Whistler's Mother is famous because, in 1932, America took a picture its painter called an arrangement of gray and black and made it a national symbol of motherhood. The real title is Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. The sitter is Anna McNeill Whistler, the painter's mother, and the canvas has belonged to France since 1891.
Whistler painted it in London in the summer of 1871. Six decades later a tour across the United States and a postage stamp had made his mother's profile the face of Mother's Day.
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Whistler never asked anyone to see his mother in it. Years later he wrote that the public had no business caring who the sitter was: "what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?" He wanted people to look at gray, at black, and at the space between them.
Yet the same passage holds a line that is easy to miss: "To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother." The man who asked for nothing but gray and black had painted his own mother, and he said so.
That split runs through the whole history of the picture, from an exhibition hall in London to a stamp printed 200 million times.
Why did Anna Whistler sit instead of stand?
Because standing was more than she could manage. In the summer of 1871, at his house at 2 Lindsey Row, Whistler began a portrait of a woman on her feet. According to the Glasgow catalogue of his paintings, the sittings began when a model failed to arrive for another picture, Annabel Lee, and Anna Whistler, who lived in the house, took her place.
She was 66. Anna later wrote that she "stood bravely, two or three days," and then found the effort too great. Whistler changed the plan and painted her seated. The catalogue records the new idea in her words: "sitting perfectly at my ease."
The seated pose gave Whistler a compact profile against a bare wall, the kind of problem he liked. Anna wrote that the portrait was her son's favorite of his works. Much of the stillness later viewers read as character began as a practical fix for a tired woman. Only one picture hangs on the wall behind her.
What You'll Discover
Why the Academy nearly refused it.
What the sale won him.
What the stamp left out.