ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 19, 1996 TAG: 9605170004
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 9 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: HUGH A. MULLIGAN ASSOCITED PRESS
The artist James McNeill Whistler was probably someone only a mother could love: an arrogant, eccentric dandy and shameless self-promoter with a malicious wit, a massive ego and a talent for making enemies and offending patrons in public print, even as the bill collectors auctioned off his furniture.
``Jimmy,'' said his friend and later enemy Oscar Wilde, ``spells art with a capital I.'' Or, as Edgar Degas, an admirer of Whistler's work, once suggested: ``He should paint with his tongue, then he might be a genius.''
``There's no doubt he was a real pain,'' acknowledges curator Edgar Munhall of New York's Frick Collection, which displays a number of the artist's finest paintings and etchings. To critical acclaim, Munhall has just published ``Whistler and Montesquieu,'' a dual biography of the painter's friendship and furious falling out with the French poet and aesthete.
Whistler's mother, Munhall mused, ``must have found her first-born difficult. She kept him in line as well as she could, and he really did worship her. I think she recognized he was a genius.''
At the age of 2, she found him with pencil and drawing paper under her dressing table in Lowell, Mass., where he later disdained being born. Instead, he chose Baltimore, fancying himself Southern born and bred, like mother, whose family were Scottish Presbyterian settlers in North Carolina.
Anne McNeill was the second wife of George Washington Whistler, an engineering graduate of West Point, who when Jemie was 9 was engaged by Czar Nicholas I to build the 420-mile rail line between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Their youngest son died of seasickness on the way there, but undaunted she helped raise three stepchildren from his first marriage and her surviving two boys.
While father was away with the work crews, the pious mother ruled a strict but loving household. At breakfast everyone recited a psalm. Sunday was the Lord's day; toys were put away after the Saturday night baths not to be touched again until Monday. Most evenings, while she sewed, Jemie read aloud from the King James bible, perhaps absorbing in memory the setting for her famous portrait.
Mom never let them forget they were Americans. To keep them abreast of doings back home, she subscribed to the weekly newspaper from Stonington, Conn., where they had briefly lived. Every Fourth of July she procured fireworks to set off, and every Sunday cooked up a batch of buckwheat cakes, which Jemie years afterward served to Henry James and Mark Twain at his celebrity breakfasts in London.
Her fondest desire was that he become a parson, but she encouraged his love of drawing. When he was ill with rheumatic fever, she bought him a set of Hogarth prints and at 10 enrolled him in drawing classes at the St. Petersburg Institute, even hiring a tutor on weekends so he wouldn't fall behind the rest of the class.
Cholera soon claimed the father's life, and the czar's imperial barge carried the body to the ship taking the family back to America. When Jemie entered West Point, mother moved from Connecticut to Scarsdale, N.Y. to be near him, not that he visited her very often.
Hardly a model cadet, the 5-foot-4 ``Curly,'' as his classmates dubbed him for his unauthorized long black curls, spent most of his off-duty hours chug-a-lugging ``flips'' - eggs beaten in ale - at Benny's Haven outside the gates. Sloppy at drill, falling asleep in class, lampooning the faculty in irreverent cartoons, he often found himself at rigid attention on commandant Robert E. Lee's carpet.
In 1854,he was expelled for piling up more than 200 demerits and flunking chemistry. No doubt he would have soldiered on the Southern side in the looming Civil War. Younger brother Willie was a Confederate surgeon in Virginia, and mother always maintained the South ``was not fighting for slavery but in defense of its homes.''
Whistler missed the conflict by going off, with Mom's blessing and help from her small pension, to study art in Paris and live the bohemian life on the Left Bank.
He never came back to America but in 1859 settled in London, where he roiled the art establishment with his moody studies of the fog-shrouded Thames at dawn or dusk and those luminous, Japanese-inspired portraits to which he assigned musical titles such as ``Symphony in White,'' ``Nocturne in Blue and Silver'' and ``Arrangement in Grey and Black.''
After Appomattox sealed the fate of the Confederacy, Mom turned up in London. She moved into his digs in arty Chelsea as Joanna Hiffernan, his flamboyant redheaded mistress and the model for the lady in white on a wolf-skin rug, hurriedly moved out.
Mom brought order into his chaotic existence. She served tea and lunch for the models who posed for hours at his easel, always remembering to knock first after the embarrassment of walking in on the parlormaid posing in the altogether.
She flogged his Paris etchings to friends in America, sweetly pressured patrons into more generous advances and chose the fabric and the dress pattern for 8-year-old Cecily Alexander, the subject of his charming ``Harmony in Grey and Green.''
After an early morning row on the Thames, searching for painting scenes, he joined her for breakfast. At least twice a week, when not sneaking off for a tryst with Joanna, he had dinner with her and sat by the fire in what he called her ``withdrawing room.'' On Sundays he walked with her to Old Chelsea Church, leaving her at the door with a tip of his broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat.
She never could do anything about his outrageous dress. With the media ever in mind, Whistler aggressively promoted his persona in frock coat and white duck trousers, yellow gloves - Marcel Proust walked off with a pair and treasured them unto death - patent-leather shoes with pink bows, flowing black curls streaked with a skunklike white forelock, a monocle on a black ribbon, an organ-grinder mustache and a jaunty swagger executed in tempo with his ``wand,'' a walking stick about a foot shorter than himself. From Wilde and Montesquieu to Frank Lloyd Wright and Dali, he set the tone for the artist as public eccentric.
They quarreled bitterly over his slipping off to France for a month with Joanna. In a Byronesque rage, Whistler stormed off to Chile to volunteer his West Point training in the war for independence against Spain and led the retreat when shells began to fall. Mother worried even more when, in another temper tantrum, he knocked his brother-in-law through the window of a Paris cafe. She stuck by her Jemie and never called again at her stepdaughter's home.
The artist at first thought of having his mother photographed. He was interested in this latest fad. Then he made an oil sketch of her standing, facing the artist. But she was in her late 60s and pleaded that her feet were killing her. ``Jemie is not a rapid painter,'' she told a neighbor, knowing that some subjects squirmed through as many as 70 sessions.
Finally he had her sit in a straight-back chair in the profile pose that has been endlessly reproduced on calendars and chocolate boxes, in art books and on classroom walls, in cartoons and sewing samplers: a sweet old lady in a lacy head scarf and a prim dark gown, hands clutching a kerchief in her lap, tiny feet on a footstool and on the back wall a framed view of Black Lion wharf. His painting, of course; he displayed no rivals.
The painting was started in the summer of 1871 on the back of a canvas on which he had begun a portrait of a 13-year-old girl who rebelled against posing anymore. Mother also complained one day about his endless rub-outs and retouches.
Three months later he cried, ``O mother, it is mastered,'' and tenderly kissed her brow. He gave it the title ``Arrangement in Grey and Black No.l: Portrait of the Painter's Mother.''
``My Jemie,'' Mom wrote in her diary, ``has no nervous fears in painting his mother's portrait for it is to please himself and not to be paid in other coin.'' But it did generate immediate business. Author Thomas Carlyle, a Chelsea neighbor who abhorred Whistler and called him ``that creature,'' agreed to pose after seeing the portrait. He became ``Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2.''
Mother was not told that the Royal Academy at first rejected her portrait, accepting it only after Sir William Boxall, an eminent Victorian artist, threatened to resign. Whistler fumed it ``was grudgingly accepted and badly hung.'' He never submitted anything to the academy again.
The portrait went on loan to the Liverpool estate of shipping tycoon Frederick Leyland who proudly hung it next to a Velazquez in his baronial dining hall. The baggage car returning it to London caught fire and, as Mom wrote a friend in America, ``the flames reached the case in which my portrait was. The lid was burnt, a side of the frame was scorched, yet the painting was not injured.''
Mom's portrait came to the rescue in Whistler's most-famous feud: his libel suit against critic John Ruskin. Hearing the price Whistler was asking for ``The Falling Rocket,'' a waterscape of fireworks over the Thames, the Oxford don wrote that he ``never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.''
The painting was brought into court and, to howls of laughter, placed upside down on the easel. Whistler, nonetheless, won his case and lost everything. He was awarded 1 farthing, about half a cent, in damages, which he wore ever after on his watch chain.
Court costs and attorney fees bankrupted the artist. He lost the new home he was building, saw his furniture and precious blue and white china sold at auction, but by serving the bailiffs beer spiked with snuff managed to smuggle out Mom's portrait to a friendly engraver. With his tailor, wine merchant, milkman, grocer and frame-maker howling for payment, Whistler fled to Venice to recoup his fortunes with a set of etchings, using Mom's portrait as collateral for loans. She knitted him a pair of gloves to warm ``those beautiful hands'' against winter's blasts along the Grand Canal.
Mother saw his money woes as a divine rebuke for working on Sunday, which he never did again. She worried herself sick when Jemie decorated the Peacock Room for patron Leyland, who broke with him over the ``outrageous'' cost of a masterpiece that has since been reconstructed at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. ``Imagine him up on ladders and scaffolding with his palate and studio brushes,'' she fretted.
When she began to fail, son Willie, now a Harley Street physician, ordered her out of London's damp climate to sunnier Hastings. As soon as Mom moved out, mistress and model Maud Franklin moved into the artist's digs. Whistler was in Paris when Mom died, 10 years after having sat for the portrait, and hurried too late to her bedside. ``It would have been better had I been a parson as she wanted,'' he wept.
With the help of friends such as composer Claude Debussy, Whistler in 1891 pressured the French government into acquiring the portrait of his mother. It hung in the Louvre until a decade ago when all 19th-century paintings were moved to the Musee d'Orsay, a converted railroad station on the Left Bank.
``Whistler would have been very disappointed and complained bitterly about how it is hung,'' Munhall mused. And the artist might have gone berserk and hurried to Washington to cane the postmaster general when in 1934 the U.S. Post Office reproduced mother on a stamp and added a flowerpot to the left-hand corner.
``Like some critics, they thought the composition was a little empty,'' said the curator with a shake of his head. ``I find the portrait endlessly fascinating, almost abstract in the formality of its composition, so powerful on so many levels. I regret it has become such a hackneyed image.''
Last summer Whistler's Mother came to Washington's National Gallery in an exhibition of more than 200 of the artist's works previously shown in London and Paris. Novelist John Updike watched school kids being herded through suddenly pause ``for a tittering moment of recognition'' before the portrait, which he ranks among the four most recognizable works of art. ``The others are the `Mona Lisa,' the `Venus de Milo' and Edward Munch's `The Scream.'''
Curator Munhall agrees with Updike's choice of the world's four best-known masterpieces. Whistler would have questioned the other three.
LENGTH: Long : 202 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Anne McNeill Whistler's portrait has become an iconby CNBto motherhood. 2. Her son, ``Jemie'' (inset), was a constant concern
in her life.