Chat with our AI personalities
$282 000 was the auction price for one of his etchings in 2010. No painting of his has been sold recently.
Whistler's Mother, otherwise known as the Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother, was an oil painting of James McNeill Whistler. It was painted in 1871.
If you are planning a trip to Whistler then you can expect to pay about $795. That will give you 3 runs down the mountain and that is the per person price.
After moving to St. Petersburg to join his father a year, the young Whistler took private art lessons, then enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts at age 11.
What we often call "Whistler's Mother" was actually called "Study in Gray and Black." It is only incidentally a portrait of his mother, and was painted for no buyer. He probably painted it as a compositional answer to his fellow artists, who thought he had left the art of painting too far. In other words, he did it to prove his method was sound, his sensibilities intact. Many artists since have considered it to be one of the very first "abstract paintings."