Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Whistler's Mother)

The picture on the wall behind her is a framed etching after Whistler's own Nocturne — but the whole composition beneath it is a debt to Japan. Whistler was the first Western painter to systematically absorb the flat pictorial planes of ukiyo-e. Anna McNeill Whistler sat because the paid model didn't turn up. She was 67. The title puts colour before subject; Whistler was fighting for aesthetics against Victorian moralism. Ruskin sued him for it. Now at Musée d'Orsay, Paris @museeorsay