James McNeill Whistler’s portrait of his mother is back in Philadelphia after a century

Americans really like to make their art in Europe. From the 13 colonies to the 20th century, moving to Paris or London gave an American painter’s brand a highbrow varnish. “My God,” the Indiana-born artist William Merritt Chase once declared, “I would rather go to Europe than to heaven.”

In 1855, the American painter James McNeill Whistler left the U.S. at 21 years old and never returned, training in Paris for four years and settling in London. And yet, in 1871 he painted what’s been called “a quintessential emblem of Americana”: Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, better known as Whistler’s Mother.

If you were born after 1881, this is your first chance to see the painting in Philadelphia, where it last hung at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts during Whistler’s lifetime. It now lives full-time in the Musée D’Orsay in Paris.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s one-room show, “The Artist’s Mother: Whistler & Philadelphia,” places the canvas in conversation with other matrimonial tributes in oil paint, charcoal, pastel, and printmaking inks by artists such as Henry Ossawa Tanner, Cecilia Beaux, and Alice Neel. The featured artists were all “spurred by Whistler and their own ambitions to depict their mothers.”

Whistler’s Mother is very big, more than 6 feet wide in a thick gold frame, and it looks good from anywhere in the room. (If you’re looking for an 8-foot-tall bronze sculpture of Whistler’s Mother, placed atop a 6,000-pound slab of granite, that’s two hours away in Ashland, Pa.)

Whistler painted his all-American picture in London. He had booked a model who didn’t show, so his mother, Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler, stepped in. Her son was known to demand up to 70 sessions with a subject, so it’s no surprise that his mother got tired, took a seat, and put her feet up.

This wasn’t meant to be a masterpiece. Whistler painted it on the back of another portrait he had already finished. While it’s true that he toiled over this canvas at length, a closer look shows hasty brush marks and unblended patches of paint. In the upper left you can see his signature in the form of a butterfly, a graphic combination of the initials of his name: J-M-W. (When he penned letters to friends and foes, he added a scorpion tale to the butterfly.)

When the French government decided to buy the painting in 1891, it was rare for an American to earn such an honor. The sale cemented Whistler’s celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic.

While Whistler’s Mother inspired a flurry of seated profile portraits, this pose has long been common across cultures. Think of Egyptian tombs that show the pharaoh seated sideways on a throne, or Roman coins stamped with austere profiles of Caesar’s face. According to legend, the first portrait ever drawn was a face in profile: the artist was a young woman in ancient Corinth who traced the profile of her lover’s shadow on a wall, so that she could remember him after he embarked on a perilous trip.

The show’s most direct homage to Whistler comes from Henry Ossawa Tanner, whose 1897 Portrait of the Artist’s Mother lives in the PMA’s permanent collection. Tanner was born in Pittsburgh in 1859, and eventually became the most influential Black painter of the 19th century. He owed his success not only to virtuosic talent, but also to access: He was one of the first African Americans admitted to study painting at PAFA.

Like Whistler, Tanner lived as an expat in Europe, but he painted his mother during a visit home to Philadelphia. (Protecting his family’s home, at 2908 W. Diamond St., has been the mission of an organization called Friends of The Tanner House, which recently secured money to save it from potential demolition.)

Also on view in “The Artist’s Mother” is Les derniers jours d’ enfance (1883-1885), a double portrait of a mother and child by PAFA-trained Cecilia Beaux, and Last Sickness (1953), a stark depiction of leading American portrait painter Alice Neel’s mother.

Whistler stood 5′4″, a bit shorter than his portrait of his mother, with a white streak in his hair and a monocle over his right eye. He wore slim suits and twirled a thin cane, embodying the spirit of dandyism. Self-assured but thin-skinned, he zinged others with ease but sued a leading art critic for disparaging his work. The Impressionist Edgar Degas sized him up by proclaiming, “Whistler, you behave like you have no talent.”

Degas turned down the chance to visit London in 1868. The invitation came from Edouard Manet, one of the century’s most influential painters, who ended up going on the trip without Degas. While in London, he was disappointed that Whistler wasn’t home. True to form, it was an aristocratic absence: “He was on an excursion on a yacht,” Manet told a friend.

For now, in Philly, Manet and Whistler have been reunited on the same wall. Directly behind Whistler’s Mother, in the next room over, you’ll find the PMA’s collection of Manet paintings. Whistler would be happy to see that three of them feature boats.

“The Artist’s Mother: Whistler and Philadelphia” runs through Oct. 29 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For quick access, go to the east entrance (on top of the Rocky steps) and take a right once inside.