Word: whistler
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...gallons of milk (for casein) to make the coated paper on which it is printed. Some of its time-tried favorites: The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, The Birth of Venus, The Laughing Cavalier, Shoeing the Baby Mare, The Angelus, Mrs. Siddons, The Music Lesson, The Blue Boy, Whistler's Mother. Editor Kent was allowed no say in deciding which pictures were to be used. Says he: "Had the selection of pictures been left to me it would have come to include many that are now in the volume. And with what vindictive fury would it have excluded others...
...standard Life of James McNeill Whistler by the etcher Joseph Pennell and his wife was published in 1908, five years after Whistler's death. Since then the artist's famed picture of his mother has become such a Mother's Day ikon* that a separate study of the Woman Behind the Painting became inevitable. If Biographer Mumford† had had the style to confine her monograph within 200 incisive pages, she might have added something to literature. By being half again as long as that, and by a dutifully winsome acceptance of Anna McNeill Whistler at face...
Implicit in Mumford, this interpretation of the saintly old figure is rudely expressed in Albert Parry's biography of her husband, the great but forgotten Major George Washington Whistler. Biographer Parry has a lively if somewhat insistent irreverence for the Motherhood which the Major's wife exuded throughout life and continues to symbolize in paint. As he reads the evidence, she snagged him after the death of his first, beautiful wife, Mary Swift, and did her best to take all the joy out of his and their children's life from then on. But Parry...
Travelers who have never heard of Whistler's Father have remarked that this 400-mile line is one of the straightest on earth. According to legend, the Tsar so ordered it by ruling a line on the map. According to Parry, Major Whistler's skill and economy had much to do with it. A firm Irish Yankee, he was amazed to find Russian engineers behaving like poets, actors, priests and revolutionaries (Dostoevsky graduated from the Imperial Engineering School in 1843). He proudly refused a commission in the Tsar's army, refused to say "Your Majesty" to Nicholas...
Mother Anna joined the Major in St. Petersburg in 1843, bringing young Jimmie and Willie (aged 9 and 7) and Deborah, the Major's child by his first marriage. While Mrs. Whistler glowingly distributed Bible tracts to the Tsar's soldiers, who used them to stuff their boots, Major Whistler saw 30,000 serfs sweating twelve hours a day to make his embankments symmetrical, heard his haughty Russian friends warn against ever giving the serfs a decent meal lest it upset their stomachs. In the evenings the Major solaced himself by playing the flute (he had been "Pipes...