Portrait of Mrs. J.P. Morgan, Jr. (nee Jane Norton Grew), John Singer Sargent, oil on canvas, 58 x 36 inches (147 x 91 cm), in the collection of the Morgan Library and Museum, NY.

The Morgan Library’s collection centers on rare books and manuscripts and a fantastic collection of old master drawings, but it does include a few paintings, and it’s fitting that this portrait of the founder’s wife should be one of them.

Sargent here displays his astonishing economy of notation. Look at the string of paint splotches that our eyes read as a golden chain, the seemingly simple brush marks that create swirls in the diaphanous fabric, or the gestural swoops of paint that make a graceful hand.

Not to mention the “whites” of her garments and how many subtle shifting colors Sargent has managed to let us see in them.

The boy could paint.

Sota l’Ombrella (Under the Parasol), by Lluís Masriera i Rosés; oil on canvas, roughly 35 x 51 in. (90 x 131 cm); Link is to image file page on Wikimedia Commons, original is in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

Spanish painter Lluís Masriera, who was active in the late 19th snd early 20th centuries, give us the equivalent of a bright splash of fall color, but in the summer, at the beach, under a brightly colored umbrella.

If you look closely, you can see some marvelous, subtle mixtures of color in the white fabrics on the women.

Autumn Woods, Albert Bierstadt, Oil on linen, roughly 54 x 94 in. Link is to image page on Visual Elsewhere, large image here. Original is in the collection of the New-York Historical Society.

I had the pleasure of seeing thie painting in person a few yars ago in a show of Hudson River School paintings at the Allentown, PA Art Museum.

At four and a half by almost eight feet, it’s a large painting and wonderfully immersive when you stand in front of it.

Beautiful fall colors and detailed naturalism aside, look for a minute at the values (light and dark) in this painting, how Bierstadt controls your gaze and immediately pulls you back into the distance.

To show how dramatic this effect is, and how it depends much more on value than color, I’ve converted the painting to grayscale in the images above. Look at how the line of trees on the left is almost a gradient of dark to light, sliding your eye into the gap between the trees.

The foreground darks, which are, if you think about it, quite dark for an otherwise sunny day, form a kind of u-shaped cup filled with sky into which we delightedly tumble.

While we’re back there, we can stop and apperciate the artist’s masterful application of atmospheric perspective, much of which is also due to control of values.

There is a saying among painters: “Value does the work; color gets the credit.”