Whistler's Mother is not a painting about motherhood. James McNeill Whistler painted his mother, Anna, in London in 1871 and titled it Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, because the subject he cared about was the balance of greys and blacks. The tribute to mothers came later, from the public.
Anna was 67, a widow, and she sat in profile in a black dress and a white cap against a gray wall. Whistler named the picture the way a composer names a piece, and for years that was all the explanation he offered.
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That is the official meaning, and Whistler defended it in public. In 1878, explaining what a painting is, he took this very picture as his example: “Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black.’”
Then, in the same passage, he gave something away. “To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother,” he wrote. And what, he asked, “can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?”
I read that as the key to the whole picture. Whistler did not empty the portrait of feeling. He kept the feeling for himself and refused to hand it to a crowd, and the crowd took it anyway.
What You'll Discover
How she ended up in that chair.
What hangs on the wall behind her.
What London's Royal Academy did to it.
Why France paid so little for it.
Who made her America's mother.