Will Gompertz explores what is unique about artists’ vision in this collection of essays about (mostly) painters, well-known and little-known. For the most part, he is interested in them as visionaries whose individual psychology and experience create something new in the world. They are not divorced from culture or history—Peter Paul Rubens, for example, is steeped in the religious tensions of the Counter-Reformation, as Gompertz tells it—but their viewpoint makes their art sui generis. Gompertz brings a fresh look at classic artists like John Constable, whose attention to the clouds in the sky added to our understanding of light, but, not incidentally, put human activity in perspective. “Exploring the idiosyncrasies of each artist’s way of seeing has taught me to approach art differently,” he writes of his method. “I now think first about the artist’s point of view” (315). If I have any complaint about the book, it is that the essays are so short, he has finished with the artist just as you are warming to him or her. It does leave you wanting more.