Beauty in painting is easy to feel and hard to explain. The twelve pictures here make it easier, because in each one the pleasure comes from a choice that can be pointed to on the canvas. Behind several of those choices sits a story, from flowers that died before the paint was dry to a frame once judged worth more than the picture.
Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907 to 1908, Belvedere, Vienna
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Beauty is the oldest thing asked of a painter, and the one with no shortcut. A color only works against the colors around it, and daylight shifts while the brush is still wet. Getting either right takes hours that the finished picture hides.
So every painting here earned its place through a decision the painter made, visible on the canvas, that explains the pleasure it gives. Each entry starts from that detail, then tells how the painter arrived at it and what stood in the way.
Only paintings qualified, on canvas or on wood, so prints, drawings and sculpture stayed out. Fame and price played no part, which is why some of the twelve are household names and others much less so.
12. Mary Cassatt, The Child's Bath (1893)
Mary Cassatt, The Child's Bath, 1893, Art Institute of Chicago
The mother's cheek rests against her daughter's temple, and their two heads lean at almost the same angle. That small repeated tilt carries the tenderness of The Child's Bath, painted in 1893: a mother sits on the floor with the girl across her lap and lowers the child's feet into a basin of water. Mary Cassatt never identified either sitter, and the picture tells no story beyond the bath itself.
What sets it apart is the angle from which Cassatt saw it, and that angle came from Japan, by way of Paris. In 1890 she had visited a large exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints at the École des Beaux-Arts. Those prints showed women and children in everyday scenes, drawn in flat color, with heavy outlines and almost no depth.
Three years later, Cassatt carried that lesson into oil, on a much larger scale. She set her easel almost directly above the pair, so that the floor tilts up toward the viewer instead of running away from it. The mother's striped dress, the flowered wallpaper and the painted chest of drawers all press into the same shallow space, with the two leaning heads at its center.
The same kind of prints had already guided Van Gogh three years earlier, when he cropped the flowering branches of number 10 so tightly.
At a Glance
Artist: Mary Stevenson Cassatt (American, 1844 to 1926)
Painted: 1893
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 100.3 x 66.1 cm (39.5 x 26 in)
Where to see it: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
11. John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885 to 1886)
John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885 to 1886, Tate Britain, London
Two girls in white dresses light paper lanterns among lilies and roses at dusk. John Singer Sargent found the idea on the Thames near Pangbourne, where, out boating, he saw Chinese lanterns hanging in trees above a bed of lilies.
In the summer of 1885 he set out to paint it in a garden in the English village of Broadway, at Farnham House, the home of the American painter Francis Davis Millet. The light he wanted lasted a few minutes each evening, and the flowers in it would not outlive the summer.