Books: Whistler's Parents

WHISTLER'S MOTHER—Elizabeth Mumford—Little, Brown ($2.50).

WHISTLER'S FATHER—Albert Parry—Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

The standard Life of James McNeill Whistler by the etcher Joseph Pennell and his wife was published in 1908, five years after Whistler's death. Since then the artist's famed picture of his mother has become such a Mother's Day ikon* that a separate study of the Woman Behind the Painting became inevitable. If Biographer Mumford† had had the style to confine her monograph within 200 incisive pages, she might have added something to literature. By being half again as long as that, and by a...