Description:
woman with long hair and dress leaning back in chair
Label Text:
Joanna Hiffernan, known as Jo, modeled for many of Whistler’s most famous works during the six years they were lovers. Weary is one such portrait. The composition of the print, with its dynamic interplay of compression and release, belies its title: Jo’s vitality literally pours off the page. The technical sophistication of the print gives it its emotional drama. Whistler’s use of drypoint, a technique in which the etching needle, rather than acid, incises lines into the copper plate, gives the inking a dense, felted quality that contrasts with the gossamer lightness of the Oriental paper. Given the amount of unworked space in the print—Jo’s voluminous skirt is mostly blank—the paper, deliberately chosen, is as crucial to the design as the lines.
Whistler must have reused this plate, or started over partway through his labor: you can see the ghost of an upside-down woman’s head in the bottom left-hand corner of the print. A lightly etched wavy line in the middle of the skirt, about three inches above the plate mark, might also be from an earlier composition. Whistler possibly retained these markings, instead of burnishing them out, to foster associations between his print and the medium of the sketch, favored during this period for its spontaneity and sense of the artist’s working process. (AS, "Image and After-Image," 5/22/2012)
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1969.4 |
