American painters who are considered Tonalists are James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), George Inness (1825–1894), Dwight William Tryon (1849–1925), Charles Warren Eaton and often John Twachtman (1853–1922).
The French Impressionists adopted a very high key palette that used many of the recently created man made pigments which allowed them to better capture the full intensity of sunlight.
Kurtzworth, who chose the paintings and wrote the catalog preface stated that: "By tone or tonal painting is meant the feeling of harmony, either in high or low key, brought about by carefully adjusting values and colors, with the result that instead of a brilliant, powerful impression of the atmosphere of subdued light out of doors in the early morning, late afternoon, or a quietly lighted interior is conveyed by the artist's skill."
Frank Tenney Johnson's loan entry was in the possession of a prominent gallery recently, so it is known that it as a moonlit painting of a cowboy smoking a cigarette, a common subject for the artist.
Advocates of this method claim that this is the way that historic artists like Titian, Diego Valesquez, John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn worked.
With this type of approach, the higher the contrast, the stronger the line would be between light and dark, where more subtle gradations would result in "lost" edges.