James McNeill Whistler’s most famous painting represents his mother Anna, dressed in modest dark attire and seated next to a gray wall. Over the years, the painting became iconic and even developed an entire mythology around it, quite far removed from the circumstances of its creation. But who was James Whistler’s mother, and what was the story behind this legendary portrait?
James McNeill Whistler’s Greatest Artwork
One of the most famous paintings in the history of art, James McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, more widely known as Portrait of Artist’s Mother or simply Whistler’s Mother, has a complicated history. Art lovers who used to see it as a sentimental icon of motherhood are often confused by its true background.
According to the popular story, Whistler never planned to paint it. Initially, he had an arrangement with one of his younger models, a teenager named Maggie, who got bored after their first posing session and did not show up to the second one. Left with a stack of preparatory sketches becoming useless, Whistler asked his mother to maintain the same pose as Maggie. However, Anna’s age did not allow her to stand for too long, so the artist ended up changing the entire arrangement. Instead of a young woman standing, he painted his aged mother seated on a chair, clutching a handkerchief in her calloused hands. The dress she was wearing is mourning attire—after her husband’s death decades ago, she vowed to grieve until her own last days.
The work was a technical experiment on arranging various tones of blacks and grays so that they would not blur into a single dark spot. The experiment succeeded, and the work soon gained a life of its own. Whistler was careful not to overcrowd the work with excessive details: the clearly visible pattern on the curtains, distorted according to the fabric’s creases, does not match the blurred and fuzzy lines of barely indicated chair legs. A similar arrangement appeared a year later in a portrait of Whistler’s patron and friend, Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle, who was impressed by the artist’s experiment. As one of the pioneers of the Aesthetic movement, he chose refined brushwork and nuanced tone over the complex and deep subject matter. But the figure of his mother behind the canvas gave an unexpected dimension to the work.
Who Was Anna McNeill Whistler?
The famous painter’s mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, had a long and remarkable life. She was born in 1804 into a British family settled in North Carolina. Her family members were known for their loyalist stance during the Revolutionary War and as active slave traders in the years that followed. According to McNeill’s family history, Anna was a cousin to at least eight mixed-race children conceived by her uncle, a prominent slave owner. Education options for Anna were limited by the constraints of her era and environment. Although she was literate and familiar with history and basic mathematics, the main focus of her education was on housekeeping, cooking, and crafts.
George Washington Whistler, a friend of Anna’s elder brother, had a military background in his family and served in the army before becoming a civil engineer. The future couple knew each other from their teenage years. According to a family legend, Anna fell in love with the young cadet from their first meeting. However, George chose to marry Anna’s close friend, Mary Swift. They spent seven years together and had three children before Mary suddenly fell ill and died in 1927. She understood that remarrying was the only way for George to maintain the household and keep his children fed, occupied, and educated while he was busy with work. Thus, Mary asked him to marry Anna and Anna only, as she trusted him to take care of her children.
Anna and George would have five children together, but only two of them would survive. James Whistler was the oldest one, cherished by his mother. Anna was a gentle and loving mother, although not without oddities: she was staunchly religious, and she forbade all toys and all books except for the Bible. However, she sometimes made concessions when it came to her favorite child. When James (Jemie, as she called him) fell ill, she gave him a book of William Hogarth’s engravings. This was the formative event in Whistler’s life, which initially moved him towards studying art. Soon, the family moved from the USA to the Russian Empire due to George Whistler’s job opportunity, and his son started to attend The Imperial Art Academy at Saint Petersburg at the age of eleven.
The family’s prosperous life came to an end unexpectedly. In 1849, George died from cholera, leaving his widow and five children broke and alone. Desperate, they moved to England, where James Whistler, already old enough to start a career, began working as a professional artist. Over the years of his career, Anna Whistler became his manager, his agent, and his greatest supporter. Still, not all was as idyllic as it seemed. Knowing his mother’s conservatism and religious views, Whistler carefully chose bits and fragments of information about his life and friends that would not offend or anger her. If Anna suspected anything about her son’s party life, self-destructive habits, and illegitimate children, she never made her suspicions known.
Moreover, she never understood the real purpose behind her appearance in her son’s most famous work. Oblivious to her son’s actual motives and thoughts, she believed it was intended as a celebration of her restraint, morals, and the sacrifices she made for her son’s career. Anna McNeill Whistler died in 1881, aged 77, a decade after the painting’s completion. She was fiercely proud of it, most likely unaware of her son’s attempt to sell it. Although the critics generally liked it, it remained unsold for twenty years until Whistler eventually pawned it.
The Myth of James McNeill Whistler’s Mother
After a short line of changing owners, the painting miraculously found its way to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Over the years, the painting gained cult status, with its backstory watered down and transformed. Sometimes, the viewers cannot help but sacrifice the actual meaning of an artwork in favor of an imaginary and more appealing one. This happened to the famous Little Dancer Aged Fourteen by Edgar Degas. The sculpture, intended by Degas as the illustration of human vices and criminal inclinations, over the years began to be perceived as a romantic image of a mischievous teenager bored to death in her ballet class. Sometimes, the expectations from a certain subject matter, particularly when they concern childhood or motherhood, outweigh the clear visual impression of the work displayed.
A similar thing happened to the portrait of Whistler’s mother. Over the years, it has come to represent the connection between a mother and her child, parental self-sacrifice, and the deep sadness of witnessing a beloved parent age and fade away. Part of this process could be attributed to the nuances of Victorian morals. The initial title of the work, The Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, seemed impossible to apply to the image of motherhood or even portraiture in general. Hence, during the first public show in London, the name was modified, indicating the relationship between the artist and his model.
Like the majority of other paintings by James Whistler, the portrait of his mother was never a planned study of character or personality. Rather, it was an exercise on tonal variation, combinations of light and shadow, and subtle differences in color value. The artist himself was frustrated by the overwhelmingly sentimental response. Whistler referred to the painting as an important step in his development of Aestheticism as an art movement. Although his claims were hardly entirely honest, he claimed that Anna’s image on its own could be significant only for himself. Others, in his opinion, should not care about the subject matter and focus on the tonal variety of the work.
Still, despite the artist’s claims and his prevalent activity in Europe, the painting soon became the all-American image of motherhood. In 1938, a group of activists erected a monument in Pennsylvania depicting Anna Whistler, with the inscription “A Mother Is The Holiest Thing Alive.” The sentimental monument cemented the work’s reputation. During both World Wars, the image of Whistler’s mother started to appear on recruitment posters and flyers. Ironically, such interpretations of the famous work were much more in tune with Anna Whistler’s personal beliefs than with her son’s artistic intentions.
The painting appeared in some form on almost any popular medium or genre, from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (Lolita was hiding money in a hole behind the painting’s reproduction) to John Lennon album covers (see Shaved Fish) and popular cartoons. Children, unable to recognize references to the painting in the Donald Duck or Bugs Bunny series, nonetheless noted the arrangement of colors and gestures.
