A young woman in a white dress stands on a white bearskin rug before a white curtain, a lily dangling from her hand. The model was Joanna Hiffernan, Whistler’s companion. He painted it in 1861–62 and later renamed it Symphony in White, No. 1 to insist it was about color, not a story.

The Royal Academy in London rejected it, and in 1863 it hung at the Salon des Refusés in Paris, the same show as Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Look at how many different whites he found: chalky, creamy, bluish, gray.