EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Whistler's etching here is an excellent example of how an initial focus on the odd aspects of a composition often bear fruit.¹ And what's odd here is the unfinished space in the center. Who draws like that, in seeming circles from the outside in?

And, although the sitter is obviously a cellist, the title curiously calls him a sculptor. It's another self-referential hint because the traditional credit line in Latin for the engraver of a reproductive print would be: "[Artist's name] sculpit". The musician, as we will see, is a reproductive sculptor and so is Whistler.

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With the cello barely there, the visible part of its bow resembles an engraver's burin or pencil drawing the cello (see arrow).² This makes sense because Whistler often gave works musical titles. And Becquet "drawing" his cello on paper once faced Whistler "still drawing" Becquet thus implying the paper is a mirror.³ What's more, the womb-like shape of the absent instrument uses human conception, i.e. reproduction, as a visual metaphor for mental conception while making the male cellist androgynous, both common themes in art.⁴

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The dark, insistent lines enveloping Becquet are curious too. Though not a literal description of anything, I believe they refer to a type of Renaissance painting known as the Madonna del Parto, the Virgin about to give birth (right). If so, Becquet's womb is the Virgin's and Whistler's work of art is divine.⁵ 

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This sense of becoming and ongoing creation is also present in the musician's cap which has, hidden within it, a rough depiction of Whistler's own face with an "eye" on top and moustache below (top L and bottom). Note how the one "eye" has a tear-duct next to the "nose"; the other "eye" is absent to indicate the two contrasting forms of an artist's vision - insight and "out-sight" to nature. It's a common tactic.⁶ Thus this veiled and partial "self-portrait" is born from Becquet's head as though a self-portrait in the making, which it is.⁷

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Great poetry, visual or otherwise, is often disjunctive and a challenge. Our job, whether reader or viewer, is to interpret the obscurities in the "text" in such a way that the poem makes more sense. This, it has been said, is a large part of poetry's charm.⁸ One trick we therefore use in visual art is to start where the image makes least sense, where the logic apparently fails, because, if we can make sense of the "errors" there within the EPPH paradigm, we generally make sense of the whole.