Whistler insisted his famous mother portrait was really an arrangement of grey and black
James McNeill Whistler titled his 1871 painting Arrangement in Grey and Black and was irritated when people treated it as a portrait. Victorian viewers wanted to know who the sitter was, so a subtitle was added. The nickname stuck, and his mother became an American emblem of motherhood on stamps and statues.
Anna McNeill Whistler sat for her son while living with him at 96 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Stories about the sitting cannot be verified; one says she stood in for a model who failed to turn up. Whistler first planned a standing figure, but his mother could not hold that pose comfortably for long, so she sits in profile. The canvas measures about 57 by 64 inches and hangs in a frame Whistler designed himself.
London's Royal Academy nearly turned it down in 1872. It scraped into the 104th exhibition, but the episode deepened Whistler's quarrel with the British art establishment, and he never again submitted a painting there. The historian Thomas Carlyle liked it enough to pose for a companion picture, which made the original No. 1 by default. Whistler's combative 1890 collection, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, argued that the public had no reason to care who the sitter was.
Money troubles led him to pawn the work. In 1891 the French state bought it for the Musée du Luxembourg, and Whistler relished seeing it honoured in Paris after its rough treatment in England, calling it a slap in the face to the Academy. The purchase helped him win rich patrons, while imitators, especially American painters abroad, copied its restricted palette. It now belongs to the Musée d'Orsay.
Americans turned it into a symbol. In 1934 the Post Office issued a stamp honouring the mothers of America, and in 1938, during the Depression, the town of Ashland, Pennsylvania, raised an eight-foot statue based on it. The art historian Martha Tedeschi groups it with the Mona Lisa, The Scream and American Gothic as images almost everyone reads instantly. It even shaped music: in 1894 Claude Debussy likened his Nocturnes to a study in grey, and in the 1997 film Bean the title character accidentally defaces it.
Source: Whistler's Mother
