The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan & James McNeill Whistler

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—a 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 s