Jo, the beautiful Irish Girl

Courbet spent the autumn of 1865 at Trouville on the Normandy coast, bathing in the sea, boasting in letters about the number of society women sitting to him, and working alongside Whistler, who was there with Joanna Hiffernan. She was Whistler's model and his companion, an Irishwoman in her early twenties, and Courbet wrote home that he had begun the portrait of a superb redhead. He liked the composition enough to repeat it three more times, so there are four of these, in New York, in Kansas City, in Stockholm and in private hands. This one is generally taken to be the first. Whistler and Hiffernan separated not long afterwards. Courbet signed the lower left corner and put the year beside it, and the year he put there is 66.