With Mother’s Day imminent it seemed apposite to take a look at an image that has been enduringly associated with motherhood, particularly in the US, since the Victorian era: the famous Whistler’s Mother. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was an American painter, based primarily in England, and a leading proponent of “art for art’s sake”, that credo which considered art to have intrinsic value quite separate from any moral or didactic function. He was all about tonal harmony and saw parallels between painting and music, even entitling many of his paintings as “arrangements”, “harmonies”, and “nocturnes” — his Whistler’s Mother is only colloquially so-called and was really called Arrangement in Grey and Black.
The subject of the painting is, unsurprisingly, Whistler’s mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, who was living with the artist in London at the time. The story goes that Anna Whistler was only acting as a substitute because the original model couldn’t make the sitting, and although Whistler had envisioned his model standing up, his mother was just too uncomfortable to pose upright for long periods of time so insisted on sitting down.
The work was shown at the 104th Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art in London in 1872, after narrowly avoiding rejection by the Academy (a bone of contention for Whistler for many years after). It seems that all these weird ideas Whistler held about “arrangements” and so on just didn’t sit well with the stuffed shirts of the Academy, and they insisted on adding an explanatory adjunct, “Portrait of the Painter’s mother”, to Whistler’s title. Whistler eventually sold the painting, which was acquired in 1891 by Paris’s Musée du Luxembourg and is now housed in the Musée d’Orsay.
In 1934, the US Post Office Department issued a stamp engraved with the portrait detail from Whistler’s Mother, bearing the slogan “In memory and in honor of the mothers of America”. In that spirit, this blog is written in memory and honour of my own lovely mum, and to mothers everywhere!
