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| Govert Flinck Bathsheba with letter from King David 1659 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"A fixed element in a work, such as a dried passage where the painting is effectively finished, can be a cornerstone around which the work is constructed. It is necessary, but it also hurts. It is often possible to look at a painting and guess which passage was fixed early in the process. It may be a face, or a beautiful passage of drapery, or a brilliant gestural mark: usually it is whatever is so obviously successful that the painter could not bear to efface it even when the whole painting changed around it until its very existence became a luxury. At first the perfect place in the image is a happy discovery, what in French is called a trouvaille, and then as the painting gathers around it, it wears out its welcome and becomes an annoyance. Often, too, it is possible to see paintings where the perfect place, prematurely fixed, has outlived its value and continues to exist only as a fossil of some earlier notion of what the picture might have been. Paintings tell the story of their creation that way. The paint gathers around the one fixed spot like the nacre of a pearl around a piece of grit. Anything permanent in the imagination is like an obstruction, an ossification of the freedom of thought. Like a bursa in a should joint or a sand grain in a clam, it attracts accretions that try to smooth it out and make it less painful. The painting swirls around the fixed spot, protecting and enclosing it like a bandage. But thoughts rub against it, and it aches."
– from What Painting Is by James Elkins (Routledge, 1999)
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| Govert Flinck Portrait of a man 1637 oil on panel Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Gerard Ter Borch Glass of Lemonade 1660s oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Jan Steen Esther before Ahasueras ca. 1665 oil on panel Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Jacob van Ruisdael The Great Oak 1652 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Jacob van Ruisdael Road through cornfields near the Zuider Zee 1660-62 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Jacob Ochtervelt Child giving alms 1663 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Caspar van Wittel Piazza Navona, Rome 1699 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Gerrit Adriaens Berckheyde Groote Market in Haarlem 1673 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Barent Fabritius Ruth and Boaz 1660 oil on panel Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Cornelis van Poelenburgh Diana and Callisto ca. 1650 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Allaert van Everdingen Rocky River Landscape in Scandinavia 1649 oil on panel private collection |
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| attributed to Jacob van Ruisdael View inland from the coastal Dunes ca. 1670 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Simon de Vlieger Stormy Sea ca. 1650 oil on panel private collection |