Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl

The Beautiful Irish Girl is regarded as one of Courbet´s most fascinating female images. The model was Joanna Heffernan, called Jo. Courbet met her at Trouville, the new fashionable Normandy seaside resorts in 1865. Jo was the Irish mistress of the expatriate American painter James McNeill Whistler. Whistler sometimes worked alongside Courbet at seascapes on the Channel coast. Courbet’s painting Jo is brought to the front of the picture plane and fills almost the entire surface so as to create a feeling of immediacy and profound intimacy, excluding anything exterior. The neutral, greenish background enhances the effect of her gorgeous thick Titian-red hair, as well as the luminosity of her pale creamy skin and the whiteness of the chemise with its fine lace trim. All over, the brushwork gives rise to a tactile and very sensuous, richly varied painterly structure. Courbet painted The Beautiful Irish Girl in four versions of roughly the same size. It is likely that the he kept the Stockholm canvas for himself. Late in life he wrote to a friend: “I still have Jo´s portrait that I will never sell and that everyone admires” and he remembered the pleasant times they had together at Trouville when Jo would entertain them with Irish songs. Courbet also painted Jo as one of two erotic nudes in The Sleepers (Petit Palais, Paris).