Brilliant White

Frans Hals had 27 blacks in his paintbox, according to Vincent van Gogh. How many whites did James McNeill Whistler have in his?

You can make your own judgement in Whistler's Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan at the Royal Academy in London. Jo, the red-headed Irishwoman who modelled for the paintings at the heart of this excellent exhibition, was also Whistler's lover (and distinctly different from Whistler's Mother), and she was central to his early development as an artist. 

As you enter this show, this is the picture of Jo you can see in the distance through the doorway to your right: Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl. Whistler started the painting in Paris late in 1861, posing Hiffernan for exhausting all-day sessions, and he submitted it to the Royal Academy's annual exhibition in London the following year. 

"Some stupid painters don't understand it at all," Hiffernan wrote, adding that Whistler thought that "praps the old duffers may refuse it altogether." 

The RA did indeed reject it, and the painting was exhibited in a private gallery, where it caused a sensation, despite the lack of narrative and tendency to abstraction that puzzled the critics. It probably helped that it was advertised as The Woman in White, echoing the title of Wilkie Collins's recently published smash-hit mystery novel, though Whistler denied any connection. 

The illustrator George du Maurier quoted Whistler as saying that "the picture barring the red hair is one gorgeous mass of brilliant white," but it's much more complex than that. There are a whole range of whites and greys in Hiffernan's cambric dress and the curtain that provides the backdrop. The paint has been applied extraordinarily thickly in parts, as you can appreciate when you get close up. And if that's not enough to draw you in, there's the head on the bearskin rug on which Jo is standing, staring straight at you. 

Whistler certainly wasn't the first artist to come up with the idea of painting a woman in white. Before we get to his version, you can see Dante Gabriel Rossetti's somewhat awkward Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation), with the Virgin Mary rigid with shock in a white nightgown, and George Frederic Watts's rather beguiling portrait of Lady Dalrymple. Both were painted about a decade before Whistler's first Symphony in White. 

That's the first Symphony in White, because there are three, and they're all in this exhibition. Hiffernan posed in a fashionable white dress, leaning on the mantelpiece in Whistler's Chelsea drawing room, for the second, known as The Little White Girl, in 1864.  

Hiffernan wears a wedding ring, though the couple weren't married, and she holds a fan with a woodcut by the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige. You can see a similar fan, as well as examples of the Chinese and Japanese porcelain Whistler loved to collect, elsewhere in this exhibition.

The third Symphony in White is smaller, and not quite so striking. Hiffernan, wearing the same dress as in the first painting, leans back on a sofa in what appears rather an awkward pose, while a professional model, Milly Jones, sits on the floor to the right in a yellowish silk dress. There are more whites in the flowers, the covering of the sofa and the motif on the carpet.

It's a painting that seems to pave the way for all those classical figures reclining on marble benches in later Victorian years, the sort that might be painted by Albert Moore (a friend of Whistler) or possibly Lawrence Alma-Tadema. 

One painter on whom Jo Hiffernan made a big impression was Gustave Courbet. Whistler, Hiffernan and Courbet stayed in Trouville in Normandy in autumn 1865, painting seascapes. Courbet wrote that he produced 25, "each more free and extraordinary than the last," and this show has examples of some -- such as Calm Sea from the National Gallery of Art in Washington -- alongside the wispier views that Whistler made at the same time, like Sea and Rain from the University of Michigan.

But Courbet also painted Hiffernan, whom he called "a superb redhead". He kept the original but made three copies for sale. Three of the paintings of Jo, la belle irlandaise are on show here; it's unclear if this one, from the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, is the first version, but it's perhaps the most impressive.   

The final section of this exhibition looks at how Whistler's fellow painters paid homage to his creation by depicting their own women in white.

Albert Herter's Portrait of Bessie (Mrs Elizabeth Newton) from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta goes even whiter than Whistler by including a polar bear skin, while John Everett Millais's The Somnambulist adds a narrative element, depicting a barefoot woman in a nightgown sleepwalking along the top of a cliff. A Symphonie en blanc by Andrée Karpelès from Nantes is somewhat racier, its model displaying one bare breast.  

This is Fernand Khnopff's Portrait of Madeleine Mabille. She is holding a palette, brushes and maulstick, though that striking white dress doesn't look very suitable for painting in.

The final picture is a portrait by Gustav Klimt of Hermine Gallia, patron of modern art and design in early 20th-century Vienna. Her dress is far more flamboyant than anything we see Hiffernan in, but the way it's painted reveals Klimt's debt to Whistler, with surely just as many shades and textures of white. 

This is an extremely well-structured exhibition, thoroughly enjoyable, with an awful lot of paintings you're unlikely to have encountered before, particularly from North America. It's the best thing we've seen so far in 2022.

Practicalities

Whistler's Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan runs until May 22 at the Royal Academy on Piccadilly in central London. It's open Tuesday to Sunday from 1000 to 1800. Full-price tickets are £17 and must be booked in advance, which you can do here. Allow 75 minutes or so to take in this exhibition. The RA is a few minutes' walk from Green Park and Piccadilly Circus Tube stations.

The show moves on to the National Gallery of Art in Washington from July 3 to October 10.

Images

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl, 1862, National Gallery of Art, Washington
George Frederic Watts, Lady Dalrymple, 1851, Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey. © Watts Gallery Trust
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No 2: The Little White Girl, 1864, Tate Britain

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No 3, 1865-67, The Barber Institute, Birmingham. Photo: The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham

Gustave Courbet, Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl, c. 1866-68, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
Fernand Khnopff, Portrait of Madeleine Mabille, 1888, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Hermine Gallia, 1904, The National Gallery, London