Anna Matilda (née McNeill) Whistler (September
27, 1804 – January 3, 1881) was the mother of American-born, British-based
painter James McNeill Whistler, who made her the subject of his famous painting
Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, often titled Whistler's Mother.
Anna McNeill Whistler was born in Wilmington,
North Carolina, to Charles Daniel McNeill (1756–1828), a physician, and Martha
Kingsley McNeill, daughter of Zephaniah Kingsley, Sr. (one of the founders of
the University of New Brunswick) and youngest sister of Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr.
(a slave trader and plantation owner, and the husband of the African princess
Ana Madgigine Jai).
In 1831, she married George Washington
Whistler, a civil engineer and former army officer, a widower who had three
children. She gave birth to two sons, James McNeill Whistler and William
McNeill Whistler.
She moved to Russia for a while, where her
husband had accepted a job. Anna returned to the United States, to live in
Connecticut in poverty. Her daughter, who remained in Europe and married well, helped William and James attend private
school. James entered West Point just before his 17th birthday, was expelled
and moved back to England. Her son William became a surgeon in the Confederate
Army during the American Civil War.
In 1863, at the advice of her stepdaughter and
son, she moved to England. Anna was 67 during the painting of the picture. She
died a decade later and is buried in Hastings Cemetery.
The mysteries of “Whistler’s Mother.”
By Peter Schjeldahl
August 24, 2015
A couple of weeks ago, I visited two mothers in
Massachusetts. One was my own, Charlene, who lives in a retirement home in
Lenox. The other was the black-clad lady portrayed in “Whistler’s Mother”—the
popular name of the masterpiece that James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted in
1871 and titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1.” Anna Matilda McNeill
Whistler, who lived with her son, in London, from 1864 to 1875, sits in profile
with an air of infinite patience, gazing steadily at, apparently, nothing. The
work is on loan to the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, from the Musée
d’Orsay, in Paris. In 1891, it became the first American art work ever bought
by the French state, and it remains the most important American work residing
outside the United States.
The painting represents the peak of Whistler’s
radical method of modulating tones of single colors. The paint looks soft,
almost fuzzy—as if it were exhaled onto the surface. There is some bravura
brushwork, where Anna’s lace-cuffed hands clutch a handkerchief, with unprimed
canvas peeking through, and daubed hints of Japanese-style floral patterning on
a curtain that commands the left side of the picture. A few of the daubs
faintly echo the pink of Anna’s flesh. She wears a gold wedding ring: a spark
of harmony with the muted gilding of the frame that Whistler designed for the
picture. Practically subliminal whispers of reds and blues underlie areas of
the silver-gray wall behind her, and a dark purple smolders in the curtain,
where the artist’s signature emblem—a butterfly—hovers.
The chromatic subtleties contribute to an
unsettled feeling. A more substantial jolt occurs when you register an over-all
spatial distortion: the forms stretch horizontally, so that the length of
Anna’s concealed legs, angled and descending to an upholstered footstool, suggests
the anatomy of an N.B.A. draft pick. The more you notice of the composition’s
economies—such as the cavalier indication of the bentwood chair legs, at the
lower right, and, at the lower left, three perfunctory diagonal strokes that do
for establishing the plane of the floor—the more happily manipulated you may
feel, in ways that, like the camera tricks of a great movie director, excite a
sense of the scene as truer to life than truth itself. It took me an hour of
inspection to take in an inconspicuous, brownish strip across the bottom of the
canvas. Anna’s dress falls smoothly past it and out of the picture. It is the
edge of a stage or a platform. Whistler is looking up at his mom.
“Yes, one does like to make one’s mummy just as
nice as possible,” Whistler allowed years later, answering friends who praised
the speaking likeness of the portrayal. But he was exasperated by sentimental
responses to the work. He regularly preached that subject matter should be
regarded merely as a pretext for adventures in aestheticism. He said, “To me it
is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to
care about the identity of the portrait?” Was he kidding? (He was sly.) Of
course we care, if not to the extent of a civic group in Ashland, Pennsylvania,
which in 1938 erected a monumental statue of the seated Anna, on a base
inscribed with words from Coleridge: “A mother is the holiest thing alive.” At
any rate, the answer to Whistler’s question touches on what many have noted is
iconic about history’s short list of artistic icons. The “Mona Lisa,” “The
Scream,” “American Gothic,” and the best of Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn”s all share
with the Whistler the distillation of a meaning instantly recognized and
forever inexhaustible. In this case, it’s the mysteries of motherhood.
Everybody has a mother, and something close to half of everybody becomes one.
I’m the oldest of Charlene’s five kids with our
late father, Gilmore, an inventor and entrepreneur. When I walked into her
building, she was at the piano accompanying a sing-along that concluded with a
briskly rendered “Yellow Rose of Texas.” Charlene is ninety-eight, but her
memory is sharp, and I had hoped that it would yield associations with
Whistler’s portrait. Her father was a postmaster in a North Dakota prairie
town. Could she recall the 1934 stamp that reproduced the image with the words
“In Memory and in Honor of the Mothers of America”? No, she said, “It was a
fourth-class post office, the smallest. I don’t think we got the fancy commemoratives.”
She was never much for art, she reminded me. But, having thought about the
painting, she e-mailed me later that it put her in mind of her own mother, who
“was born in 1875 and continued to wear rather long dresses and never cut her
hair. Her opinions were a reflection of the Victorian age.” Charlene was amused
to learn that, when the portrait was made, Anna Whistler was sixty-seven: “So
young!”
Anna, born in Wilmington, North Carolina, was a
daughter of the antebellum South; she was the niece of a slave owner, and,
through him, the cousin of a reported nine mixed-race children. She married
George Washington Whistler, a West Point graduate and a brilliant civil
engineer, and they had five sons, only two of whom, James and William, survived
to adulthood. She was described by a sister-in-law as “so unshakeable that
sometimes I could shake her.” Beginning in 1842, the family spent six years in
St. Petersburg, Russia, where George served Tsar Nicholas I as the chief
engineer of a rail line to Moscow, and the artistically precocious James, at
age eleven, enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. In 1849, George
died, after a bout of cholera, and the family returned to America.
James followed his father’s example and his own
military fantasies by entering West Point. But he proved a feckless cadet—the
superintendent, Robert E. Lee, liked but despaired of him—and he flunked out in
his third year. He evinced no better discipline in government jobs as a
geographical draftsman. Then, in 1855, Whistler went to Paris and launched
himself as an artist, a dandy, and a lover of women. He knew Courbet,
Baudelaire, Manet, Monet, and Degas, and closely befriended Henri
Fantin-Latour. Whistler’s first touchstone painting, “Symphony in White, No. 1:
The White Girl” (1862), was a sensation in the epoch-making 1863 Salon des
Refusés (though it was eclipsed by Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe”). He was
never less than esteemed in France, notably by poets and writers. (The young
Proust kept as a talisman a pair of gray gloves that Whistler had worn.) It
seems a pity that he took his act to London, by stages beginning in 1859, and
refined his genius in the pokier precincts of British art, meanwhile lavishing
rather too much of it on flamboyant combats of wit, artistic doctrine, and
personal grudge with artists, critics, and patrons who, Oscar Wilde excepted,
were little worth the candle. (At first a devoted fan, Wilde came to complain
that Whistler spelled art “with a capital ‘I.’ ”)
Polarizing opinion in the London art world,
Whistler pioneered the modern trope of the artist as scandalous celebrity. But
he tempered his raffish ways with stratagems of genteel respectability, which
his mother’s presence supported. When Anna moved in with him—her other son,
William, was serving as a doctor in the Confederate Army—the artist moved his
current mistress out to other quarters. He wrote to Fantin-Latour, “I had to
empty my house and purify it from cellar to eaves.” The religiously pious Anna
sighed at what she viewed as her son’s flaws, but she graciously hosted his
friends and became positively fond of one of them, the decadent’s decadent,
Algernon Swinburne.
Whistler’s painting of his mother overcame fierce
resistance to appear in the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, in
1872. It is unique among his portraits. Every other teases out a nuance of
personality in the sitter—the works are often seductive, but never
conventionally so in the way of portraits by his follower John Singer Sargent.
In “Whistler’s Mother,” Anna’s blank forbearance speaks of capitulation. She
will do anything for him. She is his. Such exclusive devotion is the primal
dream of every mother’s son, isn’t it?
Published in the print edition of the August
31, 2015, issue.
Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The
New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. His latest book is
“Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018.”