James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was an American painter primarily based in the UK who was a leading supporter of the “art for art’s sake” philosophy, against any notions of sentimentality in his art. His painting Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871), more commonly known as Whistler’s Mother is his most famous painting and depicts the artist’s mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, sitting in profile. Yet Whistler had no interest in painting family portraits and was instead interested in the aesthetic experiment of rendering black and grey tones in muted light, his posed mother merely another figure in the composition. Despite Whistler’s exasperation to emotional readings of the work, its subject matter continues to be interpreted as a portrait of his mother, imbuing the work with sentimentality.

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