If you want to understand what painting is- it's like coming home. ( )

Grosser, Maurice. The Painter's Eye.
This collection of articles on the history of Western painting for the last few hundred years could only have been written by a painter. It should be read by everyone with an interest in the subject, but not as an introduction.

Some of Grosser's subjects, such as the relationship between the nature of the portrait and the physical distance between the painter and the subject, the influence of the industrial chemistry of pigments on style, and the role of university painting departments, seem pretty new. In other cases, such as the Impressionists' colors, the influence of French painting on the English from the Seventeenth Century onward, and the defining characteristics of Modern Art, the subjects are pretty standard but Grosser has ideas which seem to slip by the professional art historians.

You'll enjoy paintings more after reading The Painter's Eye. ( )