Starting from Ernst Gombrich’s ambivalent attitude towards modern art, this article asks what remains valuable in the naturalistic, mimetic painting developed over five centuries, and whether “mimetic painting is also forever useful”. The author reviews Gombrich’s argument in Art and Illusion that naturalism creates illusion through learned schemata, and that even naturalistic images depend on conventions and on the viewer’s active participation. Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of water, Song dynasty bird-and-flower painting and Zhang Yanyuan’s account of the common origin of writing and painting show that images and texts each capture what the other cannot. Gu Hongzhong’s Night Revels of Han Xizai and Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ are discussed as images that bear documentary witness yet require written history to be understood. The article then contrasts Gombrich’s narrative from “painting what one knows” to “painting what one sees” with Greenberg’s account of modernism and Krauss’s reading of Picasso, and questions Gombrich’s dismissal of primitivism in Picasso and Gauguin. A video work by Gao Shiqiang and the Shanshui Creating Collective illustrates a contemporary immersive approach. The author concludes that, in an image-saturated society, renewed interest in naturalism may express a longing for slow observation of nature.