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!
Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle, North Wales
Artist: George Fennel Robson (British, Durham 1788–1833 London)
Date: 1832
Medium: Graphite and watercolor with gum
Dimensions: sheet: 7 7/8 x 11 3/4 in. (20 x 29.8 cm)
Classification: Drawings
Every summer, Robson explored the wilder corners of Britain and sketched subjects he could develop into finished watercolors for London exhibitions. He completed this drawing one year before his death. Its uncluttered composition is anchored by Mount Snowdon, the highest peak in Wales, and it reflects the influence of Robson’s teacher, the artist John Varley (1778-1842). Beautifully applied washes have been enlivened with a few telling details. Tones progress from a warm sunlit foreground inhabited by two shepherds to dappled, foliage-covered hills to cool shadows defining the distant mountain. The critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) wrote that Robson’s finest watercolors were “serious and quiet in the highest degree [and] certain qualities of atmosphere and texture in them have never been excelled.”
Well. If I was a shepherd tending my flock on this bluff, I’d sit there all day looking at the view, too. Even if the ground I was sitting on was covered here and there with sheep poop. Have you ever seen grazing pastures? There’s poop everywhere.
In some ways this looks like a still from a Disney cartoon. It has very pleasant colorings and nothing is too sharp or harsh.
Two men (I assume they’re men) sit on a bluff overlooking a valley with pastures and a lake, and on the other side of the valley is an impressive massive mountain. I assume the men are tending a small flock of sheep next to them – the man on the right has a long stick that looks like it could be a shepherd’s crook. The men have their backs to us.
Down in the valley it seems that other cattle are hanging out.
The sun is clearly to the right of the frame, an unusual position in the art posted here, and the mountain in the distance makes this very clear, as a ridge coming down the mountain side throws everything to the left of the ridge into shadow. My human mind thinks this is making some kind of statement.
The mountain has twin peaks at the top. On the shore of the lake there are two white lumps, they could be tents but I’m not sure because they are so far away in the distance. And this may not be a lake after all, it could be a river, as a finger of a stream leaves the lake area and heads off to the left.
The painting is both peaceful (see the gentle colors; see the reclining shepherds) and stirring (gasp at the large mountain and the severe shadow formed by the mountain’s ridge).