[In the following review, the critic reviews Clark's Looking at Pictures, a book of sixteen essays, each of which studies a picture and its relation to the painter and the time period.]

Kenneth Clark's Looking at Pictures is quite another sort of book about art. It consists of a series of sixteen essays, each concerned with a specific painting. They were originally written for an English newspaper and have since been somewhat expanded and reinforced by numerous halftones and a handful of color plates.

Sir Kenneth's introduction to this book begins, “No doubt there are many ways of looking at pictures, none of which can be called the right way,” a statement that makes it impossible for anyone to take issue with the author's way. His way is in fact a good illustration of the method of studying each picture as a thing in itself, beginning with the subject matter and proceeding through a consideration of the artist's intention, his technique, and his character. After these topics are out of the way, Sir Kenneth briefly considers the picture's relation to the painter's other works, and sometimes to the general output of its period.

The emphasis on each of these questions varies from essay to essay. Sir Kenneth is much interested by what he can deduce of the mind of Velasquez, but far more intrigued by Vermeer's methods than by his motives. He has a historian's soft heart for painters like Delacroix and Courbet, who considerately wrote, and wrote well, about their work. Sir Kenneth's method of discussing paintings is solidly practical, but it has certain limitations. An ignoramus in painting would come away from Looking at Pictures with the impression that Picasso was some obscure fellow who copied figures from other people's pictures.

The book is better to rummage in than to read at a sitting. Each piece is interesting and gracefully written and almost certain to yield some odd insight or unexpected bit of information. Taken together, the essays show their newspaper origin. Sir Kenneth assumes that all his readers are unshakably convinced that painters are a dissipated and disorderly lot. When he comes upon one of those artists who led lives of positively dreary respectability, he hammers the truth like a man driving a railroad spike. And when he finds it necessary to mention the habits of Titian, he makes several circles around Robin Hood's barn before sidling up to the facts, evidently fearing to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty.