![\"American](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/9edd8dee-c3dc-4637-8908-53c953536407.jpg\")
James Abbot McNeill Whistler\u00a9 Hulton-Deutsch Collection\/CORBIS\/Corbis via Getty Images<\/p>\nAnna McNeill Whistler didn\u2019t often venture into her son\u2019s studio. She had once pushed upon the door and found the parlour maid \u201cposing for the all over\u201d. Not the sort of thing a God-fearing mother should see.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0(1872), cry more than once.<\/p>\n
After a run of torturous sittings, Maggie Graham mutinied and refused to come, and Whistler found himself in the studio at a loss. \u201cPoor Jemie\u2026 is never idle,\u201d his mother recalled, \u201chis 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, \u2018Mother I want you to stand for me. It is what I have long intended and desired to do, to take your portrait.\u2019\u201d Anna saw through this filial flattery. If Maggie hadn\u2019t done a runner, Mother would never have had her chance.<\/p>\n
James Abbot McNeill Whistler\u00a9 Hulton-Deutsch Collection\/CORBIS\/Corbis via Getty Images<\/p>\n
On May 21 Whistler\u2019s Mother, or properly\u00a0Arrangement in Grey and Black, No 1\u00a0(1871), will be seen in the UK for the first time in 20 years at Tate Britain\u2019s James McNeill Whistler\u00a0retrospective. The mummy returns\u2026 <\/p>\n
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<\/a>: Whistler\u2019s Mother: The Mystery of America\u2019s Most Famous Painting.<\/p>\n Whistler\u2019s Mother\u00a0was a stopgap that became a star. It is one of a handful of paintings \u2014 Mona Lisa, The\u00a0Scream, The\u00a0Great Wave\u00a0\u2014 that have leapt their frames and become popular icons, spoofed, lampooned and repurposed. Whistler\u2019s Mother has appeared in Nike adverts (\u201cFor women who want to get back on their feet\u201d) and war recruitment posters (\u201cFight for her\u201d). It became a skit as soon as it was painted. One wag captioned it: \u201cA poor old lady left alone in a room with a smoking chimney.\u201d Others suggested that it must be a posthumous portrait, so crepuscular is the scene. <\/p>\n Many will know her as the centrepiece of the 1997 film\u00a0Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie, in which Mr Bean is appointed special envoy to Whistler\u2019s Mother when the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay 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\u00a0Whistler\u2019s Mother\u00a0home. In the 2007 zombie movie\u00a0I Am Legend, Will Smith decorates his apartment with famous paintings (zombies having no use for art galleries) including Van Gogh\u2019s\u00a0The Starry Night\u00a0and\u00a0Whistler\u2019s Mother. She has had cameos in The\u00a0Simpsons, Donald Duck\u00a0cartoons and The Naked Gun 2\u00bd (a character has a birthmark in the shape of the painting on his buttock).<\/p>\n When the work was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1872 \u2014 admitted on sufferance after an old family friend petitioned on Whistler\u2019s behalf \u2014 it was an oddity. This was the age of the tell-me-a-story picture.\u00a0Whistler\u2019s Mother\u00a0hung beside such paintings as\u00a0Poll the Milkmaid,\u00a0Fair 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\u00a0Daily Telegraph\u00a0asked why the greys and blacks should be \u201cso unmeaning and so drearily smoky\u201d.<\/p>\n Whistler detested this storytelling instinct and sent up the typical academy painting unveiled on Varnishing Day: \u201cThere you saw him: the familiar model \u2014 the soldier or the Italian \u2014 \u2026 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!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Anna was neither a nymph nor a milkmaid. Nothing \u201chappened\u201d 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 \u201cstanding\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cacademic\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Strange again was his palette. \u201cTone\u201d and \u201charmony\u201d were what Whistler was after. Not the fetching brights of pretty\u00a0Poll\u00a0or the jewelled hues of a painting such as David Wilkie Wynfield\u2019s\u00a0The 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\u2019s the whites of Anna\u2019s cuffs, cap and lace handkerchief that steal the show.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s five sons died in infancy. \u201cJemie\u201d was a characterful child, pretty and petted, a \u201cpocket Apollo\u201d 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\u2019s engravings and came round to the idea of her son as an artist. \u201cGod has given him talent, and it cannot be wrong to use it.\u201d She warned her son, however: \u201cI only want you not to be a butterfly sporting about from one temptation to idleness to another.\u201d Whistler later made his monogram a butterfly with a sting in his tail.<\/p>\n After art school in Paris, where he took up with assorted\u00a0grisettes\u00a0(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\u00a0Symphony in White, No 2: The Little White Girl\u00a0(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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket\u00a0(1875), also in Tate\u2019s show, by raging that he had \u201cnever expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public\u2019s face\u201d. Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, claiming \u00a31,000 in damages. The jury ruled in Whistler\u2019s favour but reduced the damages to a farthing. <\/p>\n The French, however, their eyes accustomed to the experiments of the impressionists, bought Whistler\u2019s Mother.\u00a0It went first to the Mus\u00e9e du Luxembourg, then the Louvre and is now in the permanent collection of the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay.<\/p>\n After Anna\u2019s death in 1881 and Whistler\u2019s in 1903 (he was buried in Chiswick Old Cemetery near his childhood hero Hogarth), it was the Americans who made\u00a0Whistler\u2019s Mother\u00a0a national icon: less motherhood and apple pie, more motherhood and greying sky. When\u00a0she 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 \u2014 cross the line and a siren sounded. Whistler\u2019s Mother was put on the three-cent stamp in 1934 in \u201cmemory and honour of the mothers of America\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n Whistler, a great one for a quip, always played down any praise for his painting, saying simply, \u201cOne does like to make one\u2019s mummy just as nice as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n James McNeill Whistler is at Tate Britain, London, May 21-Sep 27 (tate.org.uk<\/a>). Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one tickets to the exhibition. Visit thetimes.com\/timesplus<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/8903542e-d7a8-4f62-8dc4-cb37d15a4bb0.jpg\")
Wapping, 1860-4National Gallery of Art Washington<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ec2731af-c285-4ab1-a669-a5c0f0891586.jpg\")
Coast of Brittany (Alone with the Tide), 1861Wadsworth Atheneum Hartford<\/p>\n![\"Painting](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/a72365ba-2d65-4694-9a9c-835c7fe80adb.jpg\")
Symphony in White, No 2: The Little White Girl (1864)Tate 2021\/Matt Greenwood<\/p>\n