#TwistedTropes 26. Whistler's angry mother

Image from Wikimedia Commons

When James Whistler painted his mother, she didn't look too pleased. In fact she looked really hacked off, like as if any minute she was going to turn around and snarl obscenities at him and tell him exactly where he could stick his paintbrushes (steady on now - Editor).

Maybe she had a migraine coming on when he asked her to pose for him. Perhaps she was expected at her Pilates class and he was making her very late. Or maybe she was simply in a bad mood. Any of these would explain why she isn't smiling, her jaw is set, and she is sitting facing stubbornly away from him as he paints.

But there are alternative explanations. Maybe she is watching a particularly bad soap on the telly, but I doubt if they even had TV in those days (er, correct - Editor). I wonder if she was given some bad news. Possibly, Whistler had told her that he wasn't moving out like he said he was going to, and that she still had to cook for him and wash his socks and underpants. Or maybe she was just fed up with his incessant whistling. I know it would drive me bonkers (Whistler was his name, not his proclivity - Editor). Whatever is going on, it looks like it's a big inconvenience to her.

Having a famous painter for a son in those days was a bit like having a son who is a famous rapper or football player today. Whistler probably never stopped bragging about all the paintings he'd sold, his appearances on TV chat shows or the fancy parties he had been invited to (one of these is completely wrong - Editor). By contrast, his poor mother probably never ever got out of the house, except from her Pilates class, so she was probably cheesed off with him most of the time. Your kids can really do your head in.

Notice that not only is she looking angry, she's also clutching a lace handkerchief, so she might have been crying, or more likely wiping up some of Whistler's paint stains. So while her famous painter son was swanning around Paris drinking himself under the table with the likes of Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet, she was at home making sure his shirts were pressed.

It's not easy living with creative types, and you never know what to expect sharing your life with an artist. I bet Whistler's mother could tell you a story or two about her famous son. You can learn a lot from looking at a painting, can't you?

Next time: 27: Halley's boring comet

Previous posts in the #TwistedTropes series
1. Pavlov's drooling dog
2. Chekhov's smoking gun
3. Occam's bloody razor
4. Schrödinger’s undead cat
5. Pandora's closed box
6. Frankenstein's well-meaning monster
7. Thor's lost hammer
8. Noah's character ark
9. Hobson's multiple choice
10. Fibonacci's annoying sequence
11. Plato's empty cave
12. Dante's lukewarm inferno
13. Sod's unlucky law
14. Aladdin's miserly lamp
15. Batman's tangled cape
16. Cupid's bent arrow
17. Fermat's dodgy last theorem
18. Moore's obsolete law
19. Lucifer's idiotic fall
20. Adam's poisoned apple
21. Hadrian's busted wall
22. Montezuma's terrible revenge
23. Dale's shameful cone
24. Maslow's awkward hierarchy
25. Schindler's shopping list


Schindler's shopping list by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's