Every Thursday, as part of my personal “enriched environment” initiative, I post a piece of art, usually from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently released online some 400,000 high-resolution images of its collection. All artwork will show a sun (or sunlight) somewhere.
I won’t name the piece or the artist, but instead invite you to study the art and post a comment addressing one or more of these questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
If you have another idea, run with it.
Special Update! The New York Times website does this same exercise every Monday with a news photo that is uncaptioned and contains no text (click!). The Times asks viewers the same three questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
However, at the end of the week, the Times posts the background information on the picture. So, I’ve decided to do the same. I’ll still post an unlabeled piece of art on Thursday. But return on Sunday (for the Sunny Sundays post!) and you’ll find an update on the artwork here.
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
Update: Sunday, November 6
From the Met’s website:
Water Cress Gatherers, Rails Head Ferry Bridge, Twickenham (Liber Studiorum, part XIII, plate 62)
- Artist: Designed and etched by Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, London 1775–1851)
- Engraver: Thomas Goff Lupton (British, London 1791–1873)
- Publisher: Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, London 1775–1851)
- Date: January 1, 1819
- Medium: Etching and mezzotint; second state of three
Turner distilled his ideas about landscape In “Liber Studiorum” (Latin for Book of Studies), a series of seventy prints plus a frontispiece published between 1807 and 1819. To establish the compositions, he made brown watercolor drawings, then etched outlines onto copper plates. Professional engravers usually developed the tone under Turner’s direction, and Lupton here added mezzotint to describe a rural scene where a woman picks cress in a stream near two children. At the end of bridge, above, figures with baskets are bathed in a burst of bright sunlight, as a horse-drawn gig moves away down a road through the rain. The changeable weather and shifting light, characteristic of an English summer, are Turner’s signature subject, and the letter “P” in the plate indicates his category of Pastoral landscape.
The title of the picture is “Water Cress Gatherers,” but that’s a strange title since most of the people in the picture do not seem to be involved in gathering water cress. There are people in a carriage, driving away. There seems to be a large child holding a small child down by the water’s edge. The three people in the foreground, on the left, have baskets, so maybe they’re gathering water cress, but they’ve wedged one of them, it looks like a child, back against the bridge’s railing. What’s that about?
I learned from this picture that water cress traditionally grew down along river banks. Thank you for teaching me this!
In terms of the sun’s light:
everyone seems turned away from it. First off, the sun is behind the clouds but if there were not any clouds it would probably be in the middle of the picture at the top center. Unusual for this Throwback Thursdays series, where the sun is usually out of the frame and to the left. In this picture, sunlight breaks through the clouds in the upper left quadrant. But look at the people. they are turned away from the sun, all of them. The people in the carriage have an umbrella overhead and they have their backs to the viewer and are driving the carriage away from the sunshine and into the rain.
The people up close to the viewer, in the lower left quadrant, are squatting down beneath the bridge’s railing. They are mostly in the shade of the railing.
The large child holding the small child down by t he river’s edge — both of them are facing away from\ the sun. Etc., etc., etc.
And then there\ is the tree in the upper left quadrant that is bending back away from the sun.
In general, the large spot of sunshine in the upper left quadrant is sort of blotch-like and everyone and everything is avoiding it, turning away, running away.
What a strange statement.
This picture is like the USA right now on the eve of the presidential election. Heavy storms, a ray of light breaking through, but mostly everything is dark.
There ‘s hardly anyone in this picture and it’s dark and we’re on the tail end of a cantankerous election and the title is “Watercress?”
The sky seems to be filled with slanted straight lines of rain — with the exception of the many-petaled break in the clouds where the sunlight is pushing through.
On the contrary, the lower half of the picture — where all the land is — is a swirling mass of swirling curved lines, such as the railing on the bridge, the curving of the stream, the bending and flaying trees.