James McNeill Whistler

By treating his portraits as “arrangements” and his landscapes as fields of colour, the American artist was ahead of his time, as STEVE PILL explains

- STEVE PILL

James McNeill Whistler was an American artist, trained in Paris and famed for his London nocturnes, yet his connections to Scotland ran surprisingly deep. He only visited the country once as a teenager, yet he was embraced as one of their own. The Glasgow Boys called him “The Master” and petitioned for the Corporation of Glasgow to buy his Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, becoming the first public collection to own Whistler's work. The University of Glasgow, meanwhile, gave him an honorary doctorate and is now home to the world’s largest public display of the artist’s work, comprising 80 oil paintings and more than 1,700 works on paper, as well as almost 300 artworks made by his late wife Beatrix, all thanks to a bequest from his sister-in-law Rosalind.

The origin of these Celtic connections is the subject of one of Whistler’s most famous paintings, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother. Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler was born in North Carolina, yet also had Scottish ancestry, being descended from the Highland McNeills of Barra. “[James] would accentuate these aspects of his lineage for exotic effect after becoming an expatriate,” wrote his biographer, Lisa N Peters.

That maternal portrait was painted while Whistler was living with his mother in London’s Chelsea. Although it is now celebrated as a “Victorian Mona Lisa”, it came narrowly close to being refused by the Royal Academy of Art’s annual exhibition in 1872, apparently on the grounds of it being presented as an “arrangement” not a portrait. Nevertheless, it was a sign that the artist’s focus was shifting.