Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen

In the mid-1860s Whistler undertook a series of works in which recognizably English models in exotic costumes are depicted as Japanese courtesans surrounded by objects from the artist’s personal collection of Asian art. Here, he presents the Irish model Joanna Hiffernan in the guise of a Japanese courtesan, contemplating a print from Utagawa Hiroshige’s Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces, an iconic series of meisho-e, or images of notable places. When Charles Lang Freer first saw this painting in 1902, he had acquired an impressive collection of Japanese prints and paintings as well as hundreds of works by Whistler. Freer declared that Caprice was “one of the most perfect things in composition and colouring in the whole range of Mr. Whistler’s art.”