Whistler's Shadow

Being a waterman at Chelsea on the Thames was a good way to get to know artists. With its cluttered wharves and shadowy hulls in the mist, Chelsea Reach was a famous painting spot. An old boat maker named Greaves (rhymes with leaves) used to row famed Painter J. M. W. Turner up & down the Reach. Walter Greaves, the boatman's son, painted heraldic devices on his father's boats and, as he grew up, longed for broader canvases. One day in the 1860s, when Walter was in his late teens, he got to know a Chelsea neighbor, an eccentric young painter from Massachusetts: James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

From that day on, Walter Greaves and his brother Harry followed Whistler wherever he went. Strutting, dandyish Whistler was glad to have them follow. The brothers affected bis flat, wide-brimmed black hat and yellow tie. They even signed his invitations with meticulous copies of the famous Whistler signature: a butterfly with a sting in its tail. Sitting on either side of their hero at a life class, they seldom looked at the model; their eyes were fixed on the Master's drawing. Sometimes Whistler would roll a cigaret and smoke it; the Greaves brothers solemnly copied him, puff for puff.

End of a Friendship. For almost 20 years Walter and Harry often took Whistler for boat rides on the Thames, watching him as he made studies for his famed "Nocturnes." Then one day, as impulsively as he had adopted them, Whistler dropped them. He had a new follower: young Walter Richard Sickert, later to become the leading British painter of his day. Not much was ever heard again of Harry Greaves, but Walter remained a dogged admirer at a distance.

Walter Greaves won a measure of fame with a London show in 1911, but the cheers came mostly from Whistler's enemies, who took revenge by insisting that Greaves was really the original and Whistler the imitator. Not all the tributes stemmed from spite. Wrote Sickert: "Whistler gave me to understand that the Greaves boys were negligible. ... I herewith make public penitence . . . Walter Greaves is a great master."

The show didn't sell well; neither did a subsequent one. In 1919 some of his friends--including Sickert and Max Beer-bohm--gave Walter Greaves a big dinner and a check for -L-150. He died, grey and penniless, in 1930 in a London almshouse, dejected because the authorities would not let him blacken his hair, so that it would be like Whistler's.

Return of a Reputation. Last week 28 of Walter Greaves's paintings were on exhibition in a London gallery, an indication that his reputation was on the rise again--as a painter in his own right. His pleasingly melancholy river scenes lacked the sophistication of Whistler's art, but had a simple boatman's directness and integrity. "To Mr. Whistler," dogged Walter once said, "a boat was always a tone; to me it was always a boat."

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