An original and compelling exhibition like a novel that instead of the artist puts his muse at the center of attention. The Royal Academy tells the story of Joanna Hiffernan, model, lover but also friend, travel companion and manager of James McNeill Whistler and the decisive role she played in the life and artistic career of the American painter.
Hiffernan’s name is not well known but her face, with green eyes and long red Irish hair, is well known to anyone who has seen Whistler’s paintings. Her is a recurring presence, sometimes as the protagonist of a portrait, sometimes as an extra in a city landscape, sitting in a bar or standing at the port.
“Symphony in white n1”
It is the most famous portrait of the woman, “Symphony in white n1”, to give the title to the exhibition, because it had a particular importance in their history and it is also a belated act of contrition of the Royal Academy, which had rejected the painting in 1862 when Whistler had presented it for the Summer Exhibition. The two lovers had been disappointed but not surprised when the Royal Academy had not accepted the portrait of a woman with loose hair and a white dress, standing and motionless in front of a white muslin canvas, a white lily in her hand and feet that rest on a bear skin. Too disconcerting, “lacking in narrative” and “too white”, these were the criticisms of the time. Months earlier, in a letter, Hiffernan had written about the picture that “some stupid people don’t understand it at all”.
The Paris Salon also rejected the portrait, but it was admired at the Salon des Refusés in 1863. It has remained one of Whistler’s best-known and best-loved works ever since. One room of the exhibition is dedicated to the portraits that he inspired in the following decades, women in white as homages or imitations from Millais’ “Sonnambula” to Karpelès “Symphony in white” through Klimt’s portrait of “Hermine Gallia”. In a spectacular hall of the exhibition, the three Symphonies in White painted by Whistler are brought together for the first time in decades, showing the evolution of the artist’s style but also the active collaboration with his inspiring muse.
In the “Symphony II” the image is double, of her in front of a fireplace holding one of the Japanese fans at the time in great fashion (the original is in a display case) and reflected in the mirror, in a tribute to Venus by Vélazquez. The “Symphony III” is a double portrait of Joanna and Emelie, another model, both dressed in white sitting together, again with white flowers and the same Japanese fan, in a harmonious composition and an image of great serenity, that Whistler himself called “the purest I’ve ever made”.