Whistler and His Woman in White

A National Gallery exhibition glows with Whistler’s art and the copper-haired model who inspired it.

T he Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler is the lovely, important new exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington. Whistler (1834–1903) was, in his lifetime, the most written-about artist of the 19th century. His London nocturnes put the hardest of hearts in rapture. These and his gauzy, tonal portraits cleared the decks of fussy Victorian art, inviting Modernism to emerge.

In surveys of American modern art, Whistler is almost always the starting point. He had an idiosyncratic handle on the art of every century. Though he always insisted he was an American — he was born in Lowell, Mass. — the British say he’s British. Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, from 1871, called “Whistler’s Mother,” always hung among the Impressionists at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. I’m not sure what the French think about him now, but for years they considered him, in a big stretch, French.

The Woman in White is anchored by three early Whistler paintings. The White Girl, or Symphony in White, No. 1, as Whistler later called it, is from 1861–63, though the artist fiddled with it in 1872. He painted The Little White Girl, or Symphony in White, No. 2, in 1864. Symphony in White, No. 3 dates to 1865–67.

There’ve been many hundreds of Whistler exhibitions since, say, the 1880s, and it’s hard to believe there’s still unplowed terrain, but Margaret MacDonald, the exhibition’s curator and empress of Whistler studies, has found a new one. The show’s a tribute, at times rousing, at times poignant, to artists’ models everywhere. Among the many components of the art world, they’re the most often erased and among the most intrinsic. On the marquee, sharing top billing with Whistler, is Joanna Hiffernan (1839–86), model for the three women-in-white paintings, Whistler’s mistress and muse, and the essential person in his life.

Looking at these three paintings on one wall in the first gallery made me dizzy with joy. Hung on a pale yellow wall, they glowed. Whistler deployed a new color wheel made from white: white dresses, white curtains, white sofas, and pale, pretty, delicate Victorian faces, with Jo’s copper hair for added drama. That is, if we needed any since Whistler made white a drama.

On the one hand, we don’t know much about Hiffernan. There’s not much of a paper trail, and no one’s found a photograph of her. On the other hand, we do, through letters from Whistler and his circle, some documents, and, of course, the close analysis of the three paintings that MacDonald and her team have done. Born in Limerick, Hiffernan and her dirt-poor family moved to London, trading Irish squalor for the London slums and, at least, a job for her father.

Whistler met Jo, who was barely schooled, in 1860. He’d just moved to London from Paris. He wasn’t famous but was a known Young Turk. Quickly shacked up, they were a couple and team through the 1860s. After they split sometime in the early 1870s, she stayed in the picture, caring for Whistler’s illegitimate son from a fling in 1870. She died in 1886, from bronchitis exacerbated by London’s air pollution and her long exposure to toxic art materials in Whistler’s studio.

The first gallery is a master class in both Whistler studies and in curating. It sets a stage: Whistler in London, his artistic focus on seedy docksides, meeting Jo, using her as a model for Wapping in 1860, and then evolving with speed to The White Girl a year later. Wapping is a packed view of a wharf with three figures, two men and a woman, in the bottom right. Early viewers thought the woman was meant to be a prostitute. London was filled with them, after all, and it’s a dock scene. Whistler wrote to the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour, his best friend, saying Jo looked “supremely whore like” in the picture.

Wapping is Whistler the realist, an acolyte of Courbet but dynamic since the London docks aren’t Paris. It’s a picture with an edge. Jo’s Irish colleen looks, especially her red hair, give it oomph.

The exhibition moves with rhythm from Wapping and early Whistler etchings of London’s Rotherhithe district, to the main wall facing the entrance, displaying the three women in white, a wall to the right with Purple and Rose: The Lange Leiden of the Six Marks from 1864, and, facing the women in white, The Artist in His Studio from 1865 (and which he worked on later). In Purple and Rose, Jo’s the model, dressed in Japanese style and made to look Japanese.

The Artist in His Studio is the last painting with Jo as a model. The other model was the wife of a friend of his. Whistler painted it looking at a big mirror in a riff on Las Meninas by Velázquez, though The Artist in His Studio isn’t grand. It’s a small, casual, intimate, freely painted picture. The space combines biography and aesthetics.

The White Girl baffled people. The Royal Academy rejected it for its big contemporary art exhibition. The woman figure, played by Jo, looks zonked. It’s a big, full-length painting, so it references Old Master grand-manner portraits, but The White Girl wasn’t a portrait. What was it about, then? It’s got to be about something. She is, after all, standing on a rug made from a skinned bear or wolf, the animal head looking like Old Master depictions of Goliath or Holofernes post-decapitation. Whistler said simply that the picture was about a girl in a white dress.

The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne came to the rescue when he wrote a poem about The Little White Girl, a more refined, contemplative picture. The poem, “Before the Mirror: Verses Written under Whistler’s ‘Little White Girl,’” made it a painting about love, a woman pining, possibly a lost love. It’s more wistful. A catalogue essay states that the palpable intensity in Whistler’s handling of paint is like lovemaking. I looked at the three pictures for a long time. I usually hate references to the act of painting as a surrogate for sex, but this one works. Given Jo’s part in Whistler’s life, and knowing Whistler’s subsequent paintings, where the artist tends to disappear, I believe it.

Symphony in White, No. 3 is the first Whistler painting given a musical title. Whistler changed the titles of The White Girl and The Little White Girl after he painted his scene of two women, Jo modeling for the woman on the left. White is the most expansive motif. The artist seems to have hit on a tonalist formula he’d develop over the next 30 years.

I think the gallery filled with Whistler’s etchings of Jo was moving and various. Whistler’s prowess as a printmaker is rich and impressive and not secondary to his paintings and pastels but equal to them. All his media are intertwined. Anchoring this space are different versions of Weary, the drypoint from 1863 showing Jo slumped on a giant, deep chair, possibly a bergère. This isn’t fin de siècle, and Jo wasn’t the neurasthenic type, so “weary” says it all. It’s a personal, intimate image. The exhibition shows us how experimental Whistler was since each impression of Weary is inked differently, on different paper, and with drypoint deletions or additions. Whistler, master of ink, paper, and line, was a master pain in the ass, too. Jo was his model and employee but also his mistress, muse, caretaker, handler, cook, studio assistant, diplomat when Whistler quarreled, and business manager when he was away. No wonder she’s weary. Jo, an 1861 drypoint, is intimate, too, but most of all a frank, direct portrait. Jo’s neither a model nor a muse but a flesh-and-blood woman whom Whistler, master narcissist and jerk, deeply loved.

I know more about Whistler than most, but I learned so much. We can’t take anything Whistler said at face value. His relationships were unstable, and in a quarrel he’d happily lie to win. He was self-involved and competitive. These things I know.

I didn’t know he had a moment in the late 1860s when he loathed The White Girl, writing to Fantin-Latour that he tried too hard in the late 1850s and early 1860s to flaunt Courbet’s influence. His work then was too realistic, he wrote, and Courbet’s influence was “odious.” Whistler was moving toward his nocturnes, harmony pictures, and abstract portraits. He was moving away from Jo. Jo and Whistler traveled to Trouville in 1865, spending lots of time with Courbet. A set of Courbet’s portraits of Jo are in the show. She looks weary, even worried. Courbet found her red hair and distinctly Irish face a dazzling combination and very different from French looks.

Whistler’s mother, Anna, moved permanently to London in 1863, living with Whistler and displacing Jo, whom Whistler kept nearby. Mother Whistler said she prayed for Jo, but, when Whistler got a £100 inheritance from a dead aunt, she advised using it to pay Jo to disappear. Still, in 1866, when Whistler went to Chile for six months, he left Jo with a power of attorney to handle his affairs. He also made a will leaving her his estate.

The two documents are in the show, looking very official. Usually, I don’t look too long at ephemera, but these impress, at least on the point of Whistler’s seriousness. In 1870, Whistler had a fling and fathered a son who lived with Jo and her sister, Agnes. He and Jo were still emotionally involved. Whistler called the fling “an infidelity to Jo.” When a bankrupt Whistler fled to Venice in 1880, though, he took his new mistress, Maud Franklin, with him. Jo, nearing 40, was filed under “old news.” She and Agnes continued as surrogate mothers until Jo’s death.

There are only a few things I didn’t like about the exhibition. Before things took a turn, my heart went pitter-patter the instant I saw John Singer Sargent’s Fumée d’ambre gris from 1880. It’s the zenith of Orientalist painting, Sargent at his best, and the delicious thing I saw most days when I was a curator at the Clark, which owns it. It’s always a delight to see, and I thought I knew why it was there. Whistler did it years before in Symphony in White, but Sargent, then 24, made his own go at painting white-on-white-on-white. I think both artists painted women in white for many reasons, but one, unacknowledged in the exhibition, is a tribute, with a dash of one-upmanship, to Frans Hals, master of many blacks. For Sargent, Hals was a god. Whistler, too, admired Hals, but “emulation” was not in his vocabulary. Whistler, like Picasso, absorbed everything. He probably thought about Hals as well as Van Dyck, another black-on-black impresario, in doing white-on-white, but he’d never suggest it.

Then my heart sank. The museum gods giveth, I thought, and then taketh away. I saw a wall panel titled “Women in White: Color and Race.” Here we go, I thought. I glanced across the gallery. A half-dozen paintings of women in white by Whistler’s contemporaries filled the space.

We’ll learn, I assumed, Whistler’s motives were racist. The woman in Symphony in White steps on a bearskin rug. Violence against brown bodies. Aren’t bears from the American West? Dead bears mean colonialism and genocide. Or am I thinking of buffalos? “White” has the same number of letters as “slave.” The figure in The Little White Girl holds a fan decorated with a scene by Hiroshige and looks at a Chinese vase. Illicit cultural appropriation of Asian heritage, and racist. Symphony in White, No. 3: two women, dressed in white. Is this a stealth KKK rally? Whistler’s mother, after all, was a Confederate sympathizer, meaning she was a white supremacist, and on and on. Who knows where we’ll go. Many museums have a policy now, no doubt pushed by new diversity, equity, and inclusion staff, to shoehorn race grudges into every exhibition.

I write mostly in jest, though Whistler’s mother was indeed a Confederate sympathizer, and DEI bureaucrats do indeed push race grievance whenever they can, since that’s their business model. Without it, they’d be out of a job. “Women in White: Color and Race” is dumb but not the dumbest thing I’ve read. “Paintings of white women, dressed in white, by white artists reflects the lack of representation of people of color in mainstream Victorian visual culture,” we’re told. This is irrelevant. The last thing on Whistler’s mind was diversity, equity, and inclusion. Must that be every artist’s subject, and daggers to the artist who paints something else? How dull.

Sargent’s Fumée seems, in this finger-wagging context, wasted. So are Albert Herter’s Portrait of Bessie from 1892, George Frederic Watts’s Sophia Dalrymple from around 1852, and John Everett Millais’s Somnambulist from 1871, all of which depict women in white. I think these paintings, and a much expanded gallery, should have reflected Aileen Ribeiro’s first-class catalogue essay on the color white in women’s fashion. What I’m saying is The Woman in White is a great exhibition that needed more space.

Ribeiro is a distinguished historian of fashion at London’s Courtauld Gallery and doesn’t truck in racism studies. Her essay, rich, deep, and engaging, looks at the symbolism of white from Roman burial shrouds to Queen Victoria’s wedding dress, which, in 1840, made white the defining bridal color. White, she says, suggests purity, but it’s also the color of ghosts, simplicity, and mist. White underlines the dramatic contrast between Victorian women, who wear it, and Victorian men, who don’t.

White’s diaphanous. Whistler was pleased with himself for painting, or getting away with painting, see-through dresses for the two figures in Symphony in White, No. 3. Ribeiro dives into fabric, too. The figure in Symphony in White wears cambric, The Little White Girl linen with flounces, delicate and simple but high fashion, too. The dress in Symphony in White, No. 1 is tubular. Whistler used more gray. The effect’s totemic, more archaic than breezy.

I think fashion history, applied to these women in white, would have enchanted, and educated, viewers. Morisot, Renoir, Manet, and Cecilia Beaux painted famous “women in white” paintings. Including these would have made for a feast. I think some of them were in the Royal Academy’s version of the show.

Ribeiro’s excellent essay ends with Gustav Klimt’s Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein from 1905. Whistler’s art-for-art’s-sake philosophy aimed at stripping art of its didactic, moral, narrative quality in favor of what he called “the poetry of sight.” This is art about form and color. Klimt pushed this to its aesthetic end in his notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, or unity between art and design. Klimt’s picture is the stuff of drama and fantasy and his subject a design element to the extreme. Whistler is after the same effect but does it more subtly. Klimt admired Whistler’s work and ensured he was made an honorary member of the Society of Austrian Artists Secession.

There’s a panel pointing to a section called “Community Voices.” I did actually groan. I’m egalitarian, but, in a high-end art exhibition, don’t want to know what Joe and Judy Sixpack think. Was I wrong. Joe and Judy were nowhere to be found. Rather, the community voices belonged to artists’ models. I loved it.

These five women — note to the National Gallery: men model, too — spoke about opening themselves to criticism from artist and public, the tension between collaboration one minute and a mannequin’s life the next, and the absence of recognition. This section is at the end of the show and a smart, very different reprise of what must have been some of Jo’s issues.

The catalogue’s wonderful. MacDonald’s essays are art history at its best. She was a professor at the University of Glasgow for years, working on Whistler. Patricia de Montfort’s essay puts Whistler’s women in white in a mid-Victorian cultural context. Charles Brock, an NGA curator, writes with brio about the legacy of Whistler’s three women-in-white pictures. It has lots of juicy bits about Whistler’s sources and wrestles with what the bear rug means.

Grischka Petri’s essay concerns the display and sale of the three paintings. They stayed in Whistler’s studio for a while before leaving for permanent homes. Petri recites good stories about Whistler’s disputatious relations even with his collectors. He was furious at his nephew, for instance, who owned The White Girl, for selling it to an American collector. Taking the picture out of the family, he thought, was a betrayal. Whistler left no friend or relative unoffended.

The catalogue is not only scholarly and well written. It’s abundantly illustrated and designed with the NGA’s characteristically lively, good taste. Everything the NGA does looks good. And that includes the finished renovation of the East Building’s skylights. I. M. Pei designed the building in the late 1970s. Its vast, lovely atrium needed new glass, which restored its lighting to its original glory. The auditorium and bathrooms were spiffed up, too, and there’s a lactation room for milk-producing persons, once called nursing mothers.

Years ago, I worked with Margaret MacDonald on an exhibition about Whistler’s Battersea Bridge paintings and prints. Like the Hiffernan show, Battersea Bridge and Whistler, as an insular proposition, had never been done. It was a very good exhibition.

Very early in our labors, Margaret introduced me to Helen Spencer, who owned Whistler’s house on 101 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. The address was once 7 Lindsay Row. Whistler lived there from 1863 to 1867. The Little White Girl was painted in Helen’s drawing room. My husband, Steven, and I became close friends with Helen. I would say best friends. I viewed her as a surrogate sister.

We always stayed with her when we went to London, staying in the room Whistler called his studio. Lindsay Row, then, was a working-class part of London. Now, it’s posh. Michael Bloomberg owns a house two or three doors down. Mick Jagger lived next door. Shouty as he is in his music, he was a quiet neighbor.

No. 101 is the smallest house in the neighborhood, but we were always comfortable. I never intuited ghosts, Whistler’s, Jo’s, or his mother’s, but never tried a Ouija board.

Helen sold the house a few years ago, downsizing to an elegant place across from Eel Common. She died suddenly there on January 1, 2022. Steven and I were, of course, heartbroken, and still are. Whistler has delivered much intellectual and aesthetic pleasure to me, but nothing beats the warmth and comfort of a best friend. A hundred years after his death, this irascible cynic, imperious and selfish, showed himself a genius in connecting the best of friends.