To understand if art experts and novices view paintings differently, we conducted a series of experiments where we asked participants to look at digital images of paintings while we recorded their eye movements. The expert participants were recruited among students and faculty studying or practicing art. Novice participants did not study art-related disciplines. Half of the participants in each group received a free viewing instruction. The second half was told that they would be asked questions about the images they viewed. Gaze trajectories (scanpaths) were recorded using an SMI remote red 250 eye tracker. To analyze the differences between art viewing patterns of experts and novices, and for different instruction conditions, we employed Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA), which was successfully used in previous research [5] to reveal the influence of expertise in medical image viewing. Our results indicate that expertise was, indeed, a significant factor influencing eye viewing patterns in terms of several extracted RQA measures. The instruction condition and painting type were also significant.