Walter Andersons’ scrupulous trompe l’oeil paintings wryly comment on issues such as representation, photographic reproduction, and the mechanics of art history. He combines fastidious pictorial realism with a kind of fragile, narrative whimsy, creating work that both pays homage to and subverts his mostly art-historical subjects. In the small and teasing picture, 1996, Andersons faithfully copied in acrylic paint a handwritten recipe for the image—“titanium white/ivory black/raw umber/picture.” Though painting is here reduced to its components, it somehow retains a poetic quality. The words