[Claire Agre] My name is Claire Agre. I'm a landscape architect and people often assume that means I just add the plants. But I think it's really relevant to think about our place as humans within an ecosystem, our relationship and co-evolution with animals. And I love that about this painting, that we're seeing human, we're seeing biodiversity within the environment, and we're seeing an animal which we depend on, and which depends on us all together. This animal is beautiful. He's giving us a little bit of a stern look, but the artist has really captured the beauty of the whole kind of domestic scene altogether; she's doing, some handiwork, which is maybe leisure. Maybe it's work. I don't know. But it's all together in this scene. The animal is really taken care of. The landscape is really taken care of as well. You can see probably it's grazed by the cow. The flowers are allowed to come up. So everything about it is showing the kind of beauty in this very kind of small, small, small, small, small little world. The spring blooms in the meadow, a little bit of the sun in the shade. You can imagine the way the steer smells, the way the sunlight feels. And she trusts him, too. She's letting him off the lead. He's just kind of doing his thing. Everybody's really calm, very content. I do love that her skirt and the cow are color coordinated. And then the kind of silver of her sleeve and the silver of his face. His coloring and her coloring, they go together. She's so connected to this place. What's interesting in the American wing is that there's such a prevalence of these large landscape paintings. These kind of geologic forms, they're incredible, but they lack, to me, they kind of lack a knowing and a knowledge and an intimacy of those places because literally these folks were traveling around, seeing something for a short duration. So it was a sort of postcard moment. Those paintings are beautiful, no doubt, but I get a little frustrated because they don't get down to the intimate knowledge of a place. And I'm, at this point in my career, and at this point in my life, much more interested in the kind of local understanding of nature, of wildness, of ecology, of our place on the planet. And so those, sublime, ‘wow!’ kind of paintings do their job, but I think we're at a moment in the understanding of climate change, where we better get really specific and we have to really zoom in to our particular places if we actually want to make a difference.

[Aaron Henkin] Hi. Aaron Henkin here from Public Radio Station, WYPR, standing in front of this gigantic painting with Katy Rothkopf, who is senior curator of European painting and sculpture. This is a beautiful piece, but the first thing you notice about it is it's huge. [Katy Rothkopf] Yes. This painting was made by Theodore Robinson for the annual Salon in Paris, which was a showcase for artists where the bigger your painting was, the better chances you have for someone noticing you. [Aaron Henkin] So one of the joys looking at a painting this big is that you can really zoom in. Is there any particular area in this painting that really fascinates you? [Katy Rothkopf] Just behind the female figure, there's a clearing and the sun comes out, and she's really framed by the foliage around her. His technique is so delicate and so powerful. I find it a picture that I could look at forever. [Aaron Henkin] And yet somehow you are riveted to the cow's slightly hostile gaze. [Katy Rothkopf] Yeah. The cow is looking right at the viewer, which is a bit unusual. I think for Robinson, it provided a real focal point. It also allows him to showcase his skill as a portrait painter, both portraits of animal and human, but you really also get that sense of light and atmosphere and color that was so typical of the Impressionist style.

[Katy Rothkopf] Robinson was someone who had a relatively traditional academic painting background. This picture was made while he was living in France in Giverny, a town where someone very famous lived at the time, Claude Monet, who was one of the most important Impressionist painters of the day. And I think for Robinson being close to Monet really provided him with an opportunity to learn and to see the nature that Monet saw through his own eyes. And in fact, Robinson even made a very lovely drawing of Monet during their friendship. [Aaron Hankin] Let me read to you what Robinson wrote about Monet in 1892. It seems to relate to Robinson's painting as well as Monet's. He wrote, There is more color in nature than the average observer is aware of. I believe anyone not colorblind can prove this for himself by taking the time and trouble to look for it.