Poor Joanna Hiffernan. Her vagina may just have been written out of history. While there was no absolute proof – and one blazing bit of contradictory evidence – it was until now generally believed that this Irish model and artist posed for one of the most outrageous nudes of all time, Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du monde. A new discovery by a French researcher suggests it is not her after all on that bed but a dancer called Constance Queniaux.

Mystery solved? Identity of Courbet's 19th-century nude revealed Read more

I’d like to put in a word for Hiffernan. Putting a face to the woman in this painting may seem a contradiction in terms. We only see her torso, thighs, her breasts, and her lovingly painted, gloriously triumphant and powerful sex organ. Yet it’s particularly tempting to imagine Hiffernan’s features hidden under that white sheet. It not only gives this picture a fuller human identity but adds a carnal dimension to some other very beautiful 19th-century paintings.

It would also make my life a lot easier, OK, if we can stick with Hiffernan because I identify her as Courbet’s world-creating sexual being in a book I’ve just finished. The editor is going to love me making a pedantic pudendal revision at this late stage.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ethereal vision … Whistler’s Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl is an ethereal vision of shimmering monochrome paleness that seems to transport us far from the sensual realm Courbet painted. Only the bright red lips and hair of its model anchor it in the fleshly world at all. This is a painting of Hiffernan clothed. She became Whistler’s lover in 1860 at a time when this flamboyant American was negotiating a unique avant garde career between Paris and London. The White Girl may look like an aesthete’s refinement of pre-Raphaelite dreams of poetic womanhood, but when Whistler submitted it to the Paris Salon in 1863 it was rejected along with Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and shown instead at the Salon des Refusés – one of the great events in the birth of modern art.

So even before Hiffernan posed as Courbet’s revolutionary nude – supposing she did – she was at the heart of Paris modernism, provoking the traditionalists with her abstract shimmering into a whiter shade of pale.

Whistler’s most powerful portrayal of her gets us closer to the flesh of Courbet’s picture. In his painting Wapping, done between 1860 and 1864, he brings the insolent realism of Manet to London’s docklands. In front of a riverscape of Manet-like painted silkiness, we see a woman in conversation with two men. She leans back sensually against a railing over the olive river, her loose red hair not only revealing her identity as Hiffernan but also suggesting her freedom from Victorian morals. In fact Hiffernan is playing a prostitute. Wapping was so famous for its sex trade in the mid 19th century that JMW Turner’s executor John Ruskin imagined a pub the artist owned there must have been a brothel, where he went to draw his secret nudes.

Hiffernan is a strong, characterful, daring presence in Whistler’s avant garde paintings and it makes a great completion of her adventures as a model if she also showed everything in the boldest painting of the age.

You’ve probably noticed the very obvious problem, even before documentary evidence pointed to a new candidate – her red hair does not match the dark brown pubic mane of Courbet’s nude.

Against that is the fact that she spent time with Courbet in 1866 and was probably his lover. She does apparently appear in his painting The Sleepers, of two naked women in bed together, which was done that year for Khalil-Bey, the Turkish diplomat and lover of erotic art who also commissioned The Origin of the World. So Hiffernan was working and in all likelihood sleeping with Courbet in the year he painted his most outrageous masterpiece. And Whistler was an artist famously attracted to colour for colour’s sake. Maybe he exaggerated the redness of his girlfriend’s hair.

For me, the jury is out. Joanna Hiffernan still has a claim to have possessed the Mona Lisa of vaginas.