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Whistler's Technique at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has so well observed:
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Nothing is more absurd than the notion, so widely promulgated by elderly maiden ladies who misspend their energies writing about paintings and painters from Cimabue to Whistler, that a work of art is produced as the logical result of an apprenticeship served in an art school. There probably is much juxtaposition of this belief--we all know the painters whose only reason for lowering intensely blue sky is because it is _too blue_; the painters who labour, heaping up chunks of paint until it looks 'right;' but with Whistler a canvas advanced in an entirely different manner. He knew scientifically that he could use only so much of a given tone if he wished to produce _colour_, and he knew what other tone to place in juxtaposition, what parts of the canvas must hold the spectator's eye, in varying degrees of interest, in order to obtain the effect he desired to give and its use in the butterfly, the exact spot of a sail on the ocean, a light on the horizon, all these, to many insignificant objects and spots, nevertheless do their work, either to re-vivify an otherwise large surface or to hold the eye momentarily interested, until the ambience was obtained. And this science--the effect of line and colour on the eye,--is practically unknown to painters, is untaught in our art schools. This mastery over his means and material Whistler possessed in a higher degree than any other modern painter.