How to Look at a Painting: A Slow Method

How to look at a painting, in one line: stay longer than feels natural, and look at it in a fixed order, distance first, then light, then edges, and only then the subject. Most of us do the opposite. We identify what the picture is of, read the label, and leave. The order below slows that down, and each step tends to show you something the first glance skipped.

How long people actually look

The figure usually quoted comes from two studies by Jeffrey and Lisa Smith. In 2001 they timed visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in front of great works and found a mean of 27.2 seconds, a median of 17 seconds and a mode of 10 seconds. With Pablo Tinio they repeated the study at the Art Institute of Chicago, with more visitors and a wider range of artworks, timing looking and label-reading separately. The results, published in 2017 in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, were remarkably similar: a mean of 28.63 seconds, a median of 21 and a mode of 10 (Montclair State University).

Ten seconds is the most common length of a visit to a masterpiece. That is enough time to recognise a painting, not to see one. Nothing below needs special knowledge; it just needs you to give a picture three or four minutes and a plan.

Before you start: the innocent eye

John Ruskin, writing for beginners in 1857, put the problem better than anyone since. We are so quick to name what we see that we stop seeing the colours themselves:

The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of color, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify,—as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.

John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing (1857), Letter I, note

Ruskin was talking to people learning to draw, but the advice works for looking too. The four steps below are a way of postponing the moment you say “that’s a woman with an umbrella” for long enough to notice how the umbrella was made.

Step one: distance

Look at the painting from across the room, then walk up close, then step back to a middle distance. Do this before you read the label.

Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 at the Art Institute of Chicago is the classic test. It is nearly ten feet wide. From across the gallery it is a calm riverside crowd; up close, the museum notes, the figures and forms dissolve into dots and dashes of complementary colour laid side by side. Neither view is the real one. The painting is the movement between them.

Distance also tells you what the painter expected of you. A small panel asks you to come close. A huge canvas, like Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day, his largest and most ambitious work according to the museum, is built to be seen from the far side of a room, as you would see a real street.

Step two: light

Ask where the light is coming from, what it is falling on, and what it is like: hard sun, flat grey, lamplight. Then find the brightest spot and the darkest, which are rarely where you expect.

In Paris Street; Rainy Day there are no painted raindrops at all. The Art Institute points out that Caillebotte suggests the weather through the newly available umbrellas and the faint reflections on wet cobblestones. You know it is raining because of how the light sits on the ground.

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) is the opposite case: the light is the subject. The museum describes the glow of the diner’s electric lighting holding a spare, carefully organised composition together. Look at where that light ends on the pavement outside. It is the edge of the only safe place in the picture.

Step three: edges

Now look at the edges, both the edges of things inside the picture and the edge of the picture itself. Where are the outlines hard, and where do forms melt into each other? What has the frame cut off?

Cézanne’s The Basket of Apples rewards this more than almost any still life. The Art Institute notes that the tabletop does not line up from one side of the cloth to the other, the bottle tilts, and the brushwork changes from thick, sculptural strokes on the fruit to sketch-like marks at the edges of the table and the cloth. You only notice the misalignment if you trace the edge of the table with your eye from left to right.

The outer edge counts too. Caillebotte’s two central figures, the museum observes, walk straight towards us while something outside the frame catches their attention, a dramatic cropping that may owe something to photography. Seurat went further: the Art Institute dates the Grande Jatte to 1884–86, with a painted border added in 1888–89. He went back to paint the edge of his own picture.

Van Gogh thought about edges down to the frame. Describing his bedroom painting in a letter, he finished with a practical instruction:

As there is no white in the picture, the frame should be white.

Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici

Step four: subject

Only now ask what it is a picture of, and what is happening. Count the figures. Notice what is missing. Then read the label, and see whether it tells you anything the painting did not.

This is where the earlier steps pay off. In Nighthawks, the Art Institute notes, there is no entrance to the diner and no debris on the street. You can look at the painting for a long time without noticing there is no way in. Once you do, the three customers and the server stop looking merely quiet and start looking sealed off. Hopper himself later said he had probably been painting the loneliness of a large city without meaning to.

In the Grande Jatte, the subject step is a game of finding things: the museum mentions a monkey on a leash, added when Seurat returned to the canvas, and a man carrying a rolled newspaper in the far distance who is barely noticeable at all.

A few habits that help

Sit down if there is a bench. Choose one painting per room, not every painting in the room. Describe the picture to yourself in words, or to whoever you came with; it is much harder to say “the bottle tilts left” than to glance at it, and that is the point. If you sketch, sketch, even badly. Ruskin wrote his book for exactly that kind of beginner.

Try the same order on a print as well as a painting. Hokusai’s Great Wave is a good one, because the subject, a wave, is the least interesting thing about it once you have looked at the distance and the edges; see what the Great Wave is really showing. The method also makes the difference between Monet and Van Gogh obvious within a minute, which is the subject of Impressionism vs Post-Impressionism. And if you would rather someone else did the looking, poets have been doing it for centuries; see ekphrasis, when poems describe paintings.

The Smith and Tinio study found one more thing worth knowing before your next visit. Viewing times had barely changed in fifteen years; what had changed, the authors reported, was how visitors spent those seconds. A large share were taking what the researchers called arties, selfies with the artwork, at every work they observed. A phone gives you the picture to keep. It does not give you the four minutes.

Sources

• Lisa F. Smith, Jeffrey K. Smith and Pablo P. L. Tinio, “Time spent viewing art and reading labels”, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 11(1), 2017, pp. 77–85, abstract: researchwith.montclair.edu; also digitalcommons.montclair.edu
• John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, Project Gutenberg #30325: gutenberg.org/ebooks/30325
• Art Institute of Chicago: Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884: artic.edu
• Art Institute of Chicago: Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day: artic.edu
• Art Institute of Chicago: Cézanne, The Basket of Apples: artic.edu
• Art Institute of Chicago: Hopper, Nighthawks: artic.edu
• Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, Project Gutenberg #40393: gutenberg.org/ebooks/40393