Whistler: Color Him Vivid : JAMES ABBOTT McNEILL WHISTLER: A Life, <i> By G.H. Fleming (St. Martin’s Press: $24.95; 367 pp.)</i>

Admiring a gibe by James McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde admitted, “I wish that I had said that.” Replied the painter, “You will, Oscar, you will.” Frothy and brilliant, often at the edge of financial disaster, Whistler is a bit too good to be true, as if he designed his life to be irresistible to writers.

Since his death in 1903, at the age of 69, Whistler has been the subject of nearly a dozen biographies, and he parades through an astonishing number of memoirs by critics, collectors and fellow-artists. The immense heap of Whistleriana includes a book on the life of Whistler’s mother, the subject of “Arrangement in Grey and Black” (1872), one of the best-known paintings in the Louvre. There is even a biography called “Whistler’s Father,” about the former lieutenant of artillery in the American army who oversaw the construction of Czar Nicholas I’s Moscow-St. Petersburg railroad.

In all these accounts, the expatriate artist (sometimes a Parisian but more often a Londoner) displays the same dazzlingly irritating personality. This new biography by G. H. Fleming (his second on Whistler) presents a familiar figure in particularly sharp outline. Most of the familiar anecdotes have been recalled to duty, and the author has recruited fresh ones from overlooked sources--the spate of memorial essays that appeared just after the artist’s death, for example. In addition, Fleming’s reading of Anna Whistler’s diary has produced a sensitive account of motherly doting that was at once lavish and oppressively anxious.

That the personality of Whistler’s father remains dim, a shadowy presence behind the screen of his public accomplishments, suggests that he will always be a mysterious figure. For Fleming is the sort of biographer who inspires confidence. Telling his story with concision, he rarely sacrifices important detail, so you are left with the feeling that if a character is elusive there is no help for it. Whistler, of course, is so relentlessly vivid that he sometimes eclipses his own art.

Short and thin, the painter liked his walking sticks to be thinnish and very tall. Because his mother was born in North Carolina, Whistler claimed the right to assume the airs of a plantation aristocrat. With British students, he employed a drawl. To Americans he spoke in clipped British tones. He expected subservience from admirers and respectful commentary from the press. Disobedient acolytes were banished. If a newspaper reviewer sneered at his subtle, sometimes almost abstract paintings, Whistler would fire off a witty and equally contemptuous letter to the editor. Always, he maneuvered for advantage, like a field commander determined not to be outflanked. More mannered than mannerly, Whistler did not draw the line at physical assault. Annoyed by his brother-in-law, Whistler shoved him through a plate glass window. Others he merely slapped.

A West Point drop-out, Whistler stayed abroad during the Civil War while his younger brother William fought for the Confederacy. It was during the war years that his verbal aggressions turned physical. In this escalation Fleming sees signs of a guilty doubt that aesthetic risks could ever match the military kind. After surviving three years of West Point discipline, Whistler had abandoned the military for the unsupervised life of an art student in Paris.

From records in the Louvre, Fleming discovered that Whistler rarely copied the old masters, a standard practice in that period. He never learned proper drawing, yet before he was 30, he had gotten himself noticed in Paris and in London. The greatest of France’s 19th-Century art critics, Charles Baudelaire, wrote in 1862 that Whistler’s etchings of the Thames are “subtle and lively as improvisation and inspiration.”

Fifteen years later, the greatest of England’s 19th-Century art critics, John Ruskin, accused Whistler of “impudence” for putting a 200- guinea price tag on a picture of fireworks in the night sky above London. Judging the picture shockingly unfinished, Ruskin charged the artist with “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” “The Falling Rocket” (now in the Detroit Institute of Arts) is indeed sketchy--an explosive pattern of color against a field of darkness. Still, it is accurate, not about the look of fireworks but about the feel of them on the retina. More important, the image makes internal sense, as a play of form independent of appearances. This, Whistler insisted, is the sign of an artwork’s authenticity.

Whistler sued Ruskin for libel. He won and received a farthing in damages. Directed to pay court costs, he was forced to declare bankruptcy. Yet his victory was far from hollow. Under cross-examination by Ruskin’s attorneys, Whistler produced one quip after another, and each round of questioning was reported fully by the press. Turning the witness box into a podium, the artist gave the British nation a lecture on his art. Though the public was not converted, he solidified a reputation that would sustain him even in the last, unproductive years of his life. In briskly ordered detail, Fleming shows how hard Whistler worked to devise the self-image that enjoyed a paradoxical victory at the Ruskin trial.

Whistler’s portraits of his three mistresses (the last became his wife) are among his century’s most serenely sensuous images of women. Fleming argues that the subject of another portrait--Frances Leyland, wife of a leading Whistler patron--was also the artist’s mistress, though he admits he can’t prove it.

This is a plausible speculation, and not merely because the stories of bohemian artists so often lead from the studio to the bedroom. I think Whistler’s paintings must have been at least in part homages to femininity. Whatever their subject, his best canvases have a quiet, enveloping quality. In their stillness (which gives their atmospheric effects the power of perfume), an ideal of Victorian womanhood may lurk. Yet he was not always chivalrous.

Fleming tells of the time Whistler asked a woman student, “Why did you paint a red elbow with a green shadow?” “I paint what I see,” she said. “Yes,” was the reply. “The shock will come when you see what you paint.” Whistler was sometimes appalled to see what he had wrought on canvas. In his memoirs, the painter William Rothenstein recalls the uneasy experience of watching Whistler examine his own work, by candlelight, in his Paris studio. “There was something tragic, almost frightening, as I stood and watched,” wrote Rothenstein. The artist who styled himself a butterfly with a scorpion’s sting “suddenly looked old, as he held the candle with trembling hands . . . I realized that even Whistler must often have felt his heart heavy with the sense of failure.”

His great triumph was to show how much strength a picture can gain from a strategy of exclusion. His great fear was that he left out too much, that his art was, after all, a shimmering nothing--an absence. So he made himself gloriously, insufferably present in his own time. He is present in ours, too, for biographers cannot leave him alone. Whistler is among those personalities who shows us what it is to have a personality, full-scale and without apology.