It is not the technique, however, which principally interests us in the picture. Just as in his "Sarasate," Whistler attempted in his "Mother" to give us the whole atmosphere that surrounds a personality. Old Mrs. Whistler was a stern Presbyterian and her religious views must have been trying to her son. Yet "Jimmy," though he used to give a queer smile when he mentioned them, never in any way complained of the old lady's strict Sabbatarian notions, to which he bowed without remonstrance. This differentiation of character between mother and son explains much of the rigid Quaker-like and yet so sympathetic pose of the picture.
The artist does not merely represent his old mother. He endowed the old woman, sitting pensively in a grey interior, with one of the noblest and mightiest emotions the human soul is capable of—the reverence and calm we feel in the presence of our own aging mother. And with this large and mighty feeling, in which all discords of mannerisms are dissolved, and, by the tonic values of two ordinary dull colours, he succeeded in writing an epic, a symphony domestica, of superb breadth and beauty—a symbol of the mother of all ages and all lands, slowly aging as she sits pensively amidst the monotonous colours of modern life. Nothing simpler and more dignified has been created in modern art.
Luxembourg Gallery, Paris
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK AND GRAY: THE ARTIST'S MOTHER.
CHAPTER VIII
IN QUEST OF LINE EXPRESSION
"Artist, thou art king! Art is the true empire! When thy hand has drawn a perfect line, the cherubims themselves descend to delight themselves in it as in a mirror," wrote Mérodack Peladan, in his preface to the Catalogue of the Salon de la Rose-Croix (1892). He expressed a great truth, that macabre and cabalistic poet-artist.
There is nothing more exquisite, more enjoyable, perhaps, to the art lovers than a perfect line. Pure line expression, as it is found in Dürer, Harunobu, Raphael, and Ingres, is a pleasure apart from all other pictorial representations. It is more intellectual and more remote from all sensuous pleasure than colour, tone, light or shade. It is a language of itself which enables the artist to convey an abstract impression of his individuality.