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!
Sketch for View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow)
Artist: Thomas Cole (American, Lancashire 1801–1848 Catskill, New York)
Date: 1836
Geography: Made in United States
Medium: Oil and pencil on composition board
Classification: Paintings
Cole inspired many of his colleagues, including his most important student, Frederic Edwin Church, to take up plein-air painting or sketching in pencil or oils. For Cole, the act of sketching outdoors went hand in hand with the close study of nature and was an essential tool in the creation of a significant studio painting. For The Oxbow, Cole made a pencil sketch on site and later painted this small oil sketch in his studio as he worked to establish the composition, color balance, and internal rhythm of the scene. A squiggle of paint at the lower right appears almost human—perhaps a first suggestion of the artist’s presence in the landscape, as seen in his self-portrait in the final canvas (acc. no. 08.228).
This looks like a child’s version of a famous AMerican painting of an oxbow in a river in, I think it’s Massachusetts. This picture seems to show a woman sitting on the bluff overlooking the valley but in the real painting it is a man, the artist himself. The brush strokes here are larger and clunkier. It appears that this painting is very old because you can see cracks in the oils. Compared to the original, it seems rather lifeless.
Thanks for providing background info in the future!!