In his youth, Updike wished to become a cartoonist, a painter, an artist. Following Harvard, he won a fellowship to study art at Oxford. And over three decades later, 23 of his essays on art, mostly written for The New York Review of Books, were collected in this volume. He proved to be as discerning and descriptive about Monet, Wyeth and Degas as he was about Melville or Whitman.