Anna McNeill Whistler didn’t often venture into her son’s studio. She had once pushed upon the door and found the parlour maid “posing for the all over”. Not the sort of thing a God-fearing mother should see.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler might never have painted his mother. The canvas he had primed was intended for someone else. He had been commissioned to paint a portrait of Maggie Graham, the 15-year-old daughter of a member of parliament. During sittings Whistler could be brittle and impetuous. A picture, apparently nearing completion, would be scraped down at the final moment and started again. He made Cicely Alexander, the little girl in Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (1872), cry more than once.
After a run of torturous sittings, Maggie Graham mutinied and refused to come, and Whistler found himself in the studio at a loss. “Poor Jemie… is never idle,” his mother recalled, “his talent is too eager, if he fails in one attempt he tries another, so I was not surprised at his setting about preparing a large canvas though it was in late in the evening, but I was surprised when the next day he said to me, ‘Mother I want you to stand for me. It is what I have long intended and desired to do, to take your portrait.’” Anna saw through this filial flattery. If Maggie hadn’t done a runner, Mother would never have had her chance.
James Abbot McNeill Whistler© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
On May 21 Whistler’s Mother, or properly Arrangement in Grey and Black, No 1 (1871), will be seen in the UK for the first time in 20 years at Tate Britain’s James McNeill Whistler retrospective. The mummy returns…
The painting is also the subject of a fascinating new book, rich in anecdote and analysis, by Sarah Walden, who restored the artwork for the Louvre: Whistler’s Mother: The Mystery of America’s Most Famous Painting.
Whistler’s Mother was a stopgap that became a star. It is one of a handful of paintings — Mona Lisa, The Scream, The Great Wave — that have leapt their frames and become popular icons, spoofed, lampooned and repurposed. Whistler’s Mother has appeared in Nike adverts (“For women who want to get back on their feet”) and war recruitment posters (“Fight for her”). It became a skit as soon as it was painted. One wag captioned it: “A poor old lady left alone in a room with a smoking chimney.” Others suggested that it must be a posthumous portrait, so crepuscular is the scene.
Many will know her as the centrepiece of the 1997 film Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie, in which Mr Bean is appointed special envoy to Whistler’s Mother when the Musée d’Orsay sells her to the fictional Grierson Art Gallery in Los Angeles. Beanery ensues. Having damaged and defaced the painting beyond repair, Bean substitutes the original for a poster coated with egg whites and nail varnish and smuggles the real Whistler’s Mother home. In the 2007 zombie movie I Am Legend, Will Smith decorates his apartment with famous paintings (zombies having no use for art galleries) including Van Gogh’s The Starry Night and Whistler’s Mother. She has had cameos in The Simpsons, Donald Duck cartoons and The Naked Gun 2½ (a character has a birthmark in the shape of the painting on his buttock).
Wapping, 1860-4National Gallery of Art Washington
When the work was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1872 — admitted on sufferance after an old family friend petitioned on Whistler’s behalf — it was an oddity. This was the age of the tell-me-a-story picture. Whistler’s Mother hung beside such paintings as Poll the Milkmaid, Fair Quiet and Sweet Rest and Lord Foppington Relating His Adventures. Other acceptable subjects included the modestly titillating (nymphs, Cupids, harems), scenes from Shakespeare and the Bible, and stirring episodes from history. The critics were baffled. The Daily Telegraph asked why the greys and blacks should be “so unmeaning and so drearily smoky”.
Whistler detested this storytelling instinct and sent up the typical academy painting unveiled on Varnishing Day: “There you saw him: the familiar model — the soldier or the Italian — … brows knit, eyes staring; in a corner, angels and cogwheels and things; close to him his wife, cold, ragged, the baby in her arms; he had failed!”
Anna was neither a nymph nor a milkmaid. Nothing “happened” in the picture. There was no wringing of hands, no guards bursting through the door. She might have been a figure on a frieze. Anna did start by “standing” for her son, but she was 67, recovering from rheumatic fever, and it was decided she should better sit. Whistler found her a footstool. It probably had space inside for a ceramic hot-water bottle or warmed coals.
If the subject was peculiar, the treatment of the paint was stranger still. On Varnishing Day artists applied the finishing touches to their already highly finished paintings. English “academic” painting insisted on invisible brushwork, smooth surfaces, details finessed to the last degree. Whistler had painted his mother on an unprimed canvas with paint that had been thinned with turpentine until it was as loose as ink. You could not only see the grain of the canvas, but the scumbling where he had worked the paint with a dry brush and the patches where he had scraped and wiped away the pigment with a rag or blotting paper.
Strange again was his palette. “Tone” and “harmony” were what Whistler was after. Not the fetching brights of pretty Poll or the jewelled hues of a painting such as David Wilkie Wynfield’s The Arrest of Anne Boleyn, but infinite subtleties of grey and black and a few illuminating whites; the grey and black may get headline billing, but it’s the whites of Anna’s cuffs, cap and lace handkerchief that steal the show.
Coast of Brittany (Alone with the Tide), 1861Wadsworth Atheneum Hartford
Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834. His father, Major George Washington Whistler, was a railway engineer who moved with his wife and family to St Petersburg in 1843 to oversee the construction of the Moscow-St Petersburg line. He died of cholera in 1849. Three of Anna’s five sons died in infancy. “Jemie” was a characterful child, pretty and petted, a “pocket Apollo” with a talent for drawing. His mother, serious, resourceful, strict about the Sabbath, but not insensible to beauty, made him an early present of William Hogarth’s engravings and came round to the idea of her son as an artist. “God has given him talent, and it cannot be wrong to use it.” She warned her son, however: “I only want you not to be a butterfly sporting about from one temptation to idleness to another.” Whistler later made his monogram a butterfly with a sting in his tail.
After art school in Paris, where he took up with assorted grisettes (think low morals, high spirits) and cancan dancers, Whistler settled in London. When Anna came to live with her son in Chelsea, the red-haired Jo Heffernan, his mistress and the model for his painting Symphony in White, No 2: The Little White Girl (1864), which will also be in the Tate show, moved out. Whistler escorted his mother every Sunday to Chelsea Old Church but, decadent and dandy that he was, did not stay for the service.
Symphony in White, No 2: The Little White Girl (1864)Tate 2021/Matt Greenwood
The English art establishment could take neither Whistler nor his paintings that seemed hardly paintings at all, so lost were they in shadows and sulphur and smog. John Ruskin responded to Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875), also in Tate’s show, by raging that he had “never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”. Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, claiming £1,000 in damages. The jury ruled in Whistler’s favour but reduced the damages to a farthing.
The French, however, their eyes accustomed to the experiments of the impressionists, bought Whistler’s Mother. It went first to the Musée du Luxembourg, then the Louvre and is now in the permanent collection of the Musée d’Orsay.
After Anna’s death in 1881 and Whistler’s in 1903 (he was buried in Chiswick Old Cemetery near his childhood hero Hogarth), it was the Americans who made Whistler’s Mother a national icon: less motherhood and apple pie, more motherhood and greying sky. When she toured America from 1932-34 she was seen by two million people in San Francisco, Los Angeles, St Louis, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Baltimore, Kansas City and Chicago. She was protected by unprecedented security measures including an electric guard rail — cross the line and a siren sounded. Whistler’s Mother was put on the three-cent stamp in 1934 in “memory and honour of the mothers of America”. The stamp engraver added a bowl of flowers to cheer her up. She returned to America in 1953, 1963 and 1986, drawing huge crowds each time.
Whistler, a great one for a quip, always played down any praise for his painting, saying simply, “One does like to make one’s mummy just as nice as possible.”
James McNeill Whistler is at Tate Britain, London, May 21-Sep 27 (tate.org.uk). Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one tickets to the exhibition. Visit thetimes.com/timesplus
Whistler’s Mother: The Mystery of America’s Most Famous Painting by Sarah Walden is published on May 21 (Gibson Square £14.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.