A Street in Ikao by Theodore Wores

Theodore Wores painted "A Street in Ikao" in 1898, and it now lives at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It shows a steep street in a Japanese mountain town famous for its hot springs. Wores was an American who carried his brushes from San Francisco to Germany, Hawaii, and Samoa, but his time in Japan produced some of his most observant work.

Look for the woman and child descending the stone steps. Her pale kimono is the brightest thing in the picture, a spot of human warmth amid the dark wooden facades. Wores surrounds them with the texture of a lived-in town: deep eaves, weather-smoothed flagstones, laundry strung between buildings. The wet pavement reflects the humid mountain air.

Wores was not just a tourist. He studied in Munich and brought that European Impressionist training to Japan. He painted rapidly, trying to catch a transient patch of light or the gesture of a figure in motion. This little street scene, with its single-point perspective pulling us uphill toward a canopy of trees, is built like a Corridor painting, but it is full of Japanese atmosphere.

A century later, the path is still there, but the woman and the child belong only to this painting. Someone crossed the world to put them here.