Whistler's Mother
Artist: James McNeill Whistler
Anna Whistler sits beside a patterned curtain, her white bonnet and handkerchief interrupting a field of grey and black. The picture can feel like a monument to motherhood, yet its formal title asks us to attend to relationships between shapes and tones. Her own letters reveal the practical decisions, affection and religious feeling behind that apparent stillness. Later exhibitions and a controversial postage stamp helped turn a private likeness into a public emblem.