Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl

The painting Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it entered the collection in 1943 as a gift of the Harris Whittemore family. It was first shown at the 1863 Salon des Refusés in Paris after being rejected by the official Salon, having earlier been refused by the Royal Academy and instead displayed at the Berners Street Gallery in London under the title The Woman in White. The work's exhibition record thus includes the 1862 London private gallery showing and the 1863 Paris Salon des Refusés.

Symphony in White, No. 1 occupies a pivotal position in James McNeill Whistler's career and in the broader transition toward modernism. After its rejections by the Royal Academy and the official Paris Salon, the painting was shown at the 1863 Salon des Refusés alongside Édouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, where it attracted even greater attention than Manet's work. Admirers included Gustave Courbet, Charles Baudelaire, and Théophile Thoré-Bürger, the last of whom detected continuities with Goya and Velázquez and first applied the term "Symphony" to the canvas.

The critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary interpreted the figure as an allegory of a bride's lost innocence, while later scholarship has additionally read the lily and wolf-skin motifs as religious allusions to the Virgin Mary. The work also bears the clear imprint of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with whom Whistler had recently come into contact through Dante Gabriel Rossetti. By renaming the canvas Symphony in White, No. 1 in the 1870s, Whistler distanced it from Wilkie Collins's novel The Woman in White and foregrounded his commitment to "art for art's sake," an aesthetic stance that would shape his subsequent career and influence later painters, including Manet himself.

The painting's reception at the 1863 Salon des Refusés, where it hung near Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, helped establish Whistler's reputation as a leading exponent of "art for art's sake." Admirers including Courbet, Baudelaire, and Théophile Thoré-Bürger praised its musical title and abstract tonalism. Critics variously interpreted the work as an allegory of innocence and as a religious reference to the Virgin Mary, themes that recurred in nineteenth-century criticism.

Its long private ownership and its 1943 donation to the National Gallery of Art ensured its continued discussion in histories of Aestheticism and in surveys of Whistler's oeuvre.

James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl is an oil on canvas painting created between 1861 and 1862, with later revisions. It depicts a woman, identified as Joanna Hiffernan, standing in a long white dress against a light background, holding a lily. The work is notable for its nearly monochromatic palette, predominantly featuring shades of white. Whistler's later title emphasized his aesthetic philosophy, moving away from a purely descriptive name.