How to look at a painting: 5 steps

How long do people spend in front of a famous painting? Researchers have measured it. In a study at the Metropolitan Museum of Art published in 2001, Jeffrey K. Smith and Lisa F. Smith watched 150 visitors. The average was about 27 seconds per work, and the median only 17. A later study at the Art Institute of Chicago, published in 2017, found an average of about 29 seconds. You may have heard a figure of eight seconds. It circulates widely, but it does not match these studies.

Half a minute is enough to recognize an image. It is not enough to see it. On this page I share a simple five-step method for looking longer and seeing more, then walk through it with a painting full of magic.

Why slow looking works

“Slow looking” is the name educators use for spending extended, structured time with a single work. There is nothing mystical about it. The first moments of looking are taken up by recognition: that is a woman, that is a table, that is a landscape. After recognition comes a quieter phase, when details emerge, relationships between parts become visible and questions begin to form. Most visitors leave before that phase begins. The method below simply keeps you there long enough.

You can use it in a museum, in front of a building or at home with a large image on a screen. Give it ten minutes.

The five steps

1. Look without reading

Do not read the label. Do not look anything up. Let your eyes wander over the whole work for two minutes. Notice where your eye goes first, and where it goes next. Write down three words for your first reaction, then put them aside.

2. Describe

List what is there, without explaining it: people, animals, objects, places, colors, shapes, textures, writing, the edges of the picture. Aim for fifteen items. Description is harder than it sounds, because we leap so quickly to meaning. “She looks sad” is not description. “Her mouth is closed and her eyes look down” is.

If you are in front of the real object, move. Step close, then step back. Some details appear only up close, and some patterns only at a distance.

3. Analyze

Ask how the parts are arranged. Where do the lines lead your eye? Where is the brightest area, and the darkest? What is large and what is small, near and far? Is the picture crowded or empty, balanced or tipped to one side? Are colors warm or cool, bright or muted? This is the stage where the vocabulary of art helps: line, shape, color, value, space, texture, composition and scale.

4. Interpret

Now ask what the work might mean or express. Support every idea with something you described or analyzed. A useful sentence to finish is: “I think this work is about ___ because I can see ___.” You can be wrong at this stage. A good interpretation shows its reasoning, so someone else could test it.

5. Read, then judge

Now read the label, the wall text or the museum’s online record. Which of your questions does it answer, and which does it ignore? Does it tell you something you could not have seen, such as who paid for the work or where it first hung?

Then decide what you think, and name your standard. People judge art by different things: skill, beauty, feeling, story, or how well it served a religious or social purpose. “As a study of light it is masterful, as a story it gives me very little” is a clear judgment because it says what it is measuring.

Where the method comes from

Steps 2 to 5 follow the four stages of art criticism set out by the American art educator Edmund Burke Feldman in Art as Image and Idea (1967): description, analysis, interpretation and judgment. It has been used in classrooms ever since. The stages work best in order. Beginners tend to jump to judgment (“I love it,” “I don’t get it”) or straight to interpretation (“It’s about loneliness”). Description and analysis slow you down and give your later conclusions something to stand on.

A second tool comes from museum education. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the psychologist Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine, then director of education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, developed Visual Thinking Strategies, built on three questions:

• “What’s going on in this picture?”
• “What do you see that makes you say that?”
• “What more can we find?”

The second question is the heart of it. It asks you to ground every idea in something visible. If you are learning tarot, you may notice that the first question is very like the way many readers begin with a card. That parallel is mine, not the developers’, but it shows how naturally careful looking crosses between fields.

A worked example: The Magic Circle

Let me walk through the steps with The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse, painted in 1886 and now in Tate (object N01572). You can see it at the top of my art history hub, or open Tate’s own image and give it two minutes before you read my notes.

Look. My eye goes first to the woman’s face and the wand in her hand, then follows the line she is drawing around to the dark birds at the left.

Describe. A woman in a long robe with a patterned border stands in a bare, dry landscape. With a wand in her right hand she draws a circle on the ground, and the line smokes. In her left hand is a curved sickle. A small fire burns in front of her beneath a pot, and its smoke rises in a pale column. Outside the circle are ravens and a toad. Inside it grow a few flowers. The sky is heavy and gray-brown. Far behind her, on the horizon, are the shapes of ruins.

Analyze. The composition is simple: one tall figure, standing upright, and a circle around her. The vertical lines of her body and the smoke contrast with the curve of the circle. The warm colors of her robe and the fire sit inside the circle; the cold, dull tones of the landscape and birds sit outside. The circle divides the picture into two worlds.

Interpret. I think this painting is about a boundary between an ordered, protected space and a wild or dangerous world, because I can see everything living and warm inside the circle and everything dark and watchful outside it. The idea of the magic circle as protection is real. It appears in grimoires from the Middle Ages to the Ars Goetia, which I discuss on the Goetia hub.

Read, then judge. Tate’s record tells me the painting entered the national collection in 1886, the year it was painted, through the Chantrey Bequest, a fund for buying new British art. It was made for exhibition and for a public that loved literary and legendary subjects. That context matters. What Waterhouse painted is not a record of any real practice. It is a Victorian artist’s dream of a sorceress, drawing on literature, legend and the taste of his time. Judged as a story told with color and composition, I find it very strong. Judged as evidence of how magic was practiced, it tells us much more about the 1880s than about witchcraft.

Practice: ten minutes with The Harvesters

The painting at the top of this page is The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, from 1565, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 19.164). The Met’s open-access image is free to use. Open the largest version you can find and follow the five steps before you read on.

When you have done your own first ten minutes, look for these: the man asleep under the tree, the figures eating together, the path cut through the wheat, the distant harbor, the tiny figures in the far fields and the game being played near the church. Count how many separate activities you can find. Bruegel filled one panel with a whole village’s afternoon.

Now read the Met’s record. It tells you the panel belonged to a cycle of six paintings of the seasons, commissioned by an Antwerp merchant for the dining room of his country house. Does that change how you see the sleeping man and the shared meal? A wealthy city patron may have wanted a calm, generous picture of country life, not the hardest parts of harvest work. That is step 5 at work: the label adds what your eyes could not.

Questions to carry into any museum

You will not answer all of these for any one work. Pick the ones that fit.

• What is it made of, and how big is it? Size changes everything, and reproductions hide it.
• What did I notice first, and why?
• Where is the light coming from? Where is the brightest point?
• What is in the center, and what is at the edges?
• Is there a story? Which moment is shown?
• Are there words, symbols or objects that seem to mean something?
• How would it have been seen when new? By candlelight, from far below, held in the hand?
• Who made it, who paid for it, and what did they want?
• What does it make me feel, and what in the work causes that feeling?

The historian Michael Baxandall showed how much context can change what we see. Fifteenth-century Italian contracts often said exactly how much costly ultramarine blue and gold a painter had to use. A blue robe on the Virgin was not only a color choice. It was a display of the patron’s wealth and piety, written into a contract.

Three levels of meaning

When you reach step 4, the art historian Erwin Panofsky’s three levels can help. First, what is shown: the forms and their obvious meaning, such as a woman with a wand. Second, the subject: the story, symbol or convention the work uses, such as the sorceress drawing a magic circle. Third, the deeper meaning: what the work tells us about the values of its time and place, such as Victorian fascination with enchantresses. Moving through the levels in order keeps your reading tied to what is actually there.

Mark your evidence

One last habit makes your notes far more useful. When you finish, go back over everything you wrote and mark each statement:

• E for evidence you can see or document,
• I for interpretation supported by evidence,
• P for personal response.

All three belong in good looking. The marks simply keep them apart, so you always know which is which. It is the same habit I use on the esoteric pages of this site, where I separate history from later tradition and modern practice.

Art you do not like

You will meet works you dislike, and that is fine. Dislike is information. Run through the first steps anyway: describe, analyze, try to understand what the maker intended. Then ask whether your dislike is about the work or about what you expected art to be. Many people who first saw Impressionist paintings in the 1870s found them sloppy, because they expected smooth academic surfaces. You may still dislike the work at the end. But you will dislike it for reasons, and you may find that you respect it.

When you are ready to use these steps on magical and occult images, continue with the esoteric in art or the art history of tarot, or return to the art history hub.