There’s a very famous painting at Tate Britain right now that you almost certainly have seen before in books and online, and blimey, it’s huge.
This is Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, which is far better known under its colloquial name Portrait of Artist’s Mother, is the centrepiece of a new exhibition about the American-born painter James McNeill Whistler.
Whistler is an artist with a life story as interesting as his art, who upended thinking about how paintings should be made and seen, but who was also financially ruined after he sued an art critic who gave him a bad review.
Fortunately, you can’t libel the dead, so modern-day writers are safe.
With around 150 works gathered together, including the first London appearance in two decades of Whistler’s Mother, it is the largest Whistler exhibition in Europe for 30 years.
Spread across room after room of portraits, nocturnes, etchings and decorative experiments, the exhibition charts Whistler’s transformation from restless art student into the sharp-tongued apostle of “art for art’s sake”
There’s such a wide variety of work on display, from portraits and landscapes to his moody nighttime paintings, post-financial-ruin sketches, and a later return to giant portraits. For Londoners, his paintings of London evoke a lost time when the Thames was either very industrial in the centre or, out past Hammersmith, still very rural.
Battersea Bridge is here several times, as are the fogs of London that would later inspire other painters as well. His painting of the Thames at Chelsea, covered in ice, comes with a note stating that he saw his job as creating beautiful images to correct nature’s occasional mishaps.
But then, there it is – that famous painting.
The one you’ve probably seen a bazillion times online, but when used to seeing it on a small screen or a book, it’s quite a shock to see it in the flesh and realise how big it is. A bit like chatting to someone over video for ages, then meeting them in person, and oh, you’re a lot shorter/taller/etc than I expected.
That shock of looking up at the painting most of us have looked down at our screens at is probably worth the entire exhibition entry price on its own.
What is nice about the exhibition is that Whistler didn’t just paint the rich and powerful or his family, but also street children and people he saw at work while sketching urban landscapes. And of course, he wasn’t averse to painting a selfie or two, or five.
He was also prone to ignoring his paymasters, and there’s a recreation of the famous Peacock Room that he decorated for Frederick Leyland’s dining room, totally against Leyland’s wishes. With the two peacocks, as representatives of Whistler and Leyland fighting.
The turn turns dark, literally as it’s filled with his nighttime paintings, but also figuratively, as this is the moment that brought down a proud man. He was accused by John Ruskin of just splashing paint on canvases, and outraged, he sued. He won, but the legal costs were devastating.
The exhibition follows him into exile, filling rooms with smaller works and sketches.
And finishes with his last self-portrait.
As an exhibition, it brings together a vast array of Whistler’s work, showing him ranging through a host of styles, so there’s plenty to admire here. Much of it does feel slightly like padding – there’s only so many sketches a person can look at, but there’s enough outstanding works, particularly of the Thames, that are worth a visit on their own.
And of course, there’s that painting.
The exhibition, James McNeill Whistler, is at Tate Britain until 27th September 2026.
Details here.
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