1.
When I visit my mother at Friends Homes, I drive my rental car from the new airport in Greensboro onto the new, almost deserted beltway, and then down New Garden Road and into the Whittier Wing parking lot, directly across the street from Guilford College, the Quaker college from which both my mother and I graduated. Each time that I visit, I think that maybe this will be the last time that I will see her. An air of permanent convalescence hangs over the hallways of the Whittier Wing, where nurses from Senegal and Jamaica hover around the clock. Everyone here is recovering from something—my mother from the insertion of an artificial heart-valve and the series of terrible strokes, like terrible monthly beatings, that followed. A maple leaf adorns the doors of residents in danger of falling. There is a red leaf on my mother’s door. She is deciduous.
Actually, she doesn’t have far to fall, for she rarely leaves her bed, except when she is wheeled to the bathroom, a painfully complicated procedure, or the dining room. Propped up on her pillows, her stern Scots-Irish face with slightly stiffened neck in profile, always in profile, my mother could almost have been posing for me. Sitting with my mother during these recumbent
months, as she lies on her hospital bed in Whittier, I am often reminded of James McNeill Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother.
2.
One thing that draws me to the painting is that Whistler’s mother looks so much like a Quaker. In old prints depicting Quaker meetings, the men in wide-brim hats sit on plain benches facing the women in plain bonnets, all in profile. Two of these prints adorned the entrance to the little side room—a rustic reconstruction of an eighteenth-century meetinghouse—of Clear Creek Meeting in Richmond, Indiana, which I attended as a child. This room, outfitted with ancient, high benches, was never used for meetings; a modern space nearby served that purpose. Instead, it became a sort of playroom or refuge for children playing hide and seek or “Quaker meeting” (in which we sat in silence and tried to make each other laugh) during the long hour of stony silence next door, where the adults sat in silence, not laughing, not even smiling.
In her black widow’s garb, as I say, Whistler’s mother looks just like a Quakeress. At first, I assumed this link of Whistler’s mother with Quakerism was a private association of mine, based on my Quaker childhood and my failing, falling mother, but it turns out to be quite widespread. Sarah Walden, the expert conservator who restored the painting for the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it hangs alongside Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, writes of “the Quaker-like simplicity we think of as the natural habitat of Anna Whistler.” (I like that phrase “natural habitat,” as though Whistler’s mother were an endangered shore bird, glimpsed in the wild.)
Whistler’s portrait of his mother is officially called Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother. It is generally assumed to be the best-known painting by an American artist. The painting is so familiar that it is difficult to really look at it. In Don DeLillo’s Underworld, there is an artist named Klara who keeps a print of Whistler’s mother on her wall “because she thought it was generally unlooked at.” In DeLillo’s novel, Klara likes how Whistler’s mother sits “so Quaker-prim and still.”
3.
Whistler’s mother refused to pose on Sundays, but when she posed, she prayed. “It was a Mother’s unceasing prayer while being the painter’s model,” Anna Whistler later wrote, that “gave the expression which makes the attractive charm.” Soon after the portrait was completed during the early fall of 1871, Whistler and his mother spent a weekend at the home of William Cleverly Alexander. Alexander was a banker in London, a passionate collector (like Whistler) of Chinese porcelain, and a Quaker. Anna Whistler was impressed when the seven Alexander children joined the servants each morning for silent worship in the Quaker manner. “Their home life is quite according to your ideas & mine,” she wrote to a friend.
When Whistler painted a portrait of one of the seven children, Cecily, he made her look anything but Quaker-like; she resembles instead a little Spanish dancer out of Velázquez—insouciant, flamboyant, dappled with butterflies. Cecily’s plain gray wraps are flung carelessly on a chair in the background, as though they are the wrinkled Quaker chrysalis from which she has emerged, vibrantly sleek and fully fledged.
4.
The Symbolist writer Joris-Karl Huysmans called Arrangement in Grey and Black a painting of convalescence. Whistler’s mother had been quite ill during the Civil War. In 1863, trying to escape the war and her disease, she lived for a time in the Round Hill Hotel in Northampton, Massachusetts, taking the famous “water cure” there, drinking lots of water, taking many baths, and so on. (From Hartford, Harriet Beecher Stowe came to Northampton to take the cure, and Henry James came, too, for his constipation, and so did Emily Dickinson’s mother, from nearby Amherst.)
Whistler’s mother was sick again from May to June 1870 and was still unwell in December, six months before Whistler began to paint her portrait. “It may be,” as scholar Margaret MacDonald observes, “that Whistler, deeply concerned for her, wished to record his mother’s appearance before it was too late.” Whistler originally planned to portray his mother standing up—he was already famous for painting portraits in this format—but after two or three days it became clear that Anna hardly had sufficient energy for sitting.
All this suggests that Whistler planned to paint his mother’s portrait, that this was his next project, so to speak. The truth is that the painting was begun almost by accident. The female model whom Whistler had hired, for a painting that was giving him a great deal of trouble, failed to show up for her sitting.
On impulse, Whistler decided to paint his mother instead. “If the youthful Maggie had not failed Jemie as a model for ‘The girl in blue on the sea shore,’” Anna Whistler wrote her sister, “he would have had no time for my Portrait.” Necessity is the mother of invention—and so, in this case, was the presence of an actual mother. “Disappointments,” Anna added, “are often the Lord’s means of blessing.”
5.
As I try to satisfy my own curiosity about this marvelous painting, I think I know what’s really happening here. My own confused feelings while sitting with my mother in her residential wing in Friends Homes have started to grow, like a gently spreading moss, onto Whistler’s portrait of his mother. Everything about the painting recalls aspects of my mother, and everything about my mother takes up residence in different aspects of the painting. Whistler’s portrait of his mother is the culture on which I am growing my own memories of my mother. Is this a defense mechanism, a way of not quite looking at what my mother has become? Of course it is. But it’s also a way—my way—of looking at her.
6.
When I last saw my mother, she whispered to me conspiratorially, “Christopher is coming to see me this week.”
“But I am Christopher,” I said.
She turned her head sideways and squinted up at me, skeptically. “Are you little Christopher?” she asked.
7.
Whistler’s mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, was born in 1804 in Wilmington, North Carolina, a two-hour drive from my mother’s birthplace of Raleigh. She married the railroad engineer Major George Washington Whistler, in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1831. Born in Indiana, he was a widower with three children; she had been his dead wife’s best friend.
8.
Whistler’s father invented a new kind of steam whistle for use on trains.
I told my son Nicholas about the steam whistle invented by Whistler. Nicholas asked, reasonably enough, “Was the whistle named for him?”
9.
Whistler was ambivalent about his birthplace. When he was asked how he had come to be born in Lowell, he replied, “I wanted to be near my mother.”
Whistler would have preferred to have been born in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father was hired in 1842 to oversee the construction of the railroad to Moscow. It was in St. Petersburg that Whistler had his first formal training in drawing.
During the celebrated trial many years later in which Whistler sued John Ruskin for libel, Whistler claimed that he had been born in Russia. When it was pointed out to him that, after all, he was actually born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler replied haughtily: “I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell.”
Whistler’s father died of cholera in Russia in 1849, and Anna and her two sons, James and William, settled in Connecticut. They also lived briefly in Springfield, Massachusetts. Whistler’s mother dressed in deep mourning for the rest of her life. In 1851, James entered the United States Military Academy at West Point.
10.
In his 2008 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, John Updike asked himself, “What is American about American art?” and—connecting the dots from Copley to Winslow Homer and after—suggested that American artists share “a bias toward the empirical” and seek to capture “the clarity of things.”
But there is a countertradition in American art, a sort of Velvet Revolution, and its roots can be traced back to two hotheads expelled from West Point. Edgar Allan Poe, booted from the academy in 1831, wrote influential manifestos in favor of art for art’s sake and argued that “tone” and “suggestiveness—some undercurrent, however indefinite of meaning”—were at the heart of artistic effect. The poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire translated Poe’s writings into French; Poe’s influence on elite French writers and painters was considerable.
Whistler studied Poe’s books avidly in the West Point library before being kicked out in 1854 for flunking a chemistry test. He traveled to France with the ambition of becoming a painter and made close friendships with the artists Henri Fantin-Latour and Alphonse Legros, while also meeting Courbet, Manet, and Baudelaire. Legros specialized in painting women in traditional, Quaker-like religious garb. Fantin-Latour painted Whistler along with Baudelaire and Manet in his group portrait Homage to Delacroix. In 1859, recognizing that England might prove a fertile market for artists, Whistler shifted his base of operations to London.
11.
Whistler met a striking young Irishwoman named Joanna Elizabeth Hiffernan in 1861; by the end of the year, when he took her to Paris and showed her off to his painter friends, she was both his model and his mistress. Courbet was particularly taken with her long coppery red hair and portrayed her in La belle Irlandaise (1865–66).
Whether Jo also posed for Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866), as has often been suggested, remains in doubt. The Origin, which has a shadowy past and has hung at the Musée d’Orsay only since 1995, belonged for a long time to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It portrays a woman’s torso viewed from below, with a white garment pulled above her exposed breasts. The focus of attention is squarely on the woman’s lovingly painted vagina and her pubic hair, hence “the origin of the world.”
It is tempting to interpret Whistler’s Mother as a rejoinder to Courbet’s painting.
Whistler’s portrait of his mother might be called “The Origin of My World.”
12.
Anna Whistler moved to London to escape the horrors of the Civil War. In 1863, she boarded a ship in Wilmington, North Carolina, the last seaport to remain in Confederate hands, and ran the Union blockade, eluding Union raiders and arriving safely in London a few weeks later. When Whistler’s mother moved in, Jo Hiffernan moved out. It was as simple as that.
13.
It is easy to think of Whistler’s portrait of his mother as an “easy” painting, a fairly straightforward rendition of how his beloved mother looked while sitting in his studio. Actually, the painting was the result of several bold experiments that Whistler had been pursuing in his work for several restless years.
After his false start, during his early months in Paris, laying on thick brushstrokes with his friend Courbet, Whistler overhauled his style completely in London during the 1860s. It was then that he painted his first blue and black tinged “moonlights,” dreamy marine scenes that he later renamed nocturnes, seeking an analogy with musical composition.
Whistler painted the first of these dramatic scenes when he was looking out on the harbor in Valparaiso, Chile, where he made a mysterious journey in 1866. Recently discovered documents make it fairly clear that Whistler was a well-paid gunrunner for Chilean nationalists who had declared war on Spain.
“Paint should not be applied thick,” Whistler told a friend. “It should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass.” The aim in such paintings, contrary to the personal touch of Impressionism, was to abolish any evidence of the hand or the active brush. “A picture is finished,” Whistler maintained, “when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.” The colors in such pictures seem to have condensed on the surface or to have seeped through like a spreading stain from the back of the canvas.
For some critics, the labor was a little too invisible; in 1877, Ruskin accused Whistler of “willful imposture” in his nocturnes, and of charging high prices “for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler sued for libel but won only a token victory; forced to cover the cost of the trial himself, he went bankrupt in the process, selling his London house and his cherished collection of Asian porcelain.
14.
Whistler’s portrait of his mother is the culmination of his almost decadelong obsession with Asian pottery. When Anna Whistler moved into her son’s house in Chelsea in 1863, she was amazed by the profusion of Chinese and Japanese things there. “Are you an admirer of old China?” she wrote a friend. “This artistic abode of my son is ornamented by a very rare collection of Japanese and Chinese [porcelain], he considers the paintings upon them the finest specimens of Art and his companions (Artists) who resort here for an evening of relaxation occasionally get enthusiastic as they handle and examine the curious subjects portrayed.”
In searching for a counteraesthetic to the painterly realism of Courbet, Whistler fell in love with Chinese and Japanese porcelain. He admired both the colors of blue and white porcelain, as it was called, and the delicate and expressive figures, borrowed from Chinese plays and popular novels, painted on the glazed surfaces. On a collecting trip to Amsterdam in 1863, he began amassing his own extraordinary collection of Asian porcelain, and he inspired others to take up the collecting mania. “It was Whistler absolutely who invented Blue and White,” the dealer Murray Marks wrote.
To put it differently, it was Whistler who shifted elite British taste from eighteenth-century Wedgwood and Sèvres “china” back to the real thing.
In an ambitious and sometimes bizarre series of paintings, Whistler tried to apply the lessons he had learned from these pots. In Purple and Rose: The Lange Lijzen of the Six Marks (1864), Jo Hiffernan dressed up as a Chinese artisan with brush in hand, putting a finishing touch on an already glazed and fired blue and white porcelain vase. She is surrounded, as in a dealer’s shop, by other examples of Chinese porcelain, and we are meant to feel that she herself is almost made of porcelain—one of the lange lijzen, Dutch for “lanky people,” that are portrayed on the vases that surround her.
La princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1864–1865) takes the fantasy even further, with Jo in indigo kimono and orange wrapper, holding a Japanese fan and framed by a Japanese screen of birds and flowers—“the princess from the country of porcelain.”
This ravishing painting was the centerpiece of Whistler’s swooningly beautiful Peacock Room, now in the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. Whistler designed the room for a wealthy shipowner named Frederick Leyland. It was a dining room, but it was also a walk-in porcelain cabinet. The walls of green and gold have regularly placed niches for the display of blue and white Chinese porcelain. Murals of gold and blue peacocks and golden wave patterns complete the elaborate design.
15.
The first artist was a potter, or so Whistler imagined in his famous “Ten O’Clock Lecture,” delivered on February 20, 1885, at ten o’clock in the evening.
In the beginning, man went forth each day—some to do battle—some to the chase—others again to dig and to delve in the field—all that they might gain, and live—or lose and die—until there was found among them, one, differing from the rest—whose pursuits attracted him not—and so he staid by the tents, with the women, and traced strange devices, with a burnt stick, upon a gourd.
This man, according to Whistler, was “the first artist,” soon joined by “others—of like nature—chosen by the Gods—and so they worked together—and soon they fashioned, from the moistened earth, forms resembling the gourd—and, with the power of creation, the heirloom of the artist, presently they went beyond the slovenly suggestion of Nature—and the first vase was born, in beautiful proportion.”
Whistler’s own art began with pottery as well.
16.
And then there is the matter of indigo.
In Whistler’s portrait of his mother, an indigo kimono hangs like a curtain on the left-hand side of the painting. This indigo curtain is more than exotic decor. You might say that the whole painting is somehow framed in indigo, bathed in indigo. The nocturnes and the portrait of his mother are from Whistler’s indigo period, just as Picasso had a blue period.
Indigo, that purplish-blue pigment that comes from Japan and the American South, is another link between Whistler’s mother and my own. Indigo happens to be my mother’s favorite Japanese dye. On our first trip to Japan, in 1971, one hundred years after Whistler painted his mother, my mother studied Japanese fabric-dying techniques. She worked with the National Treasure artist Kesuke Serizawa. She learned to work with indigo dye.
I asked her why she liked indigo so much. “Because it’s so beautiful,” she answered, “beautiful and natural.”
17.
Arrangement in Grey and Black, yes, but there is a third major color in the painting: blue. The indigo kimono completes a background of blue and gray. Was Whistler trying to avoid any association, in the title of his painting, with the colors of the American Civil War? His mother, of course, looks like a Civil War widow. His brother, William, had served as a battlefield surgeon for the Confederate forces. Was Whistler himself a Confederate sympathizer? It might be more accurate to say that he instinctively sided with the underdog. He traveled to Chile to support Chilean separatists. When Henry Adams dined with John La Farge and Whistler, Whistler spoke incessantly in favor of the Boers against the British. And Whistler was a close friend of the Irish separatist John O’Leary.
18.
In DeLillo’s Underworld, the artist named Klara has Whistler’s portrait of his mother on her wall “because the picture was so clashingly modern.” It is worth trying to specify what this “clash” consists of. There seems to be some fundamental, bedrock ambiguity in Whistler’s portrait of his mother.
Whistler was interested in visual ambiguity. In his first major painting, Symphony in White (1861), also known as “The White Girl,” he had painted Jo Hiffernan as a melancholy woman dressed in white and holding a white lily. After taking in all this whiteness, the viewer suddenly notices that the white girl is standing on a bearskin rug. Just beyond her slippers, the bear’s feral face rears up, with ears erect, eyes wide open, and open mouth, showing his teeth. What is the relation between the demure girl and the ferocious bear?
The ambiguity in Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother is of a different order. Its doubleness is captured in its double title. Looked at one way, it is a formal “arrangement” in gray and black, drawing on Japan and Whistler’s infatuation with blue and white porcelain. Looked at another way, it is a nostalgic evocation of a specifically American motherhood.
These jarring oppositions were highlighted in 1932, the
worst year of the Depression, when Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, hit upon the idea of borrowing Whistler’s Mother from the Louvre as a way to boost sagging attendance and moribund fundraising. At MoMA, the painting would appear as a modernist icon, or so Barr assumed. But after its star turn in New York, the painting continued on a triumphal tour of great American cities, with a long stop at the Chicago World’s Fair. Along the way, it was interpreted as a tribute to American motherhood, culminating in a three-cent postage stamp issued on Mother’s Day, in 1934, in honor of mothers of America. On the stamp, Anna Whistler’s footstool is replaced by an earthenware vase full of flowers.
19.
My uncle Alec, my mother’s younger brother, dead now from Alzheimer’s disease, had a house in Wilmington, North Carolina, on Wrightsville Beach, raised on stilts as protection from flood tides caused by hurricanes. My mother loved to stay there. It was always her dream to live near the ocean, to eat freshly caught fish, and to take long walks on the sand. She seemed completely at home in Wilmington, the birthplace of Whistler’s mother. I know that she would give up anything—anything—to get up from the bed where she is now lying, walk through the door with the falling leaf on it, and walk on the sand at Wrightsville Beach.
When I stayed in the house in Wilmington, I had a different fantasy. I wanted to be the man with the metal detector who walked up and down the beach early each morning, his awkward apparatus swinging from side to side. Like a robin listening for a worm, he would stop periodically and dig down into the sand with a sharp stick. I imagined the riches uncovered in this way: doubloons, silver dollars, wedding rings.
He was a dowser of sorts, as I saw him, a feng shui artist, divining his place in the world and seeking an auspicious alignment of earth and stars. The zigzag path he traced over the sand was determined by unseen forces underground, the chance pattern of previous visitors and voyagers. From these soundings in the sand, I could imagine him piecing together a fragmented narrative of sorts, reaching back to Sir Walter Raleigh, perhaps, and forward to the most recent bride on her honeymoon, who had rashly removed her wedding ring for an impromptu frolic in the waves.
I can see, now, that some such divination has been my purpose in this book all along. My pen has been my metal detector, and I have been digging, as patiently as I can, for evidence of my family’s passages, in art and in love, as they pursued their own lives across many generations, living and surviving. A snuffbox, a stamp album, a rust-colored pitcher, a handful of white clay—these things carry their stories with them.
A mysterious passage on the questing and magnetic tendencies of human beings by the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan comes back to me unbidden:
He knocks at all doors, strays and roams,
Nay hath not so much wit as some stones have
Which in the darkest nights point to their homes,
By some hid sense their Maker gave;
Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest
And passage through these looms
God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.
20.
The poet Stéphane Mallarmé translated Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock Lecture” into French. He also helped to facilitate the sale of Whistler’s Mother, in 1891, to the public Musée du Luxembourg. From there, it eventually entered the Louvre, as Whistler had always hoped, and then, much later, the Musée d’Orsay, its current home.
Whistler, like his famous painting, moved back to Paris in 1892. He died of a stroke in 1903.
21.
The Irish painter John Butler Yeats, father of the poet William Butler Yeats, helped to bring some of Whistler’s paintings to Dublin for an exhibition.
“Imagine,” he said to his son, “making your old mother an arrangement in grey.”
