Whistler and His Mother : A Story of Bankruptcy, London's Bohemia, and America's Most Famous Painting

How does a painting by a son of his Puritanical mother become as famous as famous a female image as Boticelli's Birth of Venus or the Mona Lisa?

Sarah Walden became fascinated by Whistler, his contradictory life and the emotional and social whirlwind in which his best-known work was produced.

She discovered that despite the painting's fame, its creator was so reticent about its creation (like Flaubert about Mme Bovary) that little was known about the circumstances of its genesis.

In a book which reads like a detective story, Sarah Walden vividly uncovers the secret life of the Whistler behind the canvas and reveals the contrast between the painter's womanising, flamboyant, life (his friends included both Oscar Wilde and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and the love for his mother, a woman who 'purified' his sketches of Paris by burning them, and whose surprise arrival in Chelsea caused Whistler - never normally a shrinking violet - to evict his long-term girlfriend in a panic.