And She Was a Witch by George Fuller

This is George Fuller's "And She Was a Witch," a painting he worked on for seven years, from 1877 until his death in 1884. It hangs in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a somber puzzle with no clear answer.

Look first at the woman's face, or what you can see of it. Fuller keeps her eyes in shadow, refusing to tell us whether she is guilty or innocent, defiant or afraid. The title makes an accusation the image will not confirm. Across the cold empty ground, two other figures stand close together, their heads inclined as if in judgment.

The real hidden detail, though, is the surface itself. Fuller's late method was obsessive: he built up paint and scraped it back, over and over, for years. The dark tangle of trees in the upper left is not just painted foliage. It is a physical object, a skin of oil built through subtraction as much as addition. That slow, almost violent process turned a scene of accusation into something you feel in the body of the canvas.

Fuller was a farm boy from Deerfield, Massachusetts, who came late to recognition. He died the year this painting was finished. What do you think the surface of a painting can hold that a photograph cannot?