| Summary: | A greater contrast between Whistler's outrageously flamboyant life - he was famously a friend of Oscar Wilde and Dante Gabriel Rossetti - and the subdued, touchingly melancholic style of the painting of his Puritan mother is hard to imagine. Painted in 1871, at the height of the Victorian age of family values, Whistler gave the painting the provocative modernist title Arrangement in Grey and Black. While restoring the painting for the Louvre, Sarah Walden was intrigued by its extraordinary and complex history which has hitherto never been fully uncovered. Delving deep in sources not available in the UK, she wrote this book of its complex birth which reads like a detective story. Her view of restoration (for which she received the support of Ernst Gombrich) is that it is more than a technical job, involving an aesthetic and historical approach.
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