La Mère de Whistler

Whistler did not call this a portrait of his mother. He titled it Arrangement in Grey and Black, and he meant it. His interest was the balance of tones, the way the dark figure sits against a pale wall, and he said plainly that the public need not care who the sitter was. The sitter was Anna McNeill Whistler, his mother, and one account holds that she took the chair only because the model he had booked failed to turn up. When France bought the painting in 1891, it became the first work by an American artist to enter the national collection, which is how a study in grey by a man chasing pure tone ended up, decades later, hanging in Paris as one of the most recognised faces in the world.