White girls: avant-gardism and advertising after 1860.

James McNeill Whistler's painting "The White Girl (Symphony in White, No. 1)" caused a scandal for depicting a woman dressed all in white, uncontained by any clear framing narrative. Though the painting is usually read into history of modernism for its experimental play with tones of white, in fact the painting was linked by Victorian viewers to the mass-cultural phenomenon surrounding Wilkie Collins's sensation novel "The Woman in White." By examining the two works together, this article shows that the divide between the world of fine arts and that of sensational entertainment is perhaps more entrenched in our own canons than it was for Victorian spectators and consumers.