Unveiled at last, the secret of a naked artistic mystery
An Irish model is at the heart of a new discovery about one of the world’s most notorious paintings, writes Liam Collins
BEFORE there was the Playboy ‘‘centrefold’’ there was the erotic realism of Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World which was painted more than 150 years ago and inspired one of the great mysteries of the art world.
Painted in 1866, it was not seen publicly until 1988. The reason for this reticence becomes obvious when you see the painting, a close-up of the genital area of a naked woman — long believed to be the torso of a beautiful Irish red head.
Even today the painting is shocking because of its explicit nature and it isn’t surprising it unsettled the artist’s contemporaries when he first unveiled it.
It is, says The Art Newspaper, “one of the most controversial paintings in art history” and for more than a century speculation identified the ‘‘sitter’’ as an Irish artist’s model Joanna Hiffernan.
Because Courbet had also painted portraits of his lover Hiffernan, including one called La Belle Irlandaise which is now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, art historians who obsess about such matters believed she was also the subject of The Origin of the World.
There was a doubt, however. Hiffernan, a good if wayward Irish Catholic girl, was unashamedly a red head, whereas the cropped pubic hair in Courbet’s realist painting is dark.
Born in Ireland around 1843, Joanna Hiffernan met the American painter James McNeill Whistler in London in 1860. As well as posing with and without her clothes for him, she also became his lover for six years. The painter’s biographer maintained that she was not only beautiful, “she was intelligent, she was sympathetic, she gave Whistler the constant companionship he could not do without”.
She was with the American-born artist in 1861/2 when he painted her for a series called Symphony in White and she also met his friend Courbet, who inspired an artistic and literary circle which included the Irish writer George Moore, meeting in Paris’s Cafe Guerbois to discuss their ideas for a “scrupulous reproduction of life”.
After breaking up with Whistler, Hiffernan posed for Courbet in The Sleepers, which depicts two naked women asleep in bed and the speculation is that the artist and model became lovers at that time.
She then disappeared and is said to have become an antiques dealer in Nice.
The last sighting of her was at Whistler’s funeral in London in 1903. “I knew at once it was Joanna, the Joanna of La Belle Irlandaise that Courbet had painted with her wonderful hair and a mirror in her hand,” said the art patron Louisine Havermeyer. “She stood for a long time beside the coffin... I could not help being touched by the feeling she showed towards her old friend.”
New research revealed this week by French literary scholar, Claude Schopp, debunks the Irish connection to Courbet’s famous painting.
After reading correspondence between the writers Alexandre Dumas and George Sand discussing the subject of the painting, Schopp is “99pc certain” that the model was not Hiffernan, but a Parisian ballet dancer, Constance Queniaux (34).
It is believed that Gustave Courbet painted The Origin of the World for an Ottoman diplomat, Halil Serif Pasha, for a collection of erotic or ‘‘pervy’’ art, depending on your point of view, but her identity was kept secret because of her rising position in Parisian social circles.
Courbet’s controversial work was given to the French state in lieu of inheritance taxes in 1995 and is now in the collection of the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.