TThere were two ways to turn James McNeill Whistler into your enemy: Ignore him, or pay attention to him. You just couldn’t win. Life-long friends and complete strangers alike were equally prone to incur his wrath. And as someone who titled his memoirs The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, Whistler wasn’t the least bit gentle about it. He preferred to conduct his quarrels in the full glare of the press and had a nasty habit of dragging his opponents to court.
Whistler’s biggest fight was with the entire culture of art in Victorian England and its insistence on finding meaning and morals in paintings. Ironically, his most famous painting, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1—popularly known as Portrait of the Artist’s Mother—has been saddled with the most Victorian of meanings: It is an icon of the cult of motherhood.
Man, that would have driven Whistler nuts.
Whistler was the son of George Washington Whistler, a railroad engineer, and Anna McNeill, a devout Episcopalian. In 1842 the family packed up and left Massachusetts for Russia, where George Whistler was invited to help build the St. Petersburg-to-Moscow Railway. A precocious draftsman, young James began art training, but ill health forced him to spend several months of the year in England. After George’s sudden death, Anna collected her two sons and returned to the United States, thus ending James’s artistic training, an endeavor she considered expensive, uncertain, and ungodly. The family’s military background provided an alternate career path, and James was soon enrolled at West Point. He muddled through for a few years, but the rigid discipline made him miserable; a failed chemistry exam was the last straw. Whistler liked to say, “If silicon had been a gas, I would have been a general.”
The next year, Whistler took off for Europe despite his mother’s objections. In the late 1850s he bounced between Paris and London, becoming close friends with the proto-Impressionists and the Pre-Raphaelites and rejecting mainstream academic art. He completed many portraits such as The White Girl, which shows a young woman dressed in white (natch) and standing in front of a white curtain. Whistler entered the painting in the 1863 Paris Salon, where it was unceremoniously rejected—along with a whopping three thousand other paintings. To accommodate the horde of rejected works, French emperor Napoleon III sanctioned the Salon des Refusés, the setting where Édouard Manet had his first succès de scandale for Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass). Whistler’s White Girl received almost as much attention as Manet’s pastoral scene—not surprising, since the two works are stylistic cousins. Both feature a “rough” painting style and a contemporary setting that were new (and a bit scandalous) for the time.
Back in America, the Civil War raged and Southern fortunes failed. In despair over living in a reunited United States, Whistler’s fiercely Confederate mother hopped a ship to England. Her son, meanwhile, was enjoying a bohemian lifestyle, complete with all-night whiskey parties and a live-in girlfriend. Imagine his shock upon learning that Mother Anna intended to move in. Despite the dampening effect on his social life, Whistler enjoyed his mother’s coddling. She took over the housekeeping, managed his studio, and invited his friends over for dinner, during which she lectured about the evils of drink to such notable alcoholics as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
One day when his model failed to show up for work, Whistler turned to his mother. Initially he positioned her standing, but the frail woman was unable to hold the pose, so he directed her to sit, propping her feet on a footstool. Anna was dressed in her usual black dress, with a white lace-trimmed cap on her head; as a result, the painting is strikingly monochromatic, all tones of black, gray, and white.
With this work, Whistler discovered his mature style. First, he picked one or two colors and worked only in tones of those hues. Second, he provided no story for his paintings—he simply depicted a scene and a character. Whistler didn’t want his paintings to evoke feeling; instead he called for art to be independent of “clap-trap” such as “emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like.” To drive home the point, he titled his paintings with musically inspired names like “symphony” or “nocturne,” emphasizing that, just as a symphony doesn’t tell a story, neither does his art.
Whistler’s approach fit into a wider trend taking shape in Europe, one that called for “art for art’s sake” and came to be known as the Aesthetic Movement. Aesthetic artists were deplored by Victorian critics, who insisted that art provide some sort of edifying lesson. One of the most prominent opponents of Aestheticism was John Ruskin, the supporter of the Pre-Raphaelites. Ruskin objected especially to Whistler’s work titled Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, which was painted at a Thames pleasure garden known for its fireworks displays. In an 1877 review, Ruskin sniped, “[I] never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Well!
Whistler promptly charged Ruskin with libel.
He also turned Whistler v. Ruskin into a debate over art itself. Artists and critics were paraded before the jury and asked to weigh in on the purpose of painting and the meaning of beauty. Ruskin’s attorney belittled Whistler’s artistic abilities; after learning it took Whistler two days to complete Nocturne, he asked, “The labor of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?” Whistler retorted, “No, I ask it for knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.”
The jury found Ruskin guilty of libel but awarded Whistler only one farthing (a quarter of a penny). A popular editorial cartoon of the era showed the judge admonishing both parties: “Naughty critic, to use such language! Silly painter, to go to the law about it!”
The trial ushered in Whistler’s most prominent period. He began hosting Sunday breakfasts, serving up American-style pancakes and scrambled eggs to such English notables as writer Oscar Wilde and Lillie Langtry, the British royal mistress. However, the easily offended Whistler could never sustain friendships for long. Out of jealousy over the attention Wilde received for his lectures, in 1885 Whistler held his own, known simply as the “Ten O’Clock,” in which he attacked Wilde’s popularization of Aestheticism. Wilde’s riposte appeared in a newspaper review, and the whole dispute disintegrated into a series of increasingly nasty letters to the editor.
Yet despite all the haranguing and his contentious nature, Whistler was able to find one source of happiness. After several long love affairs with various models, in the mid-1880s he grew close to Beatrice Godwin, wife of architect E. W. Godwin. When Godwin died in 1886, and the socially mandated Victorian mourning period had passed, Whistler and Beatrice married. She brought a stability to his life unknown since the years Anna had ruled the roost. Unfortunately, their happy life was shattered in 1894 when Beatrice was diagnosed with cancer. After enduring two years of terrible pain, she died. Friends reported that the artist suddenly seemed old. He battled on, picking a public fight with his former student Walter Sickert and taking patrons to court, but it soon became increasingly difficult to rouse that fighting spirit, and Whistler died July 17, 1903.
The portrait of Whistler’s mother endured the vicissitudes of his career. During a rough patch in the 1870s, he used it as security on a loan and was unable to reclaim it until 1888. He was still able to exhibit the work, however, and it appeared in the 1883 Paris Salon and twice in the United States. In 1891 the painting was purchased by the French government for the Luxembourg Museum.
Had Arrangement in Grey and Black stayed on a wall in a Paris museum, it would have remained largely unnoticed in the United States. However, Alfred Barr, founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, hit upon the idea of exhibiting the work in America during the Great Depression. (Maybe he figured anxious Americans needed their mommies.) The museum promoted the painting as representing the dignity and patience of motherhood, and American audiences embraced it as depicting a universal every-mother. The painting toured twelve cities and attracted thousands of viewers, usually described as “reverent pilgrims” (Boy Scouts were particularly encouraged to visit). Over the next decades, it found endless uses in popular culture, from a poster advertising war bonds to covers for Newsweek and The New Yorker. The image remains popular today and can be found on Mother’s Day cards worldwide.
Yet Whistler would have been outraged by the painting’s interpretation as an icon. It’s easy to imagine him firing off nasty letters to the editor and starting lawsuits contesting others’ interpretations of his art. In the end, the irascible artist accomplished something he had never intended: He created a painting loaded with emotion—despite himself.
THE ORIGINAL ODD COUPLE, WHISTLER WAS A PARTY ANIMAL WHO LOVED TO INDULGE IN ALL-NIGHT WHISKEY-FUELED REVELRIES; HIS MOTHER, ANNA, WAS A WET BLANKET WHO LECTURED HER SON’S FRIENDS ON THE EVILS OF ALCOHOL.
The friendship of such noted wits as Oscar Wilde and Whistler was bound to result in numerous quips. One was the result of an article in Punch magazine that described them discussing actresses. Wilde immediately shot off a telegram to Whistler that read, “Punch too ridiculous. When you and I are together we never talk about anything except ourselves.” Whistler shot back, “No, no, Oscar, you forget. When you and I are together, we never talk about anything except me.”
While artists of the era such as William Morris spent significant time on interior decoration, Whistler finished only one such project—much to his wealthy client’s displeasure. F. R. Leyland asked Whistler to advise on the color scheme for his dining room, which he wanted to design around Whistler’s painting Rose and Silver: The Princess from the Land of Porcelain. Whistler transformed the project into a complete redecoration of the room, which he made resplendent with peacock designs in rich blue and gold.
Whistler’s friends loved the room, as did the society papers, but the owner was less than pleased. Not only was Leyland irritated that Whistler was entertaining the press in his dining room, but he was particularly annoyed that the artist had exceeded the original commission, and he refused to pay the increased fee. Whistler compromised on a smaller fee, but he commemorated the dispute by including a scene of two peacocks fighting, giving the more aggressive peacock white breast feathers, in imitation of Leyland’s white ruffled shirts.
Fortunately, the aggrieved patron kept the room intact. In 1904 American collector Charles Lang Freer purchased the room, which was painstakingly dismantled and reassembled in his Detroit home. Today, the Peacock Room is in the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
THE VALPARAISO ADVENTURE
The year 1865 was one of the strangest in Whistler’s life. It began when John O’Leary, an old friend from Paris, was arrested for his involvement in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an organization seeking to overthrow British rule in Ireland. Whistler seems to have feared that O’Leary would implicate him, perhaps for obtaining financial support for the Irish cause from U.S. sympathizers—although no evidence of such efforts by Whistler have been found.
Whistler boarded a ship for, of all places, South America and spent several months in Valparaiso, Chile. When he decided England was safe again he returned, managing to get in a brawl on the way with a black Haitian man who offended him “as a Southerner” for daring to dine with him. His troubles didn’t end when he arrived in London: Met at the station by the outraged husband of a woman he had seduced en route to Chile, Whistler received a thorough thrashing.
