Art: Whistler’s Mother

Official connoisseurs reported to the French Government that Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black—the portrait of his mother—”is not yet ready for the Louvre.” Of all American canvases this was the likliest for the honor.

In 1890, on advice of Clemenceau and Bourgious, France bought the painting, hung it in the Luxembourg. It was recently transferred to a smaller museum, the Jeu de Paume, in the Tuileries, where it hangs surrounded by works of living Americans-Mary Cassatt, Walter Gay, Cecilia Beaux, John Sargent.

Artists feel it would be inappropriate to take the picture from among its fellows and hang it in the Louvre as a solitary example of American art, although Whistler himself despised most American art and dreamed of the hereafter when he should be given Louvre wall-space.