What an absolutely entrancing exhibition at the Royal Academy yesterday about Joanna Hiffernan - who was Whistler's Woman in White and Courbet's Jo, La Belle Irlandaise. I stood for ages in front of the beguiling Symphony in White, No 1:The White Girl - I've seen it in the flesh before, and so many reproductions on book jackets - but, oh, the texture of her dress, and the white flowers on that voile curtain. Whistler - whilst lapping up the publicity - denied that the painting had anything to do with Wilkie Collins's sensation novel: 'I had no intention whatsoever of illustrating Mr Wilkie Collins's novel; it so happens, indeed, that I have never read it,' he protested.

I don't think I'd ever tire of Wapping. The critics objected because the painting had no story or moral. But you can weave your own story ... the confident young woman, owning the space alongside her rather louche companions - and all the life of the river behind her. 'She has the most beautiful hair that you have ever seen! a red not golden but copper - as Venetian as a dream,' wrote Whistler. Whistler's white girls had a lasting influence on other artists.

The Somnambulist by Millais ... well, this has far more of the Wilkie Collins, if you ask me! Walking dangerously close to the cliff edge, the blown-out candle in her hand, the lights of the cottage behind her ...

Albert Herter's Portrait of Bessie (Miss Elizabeth Newton) is rather more saccharine - but isn't that Whistler's polar bear rug?

And you can see where Andrée Karpelès's 1908 Symphonie en Blanc is coming from. This is my perfect exhibition - not too big and completely engaging. Quite unlike the unwieldy, indigestible sprawl of Surrealism at Tate Modern the day before. It's not often that I come out of an exhibition really not having enjoyed it - but it was too large, too muddled, too hot, too crowded, there was hardly anywhere to sit down and, to cap it all, the ladies' loo was squalid ... Oh well, Surrealism has never hit the spot for me!