Introduction

FROM September 1855 onwards, Alice's commentary falls away and she allows the papers to speak for themselves. On 25 September 1855, Joanna, her mother and her younger brother Bob left London for Paris. Joanna's engagement was at an end, but the letters she continued to write to Henry smack of a despair at the prospect of losing him that she had not shown before. And it is characteristic that even in the midst of that despair she is thinking of her painting, and wondering aloud to him whether she should study under Rosa Bonheur or under Thomas Couture.

Joanna went to Paris at a turning point in French art. Although the École des Beaux-Arts (like the Royal Academy) championed the academic tradition in its teaching, there were already a significant number of artists – Jean-François Millet, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Theodore Rousseau, Gustave Courbet and Paul Delaroche among them – who were developing new forms of realism. Barbizon, a village near Fontainebleau, became an artistic centre where Corot and Millet went to paint and students to learn.

At this stage there were relatively few artists accepting female pupils. Rosa Bonheur, a realist painter and sculptor specialising in landscapes and animals, was one of the most successful and Joanna was tempted to study under her; but Bonheur favoured large canvases, while Joanna's work thus far had tended towards small-scale portraits. Thomas Couture, who represented the juste milieu, in which French art, in the period following the revolution, strove for a happy medium between the Classical tradition and the Romantic avant-garde, appealed to her – partly because under his tutelage she would become versed in the tradition of the tête d’expression (in which students learned to depict passions and emotions in their paintings and sculptures of heads), and partly because Henry had studied with him for six months in 1850. Joanna had become accustomed to taking Henry's advice in artistic matters and there is no doubt that he exerted a powerful influence on her decision.

Her letters to him paint an invaluable picture of her life in Paris. Whatever she had initially decided after breaking off their engagement, her ingenuous habit of assuming their correspondence would continue even though she declared each letter to be the last, ensured its continuation.