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His friend, Painter Simeon Solomon, submitted to the indignant Royal Academy a series of nude saints, beautiful to look at, but wearing their halos in a very unconventional place. Art lover Charles Howell (who once hired 40 cabs to carry his 40 Japanese vases across London) became a talented embezzler. Nervous Novelist George Moore boasted of keeping a devoted python in his bedroom and went around sighing: "Oh, for crime!" Playwright Oscar Wilde made a fine art of neatly inverting the Victorian's cherished maxims ("If one tells the truth one is sure sooner or later to be found out").
Most talented, most influential painter in the new movement in Britain was American expatriate James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He always denied his Massachusetts birthplace ("I do not choose to be born at Lowell"). He affected a monocle, practiced ruthless selfishness, collected Japanese china, and developed a laugh so blood-curdling that Actor Henry Irving memorized it for dramatic moments in Shakespeare's plays. His emblem was a butterfly with a sting in its tail—a sting he attempted to keep in constant use.
Who's a Paint-Flinger? Whistler, almost singlehanded, destroyed Britain's early-Victorian esthetic conventions and opened the door to the French impressionists. When art pundit John Ruskin, whose opinions could make or break any painter in England, described him as "a conceited coxcomb . . . flinging a pot of paint in the public's face," Whistler promptly sued him for libel. In one of the strangest trials ever held outside Alice in Wonderland, the British public had its first glimpse of the new art. All through a long winter's day, Whistler's now-famed, misty blue-grey impressions of the Thames were pawed over by a jury. One painting was presented upside down. Another fell, and cracked a juror's bald pate. By evening, the jury was so benumbed that when Ruskin's attorney showed them a Titian as an example of "real" art, they couldn't see the difference. "We've had enough of these Whistlers," barked one, waving Titian away. Whistler won his case.
The effect on British art circles was tremendous. Public confidence in critical guidance disappeared; prices for paintings suddenly dropped. The unhappy Ruskin retired to a country cottage suffering from what was described as a "brainstorm," finally fell into a deep lethargy from which he roused himself only once a day, when the maid tapped on his door and announced: "The sunset, Mr. Ruskin."