LOOKING PICTURES AT

After a long day spent in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last year, I turned my attentions from the paintings to my fellow visitors. I sat down in The Annenberg Collection, one of the rooms devoted to the Impressionists, and just did some people watching instead. It struck me that most people only looked at the paintings for a very short time, perhaps 30 to 45 seconds. I soon realised that this was pretty much how long I spent looking at most pictures myself.

This revelation suggested to me something about the way we all enjoy paintings. In fact, they don’t take very long to enjoy – and for the most part they don’t take very long to understand either. Unlike literature and music, a painting has no necessary timeline.