Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Digital image: Wikimedia Commons.
Until the advent of Abstract Expressionism, after World War II, American artists who wanted to be taken seriously were obliged to live and work in Europe, primarily in Paris and London. This could mean permanent residence or extended stays, and the list of names doing so was quite extensive, going back to Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley in 18th-century London. Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent gravitated to 19th-century Paris and were followed there in the next century by notables ranging from Man Ray and Alexander Calder to Ellsworth Kelly and Joan Mitchell.
But surely the most eccentric and irascible figure among these expats was James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), an artist whose considerable self-regard and outsize personality made him a magnet for controversy. He was a brilliant innovator, a central figure in the Aesthetic movement, which espoused “art for art’s sake”—a philosophy he underscored by envisioning his paintings as “musical” compositions of colors, titled accordingly. Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871) is a classic example. Otherwise known as Whistler’s Mother, it’s as iconic a masterpiece as any in the history of art, a suite of obdurately formal elements that seems to depict its stern subject as the embodiment of New England stoicism. In fact, Anna McNeill Whistler was a North Carolina native, a background the artist played up to enhance his persona as a shabby-genteel Southern aristocrat. Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth.
Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of a civil engineer from Indiana. In 1842 his father, William, was recruited by Czar Nicholas I of Russia to design and oversee the construction of a railroad connecting Moscow and St. Petersburg. The family moved to St. Petersburg, which proved foundational to the artist Whistler would become.
Even as a moody, often indolent child given to acting out, Whistler had exhibited a talent for drawing. His parents encouraged his artistic interest because it seemed to be the only constructive outlet for his behavior. He was given private art lessons while in Russia, and at age 11 he was enrolled at St. Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of Arts, where he excelled. He also met the Scottish history painter Sir William Allan, who was in Russia for a commission to paint a scene from the life of Peter the Great. Allan was impressed with the boy’s gifts, assuring his parents of his undoubted genius. A stay in London between 1847 and 1848 furthered the young Whistler’s ambitions.
Nevertheless, Anna wanted him to become a minister, and when Whistler returned with her to America, she enrolled him at an Episcopal boarding school. Religion, unsurprisingly, was not his calling, and he pivoted to West Point, an equally bad fit. After three insubordinate years, he was unceremoniously expelled by no less a personage than the future head of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee.
Eventually Whistler embarked on his career as a painter, moving to Paris in the 1850s. In 1859 he decamped to London, though he often returned to the French capital, where he’d developed close ties with the period’s avant-garde. He was included in Henri Fantin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix (1864), a group portrait of that circle that also featured Édouard Manet and Charles Baudelaire.
But it was in London where Whistler established himself, and where he painted the portrait of his mother after she’d gone there to be with him. The story goes that she became his subject when the model intended as the original sitter didn’t show up. The result was a stripped-down affair, greeted with derision and confusion by an audience that preferred the sentimental flourishes of Victorian painting to Whistler’s pictorial simplicity.
While the tonalities of the title dominated the canvas, Whistler’s palette contained hints of browns and yellows and even bruises of blue just beneath the surface. The colors were fluidly applied using oils thinned with copal (a fragrant tree resin usually used for incense), turpentine, and linseed oil—a formula Whistler called “sauce,” which he employed to more obvious effect in a later series of nocturnes.
However, the quality that characterized Whistler’s Mother above all was its rigorous organization of flattened forms, among them Anna seen as a dark shape seated in profile on a plain chair, with her feet, in pointy black shoes, propped on a low ottoman.
Whistler rendered Anna in her entirety, swathing her in a black dress with lace cuffs matched by a clutched handkerchief and an untied bonnet on her head. He set her against a wall between two framed prints, only one of which (an etching by Whistler) was completely visible. It hung next to a curtain on the left that took up nearly a third of the image as it connected with a wide black baseboard running behind (and blending in) with Anna’s legs; together they formed a right angle mirroring Anna’s posture.
Indeed, Whistler’s Mother was a veritable symphony of 90-degree turns, locking its subject into a rigid scheme that formed a square between the edge of the curtain, the framed image, and Anna’s back; how she felt about it might be inferred from the grim set of her narrow lips.
What this all said about Whistler’s relationship with his mother is a matter of debate, but she was known to be shocked by his bohemian lifestyle. Still, his prime concern lay in the language of the painting’s composition, using it again for Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2 (1872–73), a portrait of the philosopher Thomas Carlyle in the same pose, though somewhat more relaxed.
The cool reception to Whistler’s Mother was hardly unique. Reviewing another work, Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket (1875), the critic John Ruskin, no fan of Whistler’s, described it as a pot of paint flung in the face of the viewer. Whistler sued Ruskin for defamation, with the resulting trial nearly bankrupting him. Whistler won in the end but was awarded a mere farthing by the jury while being saddled with half the court cost.
Whistler’s portrait of Anna would become popular as a symbol of motherhood, exasperating an artist who wondered why the public would care about the subject. Still, he allowed that “one does like to make one’s mummy just as nice as possible.” But if by nice one means an evocation of Puritan rectitude, then certainly Whistler’s Mother accomplished that, becoming a true piece of Americana.
Picasso Gets Reassessed by Artists, Whistler’s Mother Returns to Philadelphia, and More: Morning Links from April 7, 2023
Whistler: The Original Art Star
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