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Did Whistler’s Mother Know About His Mistress?
Meet Joanna Hiffernan, the model and mistress who had to make way for Whistler’s formidable mother
“She was not only beautiful. She was intelligent, she was sympathetic. She gave Whistler the constant companionship he could not do without” — Robins and Pennell, The Whistler Journal, 1921
The American Civil War was raging. American-born artist James McNeill Whistler was living the good life in London with his second most famous model and mistress, Joanna Hiffernan.
The couple enjoyed an Avant-guard bohemian lifestyle, hobnobbing with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others at the center of the Aesthetic Movement. But this arrangement was disrupted by the arrival of the woman who would become Whistler’s most famous model, his mother, Anna Matilda Whistler.
Joanna Hiffernan was an Irish beauty who worked as an artists’ model and who dabbled a bit in painting herself. Her mother had died when she was young, and her father was a somewhat eccentric and alcoholic teacher of calligraphy.
The artist and the model first met at a studio in Rathbone place in 1860 when she was just 17 years old. A year later, the artistic collaboration snowballed into a full-blown affair, and the couple set…
