Visiting the Whistler House
While roaming around downtown during Winterfest last weekend, we decided to visit the Whistler House Museum. We spent an enjoyable 45 minutes looking over the historic house and viewing some of the period art – an engaging mixture of landscapes, still life paintings and portraits as well as a room full of Whistler’s etchings. Of particular interest were the tidbits of Lowell history and Whistler trivia that we picked up from our enthusiastic young guide, Vanessa. Whistler, for example, was expelled from West Point for failing chemsitry, a problem that surfaced when he varnished his own paintings and they later became brown and discolored. When a cousin of his, Edith Fairpoint Davenport, was allowed to do an exact copy of his most famous work, Arrangement in Grey and Black, more commonly known as “Whistler’s Mother,” she faithfully copied the dull brown tones. This work is now on view at the Whistler House, but if you visit the original at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris you will see the true colors as intended. We also enjoyed the painting “Lowell in 1825″ by Benjamin Mather, which showed St Anne’s church and a few brick buildings in a green, pastoral setting. In the same room are portraits of Theodore Edson Parker, long the Reverend at St Anne’s and a champion of education for girls (leading Lowell High to become the first co-ed high school in the nation), and James B. Francis, the brilliant engineer whose massive floodgate, once called “Francis’ Folly” has saved Lowell many times from the raging waters of the Merrimack. All in all, between the art, architecture and history, the museum proved to be a rich and satisfying outing for our out-of-state visitors. Even though Whistler himself moved away from Lowell at an early age and in later years would never admit to having been born here (preferring to say he was from Baltimore or St. Petersburg), we were quite proud of our city as we showed our friends his birthplace.