Catalogue
The Woman in White
Author: Margaret F. MacDonald
with contributions by
Charles Brock
Patricia de Montfort
Joanna Dunn
Grischka Petri
Aileen Ribeiro
Joyce H. Townsend
Hardcover
8.75 x 10.5 inches
232 pages, 170 color illustrations
Published 2020
$50.00
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Royal Academy of Arts, London
Yale University Press,
New Haven and London
The eponymous exhibition page in Patrons
Accompanying the National Gallery of Art exhibition The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler, this catalog offers a fascinating look at the partnership of artist James McNeill Whistler and his chief model, Joanna Hiffernan, and the iconic works of art resulting from their life together.
In 1860 James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and Joanna Hiffernan (1839–1886) met and began a significant professional and personal relationship. Hiffernan posed as a model for many of Whistler’s works, including his controversial Symphony in White paintings, a trilogy that fascinated and challenged viewers with its complex associations with sex and morality, class and fashion, academic and realist art, Victorian popular fiction, aestheticism and spiritualism.
This luxuriously illustrated volume provides the first comprehensive account of Hiffernan’s partnership with Whistler throughout the 1860s and 1870s-period when Whistler was forging a reputation as one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation.
A series of essays discusses how Hiffernan and Whistler overturned artistic conventions and sheds light on their interactions with contemporaries, including Gustave Courbet, for whom she also modeled. Packed with new insights into the creation, marketing, and cultural context of Whistler’s iconic works, this study also traces their resonance for his fellow artists, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edgar Degas, John Singer Sargent, and Gustav Klimt.