John Ruskin: 'The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?' Whistler: 'No. I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the w… - James McNeill Whistler

A group from Glasgow sought in 1891 to purchase his portrait of w:Thomas Carlyle was shocked that Whistler's price was 1000 guineas. A spokesman countered that the portrait was not even life size. Whistler replied, 'But, you know, few men are life size.'

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labor, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.