Whistler's Mother

He did not call it Whistler's Mother

Everybody knows this picture as Whistler's Mother. Whistler hated that. He called it Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, and he spent years telling people that the woman in it was beside the point:

Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an "Arrangement in Grey and Black." Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?

James McNeill Whistler, "The Red Rag", 1878

The public ignored him completely. A painting he wanted to be about shapes and tones became the most famous picture of a mother in the world, printed on a stamp, cast in bronze, sung about by Cole Porter and sneezed on by Mr. Bean. The story of how that happened starts with a model who never turned up.

The model who never came

In the summer of 1871 Whistler was living at 2 Lindsey Row in Chelsea, on the Thames in London, and his mother Anna lived with him. He was working on a painting of a young girl, but the girl, a fifteen-year-old novice model, kept tiring of standing, fell ill and stopped coming. Anna told the story in a long letter to her sister:

Poor Jemie does not relieve his trouble by talking of it, but I saw his misery. But he is never ill, his talent is too eager, if he fails in an attempt he tries another.

Anna McNeill Whistler to Kate Palmer, November 1871

The other attempt was her. Jemie, as the family called him, asked his mother to pose. She was 66 and not strong, but she tried:

I stood bravely, two or three days, whenever he was in the mood for studying me, but realized it to be too great an effort, so my dear patient Artist concluded to paint me sitting.

Anna McNeill Whistler to Kate Palmer, November 1871

That is why she sits. The most famous pose in American art exists because an old lady's legs got tired.

"Oh Mother, it is mastered"

The sittings went on for about three months. Whistler was a slow, anxious painter who scraped his canvases down and started again when a passage did not work, and his mother watched him struggle. In the same letter she describes the moments when she heard him burst out that he could not get it right, and how she would quietly pray. Then, just as suddenly, it came:

Oh Mother it is mastered, it is beautiful!

Whistler, as remembered by Anna McNeill Whistler, November 1871

Look how little he needed. The face is a few soft tones of pink and grey. The cap is a thin veil of white over the grey wall, so light you can see the canvas weave through it. The lace hangs down her black dress in long pale ribbons. Nothing is sharp, and yet nothing is vague.

Who was Anna Whistler?

Anna Matilda McNeill was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1804. She married a railway engineer, George Washington Whistler, and followed him to Russia, where the tsar had hired him to build the railway between Saint Petersburg and Moscow. He died there of cholera in 1849, and she wore black for the rest of her life. That is the black dress in the picture. Look at her hands: she still wears her wedding ring.

She was a deeply religious woman who read her Bible every day. In 1863, with the American Civil War tearing her family apart, she came to live with her son in London. His life there was not quite ready for her: his companion and favourite model, Joanna Hiffernan, the red-haired woman of his Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl, had to move out before she arrived.

An arrangement in grey and black

Now look at the painting the way Whistler wanted you to: as a design. It is built from rectangles. The grey wall. The black skirting board running across it. The framed picture. The tall dark curtain on the left. Into that grid he set one big black shape, his mother's seated figure, in perfect profile, so flat she could be a silhouette cut from paper.

The idea came partly from Japanese woodblock prints, which Whistler collected and loved, with their flat areas of colour, strong outlines and figures set off-centre. The colours are almost nothing: grey, black, white, a touch of flesh pink and a warm yellow on the footstool. Whistler borrowed his titles from music, symphonies, nocturnes, harmonies, because he believed a painting should work on you the way music does, through its tones, not its story.

What is on the wall?

The framed print behind her is Whistler's own work, an etching of warehouses on the River Thames, generally identified as Black Lion Wharf from his Thames Set of 1859. It is a little advertisement for the artist, hung in his mother's portrait, and a reminder of the river that ran past the house.

Then look at the top of the curtain, near the ceiling. There is a faint circle with a mark inside it. It is Whistler's signature: instead of writing his name, he signed with a stylised butterfly made from his initials, J. M. W. Over the years the butterfly grew a sting in its tail, and so did he.

Nearly rejected, then pawned

In 1872 Whistler sent the painting to the Royal Academy in London. The selection committee almost turned it down, and it was hung only because the painter Sir William Boxall threatened to resign from the Academy's council if it was refused. It was the last painting Whistler ever showed there. Victorian visitors could not accept a portrait called an arrangement, so the title had to carry a subtitle: Portrait of the Painter's Mother.

The painting did not sell. In 1878 Whistler sued the critic John Ruskin, who had accused him of flinging a pot of paint in the public's face with his Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Whistler won, but the jury awarded him a single farthing, and the legal costs ruined him. He went bankrupt in 1879. For four years his mother's portrait sat in a London pawnbroker's as security for a loan. Anna herself died in 1881, in Hastings.

France buys it for 4,000 francs

Rescue came from Paris. Whistler's French friends, among them the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, campaigned for the state to buy the picture, and in November 1891 it did, for 4,000 francs, for the Musée du Luxembourg, the museum of living artists. It was a huge honour for an American painter, and Whistler knew it. The painting later moved to the Louvre, and since 1986 it has hung in the Musée d'Orsay.

How she became America's mother

Whistler's Mother only became a superstar after it crossed the Atlantic. In 1932 France lent it to the United States, and for two years it toured the country during the Great Depression, drawing enormous crowds, including at the Century of Progress world's fair in Chicago. To millions of Americans in hard times, the patient woman in black was not an arrangement at all. She was everybody's mother.

In 1934 the United States Post Office put her on a three-cent stamp for Mother's Day, with the words: In memory and in honor of the mothers of America. The designers cropped the picture and added a vase of flowers at her feet, which Whistler had never painted. In 1938 the town of Ashland, Pennsylvania, put up an eight-foot bronze of her, inscribed with a line from Coleridge: A mother is the holiest thing alive.

Mr. Bean and Whistler's Mother

Fame brought parody. In the 1997 film Bean, Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean is sent to Los Angeles to oversee the arrival of Whistler's Mother, bought by an American gallery for fifty million dollars. He sneezes on it, tries to clean it, wipes off her face, draws a new one in biro, and secretly swaps the painting for a poster. Cole Porter had already name-checked the painting in his 1934 song You're the Top, and it has turned up in The Simpsons, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and a whole episode of Arrested Development.

That is the strange success of this painting. Whistler wanted us to look past his mother and see an arrangement of grey and black. Instead, a century and a half later, we look straight past the arrangement and see her.

Portrait of the Artist's MotherGuido ReniThe Artist's MotherFriedrich von AmerlingThe Artist's MotherHans Thoma

Where is Whistler's Mother?

Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Painter's Mother, painted in London in 1871, hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. It is oil on canvas, 144.3 by 162.4 centimetres, signed with the butterfly, in a frame Whistler designed himself. It still travels to the United States from time to time, most recently to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2023.

We paint Whistler's Mother by hand in oil on canvas, with the soft greys, the lace cap, the flowered curtain and the little etching on the wall. See the hand-painted reproduction.