Proud Mother Whistler’s Mother Will Be The Guest Of Honor In A Washington, D.C., Exhibit Of Her Son’s Works

Whistler’s Mother is coming and his girlfriends are already here. His wife is staying in Glasgow.

Mrs. Anna McNeill Whistler died in Britain in 1881. Her picture, possibly the best-known painting by any American artist, rarely gets to the United States.

It will be a centerpiece at the National Gallery of Art in the biggest U.S. exhibit of Whistler’s work in 90 years. Its 200 paintings, drawings and prints go on view May 28.

James McNeill Whistler, who incorporated his mother’s maiden name in his own, painted her in London under the title “Arrangement in Gray and Black.” The work usually hangs in the Musee d’Orsay, just across the Seine from the Louvre in Paris. More than 10 years have passed since it was last in Washington, where Whistler learned etching as a map-maker at the U.S. Coastal Survey.

He never returned to the United States after he left that job in 1855 to go to Paris. He died in London in 1903.

Mrs. Whistler wrote her sister about the artist’s difficulty with the portrait:

“I silently lifted my heart, that it might be as the Net cast down in the Lake at the Lord’s will, as I observed his trying again, and oh my grateful rejoicing in spirit as my dear Son would exclaim, ‘Oh Mother, it is mastered, it is beautiful’ and he would kiss me for it!”

The letter is quoted in a new biography, “James McNeill Whistler - Beyond the Myth,” by Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval.

Critics in 1872 coolly received the portrait, though one praised its “powerful grasp of the Protestant character.” Mrs. Whistler’s son got a strict Episcopalian upbringing, with a psalm at the beginning of each day. But when the London Times carped that the picture could have been a little less severe, Whistler joked about adding a glass of sherry as well as a Bible.

By that time, sherry and life as a man about town were more to Whistler’s taste than the Bible. He faithfully took his mother to church every Sunday - and left her there. When she came to live with him in London, his model and semipermanent girlfriend - copper-haired Jo Hiffernan - had to move out.

Twenty years after he did the portrait, it was purchased by the Luxembourg Museum in Paris.

“The word masterpiece crept into the panegyrics,” wrote Genevieve Lacambre in the catalog of the National Gallery’s show.

Reproductions still hang in many American front parlors. Beginning in 1934, the U.S. Post Office printed 193 million copies on a three-cent stamp, which at that time could carry a letter anywhere in the United States.

Jo Hiffernan will appear more often in Washington than Whistler’s mother. She is “The Little White Girl,” featured on the cover of the National Gallery catalog, and appears in many other paintings and prints. Her successor, Maude Franklin, is the subject of a dazzling full-length oil that hangs permanently in Washington’s Freer Gallery of Art.

Beatrice Godwin, a widow Whistler married when he was 54, seems to have banished the girlfriends. Her portrait, “Harmony in Red,” hangs in a collection in Glasgow and cannot be borrowed.

Another Glasgow institution lent Whistler’s portrait of the great historian and literary figure Thomas Carlyle. Called “Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 2,” it has almost exactly the same pose, size and colors as the picture of Whistler’s mother.

Whistler’s art, which owes much to Spain, France, Japan and Britain, has a worldwide reputation comparable with those of the great French impressionists and postimpressionists of his time. One painting - “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket” - especially foreshadows some of the abstract works by American painters of this century.

The great British critic John Ruskin called it a pot of paint flung in the public’s face. Whistler, who had a nasty temper, took him to court and won damages of a single farthing, about half a U.S. cent. Whistler wore the farthing on his watch-chain. But he had to pay the legal costs, which helped throw him into bankruptcy.

Washington’s National Portrait Gallery already has opened a show called “In Pursuit of the Butterfly,” a collection of photos, portraits and caricatures of Whistler. Whistler stylized his initials into a butterfly and used it as a signature.

Jo and Maude appear in that exhibit, too, as well as another girlfriend, Alice “Tinnie” Greaves.

“James had almost certainly carried on an illicit affair (with her) for many years during the later 1870s,” says the new biography.

On May 14, the Freer Gallery, across the mall from the National Gallery, will open “Whistler and Japan.” Whistler never visited Japan, but he greatly admired its art.

Jo will be there, too, in “Variations in Flesh Color and Green.” With her red hair, she is an unlikely looking Japanese despite the kimono, as she gazes over a London balcony at the Thames.

On June 18, the National Gallery opens its second show, “Prints by James McNeill Whistler and His Contemporaries.”

MEMO: “In Pursuit of the Butterfly” will be at the National Portrait Gallery, until Aug. 13. “Whistler and Japan” will be at the Freer Gallery of Art, May 14 through Jan. 1. “James McNeill Whistler” will be in the National Gallery’s West Building, May 28 through Aug. 20 and “Prints by James McNeill Whistler and His Contemporaries” from June 18 through Sept. 24. None is scheduled to be shown elsewhere.