Top Ten Artists (Painting Division)

1. Van Gogh
2. Vermeer
3. Cezanne
4. Rembrandt
5. Hiroshige
6. Piero della Francesca
7. Caravaggio
8. Eakins
9. Monet
10. Diebenkorn
11. de La Tour
12. Durer
13. van der Weyden
14. Chardin
15. Manet
16. Constable
17. Ni Tsan
18. Velazquez
19. Kensett
20. Homer
21. Turner
22. Hokusai
23. Prendergast
24. Gainsborough
25. Veronese
26. Caillebotte
27. Filippino Lippi
28. Wyeth
29. van Eyck
30. Church
31. Pollock
32. Giotto

The first question is, How do you rank painters from different eras, different cultures? What test do you apply? It the measure is, who has produced the paintings that stop me in my tracks, that I want to look at and live with the longest, the winner is Jan Vermeer. But his output was so meager, and he did produce a couple of clunkers. No single van Gogh matches the best Vermeer, but his output was huge, and I can’t think of a bad painting or drawing from his hand. Something similar holds true for Cezanne, plus his output stretched over many more years than van Gogh’s and is less of a piece. If mastery of different genres in painting is the test, Rembrandt surpasses the others, and there are no greater paintings than a great Rembrandt. But there are forgettable Rembrandts as well, and as a portraitist I would rank him below his contemporary, Frans Hals. Finally, among my top 5, Hiroshige produced more indelible images than any other and his intuitive design sense was nonpareil, but he doesn’t project the psychological depth of the Western artists, perhaps because of the culture he inhabited. With that apologia, I will offer a few comments on each artist, in an attempt to justify my personal selections.

When Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window came to America in the Masterpieces of Dresden show in the 1970s(?) I was mesmerized and blocked the line behind me. I could never forget that green curtain. When we visited Dresden in 2007, I had a private audience with her and was smitten again. I’ve had the same experience with the Frick’s Officer and Girl Laughing and the Met’s Woman with a Water Jug. Besides what he does with light, with composition, with color, Vermeer creates the most comfortable environment of any painter I know – tension-free, welcoming. There aren’t a lot, and you could say that so many are similar – although his view of Delft establishes him as a great landscape artist in one swoop – and the works at the beginning and end of his career, above all the ones that reveal his Catholicism, erase any claim to perfection. But what he does, no one has done better, or ever will.

Rembrandt would stand near the top even if all you knew were his self-portraits, with the versions at the Frick and Kenwood House vying for the title of greatest ever painted. Other late works are even more moving: I’ve melted every time I’ve been lucky enough to see his Prodigal Son from the Hermitage, and Lucretia is the MIA’s greatest treasure (spoiled for me by its glazing, however). Unlike his Dutch contemporaries, he painted in many genres, and his style evolved from smooth to loose and rough over his career. Like the Beatles, I could pick out an album’s worth of greatest hits that no one could match, but if you see a whole gallery of Rembrandts (I’m thinking of the Met), there will be quite a few that don’t excite me. Whether this is because his heart wasn’t in painting on commission, or because these were done by studio assistants I don’t know. I just know that seeing “a Rembrandt” does not always provide the thrill I get from seeing a van Gogh or a Vermeer.

I find Cezanne the most intellectually challenging artist and, at the same time, one of the most beautiful. His beauty is not an easy beauty, but one you feel is earned by study, both his and yours. His still lifes are surpassed, if at all, only by Chardin’s; and his landscapes and portraits are almost as compelling. Like van Gogh, but unlike the Dutch masters, you sense that he is painting only for himself, trying to work out problems that will haunt every artist for the next century. Three dimensions versus two, color versus line, decoration versus depth, and in his watercolors, especially, how completely to fill the surface – all these strugges are evident in each work, and in the progression of his works; yet the struggle never detracts from the calm, the repose, the sense of resolution that haunts the finished product.

Hiroshige has been my favorite non-Western artist since, as a 17-year-old, I first encountered his 52 Stations of the Tokaido in Japan. Since that time, as well, Snow at Kambara has been my favorite image in Japanese art, appearing richer almost every time I see it. But what the years have added to my appreciation is the knowledge that Hiroshige created literally thousands of other images, primarily for woodblock editions, and I keep coming across wonderful new ones. There is humor, there is originality of composition, there is skillful interpretation of nature: Hiroshige ranks high on my list of bird artists, as well.