Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Whistler's Mother)
James McNeill Whistler (1834 to 1903) · 1871
An elderly woman in a black dress and white lace cap sits in strict profile on a plain chair, feet on a footstool, hands folded in her lap holding a handkerchief. Behind her a grey wall, a dark curtain patterned with faint flowers, and one framed etching. That is all. The sitter is Anna McNeill Whistler, the artist's mother, who had come from America to live with her son in London. Whistler called the picture an arrangement, and insisted that the public should care no more who the sitter was than they would about the subject of a piece of music. The public ignored him and made it the most famous picture of a mother in the world.
The composition is a lesson in restraint. Everything is a rectangle or a near rectangle: the wall, the curtain, the framed print, the floor, the block of the black dress. Against that grid the soft curve of the face and the lace are the only living lines. Whistler thinned his paint so much that the canvas shows through in places, and he painted the grey wall in layers of subtle warmth and coolness that repay slow looking. He was a friend of the Impressionists in Paris but took the opposite path: tone rather than colour, quiet rather than light.
The Royal Academy in London nearly rejected the painting in 1872, and it hung in a poor position. In 1891 the French state bought it for the Musée du Luxembourg, the first work by an American painter to enter the national collection, largely through the lobbying of the poet Mallarmé and the critic Duret. During the Depression it toured the United States as a symbol of motherhood, appeared on a postage stamp, and was seen by millions. Whistler's mother had in fact stood in for a model who failed to appear, and she posed standing at first until she tired and was allowed to sit.
Did You Know? The painting has appeared on an American postage stamp for Mother's Day, in Hollywood films and in cartoons more often than almost any other picture in Paris.
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