Whistler's Mother


Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, best known under its colloquial name Whistler's Mother, is a painting in oils on canvas created by the American-born painter James McNeill Whistler in 1871. The subject of the painting is Whistler's mother, Anna McNeill Whistler. The painting is, displayed in a frame of Whistler's own design. It is held by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, having been bought by the French state in 1891. It is one of the most famous works by an American artist outside the United States. It has been variously described as an American icon and a Victorian Mona Lisa.

History

posed for the painting while living in London with her son at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.
Several unverifiable stories relate to the painting of the work; one is that Anna Whistler acted as a replacement for another model who could not make the appointment. It is also said that Whistler originally envisioned painting the model standing up, but that his mother was too uncomfortable to pose standing for an extended period.
The work was shown at the 104th Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art in London, after coming within a hair's breadth of rejection by the Academy. This episode worsened the rift between Whistler and the British art world; Arrangement was the last painting he submitted for the Academy's approval. Vol. VIII of The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904 lists the 1872 exhibit as no. 941, "Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's mother", and gives Whistler's address as The White House, Chelsea Embankment.
The sensibilities of a Victorian era viewing audience would not accept what was apparently a portrait being exhibited as an "arrangement", hence the addition of the explanatory title Portrait of the Painter's mother. From this the work acquired its enduring nickname of simply Whistler's Mother. After Thomas Carlyle viewed the painting, he agreed to sit for a similar composition, this one titled . Thus the previous painting became, by default, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1.
, 1872-73
Whistler eventually pawned the painting, which was acquired in 1891 by Paris's Musée du Luxembourg. Whistler's works, including this one, had attracted a number of imitators, and numerous similarly posed and restricted-colour palette paintings soon appeared, particularly by American expatriate painters. For Whistler, having one of his paintings displayed in a major museum helped attract wealthy patrons. In December 1884, Whistler wrote:
As a proponent of "art for art's sake", Whistler professed to be perplexed and annoyed by the insistence of others upon viewing his work as a "portrait". In his 1890 book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, he wrote:
Both Whistler's Mother and Thomas Carlyle were engraved by the English engraver Richard Josey. The image has been used since the Victorian era as an icon for motherhood, affection for parents, and "family values" in general, especially in the United States. For example, in 1934 the U.S. 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 the Borough of Ashland, Pennsylvania, an eight-foot high statue based on the painting was erected as a tribute to mothers by the Ashland Boys' Association in 1938, during the Great Depression.
The image has been repeatedly appropriated for commercial advertisements and parodies, such as doctored images of the subject watching a television, and sometimes accompanied by captions such as "Whistler's Mother is Off Her Rocker."
In summing up the painting's influence, author Martha Tedeschi has stated:

Exhibitions in American museums

Whistler's Mother has been exhibited several times in the United States. It was shown at the Atlanta Art Association in the fall of 1962, the National Gallery of Art in 1994, and the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2004. It was exhibited at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from June to September 2006. From May 22 to September 6, 2010, it was shown at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. The painting was exhibited at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, from March 27 to June 22, 2015, and then at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago from March 4 to May 21, 2017. It was displayed for a period of time at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. It had returned to the Musee d'Orsay as of early August 2019.

In popular culture

The painting has been featured or mentioned in numerous works of fiction and within pop culture, including films such as Sing and Like It, The Fortune Cookie, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Babette's Feast, Bean, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 and television episodes of The Simpsons and the movie I Am Legend. The painting is mentioned in part six of Don Delillo's novel Underworld.
In a four-part episode of the Underdog cartoon series entitled "Whistler's Father", Underdog is assigned to stand guard in a museum to prevent the theft of a valuable painting called Whistler's Father.
The film features the shape of the painting as a birthmark that is used to identify a character after he is replaced with an "evil double".
Whistler’s Mother is central to the plot of the comedy film Bean , in which Rowan Atkinson plays a bumbling museum guard who is billed as an expert on the painting but accidentally destroys it during its repatriation to the US.
The painting was featured in America's Next Top Model, Cycle 5 to inspire the photoshoots for Olay's Quench body lotion, in a modern interpretation of the classical artwork.
Fred Armisen's character Karl Cowperthwaite frequently mentions the painting in season 4 of the TV show Last Man on Earth.
Actor Hurd Hatfield toured internationally several times with the play Son of Whistlers Mother by playwright Maggie Williams.
The movie Sneakers featured two characters, code-named in the film "Whistler" and "Mother".

In music

Whistler, and particularly this painting, had a profound effect on Claude Debussy, a contemporary French composer. In 1894, Debussy wrote to violinist Eugène Ysaÿe describing his Nocturnes as "an experiment in the different combinations that can be obtained from one color – what a study in grey would be in painting." Whether Debussy was using the term color to refer to orchestration or harmony, critics have observed "shades" of a particular sound quality in his music.