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CategoriesVisual Qualities

Highly Detailed

Works rendered with minute precision, where textures, surfaces and small incidents reward close looking.

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About Highly Detailed

Detail invites slow looking. Early Netherlandish painters, building images in thin oil glazes, recorded reflections, fur, brocade and single hairs with extraordinary care: Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1434) includes a convex mirror that reflects the whole room. Hieronymus Bosch filled The Garden of Earthly Delights (about 1490–1510) with hundreds of tiny figures, and Mughal and Persian miniaturists used very fine brushes to paint individual leaves and feathers.

Later artists put close description to new uses. In the 19th century Jean-Léon Gérôme gave historical scenes a near-photographic finish, and the Pre-Raphaelites painted plants and stones outdoors almost leaf by leaf. Edward Weston used a large-format camera and a small aperture to record every contour of a shell or a pepper around 1930, and Photorealist painters of the 1970s pushed the effect further still. Look for crisp focus across the whole picture, with no area left sketchy.

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