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-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 sheds light on their interactions with contemporaries, including Gustave Courbet, for whom she also modeled. Packed with new insights into the creation, marketing, and cultural context of Whistler's iconic works, this study also traces their resonance for his fellow artists, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edgar Degas, John Singer Sargent, and Gustav Klimt.

This book is edited and written by Margaret F. MacDonald, professor emerita and honorary professorial research fellow at the School of Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow, with contributions from Charles Brock, associate curator of American and British paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington; Patricia de Montfort, lecturer in the history of art and at the School of Culture and Creative Arts and research curator for Whistler studies at the Hunterian, University of Glasgow; Ann Dumas, curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and consultant curator of European art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Joanna Dunn, painting conservator at the National Gallery of Art, Washington; Grischka Petri, honorary research fellow at the University of Glasgow; Aileen Ribeiro, professor emerita at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London; and Joyce H. Townsend, senior conservation scientist at Tate, London, and honorary professorial research fellow in the School of Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow.