Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting the representational realist painter Israel Hershberg in his Jerusalem studio, where he was busy working on a small painting, one of a series of “tree portraits.” It was an exquisite work, in which each dappling of light on every needle of a towering cypress was exactingly represented on a miniature scale. But I was startled to see that, while he had blocked out the shape of the tree and the general parameters of light and shade “in the wild,” this champion of rendering from life was actually completing most of the painting in the studio. At first I thought the tree must be outside the window, or that he must be working from a photograph, but when I asked him where the detailing was coming from, he tapped his finger to his forehead.