Whistler’s Mothers: Painters, Models, and Uncanny Arrangements

Abstract: The hyper-iconicization, sentimental nationalization, and mass merchandizing of the portrait commonly referred to as “Whistler’s Mother” (1871) have made it difficult to see as anything but another simulacrum of itself. Yet when studied alongside James McNeill Whistler’s far less well known but startlingly similar portrait of Thomas Carlyle (1873) both paintings appear quite differently. This psychohistorical essay takes a fresh look at both the Carlyle portrait and its compositional model, reinterpreting one of the world’s most recognizable paintings and its first “reproduction” as a diptych of the uncanny.