Butterfly's Mummy

Anna Mathilda McNeill, born in Wilmington, N. C. 128 years ago, was a very prim and formidable lady, proud of her relationship to the McNeills of Barra, the Fairfaxes of Virginia. She married a U. S. Army engineer, bore him four sons, went with him to Russia in 1843 to build a railroad in that country: between Moscow and St. Petersburg. She held family prayers every morning, kept the Sabbath with awful rigidity and insisted on serving roast turkey and pumpkin pie on the banks of the Neva. But she would not be of the slightest interest to the U. S. public today if her son James Abbott McNeill Whistler had not grown to be a great artist, had not painted her portrait in 1872, the last portrait he ever got past the outraged admissions committee of the Royal Academy. One of the best known portraits in the world, it last week arrived in the U. S. for the first time in 50 years, was exhibited behind a stout iron railing in New York's Museum of Modern Art. Irascible Jimmy Whistler, who signed his pictures with a butterfly and fought with all his friends, painted his mother's picture on the back of a canvas on which he had started the head of a young girl. Any appearance of sentimentality revolted the little dandy. When the picture was first exhibited he insisted that the title be merely "Arrangement in Gray and Black." To Harper Pennington, a friend who was enthusiastic over the spiritual quality of the picture, the Butterfly suddenly softened. "Yes, --yes," he drawled, tugging gently at the little tuft under his lip, "one does like to make one's mummy just as nice as possible." So simple, so calm is the "Mother" that it is difficult to realize with what angry cluckings it was hailed on its first exhibition. Only because Sir William Boxall, Whistler's friend, argued himself hoarse in its behalf did it get into the Royal Academy at all. Critic Tom Taylor of the Times (he also doubled for Punch) promptly criticized it as "ignoring all accepted canons of good drawing, good color and good painting." In 1881-82 the picture was shown in Philadelphia and New York. Nobody thought enough of it to bid the $1,000 Jimmy Whistler was asking. In 1889 Georges Clemenceau, already a figure in French politics, saw it in a dealer's window in Paris and pulled wires to have it bought for the Luxembourg. Two years later the French Government got it for 2,000 francs ($400). In 1926 it was promoted to the Louvre to take its place with Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa as one of that vast repository's prime attractions.

Mincing Jimmy Whistler with his colossal conceit,* his rouged cheeks, his monocle, was a master of composition, of repartee and publicity but he knew very little about the chemistry of his craft. Because he used poor colors and sometimes repainted his canvases a dozen times, many of the best Whistlers are physically disintegrating. Not so the "Mother," whose color is as fresh, as luminous as it ever was.

Another great Whistler, even more interesting to artists, hung in the same gallery last week, the famed "White Girl," a red-haired beauty in a white medieval gown painted with great technical skill against a white background. When first exhibited the public insisted on considering it as an illustration for Wilkie Collins' great mystery story, The Woman in White. It was actually a portrait of Whistler's Irish mistress, Joanna ("Jo") Heffernan, painted in 1862 when elegant Jimmy was just deciding that there was nothing for him in the mystical moonshine of the pre-Raphaelites. At the exhibition's opening last week a dignified, grey-haired woman moved between the canvases of Mother and Mistress. She is Whistler's most faithful friend, Mrs. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, widow of Etcher Joseph Pennell. Jimmy Whistler never insulted the Pennells. Together they wrote the official Whistler biography. For a generation Mrs. Pennell has defended her friend from contemporaries who felt the Butterfly's sting.

Despite the amount of publicity given these two canvases last week, the Museum's show was not merely a Whistler exhibition. It was a most impressive review of U. S. painting of the past 70 years. Besides Whistler there were some great canvases by Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Thomas Eakins, Ralph Albert Blakelock, John Singer Sargent (looking more superficial than ever beside George Wesley Bellows). For the moderns, the Museum had works by Rockwell Kent, George Luks, Edward Hopper, Eugene Speicher, Walt Kuhn, Isamu Noguchi. Directly opposite Whistler's "White Girl" the hanging committee placed Eugene Speicher's portrait of Katharine Cornell. It more than held its own.

*Artist Whistler saw clearer than most of his contemporaries the real worth of his own painting. He treated all British and U. S. artists with vast disdain, loved nothing better than to goad and insult fat Oscar Wilde. He was always polite, always respectful to Degas, Manet, Renoir.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.