fellow for music,” Walter remembered. Talking od Whistler, he once said; “We were like brothers,” and: “He taught us to [paint and we taught him the waterman’s jerk.” Whistler’s fondness for the river equalled that of the brothers and all three sometimes rowed downstream as far as Wapping, or up to Putney. They spent whole nights on the water. Sometimes a spatter of small stones on their window would awaken the boys at five in the morning. Outside the house Whistler would be shouting to be taken out for a pull. To him, these excursions were a preliminary for work, pictures of dawn, moonlight and night were to make him famous.

Old Greaves worried that his sons were about so much with Whistler, he said they were neglecting the family business. No good would come of it, for he could not see there was any money in painting. But he could not stop them, whenever Whistler was at home, the boys were dancing attendance. “He was such a rare one for work,” Walter long after said. He might have added and for play. Days were spent in truancy from the boatyard to paint in Jimmy’s studio and when the light failed, they went to Cremorne Gardens and ragged and entered into all the fun that was going.

In 1865, Whistler revisited Paris. The next year he was off to Valparaiso.When he returned sand moved into a new house at 2, Lindsey Row, Walter was there, helping to redecorate the interior. 

Perhaps it was at this time that he began to imitate Whistler’s idiosyncrasies of dress and became what Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell described as “a strange, faraway echo of Whistler.” It was unfortunate, for it started the legend, which was to persist, and does persist, that Greaves was an unimportant disciple.

Meanwhile Whistler was working on his three greatest portraits: his Mother, Carlyle and Miss Cecily Alexander. Walter watched their progress. That of Mrs Whistler was so thinly painted that Walter feared it would never last. The exquisite lace edged handkerchief in the old lady’s hands was “just a bit of oil and white” he said. When it was finished Jimmy sponged the canvas over with warm water, to bring up the tones which had dried out flat, and a whitish film appeared. Whistler was terrified, he thought he had ruined what he considered his finest picture, he ran along the embankment to the boatyard and asked Walter what was to be done? Walter calmed his anxiety. If the painting was gently warmed in front of a fire, the “bloom” would dry off. And so it did. Old Greaves sat for Carlyle’s coat and Tinnie was called into help with the portrait of little Miss Alexander. The child posed on a carpet which Tinnie had made out of black and white tape.

So the friendship went on for the next ten years. Now when Walter paints there is a conflict between the desire to express himself and the influence of Whistler. Thus he lived two lives, sometimes he was himself, sometimes he was not. “The Boating Pond, Battersea Park,” painted in this period is essentially Walter, one of his minor masterpieces, a picture that no-one but he could have painted, personal in approach and a straightforward statement of things as he saw them.

Walter didn’t get a lot of encouragement from Jimmy. His attitude was that Walter was one of his pupils and therefore, following the French tradition, must not exhibit without his permission. So, in 1876, it was only with difficulty did Walter persuade Whistler to allow him to show the portrait of Tinnie, in her black and white quilted dress, at an exhibition at the Royal Aquarium, Westminster. Sickert, many years after, said of this picture that, in it, Greaves had “accomplished what Whistler spent his life trying to do.” But it attracted no attention and when the exhibition closed, Greaves took it off its stretcher, rolled it up, and stowed it away.

In 1878, Whistler moved into the White House in Tite Street. Meanwhile Walter had painted “Chelsea Regatta” and that too had been stacked away. Jimmy was going hammer and tongs for Ruskin, but the result of this unfortunate libel action left him a farthing to the good and with heavy costs to pay. He was bankrupted. Bailiffs took possession of the White House. At this crisis, Ernest Brown arranged for the Fine Arts Society to pay Whistler’s expenses Venice in return for a series of etchings. Jimmy asked Greaves to go with him. But Walter had no desire to travel, he couldn’t imagine any place could be lovelier than Chelsea. Jimmy was annoyed, the refusal rankled.

He was back in 1880. And then, in the next year or so, came the final quarrel. It was never known what it was about and Walter just wouldn’t talk about it. It might have been that Walter had outlived his usefulness and Whistler had found someone to take his place, for in 1882 Sickert became his apprentice. Walter was mortified at this termination to the long friendship. Only after Whistler’s death did he ever refer to it when he said to Professor Schwartz: “Whistler was the ruin of me. It’s a lesson. Always stand on your own feet.”

The boat building business came to an end sometime between 1882 and 1884. No longer at Whistler’s beck and call, Greaves now had all the days to himself, a strange and new sensation, and he enjoyed his liberty painting. “Something of my own began to come back,” he said years after. But there was nothing of the showman about him. Shy and reticent, he was useless when it came to business and was quite unable to sell his pictures. Things were pretty desperate with him and Harry when unexpected relief came. The two brothers were given a commission to decorate Streatham Hall with frescoes.

It was a big undertaking for them for they did everything themselves, the small weekly wage they received being insufficient to allow for the employment of an assistant. They worked most weeks at Streatham, walking in all weathers across the fields from Chelsea. When it rained they strapped their trouser legs under the knees to avoid the mud. It was a five mile tramp and Winter or Summer their costume never varied: “silk hat and frock coat, with cuffs much in evidence, wearing pink and yellow ties respectively.” 

The methods of these two watermen turned painters were painstaking indeed and the work took a considerable time. Their principal theme was the river and all the pageantry with which, for them, it was associated. The master, Whistler himself, was painted on the walls, and an imitation of his vision of the Thames, side by side with the Thames as the pupils had seen it before Whistler “had upset them with his theories.” They stressed their love of the river, of Cremorne Gardens, and their connection with Whistler. It is sad that these frescoes have not been preserved but allowed to fall into decay, many indeed totally destroyed. In 1925, St. Leonard’s Church acquired the building and used it to provide recreation and club rooms for boys and girls living in the district. The new owners at once obliterated most of the Greaves’ work. Lovely frescoes disappeared beneath coats of paint. But the workman directed to remove these paintings from the walls refused to do so, saying he would rather lose his job than scrape off such beauty. One hopes that he stuck to his opinion and simply painted them over, although there is little comfort in imagining underneath the stupid cream-coloured paint, the proud swans, the ceremonial barges and the gay boating parties of the brothers Greaves. Christian Brinton, who visited the place before 1912, writes of strolling “in silent wonder through room after room, marvelling at the patient naiveté of these two earnest souls.”

Soon after Streatham Hall passed into the hands of St. Leonard’s Church, the then rector, Canon Brooke-Jackson, was offered £500 by an American for the picture of the race between Harvard and Cambridge. But it was found to be impossible to transfer the painting from the wall. This offer may be the reason of the “red Room” still remaining intact. The Canon might well have hesitated before he destroyed a fresco which had been valued as highly.

Walter had hoped that Streatham would lead to other commissions. It didn’t. Somehow he contrived to scratch a living with his drawings, selling at absurd prices, but living was cheap and his wants few and simple. He was living at Fulham with his sister. Before the beginning of the century Harry died.

In 1903, Walter heard that Whistler was seriously ill. One morning he knocked at the door of 74 Cheyne Walk and said he had called to ask after Mr Whistler’s health. He was refused admittance. Likely as not, Jimmy never knew he had called. He died in July and there was a service in Chelsea Old Church. Outside, in the street, stood a pathetic figure, one hand resting on a canvas. His head was bowed, his other hand covered his face. But the clothes made the figure unmistakable. It was Walter.

We come to 1909. In that year despairing of ever selling the paintings he had stored over the years in the cellar of his house and fretted with the anxieties of increasing age and poverty, Walter took them to a junk shop in the Fulham Road and asked the owner if he could dispose of them. At any price! He didn’t want much. The dealer tried but the paintings attracted no buyers, and finally he made a roll of some of the canvases and took them to Spencer the bookseller in New Oxford Street who was also interested in pictures.  The canvases were in a deplorable state. “They had roughened and frayed at the edges. They were crinkled and crushed, dusty and even damaged in some cases, as though they had been neglected and despised for years.” Spencer was not interested until he noticed that under Walter’s signature in one picture were the words “pupil of Whistler.” Spencer was interested in Whistler and bought anything associated with him that was offered. He suggested a small sum for the canvases, put them aside, and “thought no more about them.”

But the dealer called again and again, always with a roll of pictures under his arm, and Spencer continued to buy at ridiculous prices. Soon he had acquired hundreds of Walter’s paintings. The dealer continued to call. He said Greaves was in a bad way, he couldn’t get any work to do and only Spencer would buy his paintings. Couldn’t Mr Spencer commission Greave’s to paint some pictures? Spencer agreed. Greaves called at his shop and Spencer thought him charming. He persuaded an American collector to buy some of his work for “good prices.” Spencer told Walter this one Sunday afternoon at Walter’s house. They talked of Whistler and Greaves produced a bundle of letters. Without bothering to read them, Spencer offered fifty guineas.

“They’re intimate,” said Greaves, and he tore them across and threw the pieces into the fire.

Madame Frida Strindberg, the second wife of the Swedish dramatist, bought a stack of canvases from Spencer, paying £200. Some she sold to the Dowdeswell Gallery, others to William Marchant of the Goupil Gallery. To Marchant she hinted the pictures might be Whistlers, but cleaning revealed the name Greaves. Marchant was impressed, he went to see Walter and Tinnie at Fulham. He was dismayed to find them living in want. He at once sent them furniture and other necessities. He saw Walter again and promised that when the pictures had been restored he would have an exhibition of them in his gallery. Marchant behaved generously, giving Walter a studio to work in, and although none of the pictures he proposed to exhibit now belonged to Walter, he offered an ex gratia payment on any that might be sold.

Walter agreed to put his name on a number of the canvases which he had omitted to sign. In some cases he added, as near as he could remember, the year when the pictures were painted. But he was getting old and his memory was failing. The Exhibition opened in May 1911. On the opening day there were few visitors, Pennell, Whistler’s biographer, was there. He was curious about a painting called “Passing under Battersea Bridge,” and he questioned Walter about it. Walter said he had painted it with his brother Harry. Whistler had said about it: “You boys have got something nice there.” And afterwards, Greaves said, Whistler painted his famous “Battersea Bridge.”

Suddenly the exhibition became a sensation. The Times notice was headed “An Unknown Master”. P.G. Konody in the Daily Mail conjectured how much Whistler had owed to his pupil. As a result of these and other criticisms, every day the gallery was crowded morning and afternoon and a number of the pictures were sold. Greaves was completely overcome by his sudden fame. Tinnie was with him at the gallery clad in an extraordinary garment which she must have had made for herself out of some old red curtains.

Pennell was alarmed. He thought some of the critics were trying to set up Greaves above Whistler. He proved that a date on a picture was wrong. The exhibition was ruined, why, it is not clear. The incorrect date proved nothing. It is the quality of a picture which is the criterion, not when or where it was painted. Greaves was a victim of the unfortunate inability of most critics to judge or praie a work on its own merits. When the exhibition closed, Walter continued to paint, but he still found it difficult to earn enough to keep himself and his sister.

If the critics who praised deserted him when there was a hint of trouble, his fellow artists were more consistent. In 1919, Sir William Rothenstein, Sir William Nicholson, Sickert, Max Beerbohm and others gave a dinner for Greaves. Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck presided and presented the old artist with a cheque for £150. Walter nearly broke down. He remarked that never before in his life had he had so much money. In 1921, he was elected an honorary member of the Chelsea Arts Club. Then a further dinner was given in his honour. On this occasion Greaves made a speech. Mourning the changes he saw about him, he said: “Chelsea isn’t what it used to be. The days don’t seem so long or so hot. Nothing happens in Chelsea now.” The following year there was another Greaves exhibition at the Goupil, but Walter’s bad luck persisted and the show was a failure.

He did no important work during the last years of his life. The Marchants found rooms for him at Hove and he stayed there at times. But he was mostly in Chelsea, wandering about the streets and by the river. He complained of his grey hairs to a shop-keeper who sometimes bought one of his drawings. The man picked up a tin of black boot polish from a shelf and said: Try some of this on your hair if you can’t afford dye like your pal Whistler.”

Greaves did try. Her surveyed himself in a mirror and was delighted. “Now I look more like ‘im,” he said. Tinnie also disliked growing old and wore a yellow wig with an old-fashioned dress, cut low at the neck, and adorned herself with cheap broches and rings. She died in 1921 leaving Walter quite alone. The following year he entered the Charterhouse. There was one dreadful scene with the matron when she insisted that the blacking must be washed out of his hair and it was revealed to be, not black, but snow white. But he settled down. He had a room of his own, pocket money, and a midday meal. On Quarter Days, when he received his tiny pension from the Royal Academy, he gave himself a treat and had tea at a restaurant where an orchestra played.

One November afternoon in 1930 he was suddenly taken ill in the Charterhouse and fell to the ground. Taken to the West London Hospital, he died there a few days after at the age of 84.

That night, the curfew bell at Charterhouse struck fifty-nine times, one note less than usual, this according to the ancient custom and to mark the loss of the sixtieth brother.

Finis

Walter Greaves (1846-1930) profile at ArtUK