A White Note

In 1862 Whistler's large picture of a woman in white was turned down by the Royal Academy in London and hung instead in a small commercial gallery on Berners Street, where it was advertised as a scene from a popular novel, which infuriated him. The model in that painting was Joanna Hiffernan, an Irish woman who had become his partner and who also ran his studio and his money, and she is the figure here too. This canvas is tiny beside the other one, about 37 centimetres high, and everything in it sits close together, the dulled whites and blues of her dress against a brown wall. His biographers, the Pennells, believed he painted it in Paris the year before. The canvas itself carries a very faint signature that seems to read 1862.