American Art Collaborative

A White Note features Joanna “Jo” Hiffernan, Whistler’s primary model and studio manager in the 1860s who posed for the artist’s series of Symphony in White paintings. This work shows the influence of the English painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Whistler’s representation of a lone woman, devoid of any social context or moral message, expresses the sensibility of the emerging Aesthetic Movement then led by Rossetti. Whistler would become the chief spokesman for the movement, advocating an “art for art’s sake” focused on line, form, and color in the pursuit of beauty. Whistler and Rossetti became close friends in 1863, and A White Note was in Rossetti’s possession upon his death in 1882.