The Van Gogh Museum was scheduled to open a major autumn exhibition on James McNeill Whistler on Friday. The exhibition presents the American-born artist, who built his career in 19th-century Paris and London, as a painter, cross-thinker and innovator of art, and highlights his special relationship with the Netherlands. It includes his best-known painting, the portrait of his mother, which Whistler titled *Arrangement in Grey and Black*.