I had no idea that this quote has such a delightful and well-documented origin. I'd only heard the story told about Picasso (and various mechanics and engineers). A great example of how these things morph over time.
The story is delightful because it pitted two great Victorian aesthetes against one another. Ruskin had said this about Whistler:
I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now;
but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas
for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.
So Whistler sued for defamation and was examined by Ruskin's lawyer:
Holker: Did it take you much time to paint the Nocturne in Black and Gold?
How soon did you knock it off?
Whistler: Oh, I 'knock one off' possibly in a couple of days – one day
to do the work and another to finish it.
Holker: 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 work of a lifetime.
The insinuation in the lawyer's question ("how soon did you knock it off?") is hilarious!
Whistler, by the way, was a great wit and had a famous skirmish with Oscar Wilde:
Did I read the same page you did? It seemed quite generic and gave the following rating. Which means it hasn't been explicitly disproven. In fact, I'd suggest that these things might indeed have happened if the skilled worker, needing to prove his worth, used such a glib line because he'd heard it somewhere else. But I'm skeptical too, that's why I was Googling. You'd think someone, somewhere would know how long each took and was more consistent in the retelling. Or that they would have kept the itemized receipt for the joke.
LEGEND: Hollow yellow bullets are the ones most commonly associated with "pure" urban legends — entries that describe plausible events so general that they could have happened to someone, somewhere, at some time, and are therefore essentially unprovable. Some legends that describe events known to have occurred in real life are also put into this category if there is no evidence that the events occurred before the origination of the legends.
Comments
Never happened.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp
That page does suggest a possible origin for the (equally apocryphal) Picasso fable, though, in a quote from James McNeill Whistler.
Snopes provides no citation for the Whistler story. That prompted me to look it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler#R...
I had no idea that this quote has such a delightful and well-documented origin. I'd only heard the story told about Picasso (and various mechanics and engineers). A great example of how these things morph over time.
The story is delightful because it pitted two great Victorian aesthetes against one another. Ruskin had said this about Whistler:
So Whistler sued for defamation and was examined by Ruskin's lawyer: The insinuation in the lawyer's question ("how soon did you knock it off?") is hilarious!Whistler, by the way, was a great wit and had a famous skirmish with Oscar Wilde:
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/05/oscar-will/
... which inspired this Monty Python classic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxXW6tfl2Y0
Did I read the same page you did? It seemed quite generic and gave the following rating. Which means it hasn't been explicitly disproven. In fact, I'd suggest that these things might indeed have happened if the skilled worker, needing to prove his worth, used such a glib line because he'd heard it somewhere else. But I'm skeptical too, that's why I was Googling. You'd think someone, somewhere would know how long each took and was more consistent in the retelling. Or that they would have kept the itemized receipt for the joke.
LEGEND: Hollow yellow bullets are the ones most commonly associated with "pure" urban legends — entries that describe plausible events so general that they could have happened to someone, somewhere, at some time, and are therefore essentially unprovable. Some legends that describe events known to have occurred in real life are also put into this category if there is no evidence that the events occurred before the origination of the legends.