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Whistler's Paris studio: place and meaning

This chapter looks at an interview with Whistler, conducted in his Paris studio, discovered by the author in Special Collections at the University of Reading . Whistler stressed that the location of the studio near the Luxembourg Museum was i a carefully considered choice because he was looking for easy access to the totemic Portrait of the Painter’s Mother, a picture with lasting personal significance that the museum had recently acquired. The chapter shows that the portrait has a compositional similarity to a funerary monument, a Greek stele in the British Museum, suggesting that it served as a memorial to his mother. To reach the Luxembourg Museum Whistler would have taken a short walk through the Luxembourg Gardens , and he recorded the children with their nursemaids that he saw there, in a group of lithographs. There is a psycho- biographical link between the subject of the lithographs and Whistler’s representation of his mother which the chapter explores. Whistler made some interesting comments about Mallarmé in the interview providing a new insight into the importance of the poet for him, as evident in the stress on mark making and the function of space in his lithographs. Finally Whistler created a timeless and enduring image of childhood in the lithographs of children in the Luxembourg Gardens which transcends the historical moment of their making and has universal appeal as the writings of Henry James and Jean Paul Sartre about the same subject confirm.