Devoting a whole show to a nineteenth-century model and muse is pretty niche, even by art history standards. But the reverse psychology of this RA exhibition is compelling, and by the end of it what emerges is not just a portrait of the artist, but of the strange morality and tastes of a whole age.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler arrived in London from the States – via Paris – in the 1850s and took up with artists’ model Joanna Hiffernan in 1860. He was making prints around the river in the slummy East End but it was his paintings of Hiffernan that defined his early career in the capital. The most famous of these, ‘The White Girl’, later renamed ‘Symphony in White No 1: The White Girl’, shows Hiffernan, her famous russet hair uncoiled, in a long white dress, standing in front of a white curtain, holding a white flower. It’s both stagey and ghostly, and definitely intended to challenge the accepted painterly approach of the time – a large portrait of an unknown, non-society woman without any explanatory historical narrative.
And that’s what makes this show, once you get into it, so interesting. Another painting from the same time shows Hiffernan in conversation with two men on the balcony of a Wapping pub. Her hair’s tied up, she’s hatless, she’s in a simple dress of dark green and black. She’s very much not there to be appraised and gazed upon. More importantly, she is shown as the societal equal of her companions.
Hiffernan comes across as central to Whistler’s work and life, but her ambiguous role reflects his position as an artist. Whistler went out of his way to cock snooks at the establishment, who promptly sat on him (he expensively sued art critic John Ruskin for defamation, won and was awarded a quarter of a penny in damages). ‘Symphony in White No 1’ hints at abstraction, at an art that requires no explanation beyond itself, but it was put on show with the title ‘The Woman in White’ to yolk it to Wilkie Collins’s bestselling novel.
Above all, though, Hiffernan, a poor Irish immigrant, appears throughout this intriguing and suggestive show as a symbol of a society that worshipped female beauty but refused to acknowledge women, and that prized art while mistrusting the people who make it.
