Composición en gris: retrato del pintor

In 1872 Whistler sent the portrait of his mother to the Royal Academy in London. It scraped in after nearly being rejected, and he never showed there again. He had by then started naming pictures after music, and that one went in as Arrangement in Grey and Black, the sitter demoted to a subtitle. Around the same year he turned the formula on himself, a figure in dark clothes held in a narrow range of greys, the title again naming the colour before the man. Whistler kept a photograph of Velazquez's portrait of the court jester Pablo de Valladolid, who stands in an empty grey field with no floor under him, and he was still working from that memory of it in a self-portrait 30 years later. This canvas reached Detroit in 1934, a bequest from the collector Henry Glover Stevens.