Whistler's Mother is printed on stamps and treated as the visual definition of maternal devotion, yet James McNeill Whistler despised sentimentality and titled the work Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, insisting the sitter's identity was irrelevant. This episode follows the combative American expatriate from a restless childhood in Russia, where his railroad-engineer father worked for the emperor, through his expulsion from West Point under Robert E. Lee after declaring silicon a gas, to a job at the U.S. Coast Survey where he doodled mermaids on official maps and learned etching.

We trace his reinvention in bohemian Paris, the lesson that black anchors a painting, the rejection of Symphony in White and its showing at the 1863 Salon des Refusés, and his decision to give paintings musical titles so viewers would stop hunting for a plot.  ...