The gentle art of making portraits
James McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother is the most famous portrait of an artist’s family member, and an image that rivals the Mona Lisa and American Gothic in its ubiquity and universal appeal.
James McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother 1871
One of the most charming details of the painting—and an idea which I stole for this portrait—is the inclusion of Whistler’s own Black Lion Wharf, the framed etching which appears in the background.*
James McNeill Whistler’s Black Lion Wharf 1859
Whistler’s Mother, as the work is known, was painted at a time when portraiture was undergoing a transformation. With the advent of photography, all of art was changing, but portrait painting in particular needed to shake off aspects of its mimetic nature. As Whistler himself said:
“The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this in portrait painting, to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.”**
Throughout his career, Whistler struggled with portraiture. Though he was always looking to do more of it for the financial success and academic honors it could bestow on an artist, he was never particularly adept at negotiating the process with his patrons and sitters. More often than not, he failed to complete portrait commissions even after many grueling sittings. Still he remained fascinated with the figure, honing his portrait skills with anonymous models—work that was not particularly market-friendly but which reveals that his fascination with people went beyond the commercial rewards of portraiture.
In fact, Whistler was supposed to be working on one such painting when the model failed to show and he subsequently asked his mother to fill in. To begin with, the artist asked Anna Whistler to stand—the pose he preferred for portraiture—but his mother was too weak, so he allowed her to sit and, in the process, created the striking profile pose that is so iconic.
In a letter to her sister, Mrs. Whistler wrote of sitting for her son:
“Jemie had no nervous fears in painting his Mother’s portrait for it was to please himself and not to be paid for in other coin, only at one or two difficult points when I heard him ejaculate ‘No! I can’t get it right! it is impossible to do it as it ought to be done perfectly!’ I silently lifted my heart, that it might be as the Net cast down in the Lake at the Lord’s will, as I observed his trying again, and oh my grateful rejoicing in spirit as suddenly my dear Son would exclaim, ‘Oh Mother, it is mastered, it is beautiful!’ and he would kiss me for it!”***
It never ceases to amaze me the way that portraiture is kept apart from the rest of art—by artists and their mothers as well as by historians and critics. There’s this idea that portrait painting is less than other genres and media because of the pressures involved in the making of portrait and, more specifically, in the making of a commissioned portrait. But what art is formed without the tension of mediating between an artist’s vision and the ideas of society at large? What art is safe from the world’s influence? And, if that art did exist, would it even be interesting to anyone but its maker?
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*From David Park Curry’s James McNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces 2004.
**From Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval’s James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth 1994.
***From Elizabeth Mumford’s Whistler’s Mother: The Life of Anna McNeill Whistler 1939.
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CATEGORIES: - Philosophy - On portraiture - Featuring artists -
joshua emrich...
Portraits existed throughout the 20th century in all aspects of the art world, They were just not spoken of as “portraits”. Off hand I think of Giocometti(misspelled)and Bonnard. More recently Jenny Saville, John Currin etc. etc…
--- -- - --- - ---- - - --- ----- -- -Maybe you are talking about the blatantly commercial aspects of the portrait transaction, tho’. But I like to call them portraits in my own head, since thats basically what they are-Let the big art world call them what they want.
If I’m missing your point-just wait, The art world in its present phase IS changing. R. Crumb has a show at PAM, China design was DESIGN, and Tim Burton has a show at MOMA. The audience is getting more of what it wants.
And the audience/real world wants to see itself, wants portraits.
But the world also wants memesis, I don’t agree its such a bad thing. To many it is a virtue. And YOU are incredibly memetic. You have huge talent in holing a mirror up to the sitter. You “know how to render” without your talent in that, Your work would be cut in half.
I for one, Love to take breaks from my own subjectivity and spend hours studying others through drawing.