The work shows a woman in full figure standing on a wolf skin in front of a beige curtain with a lily in her hand.

This exhibition also featured Édouard Manet's famous Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and together the two works gained a lot of attention.

[7] Heffernan supposedly had a strong influence over Whistler; his brother-in-law Francis Seymour Haden refused a dinner invitation in the winter of 1863–64 due to her dominant presence in the household.

[8] Whistler started working on The White Girl shortly after December 3, 1861, with the intention of submitting it to the prestigious annual exhibition of the Royal Academy.

The model was named as Ann Gilbert,[13] a noted equestrienne of the period:[14] however it was soon rumoured that it was actually Catherine Walters, the notorious London courtesan.

[17] Whistler exhibited it at the small Berners Street Gallery in London instead, where it was shown under the title The Woman in White, a reference to the novel of that name by Wilkie Collins, which was a popular success at the time.

The review in the Athenaeum complained that the painting did not correspond to the character in the novel, prompting Whistler to write a letter asserting that the gallery chose the title without consulting him, adding "I had no intention whatsoever of illustrating Mr Wilkie Collins' novel.

[21] The 1863 Salon des Refusés was the same exhibition where Édouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe caused a scandal, yet the attention given to Whistler's White Girl was even greater.

Lisa Peters summarises that countering criticism by traditionalists, Whistler's supporters insisted that the painting was "an apparition with a spiritual content" and that it epitomized his theory that art should be concerned essentially with the arrangement of colors in harmony, not with a literal portrayal of the natural world.

In 1943, the Whittemore family gave it as a gift to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[25] Whistler, especially in his later career, resented the idea that his paintings should have any meaning beyond what could be seen on the canvas.

"[10] Since the Berners Street Gallery had used the name The Woman in White for the painting, critics were disappointed with its lack of resemblance to the novel's heroine.

[28] Whistler was not entirely content with the realism the painting displayed in its original form, a trait he blamed on the influence Courbet had on him at the time.

[20] The panel is long and slender, and the model's pose and the shape of her clothes further emphasize the vertical nature of the painting.

[31] Art critic Hilton Kramer sees in Whistler's portraits a charm and a combination of craft and observational skills that his more radical landscapes lacked.

[29] The art historian E. Wayne Craven also sees the painting as more than a formalist exercise, and finds "enigmatic, expressive and even erotic undercurrents" in the image.

[20] Beryl Schlossman, coming from the perspective of literary criticism, sees allusions to the Madonna of religious art in the work.