A recent Vermeer show (well, three out of the scores of paintings on display were Vermeers) in Tokyo reminded me how little I know about painting, especially painting from before the twentieth century. I wished I had an educated, observant, and articulate friend to guide me through it. I wish, in fact, that I'd walked through it with Norman Bryson, whose Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting is an absolutely essential guide to a genre that has been, as he notes, overlooked. All four of the essays are essential, and intelligently linked to each other, but the final essay, "Still Life and 'Feminine' Space," is brilliant in its consideration of just why still life painting has been marginalized (and yes, it's partly because the home, and particularly the kitchen, has been defined as a feminine domain, but that's not all there is to it). Looking at the Overlooked is Criticism at its finest.