A Very Full Week

Among the works along a second-floor West Building hallway is Clodion's "Poetry and Music." (Courtesy of The National Gallery of Art)

If neophytes find a certain sameness in Jean-Louis Lemoyne's 1724 "Companion of Diana" and Augustin Pajou's "Calliope," circa 1763, that may not be absolutely wrong. This kind of marble statuary must have always been intended to live in harmony with other works of the same kind, and with the setting all of them might find themselves in. The statues in this room may not leap out at modern viewers the way some nearby paintings do, but they were never meant to. Maybe fading graciously into the background can be an artistic virtue.

• The habits we've developed in looking at Old Master paintings don't work to look at sculpture.

You want to stand a good 15 feet away to first take in a work like the gallery's new "Naiad," begun by the great Italian sculptor Antonio Canova in 1815 and recently installed in a space just off the sculpture hall. The piece isn't much bigger than the reclining naked woman it depicts. But you have to be some distance away to read the whole outline of the work, as it stands out against whatever background it's been placed against. Unlike in painting, you need to see both the setting and the work, so as to make sense of the space the sculpture fills.

And then you need to spend the time to walk all around the piece, from far and near, to take in all its details. That's the only way you'll notice how chaste and classical Canova's nude looks when seen from the side, as the girl glances over her shoulder and away from you. And how lascivious she looks when you stand at her feet and meet a gaze that runs the length of all that naked flesh.

Thursday: Highland Style

With its unknown art and new ways of looking, yesterday's visit was almost as exhausting as a special exhibition. This morning I am determined to hunt for easy pleasure.

I head straight for Galleries 58 and 59, where the museum hangs some of its portraits by the 18th-century Scottish artist Henry Raeburn. Raeburn doesn't have the fame he deserves, but he's been a favorite of mine since I first came across his work.

It's not widely acknowledged, but Raeburn seems to be the inventor of what's sometimes called the "rectilinear brushstroke," one of the most important elements of modern painting. Think of all those crisp up-and-down and side-to-side brushstrokes in the background of an early cubist painting, or in the commercial art from the middle of the last century that copied that School of Paris style. They look as though the artist has a single size of square-tipped brush to make his painting with, or maybe just a palette knife. As far as I can tell, that look gets its first outing in the pictures of Raeburn.

In his lovely portrait of Eleanor Urquhart, the daughter of a Scottish laird who sat for him in about 1793, the crisp fabric of her bodice is perfectly captured by the broad, crisp strokes of Raeburn's brush. But her soft curls and oval eyes get painted with the same spackling-knife approach. In a portrait of Scottish lawyer John Tait with his grandson, the sturdy old man's face seems cut from stone -- as do his wig and woolen coat. An old art school lesson teaches that physical reality can be reduced to forms composed of planes under illumination; that is the gospel of Raeburn's work.

There were famous artists before Raeburn who pushed around a lot of paint: Titian was the first, and then came painters such as Rubens and Fragonard. But all of them used their paint for the extravagant pictorial effects it gave: Their brushstrokes tell you that the world's in flux, and that nothing's quite as it strikes the eye. They are meant to make you feel unsettled or excited or elated.

Raeburn's art, on the other hand, presents a much more straightforward world than that. Most of his portraits are of settled worthies of the Scottish establishment, and his technique in turn feels more like a self-imposed discipline than like a letting loose. The reduction of his brushwork is an austerity measure, using an efficient minimum of moves. His angles and edges stand for the tough, certain bedrock of the world, not for a world awash in change.

In most other painters' visible brushwork, there's a hesitant, sketchy quality known as non finito -- a sure sign of the vibrant artist's soul that is supposed to lurk within even the most polished work. In Raeburn, however, each stroke is final and decisive. There's no sense that his pictures are waiting to be brought to a higher finish, or even that they ever could be.

It's hard not to see a drop of Scottish rectitude in Raeburn's rectilinearity. His whole approach seems summed up in the armchair that Raeburn sat John Tait in for his portrait. Rather than a fancy, aristocratic objet de vertu, covered in curlicues worthy of Fragonard, Tait's chair is hewn from rustic oak, with the marks of the adz that carved it left visible on its surface. It's a foursquare chair just waiting for the touch of Raeburn's foursquare brush.

Friday: A Woman's Touch

Domenico Beccafumi.

Anthony Van Dyck.