Original photo by Iain Masterton/ Alamy Stock Photo
A sidetracked teenager changed the course of art history when she skipped an 1871 portrait-sitting. James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) — a Massachusetts-born artist living in London — was commissioned to paint Maggie Graham, the 15-year-old daughter of a member of Parliament. Although James had prepared a canvas during his initial studio sessions with Graham, his creative process moved too slowly for her liking. When she failed to appear, James asked his mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, then living with him in London, to be his subject.
Rather than intentionally crafting a tender maternal tribute (he was more of a proponent of “art for art’s sake”), James focused on fine-tuning the saturation of select colors with “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Portrait of the Artist's Mother).” Artistic circles adopted the shorthand “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,” while the public preferred “Whistler's Mother.” Originally, the painting was somewhat divisive, receiving lackluster placement in the Royal Academy of Arts’ annual exhibition. But in 1891, the piece earned a place in history as the first artwork by an American to be bought by the French state, via the Musée du Luxembourg. During the Great Depression, the painting gained popularity on a 13-city U.S. tour; 1 million people visited it in Chicago alone. Back in Paris, the painting continued to relocate, becoming the Louvre’s first American painting in 1922 before the Musée d’Orsay’s 1986 acquisition. “Whistler’s Mother” has been called “the most important American work residing outside the United States.”
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“Whistler’s Mother” has a sister painting depicting the Scottish essayist and historian ______.
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“Whistler’s Mother” has a sister painting depicting the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle.
James McNeill Whistler won a lawsuit against an art critic who panned one of his paintings.
In the summer of 1877, the famed British critic John Ruskin encountered Whistler’s “Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket” at London’s Grosvenor Gallery. The oil painting was a lush, abstract vision of a fireworks show in Cremorne Gardens, overlooking the Thames River. That July, Ruskin — a painter himself — shared his opinion of the work in his periodical Fors Clavigera: “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler, who was in serious debt, responded by suing Ruskin for libel; excerpts from the two-day trial found their way into Whistler’s 1890 book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Despite emerging victorious, Whistler received far less than the £1,000 and court costs he requested: just a single farthing, the smallest coin denomination, worth 1/48 of a shilling. The lawsuit plunged Whistler further into bankruptcy, yet he kept the farthing on his watch chain for the rest of his life. “Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket” now belongs to the Detroit Institute of Arts.
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