Kay Bilisoly

Derick Crenshaw

Diane McCord

"Whistler's Mother” was Born Near Our New Gallery
By David A. Norris

The Wilmington Gallery at Newcastle gives the WAA a fine new location in the heart of a growing Art and Antiques District. It’s fitting, then, that our home is not far from a site associated with one of the most famous paintings in world. Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler, the mother of American impressionist-era painter James McNeill Whistler, was born scarcely half a dozen blocks from our gallery. She is depicted in Whistler’s 1871 painting Arrangement in Gray and Black, which is popularly known as Whistler’s Mother.

Anna was born in a house at Fourth and Orange Streets in Wilmington on September 24, 1804. Her parents were Scottish-born Dr. Daniel Whistler and his wife, Martha Kingsley McNeill. About 1814, the family moved to Brooklyn, New York. The McNeill’s two-story brick home on Orange Street was, unfortunately, torn down over a century ago.

In 1831, Anna McNeill married George Washington Whistler, a civil engineer and former army officer. They were living in Lowell, Massachusetts when the government of Czar Nicholas I hired Whistler to build a railroad from Moscow to St. Petersburg. After her husband's death in 1849, Anna and her two sons James and William left Russia for America.

When the Civil War began in 1861, James Whistler had moved to London and his art career was already prospering. His brother William, whose wife was from Virginia, became a surgeon in the Confederate Army. Anna Whistler lived with relatives in the North until her son William fell dangerously ill in 1863. She crossed the lines from North to South to be with him. After William’s recovery, he returned to duty with the army.

Anna decided to join her other son James in England. Her decision brought her back for a brief visit to the city where she spent her childhood. She would have found that Wilmington was greatly changed from the quiet port it had been when she left in 1814. Wilmington in 1863 was booming with money brought in by profits from steamers that ran through the Union Navy’s blockade of the South.

Anna Whistler left Wilmington on the blockade runner Advance in September or October 1863. When she got to Bermuda, she caught another ship for England.

Meanwhile, James Whistler had no idea that his mother had left America until he opened a letter from her, which told him to pick her up at the English port of Southampton. He quickly moved his mistress out of his flat into a nearby apartment before bringing his mother to London. Their family was completely reunited in 1865, when William Whistler arrived in London after dropping off some dispatches to Confederate agents in England.

Anna lived with her artist son in London for several years. She often treated his friends and patrons with North Carolina-style biscuits, fruit preserves, and buckwheat cakes. When she posed for Arrangement in Gray and Black in 1871, little did she know that the painting would make her world famous. The painting was used in countless advertisements, parodies, and even a US postage stamp in 1934.

On January 31, 1881, Anna McNeill Whistler died in Hastings, England. A historical marker in her honor was installed by the State of North Carolina at the corner of Third and Orange Streets in downtown Wilmington in 1939.

For further reading, see: Kate R. McDiarmid, Whistler's Mother: Her Life, Letters, and Journal (North Wilkesboro, N. C., the author, 1936); Dictionary of North Carolina Biography; Ben Steelman, "McNeill from North Carolina Posed in Art History", Wilmington Morning Star, August 29, 1984, p. 1C; Wilmington Morning Star, February 7, 1931, May 15, 1938; Whistler File, North Carolina Room, New Hanover County Public Library.