James McNeill Whistler

In 1877 the critic John Ruskin, the most influential art writer in England at the time, looked at James McNeill Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold, a hazy, near-abstract painting of fireworks falling over the Thames at night priced at 200 guineas, and wrote that he had never expected to hear a coxcomb ask that much for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Whistler sued him for libel. The trial opened at London's Old Bailey courthouse in November 1878 and turned into a public argument about what a painting was even for. Whistler described his Nocturnes as attempts to capture atmosphere and a passing moment in color and light. Under cross-examination about the 200-guinea price, he said it reflected years of accumulated skill compressed into the two days it took him to paint the picture.

The jury sided with Whistler but awarded him a single farthing in damages, a coin worth roughly a thousandth of a pound, and no legal costs. The win still bankrupted him. He sold his London house and left for Venice to work off his debts painting a commissioned set of etchings. Ruskin suffered a breakdown that same year and resigned his professorship at Oxford, saying he could no longer hold a chair from which he had no power to give judgment without being taxed for it by British law.