Most of us will recognize the portrait of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s mother, Anna, that he painted. It’s one of the most celebrated American paintings, and the first work by an American artist that the French government bought. Yet it’s a portrait that nearly never came to be.
Whistler (1834–1903) had been painting “The Girl in Blue on the Seashore” (now known as “Annabel Lee”) when his model, Maggie, became ill and failed to show up for a sitting.
“Disappointments are often the Lord’s means of blessing,” wrote Whistler’s mother in a letter to her sister on Nov. 3, 1871. She recounted how the incident led Whistler to paint her portrait instead, something that he’d long intended to do.
Sixty-seven-year-old Anna felt unwell, too, when she posed for her portrait in her son’s studio. For two to three days she “stood as a statue,” hiding her sickness from her son, so as not to cause him any distress. When she could stand no more, he changed the composition and painted her seated.
Whistler took around three months to complete the piece. Anna wrote of one instance when Whistler grew frustrated with the painting: “I silently lifted my heart, that it might be as the Net cast down in the Lake at the Lord’s will, as I observed his trying again, and oh my grateful rejoicing in spirit as suddenly my dear Son would exclaim, ‘Oh Mother it is mastered, it is beautiful!’ and he would kiss me for it!”
In the painting, a poised Anna sits in profile-view, facing a Japanese-style curtain or kimono embroidered with silver. She wears a white muslin bonnet and a black dress, and she rests her hands on a handkerchief and her feet on a footstool. (Anna had taken to wearing black after her husband died some 20 years prior.) Whistler’s print “Black Lion Wharf” hangs on the wall.
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He placed objects in the portrait that signified his style and influences, including Japanese motifs such as the curtain, and his monogram signature of a stylized butterfly. And on the wall, he rendered the print that was part of a series he made of the River Thames, a subject close to his heart and home at 2 Lindsey Row (now 96 Cheyne Walk), in Chelsea, London.
The Portrait’s Checkered Reception
Whistler’s family, friends, and peers received the painting well, marveling at his draftsmanship and the good likeness that he’d achieved. “Isn’t it the very way Mrs Whistler sits with her hands folded on her handkerchief! Oh it is exactly like her!” the daughter of Whistler’s patron said. Poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to Whistler, saying that the portrait “must make you happy for life and ought to do good to the times we are living in.”While those closest to the artist celebrated, some of the public—artists and critics alike—largely puzzled over the painting’s sparse scene and limited palette.
Whistler’s painting and its name—he titled the painting “Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother“—brought forth both support and criticism. He entered the piece in the 104th Royal Academy of Arts Exhibition in 1872. It was rejected. The general consensus? A beautiful painting devoid of color. One commentator said that the title deflected from Whistler’s delightful characteristic painting with its subtle distinctions between hues and tones.
Yet some experts condemned the academy’s decision. A painter and the director of The National Gallery, Sir William Boxall, threatened to resign from the Royal Academy of Arts council if the portrait wasn’t hung. Then, Whistler’s painting was hung high above a door in the academy, almost out of view.
“Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother” challenged the traditional artistic values, where God’s creations reigned supreme and that official title didn’t help.
The Deviant Path: ‘Art for Art’s Sake’
Whistler worked on the cusp of modernism. In his world of the late-19th century, photography had gained popularity and representational art fell out of favor. Many artists sought novel painting styles in the mistaken belief that photography could capture a truer picture than any painter could, when, in fact, a photograph captures shapes—not the nuances of light and character. This new technology threatened the artists’ livelihood and even drove some to suicide.Whistler’s portrait of his mother, more frequently known simply as “Whistler’s Mother,” sits firmly between the traditional art of painting true to life and the experimental style of the time that favored stylization and loose brushwork. It foreshadows that Whistler would eventually deviate from realistic art and embrace the avant-garde.
Traditional artists hone their technical skills to communicate universal ideas that uplift humanity, often regardless of a viewer’s mother tongue. “In traditional work the ideas are embodied in intelligible imagery. They are conveyed directly,” art scholar and critic Michelle Marder Kamhi wrote in her book “Bucking the Artworld Tide: Reflections on Art, Pseudo Art, Art Education & Theory.”
But that changed as the 20th century approached.
“The twentieth-century modernist bias has conveyed the very false impression that innovation, originality, and seriousness of purpose were exclusive to the avant garde, and that ‘traditional’ painters were a homogenous group, all alike in their degree of conservatism and general lack of artistic depth, sincerity, and imagination,” Ms. Kamhi wrote.
As part of the aesthetic art movement, Whistler believed in “art for art’s sake.”
“Art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, such as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies,’" he explained in “The Red Rag,” which was published in The World society paper on May 22, 1878.
Most of Whistler’s works have musical titles regardless of their subject matter, a practice that he started after a critic commented that the portrait titled “The White Girl,” was a ”Symphony in White,” and so the artist changed that piece’s title.
And Whistler renamed his mother’s portrait “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1”after he painted Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s portrait titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2.”
Whistler believed in beauty, placing more importance on the position of the tones and colors than on the object portrayed. “My picture of a ‘Harmony in Grey and Gold’ is an illustration of my meaning—a snow scene with a single black figure and a lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot,” he wrote in the essay.
He felt that artists shouldn’t merely imitate nature, like photographs do. “Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music.”
The artist could isolate those elements and “compose” whatever picture he wanted to, Whistler believed. However, this practice effectively puts the artist’s creation before God’s. Rather than realism, therefore, Whistler favored stylized pictures full of impressions, especially in his later works. His print “Black Lion Wharf,” which hangs in his mother’s portrait, is a good example. It’s a hectic scene, as barges and sailboats rush past the warehouse-lined riverbanks. Rather than create the picture in perspective, he reversed it—detailing the distant warehouses and loosely sketching the foreground objects and figures.
Visiting Philadelphia
Anyone visiting Philadelphia can judge “Whistler’s Mother” for themselves. “The Artist’s Mother: Whistler and Philadelphia” exhibition explores the portrait that Whistler painted of his mother, its connection with Philadelphia, and how it inspired eight other artists to portray mothers.Philadelphia last hosted Whistler’s painting in 1881 as part of a “Special Exhibition of Paintings by American Artists at Home and in Europe,” at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
The current exhibition highlights how painters looked to their peers, past and present, for inspiration. Whistler, for instance, painted his mother in a pose similar to one of Rembrandt’s etchings of his mother, “The Artist’s Mother, Seated in an Oriental Headdress: Half Length,” which the Dutch master created some two centuries prior. Whistler knew the print either from a copy he’d seen in Philadelphia or from an original print his brother-in-law owned. (Some scholars believe that Rembrandt etched his mother’s candid likeness directly onto the plate, while she sat before him—a technique called “live etching.”) Exhibition visitors can see similarities between the works for themselves via the late 18th-century copy of the print by Italian Francesco Novelli that’s on display.
Portraits of mothers from two late 19th- and early 20th-century American artists, Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942) and Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), respectively, also feature in the exhibition. Both artists studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Beaux’s endearing painting of a mother and child is of her sister and nephew, as Beaux was just 12 days old when her mother died.
Tanner saw Whistler’s painting when it was exhibited in Pennsylvania and possibly also in Paris, where he later lived. In contrast to Whistler, Tanner used soft, warm brown tones to create a tender portrait of his mother gently rocking in her chair with a shawl slung over the back and a fan keeping her cool from the intense heat. Just as with Whistler’s work, the French government purchased Tanner’s portrait of his mother.
A National Treasure
In 1891, when the French minister of the interior, Leon Victor Auguste Bourgeois, wrote to Whistler requesting the piece for the French nation, he doubted that Whistler would agree to the meager amount; he could offer him only 4,000 francs. However, Whistler agreed to the sale, saying that of all his paintings, he preferred “formal recognition” for his mother’s portrait more than any other. The sale of her portrait to the French government marked the beginning of Whistler’s success.An artist can control only so much of the image that he paints; he can’t control the viewer’s experience. Whether in “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1” we see Whistler’s “arrangement” of colors alone or his mother is up to us. Either way, it’s a painting that the nation loves and that Whistler loved. Before selling the work, he kept the portrait near him, hanging it in his studio and bedroom. When his friend commented on the beauty of the portrait, Whistler paused and then said, “Yes, one does like to make one’s Mummy just as nice as possible.”
“The Artist’s Mother: Whistler and Philadelphia” exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art runs through Oct. 29. Jennifer Thompson, the museum’s Gloria and Jack Drosdick curator of European painting & sculpture, and curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, arranged the exhibition. To find out more, visit PhilaMuseum.org
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