Whistler’s Mother in Paris and London

Red Alert: James McNeill Whistler’s iconic Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, affectionately known as Whistler’s Mother, is MIA at the Musée d’Orsay! Is this another Parisian heist or a playful game of hide-and-seek staged by the museum? Neither. Mrs. Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler is on holiday in London at the Tate Britain, scheduled to remain the center of attention in her son’s glorious retrospective exhibition James McNeill Whistler, this summer through September 27, 2026. Visitors to the Musée d’Orsay probably won’t see Mrs. Whistler at her home in Paris until fall 2026. 

Whistler’s Mother is among the most recognizable artworks in Western culture, on par with another famous Parisian portrait, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. And like her Louvre sister, Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo (i.e., “Madonna Lisa”), Mrs. Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler was not French nor historically significant for France nor for any other country. She was, like Senora Giocondo, a female subject in an extraordinarily innovative painting that ceaselessly attracts attention and clever appropriations. Posthumously, she became an icon of motherhood, thanks to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s intervention. 

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa belongs to the French government because the artist died in France while under the protection of King François I. Why is the American Anna Whistler, painted by her American son, artist James McNeill Whistler, in his London studio, owned by the French government? Sources say that James McNeill’s close friend Stéphane Mallarmé had a hand in setting up the deal to help his debt-ridden copain, who was using this painting (which he vowed never to part with) as collateral to borrow money. However, the French poet did not act alone. Whistler’s friends were eager to support this valued artist. Mallarmé led the negotiations to acquire “Mother” for France, along with Léon Bourgeois, Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts; Roger Marx, Director of Museums; Georges Clemenceau, leader of the Independent Radicals party and publisher of La Justice at the time (Prime Minister from 1903 to 1906); and influential poet/critic Théodore Duret. 

Whistler stands in the center, to the left of the portrait of Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, a red-head, stands on the right with his hand in his pocket, Charles Baudelaire with the gray hair sits to the right of Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour is seated in a white shirt. Alphonse Legros stands to the left of Whistler and Fantin-Latour. The art critic Champfleury sits between Whistler and Manet. On the extreme left are artist Louis Cordier and novelist/art critic Louis-Edmond Duranty. Artist Félix Braquemond stands between Manet and artist Albert de Balleroy 

On November 19, 1891, the agreement was delivered to and accepted by the artist. Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother was sold to France for 4000 francs, far less than Whistler had hoped for. However, the sale to the national collection held the promise of entering the Musée du Louvre, a prospect that made the meager offer palatable.  

At first, Whistler’s Mother hung in the Musée du Luxembourg, the contemporary art museum at that time. Then, in 1922, it was moved to the Jeu de Paume. In 1925, the portrait finally arrived at the Louvre, becoming the first American work of art hung in this exalted museum. When the Musée d’Orsay opened in 1986, the austere record of Anna Whistler’s likeness joined other 19th-century Realists Manet, Degas, Fantin-LaTour, etc. in the galleries devoted to their movement. 

The international fame of Whistler’s painting needs no introduction, and yet the sitter herself remains scarcely known. In fact, the circumstances surrounding the portrait are rarely discussed. Did you know that on the day Whistler started this work, he had no plans to paint his mom? Instead, he had scheduled a 15 year-old model named Maggie, who failed to show up. Anna Whistler, 67 at the time, agreed to pose as a last-minute replacement which required rethinking the composition to accommodate her aging body. He began with a standing figure, which we see in the sketches, and then he switched to a seated position, which was more comfortable for his mother. 

In 1871, Anna Mathilda McNeill was living with her adored first-born whom she called Jemie. She was a Southern belle, born on September 27, 1804, in Wilmington, North Caroline to Charles Daniel McNeill, a physician, and his wife Martha Kingsley McNeill, the daughter of Zephaniah Kingsley Sr., one of the founders of the University of New Brunswick in Canada. She married Major George Washington Whistler, a civil engineer and widower with three children from his first wife of 10 years Mary Roberdeau Swift, who died in 1827. Mary was Anna’s friend, and George was Anna’s brother William Gibbs McNeill’s friend, whom he met at West Point Academy. Anna and George married in 1831. Anna gave birth to five more children, but only James (1834-1903) and William McNeill Whistler (1836-1900) survived to adulthood. 

James Abbott Whistler (he dropped Abbott and added McNeill to his name after his mother died) was born on July 11, 1834, in Lowell, Massachusetts. When he was 5, his father became the head of the Western Railroad of Massachusetts and the whole family moved to Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1842, Czar Nicholas I of Russia commissioned George Whistler to work on a railroad that would connect St. Petersburg to Moscow. The Whistler family moved to St. Petersburg, Russia.

Little Jimmy Whistler arrived in his new home with some drawing experience that demonstrated a precocious talent. In 1845, at only 10 years old, he entered the Imperial Academy of Fine Art at Level 2 of the four levels. He also received private lessons from a fellow named Alexander Karitsky, a student in the graduating class, whom Jimmy’s parents hoped would help the young lad catch up and fulfill the curriculum of copying plaster casts of classical antiquities and portraits of living models. One year later, in March 1846, the young American beginner reached 28th place in a class of over 100.  

However, this idyllic period of art lessons did not last long. Jimmy and Willie’s father enrolled his sons in a local boarding school with military discipline. According to biographer Daniel E. Sutherland, Jimmy thrived in this regimented environment, but Willie found it painful to live away from home and only visit his family on weekends. During the Russian Christmas recess in January 1847, Jimmy contracted rheumatic fever. Both children did not return to the school after the holidays. 

Seven months later the family visited London to attend George’s eldest daughter Deborah’s wedding to Sir Seymour Haden. Because of Jimmy’s frail health, the Whistlers returned to St Petersburg without their son, who stayed with the Hadens and then went to a boarding school in London in 1848. In 1849, Anna and the children returned to London to escape an outbreak of cholera. Major George stayed in St. Petersburg and died of cholera on April 9th. Anna moved the family back to the United States, settling in Pomfret, Connecticut.   

At age 17, following in his father’s footsteps, James enrolled in West Point Academy. This period of military education lasted from 1851 to 1854, when he was expelled because of his poor grades. While at West Point, Jimmy visited his mother in Scarsdale, New York at the home of her dear friends Margaret and Sarah Hill, sisters of the wealthy William Sherbrooke Popham, who owned a vast estate. Today “JW”’s Scarsdale sketches are located in the U.S. Library of Congress. One is Fleming-Hill House at 4 Rectory Lane and the other is St. James the Lesser Church at 10 Church Lane. The church caught fire on Palm Sunday, April 2, 1882, nearly destroying the entire building. Fortunately, Whistler’s handsome drawing survived and serves as a record of the original building, which was rebuilt differently. Anna, a “devout Episcopalian,” Sutherland claims, probably worshipped at this church when she resided in Scarsdale.  

After James left West Point, he packed his bags to set sail for Paris in pursuit of the artist’s career he read about in Henri Murger’s Scenes of Bohemian Life, published in 1851. With this new-found freedom, James McNeill Whistler acquired his reputation as a flamboyant, stubborn, and courageously inventive aesthete, dedicated to “art for art’s sake.” His circle of friends included the contemporary modernist artists and writers who questioned academic rules and social norms: Alfonse Legros, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Charles Baudelaire. To polish his artistic skills, he chose the renown Swiss artist Charles Gleyre’s free atelier, where he studied from 1855 to 1858.

In 1858 Whistler printed the first of his etching series called The French Set, images of working–class life and neighborhoods. He hoped to sell these works for much-needed income. While visiting London, he stayed with the Hadens and painted his half-sister Deborah and niece Annie in his first major oil painting At the Piano (1858-9).  

The strong horizontal composition foreshadows the portrait of Anna Whistler’s composition. It also exemplifies the influence of Dutch artists, such as Rembrandt and Vermeer. Art historian Hilary Taylor quoted Degas’ remark: “In our beginnings, Fantin, Whistler and I were all on the same road, the road from Holland.” (p.14). However, Whistler’s submission of At the Piano to the 1859 Paris Salon met with rejection. The blow triggered a new plan: to leave Paris and set up a studio in London.  

Whistler’s painting Wapping (1860-64) signals this new direction for his career and the beginning of his relationship with Joanna Hiffernan (aka Heffernan), his favorite model and mistress. We see Jo seated next to a gentleman who might be their mutual friend the French-British writer George du Maurier, whom Whistler met in Gleyre’s classes. Jo became his ethereal, red-haired muse, featured in his breathtaking Symphony in White, No. 1 (1862) and Symphony in White, No. 2 (1864-55). The sensual flow of her abundant hair framing her pale complexion and cascading down her shoulders coupled with a far-off wide-eyed stare falls in line with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s feminine mystique: natural and unadorned. The poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who presided over the PRB, was one of Whistler’s close friends in London. 

However, the thick, broad brushstrokes of various white hues irritated the jury for the Paris Salon of 1863. They lacked the polished, smooth, blended surfaces prized by the French Academy and also the PRB painters. Symphony in White, No. 1 was rejected by the French jury, and yet appeared in the infamous Salon des Refusés, along with another “loser,” Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1863). 

In 1866 Jo posed for Whistler’s close friend Gustave Courbet in Trouville (while they all were on holiday together) and in Paris (The Sleepers, 1866, Petit Palais, Paris). The intimate relationship between James and Jo ended around 1867, but the American artist did not forsake her entirely. Jo had not only been his model and mistress, but she also ran his household and sold his work, identifying herself as “Mrs. Abbot.” When another relationship produced an illegitimate son, Jo and her sister took the child into their home and raised him. In light of this, Whistler provided for Jo in his will, gave her power of attorney in his absence, and entrusted her with his bank account. However, she died decades before Whistler (five years her senior) in 1886. 

While still in the throes of this romance, Anna moved in with her son in 1863 and Jo had to move out. Their home was at 2 Lindsey Row (now 96 Cheyne Walk), near the Black Lion Wharf, which we see in a framed etched located on the left side of Anna’s portrait. Unfortunately, the climate in London did not suit Anna’s health and she developed a respiratory illness. Deborah, her stepdaughter, helped her move to Hastings in East Sussex, by the sea, in 1876, to recover. She lived in Hastings until her death in 1881 and was buried in Hastings Cemetery.

After Anna moved to Hastings, the infamous Ruskin trial took place in 1878 which bankrupted the artist. In a published pamphlet, Ruskin had accused Whistler of “flinging a paint pot in the public’s face” with his almost abstract seascape Nocturne Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (c. 1875). Whistler sued the critic for libel. The trial did not go well for Whistler and yet the court ruled in his favor, awarding him the lowest monetary denomination, one farthing. It was humiliating. To recover financially from his legal expenses, Whistler sold most of his possessions and set off for Venice to fulfill a commission for scenic etchings.    

On August 11, 1888, Whistler finally married the love of his life, Beatrice Godwin, his “Trixie,” after her husband died, and the two relocated to Paris in the spring of 1892, a few months after Whistler’s Mother was acquired by the French State. That year he became an Officier de la Légion d’honneur. (John Singer Sargent, another American artist and Whistler’s junior by 11 years, was awarded a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1889.)

The Whistlers took up residence in Paris at 110 rue de Bac, and James found a studio space on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs in Montparnasse. He was about to become 58 years old, and it seemed his life in Paris had reignited his career, beginning with his elegant portrait Arrangement in Black and Gold: Robert, Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac (1891-4, The Frick Collection). Unfortunately, the joy of Paris dimmed when Trixie fell ill with cancer. The treatments in France failed to improve her health and the couple returned to London to save Trixie’s life. They arrived in February 1896 and she died on May 10th. She was buried on her birthday, May 12th, just shy of 38 years old. The loss of Trixie devastated her husband to the extent that his production ebbed considerably. James Abbot McNeill Whistler died seven years later, on July 17, 1903, almost a week after his 69th birthday. 

And yet, Anna Whistler and her beloved Jemie live on in the current exhibition at the Tate Britian. Flanked by her two sons, Dr. William McNeill Whistler (1871- 3) and Arrangement in Grey: Self-Portrait of the Artist (1872), we can study Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother as a likeness of Anna and as a still life because of its emphasis on the relationship of geometric forms unified by its limited palette. The choice of black, grey and white, what we call grisaille, interrupted by Mrs. Whistler’s pink skin, seems to be a medley of tonal gradations. Moreover, it harks back to the range of colors and monochromatic backgrounds backgrounds favored by 17th-century Spanish artist Diego Velásquez, whom Whistler greatly appreciated and Anna mentioned upon viewing the finished work. And yet, in Whistler’s Mother, the evident flatness of the wall behind the sitter, rather than implied deep space in Velázquez’s paintings, seems to reference Japanese prints which Whistler admired and owned. 

Anna’s posture also approaches a Japanese feeling for abstracting recognizable shapes to highlight the purely aesthetic aspect of its content. Clothed in her mourning gown (adopted since the death of her husband George) and modest lacy white bonnet, she anchors the composition in black surrounded by grey that pulls together a long vertical Japanese curtain (actually a kimono) and the etching of Black Lion Wharf on our left, with the rectangular framed print, cut off from view, on our right. Anna’s once beautiful face is now lined with age and drooping at the jowl, illustrating the  Realists’ fidelity to nature instead of upholding the academic preference for idealization. 

Whistler’s title “Arrangement” references music, which Whistler explains in his book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890): “Nature contains the elements, in color and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful — as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony.” (Dover edition, pp 142-43). Other musical terms in his titles were “symphony,” “nocturne,” “rhapsody,” “caprice,” and “harmony.” In this respect, Whistler led the burgeoning Aesthetic Movement’s attempts to integrate all the arts as well as assert the superiority of artificial beauty over natural beauty.  

At the Tate Britain, the curators organized Whistler’s Nocturnes in one gallery, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to delight in a comparison of these dreamy landscapes and seascapes usually scattered all over the globe. The technique Whistler achieved their misty effects came from his special “sauce” layered like sheets of watercolor, one on top of the other, sometimes dripping into place. Whistler’s willingness to experiment tempered by control and experience can be observed in this video featuring the museum’s conservator, Rachel Scott. (In another video, Scott demonstrates how to clean Whistler’s delicate paintings.)  

And what of Whistler’s relationship to Impressionism, still in its infancy in 1871? As we see in Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1, stillness dominates and stillness dominates and timelessness pervades this arid room. Our only sense of movement comes from the Japanese “curtain” that seems to flutter, ever so gently gently, its silver floral pattern spread across the opaque charcoal grey-black cloth. Whistler’s interest in the play of light on surfaces attempts to articulate pure form and pure light in his compositions to drive home the notion art is about the literal components in a work of art. Conversely, the Impressionists animated their surfaces with light to invoke the quickly changing nature of life, especially modern life – its highly-charged tempo and its endlessly ephemeral qualities. Impressionism remained tethered to the anecdotal in art. Whistler came as close as possible to becoming the first abstract artist in western art history, but he just couldn’t give up referencing the world as he knew it. 

The Tate Britain’s exhibition features 150 paintings, drawings, and etchings as well as an entire recreation of the infamous Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room (1876-77), which belongs to the Freer Gallery of Art, the Asian collection of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. Commissioned by the British shipping magnate Frederick Leyland, and designed by Whistler with the British architect, Thomas Jeckyll (1827-1881), this completely original concept of Japanese-inspired wall murals surrounded by Leyland’s collection of hundreds of blue and white porcelain vases testifies to the American artist’s unlimited imagination. In effect and color scheme, The Peacock Room feels like the complete opposite of Arrangement of Grey and Black, No. 1’s calm, and restraint.  

For here is a resplendent interior painted in blue-green and gold surrounding enormous murals of animated peacocks and the painting Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65). At first, Leyland gave Whistler full reign and then to his utter shock and dismay, he discovered the artist completely painted over his prized possession: 16th-century Spanish leather wall coverings that belonged to Catherine of Aragon when she married Henry III. Once again Whistler suffered the consequences of his unapologetic arrogance. Leyland became one of Whistler’s creditors during his bankruptcy.  

As for Anna Whistler, Jemie’s steadfast mother and patient, cooperative model, there was never any doubt nor complaints about his behavior. She trusted his instincts implicitly, as we see in her November 1871 letter to her sister: “I silently lifted my heart, that it might be as the Net cast in the Lake at the Lord’s Will, as I observed his trying again, and oh my grateful rejoicing in spirit as suddenly my dear Son would exclaim, ‘Oh Mother, it is mastered, it is beautiful!’ and he would kiss me for it!(Anderson, p 180)   

She was the perfect mother for a driven, brilliantly gifted individualist. (She also insisted he study French, which influenced his decision to study in Paris in the 1850s.) With such unconditional love and support, we might ask ourselves: could James Abbot McNeill Whistler have become the artist we revere without her? Probably not. And so, we celebrate here Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler and his son’s Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1, while the painting is en vacances across The Channel, and we look forward to its Rentrée shortly after Anna’s 122nd birthday.

James McNeill Whistler was curated by Carol Jacobi, Curator, British Art 1850-1915, Tate Britain, with Isobel Muir, Assistant Curator, 19th Century British Art; James Finch, former Assistant Curator, 19th Century British Art; and Edwin Becker, Chief Curator of Exhibitions, Van Gogh Museum, and Renske Suijver, Curator, Van Gogh Museum and The Mesdag Collection, along with curatorial advisors Patricia de Montfort, Senior Lecturer in History of Art & Research Curator, The Hunterian at University of Glasgow; Elisa Germán, Lunder Curator of Works on Paper and Whistler Studies, Colby College Museum of Art; and honorary advisor Margaret F. MacDonald Professor Emerita & Honorary Professorial Research Fellow, School of Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow.  

Sources for this article: 

James Abbot McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, Dover, 1967, reprint of the 1892 edition. 

Stanley Weintraub, Whistler: A Biography, Weybright and Talley, 1974. 

Maria Naylor, Selected Etchings of James A. McN. Whistler, Dover, 1975. 

Hilary Taylor, James McNeill Whistler, G.P. Putnam’s Son, 1978. 

Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval, James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth, Carroll and Graf Publishing, 1994 

Daniel E. Sutherland, Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake, Yale University Press, 2014. 

Whistler’s Mother: Grey, Black, and White, The Clark Institute, July 4 – September 27, 2015. 

Whistler’s Woman in White: Jo Hiffernan, Royal Academy of Art, February 26-May 25, 2022. 

The American Artist Who Introduced French Painting to Britain, Perspective Video Series, 2023. (Documentary) 

James McNeill Whistler, Tate Britain, May 21-September 27, 2026.