It’s an odd, ungainly, unforgettable portrait. Anna McNeill Whistler’s face is rigid, lightless and cold as she poses for her son. She’s like a carving from a medieval tomb sutured to an aesthete’s dream. Starbursts of silver dance on the curtain in front of her while she sits as grim as death. Yet by painting her in silhouette, absorbing her black dress into his personal vision, Whistler turns her into a symbol of art for art’s sake.
At least that’s one way of seeing the masterpiece lent by the Musée d’Orsay that stars in Tate Britain’s luscious, seductive blockbuster dedicated to the American painter who delighted and scandalised late Victorian Britain. He competed with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde for leadership of the Aesthetic Movement which dared to say that art has no responsibility to depict real life or serve a moral purpose. The cosmic curtain and carefully composed pattern of Whistler’s Mother add up to the movement’s earliest manifesto: to ram the point home, he called it Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1. Even when I’m painting my mum, says Whistler, I “arrange” her.
