Joanna Hiffernan, James Whistler and Gustave Courbet, her Lovers…

By Santiago Sevilla

Usually Jo Hiffernan has been mentioned as a secondary character in the biographies of both the famous impressionist painters James Abbot MacNeil Whistler and Gustave Courbet. But, in her own right, she was a most extraordinary woman. She was beautiful and of very good nature.

Her origin was rather modest, but her appearance and personality made her friends call her “La Belle Irlandaise”.

There is a strange trait in many painters, such as Pablo Picasso, and James Whistler, unwittingly, to be fatal womanizers, leaving a track of broken hearts on their way to fame. These abandoned beauties are called their mistresses and are left as collateral damage of the achievement of those geniuses in their art. But, the very subject of that art, are those more or less infamous mistresses. This is an astonishing contradiction due, no doubt, to some entrenched social prejudice.

Whistler used Jo Hiffernan as a model for many of his most famous portraits. She had a splendid coiffure of red hair, which fascinated both her painters and lovers, Whistler and Courbet. Her skin was candid and tenuous and her hands most delicate. For Whistler, a keen observant of harmony, she embodied perfection. His ideal of harmony would go beyond realism, so in his painting “Symphony in White, No.1, The White Girl” (1862) Whistler ignored her sky blue eyes, and painted them rather dark to better combine with her hair. It is a wonderful experience to contemplate this painting in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. It can be seen from great distance and its magnificent size is most astonishing. The portrait contains plenty of symbolism, and the bear at her feet has some resemblance with Whistler himself, and his defiant smile. The spring flowers are a metaphor for unblemished youth. The white dress so pure, would be kept by Whistler for many of his future paintings of Jo Hiffernan, over decades. She was born around 1843 and in this portrait she was 19 years old.

The next painting of Jo Hiffernan by James Whistler is the Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White Girl, dated in 1864, Canvas, 76x51 cm. London, Tate Gallery

Here Whistler makes Jo Hiffernan appear in angel like complexion, and spiritual meditation, confronting a mirror, where she appears in reflexion even more spirituliazed. So the vision of Whistler regarding Jo Hiffernan is an aesthetic one, where she is an object of beauty for itself, with no real sexual perception. Her hand holds the fan with no effort, as in a dream. It is the same touch-less hand of the first symphony in white.

The Symphony in White No. 3. (Canvas, 52 x 76.5 cm. University of Birmingham, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts), shows Jo Hiffernan in playful mood, with the same famous white dress, together with Millie Jones. Jo Hiffernan’s blue eyes are very shiny and clear:

By 1865 the relationship of Jo Hiffernan with James Whistler suffered decay. She flirted with Gustave Courbet, and they became excellent friends and lovers. Courbet saw in Jo Hiffernan the sensuous woman. He loved her hair and her marvellous eyes.

Soon he painted her in a manner totally different from James Whistler: he had discovered her lovely femininity. Hardly ever has a painter expressed so much admiration for a woman with the stroke of his brush as Courbet did. Here is his “Belle Irlandaise”:

Courbet’s admiration for Jo Hiffernan knew no boundaries. He saw her as a goddess of love of all kinds. He even thought she could be an Eve, the very origin of mankind. He speaks through his magnificent and very daring paintings. He saw womanhood in a very particular and fascinating way, which today astonishes almost everybody. He painted Jo Hiffernan in lesbian passionate love, with eyes closed, as if asleep:

He painted also a partial nude of Jo Hiffernan he called: “L’Origine du Monde”, a most audacious and truthful view of the origin of mankind which is to be seen at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris:

Later, when Jo Hiffernan grew older, she kept her friendship with James Whistler, she even took care of his son James Whistler Hanson by a gentle parlor maid, Louisa Fanny Hanson. Whistler’s son was born 1870 and lived until 1935. The young boy lived at least for ten years with Jo Hiffernan at her house in London, 5 Thistel Grove.

James Whistler died 1903, and Jo Hiffernan was at his funeral, as recorded by the most famous art collector and patron Miss Louisine Havemayer.

So it was for me fascinating one day to discover, that Whistler had painted Jo again in rather elder age at some time around 1898 in a “Symphony in White No. 4”, signed with a butterfly, which is now in private collection:

She appears to signal to the butterfly or whistler with her hand in similar shape as in the first and second Symphony; the famous white dress is the same, but time has passed and youth is mostly

gone, nevertheless Jo is still a “grande dame”. Her coiffure shows some loss of hair, but it is the same reddish colour and waved mesh of the Belle Irlandaise.

The butterfly is present on her lap as a symbol, very similar of Whistler’s signature at that time:

Design for Butterfly, around 1898, University of Glasgow, Hunterian Art Gallery.

What really matters here is to see the development or “Werdegang” of a famous woman, Joanna Hiffernan, from youth to later years through all these famous paintings, as Shakespeare in one of his “sugared” sonnets said:

LIV

O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,

By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!

The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem

For that sweet odour which doth in it live.

The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye,

As the parfumed tincture of the roses,

Hand on such thorns, and play as wantonly,

When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses;

But for their virtue only is their show,

They live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade,

Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;

Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made.

And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,

When that shall vade, my verse distils your truth.

Sources:

Whistler, by Francis Spalding, Phaidon. Oxford 1979

Frances Spalding is an art historian and critic who lectures in Shefield.

Selected Etchings of James A. McN. Whistler by Maria Naylor,

Dover Publication, Inc. New York, 1975

University of Glasgow

Wikipedia

Google Images

Many other generous sources, to which I am very grateful.