Later Years
After she and Whistler parted, Hiffernan helped to raise Whistler's son, Charles James Whistler Hanson (1870–1935), the result of an affair with a parlour maid, Louisa Fanny Hanson. He lived with Hiffernan at 5 Thistle Grove as late as 1880 when Whistler was away in Venice with Maud Franklin, his then mistress. The 1881 English census recorded Hiffernan, her sister Bridget and Charles Hanson as visitors of Charles Singleton (whom Bridget would later marry) at 2 Thistle Grove.
Little is known of Hiffernan after 1880. A woman reported to Juliette Courbet (1831–1915), the sister of Gustave Courbet, in a letter of 18 December 1882, that "the beautiful Irish girl" was in Nice, where she sold antiques and some pictures by Courbet. It is believed that Hiffernan married a man named Abbot some time after 1881, possibly on the Continent.
The art collector Charles Lang Freer met Hiffernan when he was a pallbearer at Whistler's funeral in 1903 when she came forward in heavy mourning to pay her last respects. His fellow art patron Louisine Havemeyer (1855–1929) later recorded the incident as she heard it from Freer:
"As she raised her veil and I saw ... the thick wavy hair, although it was streaked with gray, I knew at once it was Johanna, the Johanna of Etretat, 'la belle Irlandaise' that Courbet had painted with her wonderful hair and a mirror in her hand.... She stood for a long time beside the coffin—nearly an hour I should think.... I could not help being touched by the feeling she showed toward her old friend. "Did Maud come?" asked. "Yes" answered Mr. Freer, "the same afternoon. She had come all the way from Paris and was very much affected as I uncovered Whistler's face for her to see him." ... "that the real drama of life was bound up in the love of devoted women."
Read more about this topic: Joanna Hiffernan
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“If you feed a man, and wash his clothes, and borne his children, you and that man are married, that man is yours. If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stoves, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.”
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—Paula Wolfert, U.S. cookbook writer. Paula Wolfert’s World of Food, Introduction, Harper and Row (1988)