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!
Young Woman Looks at Silhouette of a Male Prisoner being Led Away
Artist: Tomioka Eisen (Japanese, 1864–1905)
Period: Meiji period (1868–1912)
Date: early 20th century
Culture: Japan
Medium: Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper
Eisen’s print displays the rather melodramatic sentiment as an illustration for a novel is typical of late Meiji print. A woman watches the silhouettes of her lover being led away by the police man. The silhouettes without background motifs suggest an unreachable place from the woman in the reality.
A woman is looking over her shoulder at what appears to be a police officer or soldier leading away a hunched-over man. The two men are connected by a chain or a rope, and the hunched-over man appears to be wearing a ragged kimono. The two men are almost completely gray. The sun hangs in the sky between the woman and the men.
I don’t know what this story is, however. It raises many questions.
Uh-oh !!!
Another alien deportation.
I agree that this painting leads to lots of questions.
1. What is the relationship between the woman and the two men. Is she connected in some way to the hunched-over guy being led away by the military guy, or is she connected to the military guy?
2. As it’s so difficult to determine what people are thinking and feeling in Japanese paintings, what is this woman really thinking and feeling?
3. Is there a reason why the sun seems to be strategically placed between the woman and the two men?
4. Is this another example of the lack of strictly vertical and horizontal lines in Japanese paintings? There are so many diagonal, oblique lines here, starting with what seems to be the horizon which runs from up to down across the page. The woman’s eyes – the right eye appears lower than the left. The two men: the man on the right has his head higher than the man on the left, and his feet are lower than the man on the left. The sword in his belt is also a diagonal.