Whistler treated his monogram in the same conscientious and picturesque fashion. He used it with preference in his symphonies, nocturnes and large portraits, but, at times, also in white, as on a rail post in the lower right corner of his "Bognor." He handled it with more than ordinary reverence, as everything that pertained to the exploiting of his own personality. He often introduced it at the first painting to judge the effect, and, of course, he wiped or scraped it out over and over again until he procured the desired effect. He continually made slight changes in the design, he toyed with it as with some curio, elaborated it in many ways, and, eventually, even bestowed a sting upon the insect, as it appears in his "Gentle Art of Making Enemies."
The butterfly teaches a lesson. It proves that an artist can be self-assertive, arrogant and yet refined. Whistler thus introduced a method of picture signing that should be generally adopted. Every artist should have his own monogram, and use it with discretion.
But it has even a deeper significance in Whistler's life. It is in a way a symbol of his evolution as a painter. As we study his work we find that the butterfly monogram does not appear before Whistler freed himself from foreign influences, and invented an individual and independent style of his own. The butterfly may well stand for the full awakening and realization of his own faculties. Did he not say himself:
"In the pale citron wing of the butterfly, with its dainty spots of orange, he saw the stately halls of fair gold, with their slender saffron pillars, and was taught how the delicate drawing high upon the walls should be traced in slender tones of orpiment and repeated by the base in notes of graver hue."
Like all painters Whistler had to learn his trade, and then find his peculiar way of expression. It took him well nigh a quarter of a century. He entered the studio of Gleyre in the summer of 1855 as a young man of twenty-one, and was nearly forty-seven when he had finished the "Portrait of the Artist's Mother" and had painted a few nocturnes. All his earlier pictures remind us of some other master. "The Music Room" recalls Stevens, "The Blue Wave: Biarritz" the forceful style of Courbet, and "The White Symphony" even the light manner of Alma Tadema.