Beyond the Artist’s Mother : Everyone knows James McNeill Whistler’s icon, but there’s more: A retrospective shows the painter as a subtle colorist and versatile portraitist.

James McNeill Whistler, the 19th- Century American painter, would stroll about the great cities of Europe with a monocle, a walking stick, a top hat, an arching mustache and a shock of white hair sprouting from his enormous, wavy, dark mane.

To the public, according to an artist friend, he seemed like “the fop, the cynic, the brilliant, flippant, vain and careless idler.”

In a sense, Whistler was the Andy Warhol of his time. Whistler tried to create a persona for himself--the eccentric attention-grabbing artist--that would keep him in the public eye.

“The very notion of the artist as a public figure is his,” says Nikolai Cikovsky Jr., one of the curators of a grand exhibition of the works of Whistler opening next Sunday at the National Gallery of Art, the largest retrospective in the United States since the memorial exhibition of Whistler’s work in Boston 1904. Before coming here, this show made stops at London’s Tate Gallery and Paris’ Musee d’Orsay.

But the friend, American painter William Merritt Chase, said the private side of Whistler was far different from the public image.

“Whistler of the studio,” Chase said, was “the earnest, tireless, somber worker, a very slave to his art, a bitter foe to all pretense and sham, an embodiment of simplicity almost to the point of diffidence, an incarnation of earnestness and sincerity of purpose.”

For Americans, the new exhibition may reveal this least-known side of Whistler. Cikovsky, a teacher of art history at Pomona College, the University of New Mexico and other schools before joining the staff of the National Gallery of Art a decade ago, believes that Americans know little about Whistler. They certainly know he painted a picture of his mother that has become an icon of American motherhood. They also may know that he was an American who lived in Europe like an eccentric Bohemian. But the exhibition, Cikovsky says, will demonstrate that “he was a complex, many-layered artist.”

Whistler was one of the most influential artists of the 19th Century--revered by some of the era’s great writers, such as Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust. French artists looked on him as one of the avant-garde painters of the age. He worked in different forms and genres, and visitors will have a chance to take in all of them.

The exhibition, which took five years of planning, offers 64 oil paintings and 135 other works. The whole exhibition, already shown at the Tate Gallery in London and the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, will remain at the National Gallery of Art until Aug. 20.

The paintings include the most famous of all, the one most Americans call simply “Whistler’s Mother,” which normally hangs in the Musee d’Orsay. “The exhibition would have been unthinkable for Americans without ‘Whistler’s Mother,’ ” said Cikovsky.

Americans, however, may be surprised at the title. Whistler, who liked to call his paintings arrangements or symphonies or nocturnes or variations, titled it, “Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother.”

A lthough known as an Ameri can painter, Whistler spent very little time in the United States.

He was born in Lowell, Mass., on July 11, 1834, the son of Maj. George Washington Whistler, a civil engineer. When James was 9, the Whistler family left for St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father worked as a civil engineer on the railroad linking the capital with Moscow. After his father died in 1849, the family returned to the United States. James was then 15.

He entered West Point as a cadet in 1851 and soon rose to the top of his class in drawing. But that counted little against his failure in chemistry. He was expelled and worked for several months at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington, etching maps and topographical plans. In 1855, at age 21, he set sail for Europe and never returned to the United States.

Whistler spent years alternating between London and Paris. Even when he later decided to make London his home, he still spent a good deal of time with friends in Paris. Although he was born in New England, he liked to pretend he was an American Southerner (perhaps because his mother was born in North Carolina and his brother fought with the Confederate Army). He even fooled the expatriate American novelist Henry James.

“He is a queer little Londonized Southerner and paints abominably,” James said of Whistler in a letter to family in the United States. “But his breakfasts are easy and pleasant, and he has tomatoes and buckwheat cakes.”

W histler liked to use nouns like arrangements and symphonies to describe his paintings because he tried to imply that he was painting art for art’s sake--as if the subject matter did not count but only the way colors and forms were put together.

But it is hard to look on two portraits of his mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, in the exhibition--”Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl” (part of the National Gallery’s permanent collection) and “Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl” (usually in the Tate Gallery)--as no more than exercises in color.

They seem like the climax of some kind of story. The English poet Algernon Swinburne even wrote a poem about the second portrait. My hand, a fallen rose/Lies snow-white on white snows/and takes no care, one verse ends.

Whistler painted the portrait of his mother, Anna Matilda McNeill, in 1871 when she was 67 years old and lived with him in Chelsea in London. When she complained that posing for a standing portrait tired her, Whistler decided to change the pose and paint her seated in profile. He submitted the painting for exhibition at the annual showing of the Royal Academy in 1872. It was rejected at first until a Whistler friend in the academy threatened to resign if it were not accepted.

The painting did not make much of an impact. One newspaper critic suggested that Whistler could have “thrown in a few details of interest without offense.” Whistler decided never again to exhibit at the Royal Academy. He also vowed never to sell the painting, but relented two decades later when friends arranged for the French government to buy it for the Musee du Luxembourg for the modest sum of 4,000 francs.

The patience and piety of the widow were so striking that the painting became one of the most famous in the world. It has, in fact, become an almost cliched symbol of motherhood. Like Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” it is often reproduced on greeting cards and caricatured in cartoons.

The exhibition features another important painting in Whistler’s life--”Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket.” This painting, which now belongs to the Detroit Institute of Art, depicts the fireworks at the Cremorne Gardens amusement park on the Thames River. After viewing it in a gallery in 1877, John Ruskin, the most famous art critic of the era, wrote, “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”

The 44-year-old Whistler sued for libel, asking for 1,000 British pounds in damages, plus his court costs. Not only would victory ease his financial situation, Whistler believed, but the trial would give him a public forum to defend the concept of “art for art’s sake.” To foster his image as a sophisticated artist, Whistler even lied under oath that he was born in St. Petersburg.

The artist explained to the court why he called his painting a nocturne. “By using the word nocturne ,” he said, “I wished to indicate an artistic interest alone, divesting the picture of any outside anecdotal interest which might have otherwise attached to it.”

In one famous exchange with Ruskin’s attorney, he was asked: “Did it take you much time to paint the ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold’? How soon did you knock it off?”

“Oh, I ‘knock one off’ possibly in a couple of days,” Whistler replied to much laughter. “One day to do the work and another to finish it.”

“The labor of two days is that for which you ask 200 guineas?” the lawyer demanded.

“No,” said Whistler. “I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.”

In the end, Whistler won a pyrrhic victory. The court awarded him not a thousand pounds, but only a symbolic farthing, one fourth of a penny. And he had to pay his own court costs. The trial had enhanced Whistler’s image as an avant-garde artist, but he was now bankrupt.

The Whistler exhibition at the National Gallery of Art includes sketches for the design of a room called the Peacock Room. The sketches will surely attract attention to the Peacock Room itself in the Freer Gallery of Art, a few blocks away across the mall in Washington.

The gallery houses the Asian and American art collections of Charles Lang Freer, a railroad-car manufacturer who became a friend of Whistler in London. The Freer Gallery has the largest collection of Whistlers in America, but none of them, according to the terms of Freer’s will, can travel, not even a few blocks to the National Gallery of Art.

The Peacock Room is the finest example of Whistler’s decorative art. The room was originally the dining room in the London house of Frederick R. Leyland, a Liverpoolshipowner. A painting by Whistler, “The Princess From the Land of Porcelain,” hung above the fireplace, and Whistler agreed to retouch the room with traces of yellow so that the colors of the walls did not clash with his painting.

While Leyland was in Liverpool, Whistler could not control himself. He painted the ceiling in imitation gold leaf and covered it with a pattern of peacock feathers. He added lavishly plumed peacocks to the wooden shutters of the room. He painted the walls in Prussian blue. And he invited society guests and the press in to view the work, handing them leaflets with the title “Harmony in Blue and Gold--the Peacock Room.”

Leyland was furious that Whistler had exceeded the original idea of touching up the room and then had put it on public display. He paid Whistler less than half of what he asked. As an act of vengeance, Whistler painted gold coins near the peacocks to symbolize the withheld money. Leyland broke off their friendship and his patronage and never allowed Whistler to see the room again. But he never changed Whistler’s designs.

After the death of Leyland, Freer bought the room, reassembled it in his home in Detroit, and bequeathed it for display in the gallery in Washington. As part of an expansion of the Freer completed two years ago this month, the room underwent a major cleaning and refurbishing with the aid of a grant from the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Over the years, Whistler won the acclaim that he had sought so assiduously when he was younger. More commissions came in for portraits than he could fill. “Where were they when I wanted to paint them?” Whistler asked.

In 1892, so many people came to see a retrospective of his work in London that the Times of London wrote: “Mr. Whistler is becoming the fashion, at the least it is becoming the correct thing to pretend to admire him.”

But Whistler did not forget his early treatment by the Royal Academy and the English court trying his libel suit against Ruskin. After the death of his wife, Beatrice Godwin (born Beatrice Birnie Philip, she was the widow of British architect E.W. Godwin and married Whistler in 1888), he asked one of his sister-in-laws, Rosalind Birnie Philip, to make sure that the works in his possession were bequeathed after his death to an institution in any place except England.

After he died in 1903 at age 69, she chose the University of Glasgow. It was a logical choice. His mother was of Scottish descent. The University of Glasgow had given him an honorary degree. Some artist admirers of his had persuaded the city of Glasgow in 1891 to purchase his portrait of the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle. Now owned by the Glasgow Museum and Art Gallery, the portrait, titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2” (No. 1 was the portrait of his mother), is included in the current exhibition. It was the first Whistler bought for a public collection.

As a result of the bequest, the Hunterian Art Museum of the University of Glasgow now holds the largest collection of Whistler works outside the United States. Not all the collection is permitted by the bequest to travel, but the exhibition includes two elegant, full-length portraits of Whistler’s sister-in-law, Ethel Philip, from the Hunterian titled “Red and Black: The Fan” and “Harmony in Brown: The Felt Hat,” both painted in the 1890s.

Washington is devoting even more space to the American artist this spring and summer. A companion show, “Whistler and Japan,” opened at the Freer Gallery last Sunday and an exhibition of prints by Whistler and his contemporaries will open at the National Gallery of Art on June 16.

In addition, the National Portrait Gallery has been showing since early April an exhibition of portraits, photographs and caricatures of Whistler. They include portrayals by George du Maurier, Henri Fantin-Latour, William Merritt Chase, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm and Whistler himself. It is doubtful that an exhibit of such variety and richness could be mounted of any other artist of that era.

National Gallery of Art, Harris Whittemore Collection