Has the Mona Lisa Been on Display at Philadelphia Museum of Art
10,599. See 'Whistler'south Mother' At Its Beginning Day in Metropolitan
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August 2, 1964
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"Whistler'due south Mother," on loan from the Louvre, went on display yesterday at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art and turned out to exist far less of an allure than the Mona Lisa, last twelvemonth's visitor from the aforementioned museum.
The celebrated portrait past the American artist Jamea Abbott McNeill Whistler was seen past 10,599 persons, a littla better than boilerplate museum omnipresence for a summer Saturday. By dissimilarity, 30,872 were drawn by the da Vinci painting on Feb. 7, 1963, its opening twenty-four hours.
The Whistler painting, which arrived in this country in Feb, has been on tour of U.s. museums. It started at the City Fine art Museum of St. Louis, appeared for three weeks in June at the National Gallery in Washington and was shown at the Philadelphia Art Museum last month.
It will remain at the Metropolitan until Sept. 30.
The museum had not expected a huge turnout to view the painting, which is more than formally known as "Arrangement in Grey and Black."
"She'south really been seen too oft in this country to attract a large crowd," said a museum spokesman.
Merely the painting, which hangs on the east wall of the entrance hall next to a 16thcentury Western farsi carpet, kept drawing minor knots of people.
"Wow, is that the original?" asked a small-scale daughter in a blue apparel, squinting up at it. "I always though she was sitting on a rocker, but it'south just a plain old chair."
The painting, massively framed and bathed in a soft light that seemed to brighten its somber colors, is hung above eye level and fenced off by a, guard rope and a wooden battlement.
A glass case below information technology, displays a re-create of a letter from Whistler to George Smalley, an American fine art journalist, exulting over the French Regime's conclusion to purchase the painting in 1891. Though the Government bought it for just $800, the painting was insured for $500,000 on a trip here in 1954.
Many of the people who paused before the painting yesterday were visitors from out of town who had come hither for the fair and were taking in the Metropolitan as a side attraction. That was the instance with Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bailey of Osceola, Ark., and their son, Frank, a freshman at the University of Arkansas and an amateur painter.
Mrs. Bailey was enraptured by the painting. "My son has painted my portrait, and, without knowing information technology, seems to take captured exactly the thoughts I had while I was posing. I believe Whistler did the aforementioned for his mother," she said.
"I'm curious about what she's looking at beyond the frame," said Frank Wesson, a friend of the Baileys. "A television receiver," murmured a immature human standing nearby.
Not all of the onlookers had praise for the painting.
"It's almost Pop art, I've seen it so ofttimes," said a youth in a blue‐striped sportshirt
"No, Mom art," corrected a friend.
That seemed to release some adverse sentiments amidst viewers.
"I wouldn't have liked to know her." said Stanley Prowler, a Manhattan architect.
"She looks like a nasty old lady." A prosperous‐looking businessman from Minneapolis agreed. "She's too astringent‐looking," he said. "I don't know why the painting is so famous."
But whatever their sentiments about Mrs. Whistler, most viewers agreed that reproductions did her inadequate justice. "You lot never run across that special background radiance in the prints," said an elderly woman. "And y'all don't realize how truly alive the face is."
Despite his somber portrayal of her, Whistler is said to have described, his painting as "a very pretty bit of color" to a friend during his early on days in Paris.
The painting drew fire from critics, who accused Whistler of sentimentality, when information technology was starting time exhibited in 1872 at London's Royal Academy. Only the creative person ever insisted that the painting's true title was "Arrangement in Gray and Black."
"What can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?" he asked.
The painting has had what might be called maximum exposure in this country. It start came here in 1881 for an unsuccessful run at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. But in 1933, it drew more than a quarter of a million visitors in its second appearance here, at the Century of Progress fair in Chicago.
It was seen once more in Chicago in 1954 and made its first appearance at the Metropolitan later on that year. In 1963 it was displayed at the Municipal Art Museum in Atlanta equally part of a tribute to 121 members of the Atlanta Art Association who died in a plane crash in Paris in 1962.
After its turn at the Metropolitan, the painting will travel to museums in Toledo, Ohio; Chicago, Cincinatti, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Boston. And it is already booked for Mother's Day at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1964/08/02/archives/10599-see-whistlers-mother-at-its-first-day-in-metropolitan.html
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