Yes. Whistler's Mother is a real painting: an oil on canvas painted in London in the summer of 1871, now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Its real title is Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, and the woman in the chair is the painter's mother, Anna.
The painting that Mr Bean ruins in the 1997 film Bean exists only in the movie. He sneezes on it, then dissolves the face with lacquer thinner while trying to clean it. The real canvas has belonged to the French state since 1891.
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Real is a slippery word for this picture, because very few people have ever stood in front of the actual canvas. What most people know is a reduction: a mug, a greeting card, a stamp, a small old woman in profile who fits in one hand.
The canvas in Paris is not small. It is about 1.44 meters high and 1.63 wide, wider than it is tall, and with its frame it measures 186 by 204 centimetres and weighs 78 kilos, according to the Orsay. A great deal of that surface is plain gray wall, and the chair, as we will see, did not start out where it sits now.
I suspect that gap is why people ask whether the painting exists at all. The picture they know reached them already shrunk and cropped, and the one in Paris has a history that no mug mentions.
Who failed to turn up for the sitting?
A model, and she was fifteen. In the summer of 1871 Whistler was working on a figure he called the girl in blue on the sea shore, but the girl fell ill after her brother hurt her in a game, and a canvas stood ready at 2 Lindsey Row, his house in London, with no one to pose.
We know the story because Anna wrote it to her sister, Catherine Jane Palmer. Whistler told his mother that sitting for her portrait was what he had long intended to do. She stood bravely for two or three days and found it “too great an effort.” So he sat her down, “perfectly at my ease,” in her words, and the portrait became a seated profile.
The portrait took about three months to finish. Yet the woman in the finished picture is not quite where Whistler first placed her.
What You'll Discover
What lies under the paint.
Who saved it from the Academy.
What France paid for it.
How America fell for it.