Lennart Anderson (1928-2015) has become our modern-day Old-Master Artist, respected by painters, loved by his students, and admired by the many museums whose collections his work is in, such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museum of Fine Arts, the Whitney, Fralin Art Museum, Palmer Museum of Art and the Delaware Art Museum, as well as the Prix de Rome and Guggenheim Fellowship Committees that issued him awards. The current exhibition at Steven Harvey, up through Oct. 5, is fascinating, as it delves into the evolution from oil sketches to final painting of one of Anderson’s major oils, “Jupiter and Antiope” (64 x 78 in), painted between 2004-2008, when Anderson was in his late 70’s and working from a lifetime of experience. From these sketches of individual figures and compositions, we get glimpses into the visual thinking process of Lennart Anderson, and his phenomenal understanding of color, light, space, rhythmic organization, storytelling, and of course art history. The sketches, though made over many years, have a spontaneity, ease of execution, and fluidity of brushwork that result in airy suggestions of forms and soft atmospheres, and ultimately, embodiments of deep emotional poignancy. As a student of Edwin Dickinson, and devotee of Piero della Francesca, Diego Velasquez, Edgar Degas and Claude Poussin, Anderson understood the importance of tonal contrasts, and these are always exquisite in his work. But more subtly, Anderson also played warms and cools against each other, suggesting the nuances of colored light and a rich understanding of modern color theory, and this understanding of the complexity of color can be seen in the paintings in this show. For those who love painting, the history of its language, and the focused study of an artist as he develops a single painting, this show will be most rewarding.