Berthe Morisot’s Girl on a Divan, displayed in the National Gallery, London, caught my eye as soon as I saw it. The painting was the last one I saw in the Impressionist room in the Gallery, but despite having been on my feet for hours before I stood for several minutes looking at the painting from all angles. There was something wonderful about the painting.

Girl on a Divan portrays a woman gazing directly at the viewer. The woman’s expression is relaxed and friendly; the woman has a slight smile on her face. The woman is wearing a white dress with several stripes of colour. The stripes are somewhat incongruent with the white, not having any particular pattern. With that said, the stripes add to the depth of the image, and the colours of the stripes – mainly blue and orange – contrast well with the blue background.

In the middle ground, a shade of blue/green is used to create what could be a chair. This further adds depth to the painting. The woman has one arm raised slightly. Could the arm be resting on the arm of the chair?

I love the use of blue in this painting; the colours are both soft (through the shades chosen) and eye-catching (through the extensive use of blue for the background) at the same time.

The painting is made with sketch-like brushstrokes for the dress, background, and the hair; the face is more relatively detailed.

After several minutes of looking at the painting, I noticed a white dot in the left eye: a glimmer of light. This brought me a lot of joy. First, it took a while to notice this detail! I love “Slow Looking”. Second, after noticing the glimmer in the eye, I thought about how much it adds to the expression of the sitter.

Girl on a Divan is now one of my favourite paintings.

I didn’t include a photo of the painting in this post for licensing reasons. You can see a detailed photo of the painting on the National Gallery website.

I am writing about a few paintings to help me build my description skills. My analyses are not formal or comprehensive. If nothing else, I hope that you enjoy the painting that I feature!

The warm colours in Monet’s The Church at Varengeville (1882) stood out to me the moment I saw them in a corner of the Courtauld Institute in London [1].

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The Church at Varengeville

In the top left of the painting, the subject, the church of Varengeville, is painted. But the church takes up a relatively small portion of the painting: a much greater portion is dedicated to the cliffside, bushes, and two trees that span from the bottom to the top third of the canvas. This is in contrast to other paintings of churches that Monet has made like the Roen Cathedral and the Church at Vétheuil where the church takes up much more of the canvas.

The Church of Varengeville stood out to me for its use of colour; Monet paintings always make me feel something, and one question I would like to answer in my studies is why his use of colour makes me feel the way it does. The sky is a warm yellow. Is the sun about to set?

I appreciate the contrast between the sky and the ocean: the sky is yellow and bright, whereas the ocean is a soft blue with yellow tones. The sea and sky are separated by a horizon line.

The bushes in the foreground are more clearly defined than the fields of grass; the bushes use a mix of vivid yellows and reds and oranges, whereas the grass uses a more limited range of colours. The left side of the painting is orange. I am unsure what phenomena or flora it depicts.

I was mesmerised while looking at this painting, studying up close the detail of the brushstrokes in the bushes and from afar the overall composition and use of colour. I like to look at paintings from many different angles to help me understand what I see, and if what I see is different as I change my distance from the work.

Now that I am back home and analysing the painting, I realise that, if I put a romantic lens on, the two trees in the foreground take on new significance for me. There is something beautiful about there being two trees so close seeing the sun set together.

Visual analysis aside: this painting brings me joy.

[1]: The painting is displayed as part of a temporary exhibit while the Barber Institute of Arts that usually houses the painting is renovated.

Trafalgar Square is a special place. The architecture and views are breathtaking. The National Gallery, the church of St. Martins in the Fields, Canada House, and more, all surround the Square. From the right place you can look down Whitehall and see Big Ben.

In the heart of the Square is the National Gallery, a huge, Neoclassical building. I have visited the gallery a few times and only last weekend, on my most recent visit, did I start to feel oriented in the gallery. I love that feeling of getting lost in an art gallery; of wandering around and exploring and building a map of where things are. I also love the feeling of looking back and realising it is getting easier to find your way because you have visited a place a few times before.

I studied the architecture of the new Sainsbury Wing in the V&A course I did last year. [1]

Visiting now, following my studies, I came to see the building. with a new perspective. My first perspective is as it always is when I see beautiful architecture: wow. Then I thought “I studied the new building!” I started to appreciate the architecture more.

I noticed the columns that I had until then only studied on the screen. I find myself looking at columns in architecture more. I now know the difference between an Ionic and Corinthian column; learning about architecture feels like learning languages of design.

Inside the gallery, I noticed a few paintings I had seen before only on a computer screen. That’s Hay Wain by John Constable! I thought with excitement as I noticed the painting. The gallery is also home to Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed, a painting I first learned about through a blog post. I studied the painting with great excitement. What can I see that I don’t remember from looking at it first? Many details stood out: the bridge feels darker in the real painting; there is a person in a boat in the bottom left of the image. The boat is tiny in comparison to the scale of the bridges.

I went to the National Gallery with new perspectives: of architecture, of seeing paintings I had only until then seen on a computer screen.

When I visited the Rembrandt room I said to myself I thought I knew Rembrandt’s work. I had seen paintings by him before, understood that he used dark backgrounds to highlight the subject of the painting. But I knew so little: of Rembrandt’s difficult life, of his changing artistic style over the years, of how expressions were his subject.

On reflection, studying a work of art involves a lot of “take twos”: of looking and looking again to gain a better understanding of a painting, either in one sitting (looking around a work and coming back to different features) or across multiple sittings. Impressions of art change with time, too: with knowledge of the artist, the time period in which the work was painted, growing knowledge of how others painted similar subject matters, my own new experiences since I last saw the painting, and the context in which a painting is seen (location, digital vs. physical).

As I learn more, I know more of what to look out for in a work of art. I am learning to distinguish details that are significant in painting: how colour is used, perspective, theme, brush-stroke, symbols. I recently learned that anchors are the symbol of hope in some paintings.

I will soon be starting my first art history block in school where I’ll be learning how to use a visual analysis toolkit to analyse a painting. I am excited to learn and apply what I learn when I visit galleries in the future.

In a lecture this week we were asked to say what we saw in a painting as a light introduction to visual analysis. One person noted the presence of a dog under a table. The lecturer then said they had looked at the painting many times through the course of their teaching and never noticed the dog. This makes me think about how we all see different things, and how much there is to see even in art we already know.

This is my (very late) submission for the June 2025 IndieWeb Carnival on the topic “Take Two.”

[1]: The Sainsbury Wing has a storied, tumultuous history; then-Prince Charles publicly criticised one of the proposals for a redesign in May 1984. Today, the Sainsbury Wing houses a wonderful collection of medieval art.