Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl by James McNeill Whistler

Welcome back! I hope you all had a great summer. We’ll be spending the rest of 2024 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, starting off with this stunning portrait of a red-headed Irish beauty that shocked London society. We’ll find out who she is and how she was much more than a pretty face. 

Then we’ll learn about the very mercurial artist she had to put up with, James McNeill Whistler and the chaos he caused in his own life and others! 

If you want to zoom in and pan around, you can find it here on the Gallery’s website.

SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)
“A Long Look” opening and closing themes are by Ron Gelinas:
“Ascension” https://youtu.be/jGEdNSNkZoo and “Easy” https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs

Episode music
“Chopin Waltz in A Minor, B. 150.” Performed by Aya Higuchi

String Quartet no. 2 in B minor – II. Minuetto moderato.” Composed by Joseph Miroslav Weber, Performed by Steves Bedroom Band

Courtesy of musopen.org

Artwork information
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.12198.html

https://www.nga.gov/features/joanna-hiffernan-the-white-girl.html

https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.12198.html#relatedpages

https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2022/woman-in-white.html

https://www.nga.gov/collection/highlights/whistler-symphony-in-white-no-1-the-white-girl.html

https://www.nga.gov/blog/how-whistler-painted-white-in-full-color.html

James McNeill Whistler info
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/whistler-james-abbott-mcneill

Joanna Hiffernan Bio
https://www.dib.ie/biography/hiffernan-joanna-jo-a9605

The Peacock Room
https://asia.si.edu/explore-art-culture/interactives/peacock-room/making-the-peacock-room/

TRANSCRIPT

Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? Join me while I take you through the experience of what I see and discover while looking at a work of art for minutes instead of seconds. Then I’ll share the history, mystery, or controversy behind it!

Welcome back! I hope you all enjoyed your summer and are ready for some new looks! 

We’re back at the National Gallery for the next few episodes so let’s get started. 

MUSIC

Today I’m looking at “Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl” by James McNeill Whistler

If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/whistler, wh-is-tl-er. When you get there, just click on the image to zoom in and pan around! 

So what do you first notice?

A tall, slender, red-headed young woman stands facing us in this very big vertical portrait. It’s about 7 ft tall by 4 ft wide and she’s life-sized, filling most of it. 

Her luminous blue eyes stare over our heads out of a thin face with a delicate nose and full wine-red mouth. She has ivory skin but her face is slightly flushed and loose, luxurious copper hair cascades past her shoulders. 

She wears a full-length white gown belted above the waist with a fitted bodice and striped pewter-grey sleeves that pouf at the shoulders and taper down to white cuffs. The skirt falls to her feet, flaring out to our right where it hits the floor. 

That dress is a knock-out. Whistler painted it with shades of grey and white to create the pintucked bodice, the dimples in those poufy shoulders, the white stripes on the sleeves, and shadowy folds of the skirt.

She’s turned slightly to our left with a blank expression on her face. Not smiling, frowning or anything, she kinda looks dazed or preoccupied. Her hands hang by her sides and the one closest to us, on our right, loosely holds a white lily dangling from its long stem. 

The young woman stands on a tan bear-skin rug, although it might be a wolf, it’s kinda hard to tell. It’s layered over a carpet patterned with strokes of steel blue and black against a stone grey background filling the bottom third of the scene. 

The painting’s hung so high on wall, I actually had to step back and crane my neck to see her face. But that fierce creature is on eye-level, staring right at us with gleaming brown eyes and a snarling mouth lined with pointy teeth. Thin trails of blood red trickle from the corners of its mouth onto the carpet. Two small clusters of red, pink, burgundy and white flowers lie on the rugs near her feet, like they were just dropped.

An ivory-colored brocaded curtain fills the space behind her from top to bottom. Its abstract floral pattern is created with shades of light grey layered over the slightly darker ivory tone.

The whole scene is painted very loosely except for her face and the weird thing is her skirt and that background curtain have a rough, granular texture, like something was mixed in with the paint.  

So who is this red-haired beauty?

MUSIC

She is Joanna Hiffernan, an Irish immigrant who came to London in 1843. She was one of 7 children and her father was a teacher, although he often had to work as a laborer. Although she didn’t get much formal education, Jo was smart and curious. She became an artist’s model and an artist herself, but apparently never showed her work. She met James McNeill Whistler in 1860 when she was 21. She became his model and lover and even moved in with him, a shocking thing to do back in the Victorian era! 

But she also became a trusted business partner, managing his studio, selling his works, and may have collaborated with him on some of the many paintings, drawings, and prints she appeared in. Whistler named her his sole heir, giving her power of attorney and put her in charge of managing his property when he went to Chile for several months. 

I found a link to a short bio of Jo that I’ll include in the shownotes, please check it out. 

[MUSIC]

James McNeill Whistler was what you’d call a real character! He was born in Lowell, MA in 1834 and showed a real talent at a young age. By the time he did this painting, he’d gotten kicked out of West Point and spent his 20s studying in Paris where he invented himself as a dramatic, stylish man about town, who was often broke. Although he did manage to make money by selling copies of Dutch Old Masters he’d studied at the Louvre. He hung out with and learned from experimental artists like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. A few years later, he ended up in London in 1859 where he met Jo. 

Whistler was ambitious and painted “The White Girl” as his entry for the 1862 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in London which he hoped would launch his career. 

“The White Girl” stunned the Victorian audience. There was deep-seated prejudice against the Irish so the idea of a full-length portrait of a working-class Irish girl with her hair down and wearing what was basically just a fancy bathrobe blew their minds. Big portraits like this were supposed to only show the wealthy and powerful, the cream of society. 

The painting was rejected by the Academy so Whistler showed it at a private London gallery. Then he tried his luck with the Paris Salon. Also denied! “The White Girl” finally got her break at the Salon des Refusés, the Paris avant-garde exhibition where Edouard Manet’s clothing-optional “Le dejeuner sur l’herbe” debuted. 

It caused an uproar in both places but in Paris, some critics liked it. One reviewer described the effect of all the subtle shades he used as a “symphony in white.” Whistler really liked this and began giving musical titles to all his paintings, even later renaming this one. 

The painting was so different, no one knew what to make of it. It sounds like it became a kind of Rorschach test. Viewers and critics imposed their own baggage…uh…interpretation on it. Some thought Jo looked like she’d just gotten out of bed. Her loose hair and dazed face made a lot of them see a sexual morning-after situation, an idea that lasted for years. Others said she looked like an apparition, some ghostly creature. Whistler got exasperated at all this wild speculation, saying it just “represents a girl dressed in white standing in front of a white curtain.” 

But this was also an experiment with an idea at the time called “art for art’s sake.” He sort of flattened shapes and tilted the floor towards us, using that tone-on-tone, loose style to make things more abstract like the patterns of the curtain and carpet, basically breaking the rules of portraiture. He wanted to play with what paint could do. So in some ways, Jo wasn’t really the point, she was just like a framework he could hang his ideas on.

Whistler has become famous for being a difficult man (to say the least). He had an illegitimate child he gave to Jo and her sister to raise, after they had broken up. He went broke after suing a famous critic named John Ruskin for libel and infuriated his wealthy friend and client, Frederick Leyland by ignoring his instructions and going a little overboard decorating his dining room. The result was the stunning Peacock Room which you can see at the Freer Gallery here in Washington DC. 

OUTRO:

I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.

You can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglookpodcast.com and in most podcast apps. 

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Thanks for joining me!