Whistler's Mother is a portrait of Anna McNeill Whistler, painted in London in 1871, that her son called Arrangement in Grey and Black. He meant it as a study of tone and shape. Americans made it a symbol of motherhood.
Anna was in her late sixties and living with her son at 2 Lindsey Row in Chelsea. The sittings took about three months. Whistler never stopped calling the picture an arrangement, but he never stopped calling it his mother either.
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The motherhood was added later, and not only in people's minds.
In 1934 the United States issued a three-cent Mother's Day stamp. President Franklin Roosevelt had chosen the painting. The stamp's designer cropped it, added a vase of flowers at the lower left and removed the etching from the wall. In its place went the words "In Memory and in Honor of the Mothers of America."
Anna, painted in profile against a plain wall, was now looking at a bouquet. A telegram to the Postmaster General that year called the result "a mutilation of the artist's original picture." I think the stamp tells the truth about the painting. It was bare enough that a country could put whatever it needed into it.
Why did Whistler's mother end up posing?
Because her son asked her. In a letter of 3 or 4 November 1871, Anna quoted Whistler: "Mother I want you to stand for me!" The same letter says the portrait was "what I have long intended & desired to do, to take your Portrait."
The old story says a model failed to turn up and his mother filled in. The letter has a trace of that. Anna writes of "the youthful Maggie" failing him as a model. But nothing in it says Anna was a second choice, and Whistler's own words say she was the first.
He had planned to paint her standing. The Clark Art Institute says she grew tired, so he finished her seated. When it reached the Royal Academy the next spring, the title on the label was longer than the one people use now.
What You'll Discover
What Whistler admitted about the title.
Why crowds lined up for it.
How it ended up in Paris.