After the Virgin Mary herself, Anna McNeill Whistler may be considered one of the most recognizable mothers in all of art history. The Wilmington native is also one of the most famous moms to call North Carolina home.
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She has been the subject of songs, films, television shows, postage stamps, and even an 8-foot bronze statue in Pennsylvania that is dedicated to mothers everywhere.
Admirers have described her son James’ 1871 portrait of her, “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,” as a “Victorian Mona Lisa,” an “iconic symbol of motherhood” and one of the “most famous works by an American artist outside the United States.”
Art historians see it as a leading example of the “aesthetic” movement — a style that emphasized composition over subject matter and helped to coin the term “art for art’s sake,” according to Dana Cowen, curator for European and American art before 1950 at UNC Chapel Hill’s Ackland Art Museum.
“I think that this was a picture that he made that he intended to be his masterpiece,” Cowen told the Carolina Journal.
The painting, which made James Whistler the first American-born artist to be displayed in The Louvre (24 years after his death), is currently housed in Paris’ Musée d’Orsay. Sold for 4,000 francs to the French government in 1891, the priceless work now has a theoretical value of up to $200 million.
But according to historian Blake Tyner, the enduring image of Mother Whistler in her golden years is just the cherry on top in a life that few people even now — much less in her lifetime — could begin to comprehend.
“When you do look at the painting, you think you just see this old woman,” said Tyner, whose dual interests in women’s history and regional history first led him to research Mrs. Whistler. “But, you know, there’s so much more to her.”
Like a 19th-century Forrest Gump, she traversed the globe and stumbled into historic milestones, crossing the Atlantic Ocean 11 times by ship in a life that took her from the plantations of the antebellum South to industrial-era New York City, czarist Russia, and Victorian England.
“There were people who didn’t even know that Russia existed in the back countries of Bladen County, North Carolina,” Tyner said. “But to think that she’s there, being around the upper echelons of society, buying Russian sables and going to the Catherine Palace — you don’t get that view of her just by looking at that painting of her in black and gray.”
BOUND FOR GLORY
Although much has been written by and about Mrs. Whistler, there are few traces left of her childhood in North Carolina, where she lived until the age of 10.
She is remembered in Wilmington by a historical marker at the intersection of Third and Orange streets — a block from where she was born in 1804, in a two-story, brick home on the site of what is now known as the Rankin‒Walker House. (The house that now stands there, built circa 1890, has itself made appearances in several TV shows.)
Anna was the fifth of six children born to Martha and Daniel McNeill. Her father, a physician who had been educated at the University of Edinburgh, had married an earlier wife while living abroad and had two daughters before returning home to Wilmington. After his first wife died, he wed Martha, a “local beauty,” according to biographers.
In addition to the home in Wilmington, where Dr. McNeill set up his practice, young Anna spent her summers at her grandparents’ plantation, Oak Forest, located near present-day Clarkton in Bladen County.
Through her brothers, she cultivated an interest in refined activities like music, history, French and cooking. And it was through her brother William, a cadet at West Point, that she became acquainted with George Washington Whistler, whom she would eventually marry, becoming his second wife.
“His first wife was her best friend,” Tyner said. “When the friend died, then she ended up raising her friend’s children.”
In addition to the three stepchildren, she and Major Whistler had several of their own. James, the eldest, was born in 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, where his father had taken a job as chief engineer of the Locks and Canals Company.
The Whistler patriarch would eventually get into the railroad industry, with a flourishing business building locomotive train engines. This caught the attention of Russian emissaries who had gone to study American railroads in order to build their own line from St. Petersburg to Moscow during the reign of Czar Nicholas I.
They offered George Whistler a job overseeing the project, for which he received an annual salary of $12,000 (the equivalent of around $480,000 in today’s dollars) and supervised the work of some 60,000 mechanics and laborers.
CZARS AND WARS
During the family’s five years in Russia, Anna Whistler maintained detailed diaries that “presented her criticizing, anguishingly empathetic, and sometimes uninformed insights into the life of mid-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg,” according to a description by Evelyn Jasiulko Harden, assistant professor of Russian and Russian literature at Simon Fraser University.
But despite a sense of alienation due to the language barrier, she did her best to act as a sort of cultural ambassador to the Russian aristocracy, celebrating American traditions while keeping her roots close at heart.
“At Thanksgiving, she insisted on roast turkey and actual pumpkin pie,” Tyner said. “So, she was introducing them to those types of Southern foods that they wouldn’t have necessarily been familiar with.”
In return, the Whistler family was exposed to an entirely new world of culture, which made a lasting impression on young James.
“They traveled in circles with royalty, and when [James] was 10, [Anna] actually got to take him to the Catherine Palace to view all the paintings,” Tyner said.
James subsequently was enrolled at St. Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, where he first began to study drawing and was described as having a “singular talent” by visiting artists.
But the family’s fortunes took a drastic turn when the city was struck by an outbreak of cholera in 1848. Anna took the children to England. Her husband stayed behind to finish the railroad job, dying a year later.
“When he died in Russia, [Czar] Nicholas offered to let her stay there and educate her children, and she said no, she wanted to come back to America,” Tyner said.
Her income took a major hit, dropping to around $1,500 a year (or $63,500 in today’s dollars).
“But she still insisted on keeping those children as much as she could in the upper parts of society and being around artists and writers and things like that,” Tyner said.
James went on to study in Paris before moving to London, where he proceeded to establish himself as a prominent artist. Another son, William, went on to become a surgeon for the Confederacy when the Civil War came.
Torn between her New York home and North Carolina heritage, Anna Whistler opted to join James in England. But with her money tied up in Northern banks, she was forced to return to Wilmington seeking funds for the trip, and then to evade an enemy blockade on a Confederate steamship known as the Advance.
In London, Mrs. Whistler once again enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle with a three-story house in the fashionable Chelsea district, where she served homemade biscuits and iced tea to writers and artists such as Ford Madox Ford, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Meredith, Charles Augustus Howell, according to an NCpedia entry.
But it wasn’t all easy-living. Despite his stern, biblical upbringing, James had a reputation for carousing and womanizing.
“When [Anna] was going to move in with him, he actually made his mistress move out,” Cowen said.
“And so, you get a sense that he had a deep respect for her,” Cowen added. “But at the same time … he was flamboyant in his life. He verged on bankruptcy. I think, on multiple occasions, he was openly hostile to critics of his work. He had a hard time keeping relationships.”
PORTRAIT OF A LADY
Mrs. Whistler was in her late 60s when she sat for her famous portrait at James’ home.
“His plan was to paint her standing, but she didn’t want to stand for that long of a period of time,” Tyner said. “So that’s why she’s actually in the rocking chair.”
Although it was initially scoffed at by the Royal Academy of Arts, exhibitions in France and America helped it to gain international renown, drawing favorable comparison to European art’s Old Masters.
Yet, for many it was the subject of the painting that made it so intriguing — causing James Whitmer to bristle at the reaction.
“To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?” he said.
According to Cowen, its modern appreciation lies in its paradoxical nature, balancing a deeply intimate and intriguing subject matter to which any viewer can relate, alongside the pared-down, paradigm-shattering explorations of form and color that art experts can admire.
“It’s a highly legible image of motherhood, of age, of the idea of restraint and dignity; I think people really resonate with that,” she said. “And it’s just a beautifully composed picture. I think there is this kind of quietude to it. It’s beautifully painted: You have these tonal relationships. It’s a very monochromatic picture. You’re getting just blacks and browns and grays and whites. And so, it’s very pleasing to the eye.”
If a trip to Paris is too expensive, a full-size replica of the painting hangs in Wilmington’s City Hall.
Visitors to Chapel Hill also can admire the Ackland Museum’s collection of around 50 Whistler drawings and prints (including an early print reproduction of Mrs. Whistler’s famous portrait) whenever they go on display.
“We don’t have anything on view by him right now because works on paper are light sensitive, and so we have to rotate those out pretty frequently,” Cowen noted.
As for historians looking to learn more about Mrs. Whistler’s life, the State Archives in Raleigh lists several documents in its collection, including a mimeographed sketch titled “North Carolina’s Claim to Whistler’s Mother” by her biographer, Kate R. McDiarmid, which contains details of Mrs. Whistler’s family, her early years in Wilmington and Bladen County, and her later life.