Forty non-artists and 16 art students rated the 22 in-progress states of Henri Matisse's great 1935 painting, Large Reclining Nude, on 26 survey items measuring several constructs: quality, originality, technique, arousal potential, and primordial thought. Factor analyses revealed differences in aesthetic judgment criteria consistent with previous research: non-artists value technique and realism, while art students emphasize originality. Changes in quality and other items were evident as the painting progressed. Non-artists judged the painting as getting generally worse over time, consistent with the increasing abstraction of the image. In contrast, art students' judgments showed a jagged trajectory with several peaks (including the finished version), suggesting an interactive hypothesis-testing process that gradually transformed the image.
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