The museum keeps the title in two languages — Jo, den sköna irländskan in Swedish and Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl in English — and its own account names the sitter: Joanna Heffernan, an Irishwoman who moved in artists’ circles and was admired for her beauty, and who sat both for the Frenchman Courbet and for the American James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In Courbet’s picture, the museum writes, she runs her hand through her loose red hair while looking at herself in a mirror — a gesture it reads as a motif bound up with defiant sensuality, vanity and the transience of beauty.
The painting was made in 1866 and measures 54 × 65 cm; the museum measures its frame at 79 × 89 × 10 cm.
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) was born at Ornans in the Franche-Comté and went to Paris in 1839, where he taught himself from the old masters in the Louvre rather than in a studio. From the late 1840s he set himself against the academic and romantic painting of the day and became the leader of the movement that took the name Realism; his one-man Pavilion of Realism, put up beside the 1855 World Exhibition when the jury refused his work, became the manifesto of that position. He took an active part in the Paris Commune of 1871, was imprisoned for it and in 1873 went into exile in Switzerland, where he died at La Tour-de-Peilz in 1877. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.