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!
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Coast View with Perseus and the Origin of Coral
Artist: Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée) (French, Chamagne 1604/5?–1682 Rome)
Date: 1674
Medium: Pen, brown ink, brown, blue, grey wash, heightened with white gouache
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This highly pictorial drawing, along with a sketchier one depicting the same scene (Lehman Collection, 1975.1.661), are part of a group associated with one of Claude’s most celebrated paintings from the last phase of his long artistic career (Holkham Hall, Norfolk, England). The painting, which bears the same title and date as the drawing, was executed in 1674 for Camillo Massimi (1620-1676), who became a major patron of the arts after being elevated to the position of Cardinal by pope Clement X in 1670.
The subject, going back to the Latin poet Ovid, was not common among artists, but cardinal Massimi’s collection of drawings featured a sheet of the same subject by Claude’s fellow countryman Nicolas Poussin (Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, England) which included all the characters found in Claude’s work. Taking into account the annotation on the Lehman sheet specifying that the “idea” came from the prelate, it seems likely that Massimi commissioned from Claude a recreation of Poussin’s theme. Perseus, the mythological hero, had decapitated Medusa, whose gaze petrified anybody looking at her, and used her severed head as a magic weapon to rescue princess Andromeda from a sea-monster. Immediately after this deed Perseus stopped on an island with his winged horse Pegasus to wash the monster’s blood off his hands. He laid Medusa’s head on seaweed: the blood still dripping from it transformed the twigs into coral, to the wonder of a group of sea-nymphs.
The setting is one of Claude’s highly evocative landscapes. The artist made full use of the tonal and chromatic possibilities of brown, gray and blue washes combined with white gouache to imbue his scene with an early morning atmosphere. He anchored his composition by means of a group of trees on the left and a rock formation in the shape of an arch on the right, with the foliage of the bigger tree echoing the bend of the rocks. He set them against the light, whose source is visible in the disk of the sun hovering in the sky and its reflection on the sea, rendered through an extensive use of white heightening. As a result, the celestial expanse and the water surface shimmer with light amidst subtle modulations of color: from greyish blue to yellow and a streak of white above the horizon in the sky; from yellowish blue to pale and dark blue in the sea. The effect is enhanced by white gouache highlights on the figures, which acquire a sculptural quality despite their small size.
While the Lehman drawing is undoubtedly a compositional study, this work may have been a presentation piece, made to obtain the approval of the patron.
This is both gray and tropical. And while we’re at it, cartoonish. Although the landscape is mighty and seemingly impossible to believe (see the arching land bridge), the humans and animals are tiny. I see a horse with wings and a humanoid with wings. It’s a fantasy world and I can’t understand why there aren’t more colors to it. It makes me wonder if anyone ever produced an animated cartoon in black and white. I guess the early Mickey Mouse flix were black and white. But this picture here seems so much more sophisticated.
This is a page from a famous children’s book from pre-historic Egypt, written by what scientists believe to be an ancestor of Abraham Lincoln. The book is about a child goddess who sold all the color in the world to an alien from outer space in exchange for what were then the equivalent of a hundred gummy bears. So for forty days and forty nights the world was essentially gray. Except for the gummy bears, which were their usual not-to-be-found-in-nature hyper colors. The final pages of the book are missing but apparently “something happened” because look, we have colors all around us now, just look at the world around you. Even penguins have bits of orange or yellow or red somewhere on them.
Printed it out on large paper. Grandson supplied the colors with crayons. Beautiful.
This is a strange work of art because it’s so colorless and because the human activity is relegated to the bottom strip of space. I see what looks like five women gathered around a camp fire, although two of the women are holding what looks like a cloth over their heads. On the right I see a horse with wings, an angel with wings, and a man with wings on his ankles. I forget who that mythological being is. The man with the wings on his ankles looks like he’s receiving something from the angel. Everything is gray and blurry and I wonder why this is a famous piece of artwork.