They are tenderly painted and interesting to compare for slight differences.

Some of these, like the "Annunciation," are so tenderly painted they can make you weep, and they convey a peculiarly old-fashioned quality that harks back to Raphael.

"Max Newborn," a small portrait tenderly painted by Anne Harris, looks like the work of a new mother.

As with his "Blinding of Samson," where a beefy soldier rams a spike straight into Samson's eye, the image would be almost too hard to look at if it weren't so tenderly painted.

The power of pictorial illusion is summed up by a box on a pedestal that looks one way from a distance (tenderly painted brown and edged in gold) and another up close (burl veneer with interior lights shining through its seams).

FOR instance, the 18th-century French nobility had a special fondness for paintings of hunting scenes and their aftermath, so tenderly painted still lifes of dead stags, pheasants, wild hares and other parkland-to-pantry carcasses are fairly abundant.

The canvases of Robert Feinland's tenderly painted Brooklyn views, Deborah Kriger's roiling hillside and the canvases of John Goodrich and Gary Shankman also deserve special attention.

There are even a few of the tenderly painted, deformed little creatures with enlarged tear-sacs or phalluses from Mr. Baselitz's first Berlin show, notorious for being closed by the police on charges of pornography.

Outstanding among the artist's earlier efforts are two small, tenderly painted pictures, one of a sand dollar propped against a blue wall, the other of a silver creamer standing in a shadowy room, its convex form mirroring the face of the artist and his surroundings.

More beguilingly mysterious are Scott Teplin's oddball, finely drawn cartoons and Hiroshi Kimura's simple, tenderly painted pictures of people departing.