Pretty women: Charles Lang Freer and the ideal of feminine beauty

It is a rare instance when an art connoisseur actually knows the women depicted in the pictures in his collection. But the Detroit railroad car builder Charles Lang Freer (Fig. 4) was just such a collector, familiar with the models whose lovely images he placed on his walls. The answer to why this lifelong bachelor surrounded himself with such paintings by James McNeill Whistler, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing lies in the love of transcendent beauty that he shared with the artists. Womanhood was the most common subject for artists at the turn of the twentieth century and feminine beauty was the symbol of American culture, but Freer approached the women in his paintings on another level as well. Since he had met many of them personally or knew details about their lives, this knowledge must have added a certain frisson of sexual innuendo to what were otherwise idealized conceptions. Moreover, these likenesses provided access to a removed feminine beauty, one well insulated from the actual types of women who seemed so threatening to him: he once complained to Dwight William Tryon (1849-1925), an artist whose landscapes also adorned his walls, "the modern American woman ... with her fancies of independence, rights, wrongs, extravagances, dress and other diabolical tendencies is startling all sensible people--both male and female, around the world." (1)

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The images of women in Freer's collection were artistic expressions that drew on the female figure for inspiration, but the actual women behind the pictures were hardly the cosseted creatures portrayed. In fact, they were often of low social status and ethnic outsiders in a stratified society. Whistler's sitters--in later years he termed them "my little pretties" (2)--illustrate this dichotomy well.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, mostly educated abroad, and trained in Paris, Whistler settled in London during the 1860s and became a key figure in the aesthetic movement, which gave art a role independent of storytelling or social function. When he and Freer met in 1890, the expatriate artist was recently wed and had achieved the international recognition that he had so long craved. Freer, for his part, was building a new house in Detroit for his art collection. Known nationally as a print connoisseur, he was the owner of a small group of American paintings and had started to buy Asian art as well. Whistler soon convinced him to assemble a collection of his creations, a collection that eventually grew to about seventy oils and numerous works on paper. His first purchase of an oil painting, in 1892, was Variations in Flesh Color and Green: The Balcony, in which one of the sitters has the russet tresses usually associated with Joanna Hiffernan, Whistler's well-known model and mistress of the 1860s.

Physically striking, Jo (as she was called), was even more impressive as a person. The artist's biographers Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell wrote, "She was not only beautiful. She was intelligent, she was sympathetic. She gave Whistler the constant companionship he could not do without." (3) Furthermore, the Pennells thought she had borne him a son. In fact, while Hiffernan helped to raise Whistler's son Charles James Whistler Hanson (1870-1935) after the couple parted, he was the child of a liaison with another woman. (4) In Whistler's sumptuous work Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen (Fig. 5), Hiffernan seems fragile and diaphanous. She is swathed in a plum-colored kimono with a maple leaf pattern, with a white kimono thrown over her left shoulder. The prints on the floor are from the series of views of sixty-nine famous sites in Japan by Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858), some of which Whistler owned. Most importantly, Hiffernan sits on the floor as if she were a courtesan in a Japanese ukiyo-e print. Yet the illusion is not a serious one, for the subject is clearly a Western woman. Of Irish working-class stock, Hiffernan had coppery red hair and pale skin, attributes that Whistler emphasized in the painting. Their mutual friend the French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) also featured her vibrant locks in his Jo, La Belle Irlandaise of 1866 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), but in his rendering the model is coarser and fleshier. In fact, the only known photograph thought to show Hiffernan (Fig. 6) records this fuller appearance, although it was taken later in life, sometime after a friend described her as a "buxom short woman of say forty." (5)

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Freer met the famed Hiffernan in the summer of 1903 when he was a pallbearer at Whistler's funeral. He was sitting near the coffin and was startled to see a woman in heavy mourning come forward to pay her last respects. His fellow art patron Louisine Havemeyer (1855-1829) later recorded the incident as she heard it from Freer:

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"As she raised her veil and I saw ... the thick wavy hair, although it
was streaked with gray, I knew at once it was Johanna, the Johanna of
Etretat, 'la belle Irlandaise' that Courbet had painted with her
wonderful hair and a mirror in her hand.... She stood for a long time
beside the coffin--nearly an hour I should think.... I could not help
being touched by the feeling she showed toward her old friend. "Did Maud
[Franklin] come?" [Havemeyer] asked. "Yes" answered Mr. Freer, "the same
afternoon. She had come all the way from Paris and was very much
affected as I uncovered Whistler's face for her to see him." ... [One
could see, Freer mused] "that the real drama of [Whistler's] life was
bound up in the love of [these] devoted women." (6)