Sheet of Stamps of Whistler's Mother

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is said to have selected Whistler’s portrait for this U.S. postage stamp, issued “In Memory and in Honor of the Mothers of America.” In adapting the painting’s composition for the stamp, the designer took the liberty of cropping and altering the image, adding a vase of flowers in the lower left corner. These alterations gave rise to a controversy, at whose center was Alfred Barr, then the director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Barr had been the architect of the American tour of Whistler’s painting in 1933–34 and felt a special obligation to defend the painting as a work of art.