By 1867 Whistler had moved west to Chelsea and settled beside the Thames, a stretch of river that became a lasting source of subject matter for him. He worked initially from etching and precise line, but the smoky, polluted atmosphere of the city gradually pulled his painting toward soft, evocative treatments of fog, dusk and lamplight^[1]. He made pencil sketches from a boat on the river and later worked those observations up from memory in the studio, aiming for a sense of tranquillity rather than topographical accuracy. Years afterward, recalling the city from abroad, he wrote that he wished himself back among his own lovely London fogs, adding: 'they are lovely, those fogs, and I am their painter'^[1]. Dance-House takes its place among these river subjects, its title marking it out as a scene of a lit, populated riverside venue rather than the quieter bridge and skyline views that make up much of the series.

Whistler's technique for these night scenes was distinctive and demanding. He diluted his oil paint heavily with turpentine and added mastic varnish to make a fluid mixture he called his sauce, which could be brushed on quickly without drying to a dull, matte finish^[3]. Working over a dark-toned ground, often mixed from ivory black and lead white, he scumbled this thinned paint across the canvas with a large brush to build up shadow and develop the lighter passages, controlling tone mainly through how thickly the paint sat on the surface rather than through colour mixing^[3]. The paint was worked wet into wet, and reflections such as those in the water could be scraped, rubbed or dragged across the wet surface for their shimmering effect. A Nocturne was typically painted in a single day, with only minor reworking the next, before being set outside to dry in the sun^[3]. Whistler himself admitted under oath, during his later libel trial, to painting one of these canvases in under two days, a fact his opponents seized on as proof the work was slight^[4].

One of Whistler's other Nocturnes, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket of 1875, a depiction of exploding fireworks over the Thames at the Cremorne pleasure gardens, became the centre of the most notorious lawsuit in nineteenth-century art. The critic John Ruskin, reviewing the painting when it hung at London's Grosvenor Gallery, accused Whistler of 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face' and asking two hundred guineas for the privilege^[1][2]. Whistler sued for libel. At trial in November 1878, cross-examined on what the painting depicted, he explained that it was 'an artistic arrangement' rather than a literal view, and that his fee reflected 'the knowledge of a lifetime', not the day and a half of labour it had taken to paint^[2]. The jury found for Whistler but awarded him only a farthing in damages, and the legal costs of the case pushed him into bankruptcy, costing him his house, his studio contents and his celebrated collection of blue and white porcelain^[4]. The trial nonetheless became a defining public argument over whether a painting needed to represent its subject in detail to count as serious art, with Whistler's insistence on 'arrangement' and mood over description setting out the position now associated with the phrase 'art for art's sake.'