This painting shows a young woman in a three-quarter figure, dressed in white and with loosened hair, standing by a fireplace with a large mirror above it. She gazes dreamily into the mirror, which shows not only the reflection of her somewhat sad face, but also a painting hanging on the opposite wall, a seascape. A wedding ring is prominently displayed on her left hand, which is resting on the mantelpiece. In her right hand she holds a Japanese fan - with its ukiyoe-like design, it appears to have been made in Japan for the export market. Also on the mantelpiece are a red pot and a blue-and-white porcelain vase, and in the lower right corner is a sprig of pink azalea, probably in a vase. All of this adds a certain Japanese atmosphere to the painting.
[Whistler - Symphony in White No. 2]
What are we seeing?
There is no story behind this painting - Whistler's goal was for viewers to appreciate the design, color and mood of this painting. This is also why he changed the original title "The Little White Girl" to "Symphony in White", a title under which he created three paintings. In all three paintings, the model is the artist Joanna Hiffernan, Whistler's muse and lover. Whistler was deeply interested in Japanese design and culture (so-called "Japonisme"), and this influenced the composition and the choice of objects, such as the fan and the porcelain vase.
Whistler created Symphony in White No. 2 in 1864 and decided to submit it to the 1865 annual exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. However, the jury rejected the canvas, which was in fact judged very negatively by art critics, who did not hesitate to stigmatize the work as a "bizarreness tinged with a dirty gray". Whistler continued to consider the painting worthy of his talent and exhibited it at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, where it won the Grand Prix for painting. In other words, Whistler had been more than 35 years ahead of his time! After this resounding success, the canvas was purchased by the British wallpaper manufacturer John Gerald Potter, a friend and patron of Whistler's. It is now in the Tate Gallery in London.
The Symphony in White is inextricably linked to Algernon Swinburne's poem "Before the Mirror." Whistler and Swinburne met in 1862 and immediately struck up a warm friendship. Enchanted by the painting, Swinburne wrote this poem on the spot in Whistler's studio. Whistler copied it on sheets of gold paper and pasted them on the frame. For Whistler, this was proof of the superiority of painting over all the arts, including literature: it was Whistler's painting that inspired Swinburne's poem, not the other way around. Swinburne himself said: "Whatever merit my song may have, it is not so complete in beauty, in tenderness and meaning, in exquisite execution and delicate power, as Whistler's picture...". One could also say that, for Whistler, Swinburne's poem praised a sensibility based on the autonomy of artistic creation, uncontaminated by moral and utilitarian justifications.
Whistler
He first became famous for a painting of his mother, almost entirely in black and white, entitled "Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1" but commonly referred to simply as "Whistler's Mother."
His highly atmospheric "Nocturnes" series shows Japanese influence. His sparing use of color makes the work almost abstract. The color-analytical method of the Impressionists did not suit him. His attention to the aesthetic effect of color is rather based on 17th-century Dutch tradition, which he greatly appreciated.
In 1878, Whistler sued the famous art critic Ruskin for libel after he called his "Nocturne in Black and Gold" "a pot of paint" and himself "a conceited brush". After this he left for Venice for a few years, where he mainly made etchings. He also loved Amsterdam. He said to his Dutch colleagues: "You Dutch painters do not know what you are neglecting by not making anything of your wonderful Amsterdam, which I find more beautiful than Venice." He associated with Willem Witsen and George Breitner, on whom he had great influence.
Whistler was on close terms with several French artists, including Édouard Manet. He was also a prominent figure in the aesthetic movement, together with his friend Oscar Wilde. But he also made many enemies in his life. He cultivated these enmities, among other things, by conducting many lawsuits. He wrote a book about it in 1890: The gentle art of making enemies.
Joanna Hiffernan
Whistler's family disapproved of this relationship. Unmarried artists' models, and especially those who posed nude, were considered little better than prostitutes at the time. When Whistler's mother visited from America in 1864, Whistler had to seek alternative accommodation for Hiffernan.
In 1866, when their relation was cooling down, Hiffernan traveled to Paris and posed for Courbet's "Le Sommeil" (The Sleep), which depicts two naked women sleeping in bed. It is likely that she had an affair with Courbet during this period. After 1880 almost nothing is known about her, although she helped raise Whistler's son, Charles, the result of an affair of Whistler with a housemaid.
Other "Symphonies in White"
Here are the two other Symphony in White paintings for which Joanna Hiffernan modeled:
Whistler created the painting "Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl" in the winter of 1861–62. It was rejected both at the Royal Academy and at the Salon in Paris, but eventually accepted at the Salon des Refusés in 1863. That exhibition also featured Édouard Manet's famous Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and together the two works gained a lot of attention.
The White Girl seems to have made 19th-century viewers uncomfortable. The woman pictured wears an informal cambric house-dress - in other words, she has been caught at a private moment. Her long red hair hangs loose, contrasting vividly with the white dress and the white curtain at her back. All of this was against the conventions of portraiture. She stands on a bearskin rug (with an aggressive maw directed at the viewer) and flowers have apparently dropped from her hand to the floor. Her expression is vacant, but at the same time exudes a worldliness and lack of innocence that in the 19th century were deemed as shocking.
"Symphony in White, No. 3" was started in 1865, but Whistler was not ready to exhibit it publicly until 1867, when it went on display at the Royal Academy. This painting shows two women, one (Hiffernan) sitting on a white sofa dressed in white, and the other resting on the floor, with a yellowish dress. The presence of a fan on the floor again shows the influence of Japonisme. Joanna Hiffernan poses as a "collapsing woman," shown in the presence of a woman friend - a popular theme in those years. Her attitude is a mixture "of the cult of invalidism, stylish boredom, and a new, slightly troubling undercurrent of erotic languor" (Bram Dijkstra in Idols of Perversity, p. 70). The work was greatly admired by Whistler's colleagues, including Henri Fantin-Latour, James Tissot and Edgar Degas.
Swinburne's poem
BEFORE THE MIRROR.
(verses written under a picture.)
inscribed to J.A. Whistler.
I.
White rose in red rose-garden
Is not so white;
Snowdrops that plead for pardon
And pine for fright
Because the hard East blows
Over their maiden rows
Grow not as this face grows from pale to bright.
Behind the veil, forbidden,
Shut up from sight,
Love, is there sorrow hidden,
Is there delight?
Is joy thy dower or grief,
White rose of weary leaf,
Late rose whose life is brief, whose loves are light?
Soft snows that hard winds harden
Till each flake bite
Fill all the flowerless garden
Whose flowers took flight
Long since when summer ceased,
And men rose up from feast,
And warm west wind grew east, and warm day night.
II.
"Come snow, come wind or thunder
High up in air,
I watch my face, and wonder
At my bright hair;
Nought else exalts or grieves
The rose at heart, that heaves
With love of her own leaves and lips that pair.
"She knows not loves that kissed her
She knows not where.
Art thou the ghost, my sister,
White sister there,
Am I the ghost, who knows?
My hand, a fallen rose,
Lies snow-white on white snows, and takes no care.
"I cannot see what pleasures
Or what pains were;
What pale new loves and treasures
New years will bear;
What beam will fall, what shower,
What grief or joy for dower;
But one thing knows the flower; the flower is fair."
III.
Glad, but not flushed with gladness,
Since joys go by;
Sad, but not bent with sadness,
Since sorrows die;
Deep in the gleaming glass
She sees all past things pass,
And all sweet life that was lie down and lie.
There glowing ghosts of flowers
Draw down, draw nigh;
And wings of swift spent hours
Take flight and fly;
She sees by formless gleams,
She hears across cold streams,
Dead mouths of many dreams that sing and sigh.
Face fallen and white throat lifted,
With sleepless eye
She sees old loves that drifted,
She knew not why,
Old loves and faded fears
Float down a stream that hears
The flowing of all men’s tears beneath the sky.
Paintings and their stories:
The Birth of Venus by Botticelli
The Nightmare by Fuseli
Suzanna and the Elders by Gentileschi
Jupiter and Io by Coreggio
The Pretty Horsebreaker by Landseer
Girl in a white kimono by Breitner
Lady Godiva by Collier
The Roses of Heliogabalus by Alma-Tadema
Saint George and the Dragon by Uccello
Proserpine by Rosetti
The Lady of Shalott by Waterhouse
Judith and Holofernes by Klimt
Nana by Manet
Symphony in White, No. 2, by Whistler