How to Look at a Painting

Which of us, in the presence of a painting, has not felt that we lack the keys to decipher it? We feel an emotional response, but the work still seems to evade our understanding.



Francoise Barbe-Gall combines a nuanced understanding of the way viewers respond to paintings with a rich knowledge of their context and circumstances of their creation. The result is like a tour of an extraordinary museum in the company of a gentle yet authoritative guide. A fascinating range of works are grouped in six thought-provoking chapters that examine our different responses to the ways in which paintings define reality.



The author takes as her point of departure the impressions that we all feel when confronted by a canvas and takes us on a voyage of discovery fired by her own passionate enthusiasm for the subject. What is the painting’s relationship with the real world? Has the artist idealized nature, or distorted it? Did they want to shock the viewer, or provide consolation? With a clear approach and straightforward yet subtle analysis, the meaning of each work slowly becomes clear.



From Raphael’s penetrating character study of Castiglione, through Hopper’s cinematic take on the wee small hours of the morning, Barbe-Gall begins by covering a number of ostensibly realistic works, made from the stuff of everyday life. Going in quite the other direction, she then looks at the way paintings can express moments of heightened reality, from the perfection of Boticelli’s Primavera to the arresting glance of Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring. She discusses paintings that distort the visible world (Parmigianino’s Madonna with an improbably long neck, Dali’s melting clocks) and those that sow confusion to make us pay closer attention to the real world (Cezanne’s depiction of a forest glade, a mysterious fifteenth century altarpiece). Questions of history, style, iconography and composition are dealt in context of the paintings she discusses.



Lavishly illustrated and featuring thirty-six fascinating works from Raphael to Rothko, Breughel to Bacon, this is also a magnificent art book.

Chapter 1

Observing a simple reality



Discovering the essence of a character

Raphael, Balthazar Castiglione

12



Confronting the truth of emotions

Caravaggio, The Death of the Virgin

20



Guessing what remains unsaid

Bartolomeo Bettera, Still Life with Two Lutes, a Virginal and Books on a Table Covered by a Carpet

28



Feeling a sense of déjà vu

John Constable, Helmingham Dell

34



Believing ourselves at the cinema

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks

40



Recognizing the substance of the world

Antoni Tàpies, Seven Chairs

48



Chapter 2 > page 54

Contemplating a sublimated world



Assisting at a significant event

Rogier van der Weyden, The Descent from the Cross

58



Flirting with the idea of perfection

Sando Botticelli, Primavera

66



Feeling time stand still

Jan Vermeer, The Head of a Young Girl, or Girl with a Pearl Earring

74



Accepting that we cannot see everything

Diego Velazquez, The Rokeby Venus

82



Noticing the grace of the present

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Moulin de la Galette

90



Witnessing the birth of light

Pierre Soulages, Painting

98



Chapter 3 > page 104

Analysing distortions to the visible world



Imagining the point of eternity

Giotto di Bondone, Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata

108



Discerning the troubles of history

Il Parmigianino, The Madonna with the Long Neck

116



Sensing a metamorphosis

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Mademoiselle Rivière

124



Glimpsing primitive nature

Henri Rousseau ('Le Douanier'), Child with Doll

132



Adapting to circumstances

Pablo Picasso, The Aubade

138



Abandoning the evidence

Salvador Dali, Persistence of Memory

144



Chapter 4 > page 152

Taking account of what appears confusing



Making allowances for mystery

Anonymous Provençal artist, The Boulbon Altarpiece

156



Taking time to be wrong

Pieter Bruegel, The Bearing of the Cross

164



Appreciating a way of thinking

Jean-Antoine Watteau, Embarkation for Cythera

172



Measuring the difficulty of seeing

Paul Cézanne, In the Park at Château Noir

180



Welcoming a new freedom

Vassily Kandinsky, With the Black Arch

188



Feeling our way to reality

Georges Braque, Woman with a Guitar

194



Chapter 5 > page 202

Getting over the shock of our first impression



Considering the function of a painting

Mathias Grünewald, The Crucifixion

206



Seizing the grandeur of a ritual

Rembrandt, The Flayed Ox

214



Passing through the mirror

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Les Vieilles or Time

220



Understanding the logic of a vision

Paul Gauguin, Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)

230



Seeing life unravel

Edvard Munch, The Scream

238



Gaining access to the opposite side of things

Francis Bacon, Study of George Dyer in a Mirror

246



Chapter 6 > page 254

Abandoning ourselves to the gentleness of a painting



Abandoning our fear of shadows

Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne

258



Seeing history in the making

Nicolas Poussin, Rinaldo and Armida

266



Forgetting the weight of the world

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Saint Thomas of Villanueva Distributing Alms

274



Enjoying a lasting peace

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Three Apples, Two Chestnuts, Bowl and Silver Goble, or The Silver Goblet

282



Welcoming the ephemeral

Claude Monet, Water Lilies

290



Learning to wait

Mark Rothko, The Ochre

298

In a painting in which everything has become rounded and mangled, the

rectangle of the mirror stands out. By resisting the general sense of wear and

degradation, its very shape implies the adoption of a particular stance, which

it clearly signals by reproducing a reflection that bears no relation to external

reality. Having been spirited away, Dyer’s face is reflected here in what

seems to be a magnifying glass. But this man who expands in all directions

has no chance of seeing himself from the side, even from the corner of his

eye. And in any case he no longer has an eye. The intense blue of the

background confirms the disharmony between what we can see of the model

and what he can see of himself. The mirror does not lie. It is more like

another painting than a mirror, producing an alternative image, not a

reflection. The dream of a portrait. Or the battered portrait of a dream.

It is almost like one of those profiles that one sees on medallions painted

against a pure blue sky: the serene and emblematic image of humanity as

conceived at the time of the Renaissance. The resemblance isn’t close:

something disastrous seems to have happened in the meantime. Not much,

really, but a disaster none the less.

A halo of light forms a circle on the ground. The regularity of the shape exposes

it all as something staged, the careful calibration of a projector. Beyond the

area that it circumscribes the space remains ill defined, its limits vague. It

has something of an arena about it, or a circus ring, a place appropriate to a

story that keeps on going round and round until all its participants are

exhausted. The darkness isolates it from the rest of the world. In his

dizziness, can this man really ignore the fact that it is the earth itself that is

turning beneath his feet? It is a fairly derisory world from this point of view.

Here is a man reduced to shreds on this planet of ours. And the sky retains its

icy composure.