The apparently simple study that electrified American art
Our columnist takes a peek behind some of the world’s most significant paintings. This week, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother
In 1891, James Mcneill Whistler’s portrait of his mother was the first painting by an American artist to be bought by the French government.
It would have been hard to predict that a moody, temperamental young boy, whose parents had discovered that the best way to soothe him was to hand him pencils and crayons and let him draw, would end up with such a distinguished honour.
His engineer father had been commissioned by Tsar Nicholas I to design a railroad, taking young James and his family to live in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1842. There, the precocious 11-year-old insisted that he be allowed to show his drawings to the Tsar’s court artist, who was impressed enough to assist James’s acceptance into the Imperial Academy of Fine Art.
Four years later, after his father died, Whistler was back in America and grudgingly enrolled in West Point Military Academy: this part of his education was to be short-lived, as he was promptly expelled for poor conduct and dismal academic results.
Keen to fulfil his artistic ambitions, Whistler decided that Paris was the place to be. Here he was free to become the epitome of a bohemian painter, adopting the casual air of a stylish young man who spent freely on clothes and drink. He funded his somewhat louche lifestyle by selling his copies of works by French and Spanish masters in the Louvre. Soon, his circle of friends included many artists on the brink of greatness, including Henri Fantin-latour, Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, whose earthy, realistic approach to painting influenced Whistler’s early works. It was after he moved from Paris to London and produced his remarkable picture At the Piano, in 1859, that he achieved recognition as an artist of note. The picture was included in the Royal Academy exhibition, to some critical acclaim. However, his initial success was fleeting. As he developed his mature style, incorporating Japanese aesthetics and oriental motifs, it separated him from the Realists.
Pictures such as The White Girl, 1862, which portrayed his flamehaired mistress full length and confronting the viewer directly, were rejected by both the Royal Academy and the French Salon. The painting was considered inflammatory, inappropriately suggesting a loss of innocence.
The picture introduced Whistler’s unique approach: a limited colour palette, flat tonal contrasts, and a skewed perspective that he created by manipulating his paintstrokes. He was soon seen as spearheading the Aesthetic movement, whose ethos of “art for art’s sake” celebrated beauty and a refined sensibility.
When it was first shown in 1872, his Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, painted the preceding year, struck audiences like a thunderclap. Seen seated in profile, in a long black dress and white lace cap, she holds a handkerchief in her lap and gazes straight across the room. Although the picture appears oddly simple, there is a calculated balancing of its structural elements. The rectangular shape of the floral curtain on the left, the picture hanging behind her on the plain grey wall, the straightforward simplicity of the matching dull floor, all combine to emphasise the stillness of the seated figure.
The painting was widely interpreted as a celebration of the stoicism of motherhood, and resonated with radical-thinking artists and critics, as well as with the public. When it was purchased for the Louvre, 20 years later, Whistler’s reputation was elevated to new heights, and his work was soon in demand by wealthy American collectors.
Disconcertingly for Whistler, his mother was also impressed by her son’s celebrity, and decided to move to London to live with him. This somewhat cramped his man-about-town persona – he even had to move his mistress out of his home.
He was fond of wearing a monocle, dressing flamboyantly, and even dyed a lock of his brown hair bright white, to denote his devilish magnetism. His reputation as a witty but opinionated member of fashionable society often found him feuding verbally with Oscar Wilde and others at various parties, and arguing with art critics. He went so far as to sue the most eminent of them, the redoubtable and revered John Ruskin, for libel. Ruskin had been very publicly disobliging about his picture Nocturne in Black and Gold,
painted in 1874. Whistler was awarded a derisory one quarter of a penny by the judge in the court case, but the legal expenses he had racked up brought him to financial ruin. Forced out of his house, he moved to Venice and managed to secure a commission to create a series of etchings for the Fine Art Society.
By the time of his death, in London, 1903, though much of his work had been difficult for the Victorian era to fully embrace, the
Daily Chronicle newspaper credited his important impact. “It is 25 years since the famous case, Whistler versus Ruskin, was tried. In the history of art, it might be 200 years, so completely has the point of view of the critics and public changed, so completely has the brilliant genius of the man whom Ruskin called a ‘coxcomb’ been vindicated.”
The fiery young boy who had grown up to become a dandy would have been quietly satisfied with that legacy. But his personality is perhaps best summed up in his own words: “I can’t tell if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.”
In reality, his legacy was his approach to colour and composition, which marked the beginning of art moving towards abstraction. He became forefather to the greats of Abstract Expressionism, arguably the most powerful art movement in American history.
His mother decided to live with him – he had to move his mistress out