The Stroke of a Genius

Kit White proclaimed in his "101 Things to Learn in Art School": "A painting should be satisfying at a distance of both twelve inches and twelve feet". Now look at Noldes image reproduced pretty small here due to the limited width of 500 pixel, so somewhat akin to "12 feet" away:




Beautiful portrait of a lady sitting on a chair or couch in the warm afternoon light - until you recognize the second young lady sitting opposite to her. I really had my moment of slow reveal here as I did not immediately realize there was a second face in the image. Perhaps I was too close to the painting admiring the brush strokes of the genius Emil Nolde.
Here is a close-up of the face on the right and I really urge you to click through the image and have a good look on the large version of that crop to get an almost life-like impression of being "12 inches" away:




Simply marvelous!