Tell me if you’ve seen this one before
I was thinking gallery browsers must have been doing double takes ever since Vilhelm Hammershøi’s “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother” first went on the wall in 1886, but I discover that people have been copying Whistler’s mom all along.
James MacNeill Whistler’s 1871 maternal homage was after all an exercise in painting and was given the frosty academic title “Arrangement in Grey and Black”.
Whistler was grudgingly allowed to show it at the Royal Academy of Art in London, and nearly two decades later (after Whistler pawned if off so he could buy some proper colour paints) the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris bought it.
Hammershøi quite likely saw it there on a vacation from Copenhagen and, having admired Whistler as a student, tried to meet him in Paris, but for some reason it couldn’t be arranged.
He should have had his mother, Frederikke, pop round with the picture to see Whistler’s mother, Anna, so they could compare notes on adoring offspring.
Anna would probably have confessed that she only posed for James because his model didn’t show up, the Cockney tramp, and even then he wanted her to stand for something like four hours.
“You’ve got to be kidding me, boy! Fetch my rocker.”
James spent much of the rest of his life trying to convince people to stop calling his “Arrangement” a “portrait”.
“To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?” he whined in a book.
It was a good thing he was long dead when the US Post Office issued a stamp in 1934 bearing an image of “Whistler’s Mother” and the dedication “In Memory and In Honor of the Mothers of America”.
At any rate, Whistler’s experiment in squares and shades of grey was a hit from the start, and lots of artists who could only afford two tubes of paint at a time copied the approach, right down to the posing.
American expatriate painters followed the lead of their countryman in particular, and they were joined by the Dane Hammershøi (1864-1916), who not only loved his mum unreservedly, he painted her picture a dozen times, twice seated in profile.
Primarily a landscape painter, Hammershøi deigned to do portraits only of people he knew personally. Here comes the missus, albeit from the back.
“Double Portrait of the Artist and His Wife, Seen through a Mirror” offers more of the same muted tones he picked up from Whistler, but he’s giving all the light to Ida (Mrs Hammershøi) and keeps himself in the shadows.
The year is 1911. The setting, according to Sotheby’s, which is selling both of these Hammershøi paintings this season in London for maybe £120,000 apiece, is the “great hall” on the first floor of Spurveskjul, their rented country house in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen.
The prop is an oval mirror that appears in at least two other of his works.
The interpretation is wide open, unlike either artist’s portrait of his mother. Personally I can’t resist thinking he’s wondering if he should push Ida over the terrace railing, but that’s just me.
