Andrew Wyeth, Looking Out, Looking In

I spent hours at the National Gallery’s show of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings of windows, “Looking Out, Looking In”. Entering these four rooms of paintings felt like coming home. The rooms are grouped by place: the Olson House, the Kuerner Farm, Wyeth’s Brandywine Studio, and a final room called Variations.

But it was the paintings themselves that so appealed to me. Spare and austere, with little color, they all include windows but no people. As Nancy K. Anderson describes in her catalogue essay,...