The Art Room

1. A Gorge in the Mountains

Sanford Robinson Gifford, 1862. Oil on canvas.

Almost nothing in this picture is a solid object. Gifford painted a valley in the Catskills at the end of an October afternoon, and what he was really painting is the air — layer on layer of warm haze, so the far ridges dissolve rather than end. The sun is directly ahead and buried in the glow, which is why there is not one hard edge in the middle of the canvas.

Look at the lower left: a single birch leaning off the cliff, lit gold, the only thing drawn sharply in the whole painting. It is there to give your eye somewhere to stand before the rest of it opens out.

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2. South Wind, Clear Sky — “Red Fuji”

Katsushika Hokusai, about 1830–32. Woodblock print.

Same series as the famous wave, but this is the quiet one. Fuji in flat late-summer red-brown against a graded blue sky, with rows of small white clouds stacked like handwriting across it. There are about five colors in the entire print and no outline around the mountain at all — the shape exists only because the red block stops.

Look at the dark stippling on the lower slope. That is forest, printed as thousands of tiny marks, and it is the only texture in a picture otherwise made of flat planes.

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3. Hummingbird and Passionflowers

Martin Johnson Heade, about 1875–85. Oil on canvas.

Heade went to Brazil to paint hummingbirds and came back painting them like portraits — one bird, close, at eye level. This one is perched rather than hovering, which is the unusual part: he has caught it still.

The flowers are painted with more attention than the bird, every filament of the fringed crown picked out. Notice the mist in the background valley — he keeps the far distance deliberately vague so that the few inches in front of you feel very sharp and very close.

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4. A Panoramic Landscape with a Country Estate

Philips Koninck, about 1649. Oil on canvas.

Two-thirds of this canvas is sky, and the horizon sits down near the bottom edge. That is what the flat Dutch landscape actually looks like, and almost nobody had painted it that way before his generation. A bank of cumulus is moving left to right with full sun on its top edge and blue-grey shadow beneath, and the land under it is checkered light and dark because cloud shadows are crossing it.

Follow the pale sandy road in the lower middle. There are two or three figures on it the size of a grain of rice, and they set the scale for everything above them.

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5. Rough Waves

Ogata Kōrin, about 1704–9. Two-panel folding screen, ink, color and gold leaf on paper.

Kōrin painted water as pure pattern. Every wave is a set of parallel ink lines curling into a spiral, and the crests break into little claw shapes that repeat across the screen like handwriting. The ground is gold leaf, now tarnished to a soft olive, so the sea has no color of its own — it is light, with dark lines drawn on it.

There is no horizon, no boat, no shore and no weather. Just water, filling the frame. Sit with it for a minute and the spirals start to move, which is exactly the effect he engineered.

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6. Autumn Flowers

Unidentified artist, Japan, 17th century. Six-panel folding screen, ink and color on gilded paper.

The entire background is gold leaf, and the flowers are planted in two horizontal bands across it — as if you were lying in the grass with your eyes at ground level. Chrysanthemums, bush clover, pampas grass: the flowers of autumn in Japan, painted at life size. There is no sky, no earth and no horizon. Gold stands in for all of it, which is why the whole screen glows rather than being lit from any direction.

Look along the lower band. The painter varied the height of every single stem so the line never reads as a row.

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7. Wheat Field with Cypresses

Vincent van Gogh, 1889. Oil on canvas.

He painted this outdoors in June, in Provence, in the wind — and what he painted is the wind rather than the field. The clouds are not cloud-shaped; they are thick rolling coils of white and grey laid on in separate strokes you can count. The dark cypress on the right is the only vertical in the picture, and it moves too.

Get close to the wheat in the foreground. The paint stands up off the canvas in ridges, so in raking light the surface casts its own tiny shadows. The field is textured in real three dimensions, not just painted to look it.

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8. Garden Carpet

Unidentified weaver, Iran, second half of the 18th century. Wool pile on cotton.

This is a map. Persian garden carpets are laid out as an aerial plan of a real walled garden: the dark blue channels running down and across are water, the squares between them are flower beds, and the panel in the middle is the pool where the channels cross. Each bed is planted with its own species — cypresses, flowering fruit trees, tulips — drawn flat and from above.

Look into the corner panels. There are birds and animals among the plants, woven at thumbnail size by somebody who never saw a garden from the air and drew it that way anyway.

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9. Irises

Vincent van Gogh, 1890. Oil on canvas.

A jug of cut irises on a table, and the color scheme is doing something deliberate: violet-blue flowers against a pink-cream wall, on a green table. He was arranging opposites so that each one makes the other louder. The flowers have gone slightly over — several heads droop and the petals are curling — and he painted them that way on purpose.

Every leaf is a single unbroken stroke, drawn from the base of the jug upward in one movement. One other thing worth knowing: the pink wall has faded. The red pigment he used was unstable, so it was originally much warmer than what you see.

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10. Brig on the Water

Gustave Le Gray, 1856. Albumen silver print from glass negatives.

The only photograph on the page, and it is a hundred and seventy years old. One small sailing ship on a silver sea, under an enormous broken sky, with the sun laid in a bright path across the water.

Here is why it was remarkable in 1856: no plate of the period could hold both a bright sky and a dark sea in one exposure. Le Gray made two negatives — one for the sky, one for the water — and printed them together on a single sheet. People did not believe it was a photograph.

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