"Whistler's Mother" - James McNeill Whistler, 1871

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"Whistler's Mother" - James McNeill Whistler, 1871

The painting everyone knows as a symbol of American motherhood was almost never made. Whistler had booked a professional model. She cancelled. His mother, Anna - 67 years old, wearing the mourning clothes she had worn every day since her husband died in 1849 - stepped in as a replacement.
Whistler had planned to paint her standing. She couldn't hold the pose. The seated position was an accommodation, not a design choice. The painting required dozens of sittings.

Whistler titled it "Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1." Not a portrait of his mother. A formal composition problem. In 1872, the Royal Academy's selection committee nearly rejected it. It was the last work Whistler submitted there.
In 1891 - ten years after Anna died - the French government purchased it for 4,000 francs. It became the first American painting in France's national collection. French authorities compared it to Rembrandt, Titian, and Velázquez.

In 1934, the United States Postal Service put it on a stamp captioned "In Memory and Honour of the Mothers of America." Whistler had spent years publicly rejecting the sentimental reading. The world kept it anyway.
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