Portrait of the Artist's Mother | James McNeill Whistler

there are very few paintings in the history of art which we call iconic there's the Mona Lisa there's Vincent van Gogh starry night and there's also whistlers mother so in terms of how the painting became so popular certainly wasn't popular when it first was painted by Whistler when it was entered into the Royal Academy exhibition in 1872 people were very polarized about it they thought it was quite a severe and an austere painting we're still used it almost like his creative calling card for him it was about a study in tone and form in 1933 so long after Whistler was was passed away the work was sent by the Louvre who by that time owned it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York the work was enormous ly popular made more so by the fact that the president of the time he drew up a little diagram of it as a stamp he sent that to the postal exchange and they turned it into a stamp and sent it out the timing of this painting was very significant because it was going round America during the Great Depression this Puritan appearing mother who was suffering the the kind of the ills of her life with a great deal of forbearance and severity she does touched the nation hood and in fact they even made statues to her in America James McNeill Whistler was a painter and a print maker he was born in 1834 his mother Anna McNeill was not the little mouse that she may appear to be in the painting she came from South Carolina she was raised in New York and when she eventually married her husband they went to live in Russia where they lived a quiet prosperous life it was while they were living in Russia that the young James or Jimmy as they called him his nickname started to learn about art then disaster struck because in 18-49 the husband Major Whistler died and so the family came back to the United States where mother enrolled her son in the United States military it was a disastrous thing to do he was terrible student and eventually decided to leave there and go and study in Paris he also learned the fundamentals of itching and so he took this practice with him when he went throughout France he went on travels there and he produced the French set of etchings he then decided to move to England and it's there that he had his first great success as a painter he did a work called at the piano which was entered into the Academy he was a tall man he had a flash of dark hair with a streak of white in it he wore a top hat he carried a long cane that he'd just stick you lated with but the other side of whistlers flamboyant personality was actually a very hardworking and dedicated artist who was was plagued a bit by self-doubt the twin sides of whistlers personality show through in his monogram that he painted on all his work it's a very stylized butterfly and when he was feeling more feisty and combative he added a scorpion-like tail to this butterfly just to show that he had a bit of a sting to him the painting was made in whistlers studio at to Lindsey row opposite the Battersea Bridge in Chelsea and unfashionable part of London in those days we know quite a lot about how Whistler painted this work from his mother one of whistlers models fell ill and her son came to her and said I've always wanted to paint you so he started the preparatory studies for this painting having her standing apparently at the time she had been quite ill and so he had her sit down in the pose that we now see in the painting his mother was in mourning her husband had died and she continued to wear mourning clothes black clothes throughout her life and so really this painting reflects not only the kind of the mood of his mother but also the aesthetic style which Whistler became so well-known for Whistler had limited formal training as an artist and by the time he came to paint portrait of the artist mother really his studio methods have become quite unconventional and and innovative so when he began this painting Whistler took a prepared canvas which had an incomplete composition and he reversed it so that he could paint on the raw linen back and he did this because the back had a rough woven texture and absorbent influence on his paint he had a very impressive ability with paint and that's revealed best when we start to look at the flesh tones on the hands and the face he used thin rounded brushes loaded with ochre and tints of lead white paint which render the fragile aged skin of Anna Whistler the painting was done quite quickly it was done only over three months and Whistler was notorious for taking a very long time to paint it was a transitional work he went on to produce 70 paintings he had a great creative period we've singled out one work in this show which is called Black Lion Wharf and it's a print that he made in 1858 but which he published in 1871 and we single this out because it's included in the painting and it forms a really interesting contrast to the kind of formality and the severity the Christian authority of Anna Whistler to see this print which is of a quiet rough kind of tems worker sitting in the background but I think the reason that he put these two works together a it had just been published so it was obviously on his mind but also it shows the reduced tonal values of the print in comparison to the reduced tonal values of the painting there are actually a quite a large number of possible influences that impacted Whistler in his construction of this work there is a fascinating image by Hill and Adamson to Scottish photographers and it's Oliver woman called and Rigby and it shows her sitting with the same kind of gravitas and almost severity as Anna Whistler now what's interesting is that these two women knew each other and it's quite possible that this photograph of an rigby ended up in the whistler household and that whistler saw it whistler was working in a time where there was a real interest both in photography and in Japanese prints the framing of the painting is an excellent example of the a Japanese woodblock prints on whistlers compositional style from the 1860s onwards Japanese artworks including bronzes textiles ceramics and especially woodblock prints began to arrive in Europe in considerable quantities artists like Whistler were encouraged to experiment with dramatic uses of color they drew upon the Japanese traditions of compositions involving asymmetry the space use of ornament and stylized natural forms and quite dramatically truncated framing whistlers mother sits not in the center of the composition as we would expect in a traditional classical European painting but is in fact slightly offset from center the use of very soft lighting effects in the portrait and the avoidance of the obvious use of shadows is another strategy which suppresses spatial depth in the picture and is a compositional strategy which Whistler is drawing directly from his knowledge of the practices of Japanese woodblock artists one of the really interesting things that we've been able to do in this show is to show the impact that Whistler had on Australian artists out of all the Australian artists it was Mortimer Memphis who had the most direct relationship with Whistler he became whistlers assistant and helped him print his prints and also published a book about his experiences with him here in this exhibition we've also included John long staffs painting the young mother because it shows a really direct correspondence to whistlers portrait of the artist mother so whistlers mother has had an enormous impact on art it's not only entered into the the public consciousness of people but it's also had an impact on the development of modern art Alfred Barr who was then director of the Museum Modern Art in New York said in the 1940s that if you took out the figure of whistlers mother what you're left with is an incredibly abstract painting of the climb that Piett Mondrian made I however would like to leave the last word to Whistler himself when Whistler finished his painting apparently he turned to his mother and he said Oh mother it is mastered it is beautiful and I'd have to agree with that you

Channel: NGV Melbourne

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Id: baUJTGZTOvU

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 03 2016