A detail of Whistler’s iconic portrait. The sentimental responses to it exasperated him. Courtesy Musée D’Orsay, Paris / Art Resource

A couple of weeks ago, I visited two mothers in Massachusetts. One was my own, Charlene, who lives in a retirement home in Lenox. The other was the black-clad lady portrayed in “Whistler’s Mother”—the popular name of the masterpiece that James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted in 1871 and titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1.” Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler, who lived with her son, in London, from 1864 to 1875, sits in profile with an air of infinite patience, gazing steadily at, apparently, nothing. The work is on loan to the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, from the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris. In 1891, it became the first American art work ever bought by the French state, and it remains the most important American work residing outside the United States.

The painting represents the peak of Whistler’s radical method of modulating tones of single colors. The paint looks soft, almost fuzzy—as if it were exhaled onto the surface. There is some bravura brushwork, where Anna’s lace-cuffed hands clutch a handkerchief, with unprimed canvas peeking through, and daubed hints of Japanese-style floral patterning on a curtain that commands the left side of the picture. A few of the daubs faintly echo the pink of Anna’s flesh. She wears a gold wedding ring: a spark of harmony with the muted gilding of the frame that Whistler designed for the picture. Practically subliminal whispers of reds and blues underlie areas of the silver-gray wall behind her, and a dark purple smolders in the curtain, where the artist’s signature emblem—a butterfly—hovers.

The chromatic subtleties contribute to an unsettled feeling. A more substantial jolt occurs when you register an over-all spatial distortion: the forms stretch horizontally, so that the length of Anna’s concealed legs, angled and descending to an upholstered footstool, suggests the anatomy of an N.B.A. draft pick. The more you notice of the composition’s economies—such as the cavalier indication of the bentwood chair legs, at the lower right, and, at the lower left, three perfunctory diagonal strokes that do for establishing the plane of the floor—the more happily manipulated you may feel, in ways that, like the camera tricks of a great movie director, excite a sense of the scene as truer to life than truth itself. It took me an hour of inspection to take in an inconspicuous, brownish strip across the bottom of the canvas. Anna’s dress falls smoothly past it and out of the picture. It is the edge of a stage or a platform. Whistler is looking up at his mom.

“Yes, one does like to make one’s mummy just as nice as possible,” Whistler allowed years later, answering friends who praised the speaking likeness of the portrayal. But he was exasperated by sentimental responses to the work. He regularly preached that subject matter should be regarded merely as a pretext for adventures in aestheticism. He said, “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?” Was he kidding? (He was sly.) Of course we care, if not to the extent of a civic group in Ashland, Pennsylvania, which in 1938 erected a monumental statue of the seated Anna, on a base inscribed with words from Coleridge: “A mother is the holiest thing alive.” At any rate, the answer to Whistler’s question touches on what many have noted is iconic about history’s short list of artistic icons. The “Mona Lisa,” “The Scream,” “American Gothic,” and the best of Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn”s all share with the Whistler the distillation of a meaning instantly recognized and forever inexhaustible. In this case, it’s the mysteries of motherhood. Everybody has a mother, and something close to half of everybody becomes one.

I’m the oldest of Charlene’s five kids with our late father, Gilmore, an inventor and entrepreneur. When I walked into her building, she was at the piano accompanying a sing-along that concluded with a briskly rendered “Yellow Rose of Texas.” Charlene is ninety-eight, but her memory is sharp, and I had hoped that it would yield associations with Whistler’s portrait. Her father was a postmaster in a North Dakota prairie town. Could she recall the 1934 stamp that reproduced the image with the words “In Memory and in Honor of the Mothers of America”? No, she said, “It was a fourth-class post office, the smallest. I don’t think we got the fancy commemoratives.” She was never much for art, she reminded me. But, having thought about the painting, she e-mailed me later that it put her in mind of her own mother, who “was born in 1875 and continued to wear rather long dresses and never cut her hair. Her opinions were a reflection of the Victorian age.” Charlene was amused to learn that, when the portrait was made, Anna Whistler was sixty-seven: “So young!”

Anna, born in Wilmington, North Carolina, was a daughter of the antebellum South; she was the niece of a slave owner, and, through him, the cousin of a reported nine mixed-race children. She married George Washington Whistler, a West Point graduate and a brilliant civil engineer, and they had five sons, only two of whom, James and William, survived to adulthood. She was described by a sister-in-law as “so unshakeable that sometimes I could shake her.” Beginning in 1842, the family spent six years in St. Petersburg, Russia, where George served Tsar Nicholas I as the chief engineer of a rail line to Moscow, and the artistically precocious James, at age eleven, enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. In 1849, George died, after a bout of cholera, and the family returned to America.

James followed his father’s example and his own military fantasies by entering West Point. But he proved a feckless cadet—the superintendent, Robert E. Lee, liked but despaired of him—and he flunked out in his third year. He evinced no better discipline in government jobs as a geographical draftsman. Then, in 1855, Whistler went to Paris and launched himself as an artist, a dandy, and a lover of women. He knew Courbet, Baudelaire, Manet, Monet, and Degas, and closely befriended Henri Fantin-Latour. Whistler’s first touchstone painting, “Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl” (1862), was a sensation in the epoch-making 1863 Salon des Refusés (though it was eclipsed by Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe”). He was never less than esteemed in France, notably by poets and writers. (The young Proust kept as a talisman a pair of gray gloves that Whistler had worn.) It seems a pity that he took his act to London, by stages beginning in 1859, and refined his genius in the pokier precincts of British art, meanwhile lavishing rather too much of it on flamboyant combats of wit, artistic doctrine, and personal grudge with artists, critics, and patrons who, Oscar Wilde excepted, were little worth the candle. (At first a devoted fan, Wilde came to complain that Whistler spelled art “with a capital ‘I.’ ”)

Polarizing opinion in the London art world, Whistler pioneered the modern trope of the artist as scandalous celebrity. But he tempered his raffish ways with stratagems of genteel respectability, which his mother’s presence supported. When Anna moved in with him—her other son, William, was serving as a doctor in the Confederate Army—the artist moved his current mistress out to other quarters. He wrote to Fantin-Latour, “I had to empty my house and purify it from cellar to eaves.” The religiously pious Anna sighed at what she viewed as her son’s flaws, but she graciously hosted his friends and became positively fond of one of them, the decadent’s decadent, Algernon Swinburne.

Whistler’s painting of his mother overcame fierce resistance to appear in the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, in 1872. It is unique among his portraits. Every other teases out a nuance of personality in the sitter—the works are often seductive, but never conventionally so in the way of portraits by his follower John Singer Sargent. In “Whistler’s Mother,” Anna’s blank forbearance speaks of capitulation. She will do anything for him. She is his. Such exclusive devotion is the primal dream of every mother’s son, isn’t it? ♦