I get teary eyed every time I see it – the relaxed confidence and gentle smile with which Labille-Guiard has depicted herself.

He was not a particularly remarkable painter. There is no dazzling brushstroke or consummate gesture. They are paintings that get the job done and punch the clock.

I first saw Frederic Church’s “Twilight in the Wilderness” in 1996 on my first trip to Cleveland; I was wandering aimlessly through the galleries of the Cleveland Museum of Art when this painting stopped me dead in my tracks.

My son's breath warmed my neck as I lost myself in the wrinkle of his wrist. Blackness. Quiet. Then the skeleton.

“Our Banner in the Sky” is a painting made almost entirely of belief, which is why I liked it at first sight, in reproduction no less, advertising the Met’s 2013 Civil War and American Art exhibition in a newsletter.

Of course I never could draw like Ingres, much as I wanted to, but the fact that my father admired him so much made me admire him, too.

I remember Al Held saying that Van Goghʼs paintings never quite settled in on the walls of museums and that there was a strange awkwardness about the way they related to the other works around them.

I’m not sure when I first saw Winslow Homer’s “The Herring Net,” but the piece bobs up and down in my imagination, weathering trends, taste and time.

It is rare, and always impressive, when an older artist turns a winter’s passion into a new body of work.

Don Manuel’s pets create an illusive narrative, one that sets the stage for Goya’s future projects as social commentator and archivist of brutality.

I love this image. And have for many years. Actually, it’s less about one painting and more about a book of images. I chose this one at random.

Before I can grasp it with my mind, this painting has already saturated and immobilized me. What am I looking at? Not so much a painting as a force.

The painting is a force-field of conflicting languages and subjects - civility and barbarous imagination, the desire to communicate and a possibility that no connection is possible.

"I paint them until I want to Pinch their bottom." - Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I first saw Bonnard’s Large Yellow Nude at MOMA in 1998, and was immediately struck by what an exceedingly weird painting it is.