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! 

[Farmyard Scene]

Artist: V. Dijon (French)

Date: 1850–54

Medium: Albumen silver print from paper negative

Dimensions: 27 x 29.9 cm (10 5/8 x 11 3/4 in.)

Classification: Photographs

This farmyard scene, modeled in strong chiaroscuro, is thought to be the work of an amateur photographer working in the region of Vichy. Few photographs by V. Dijon are known, and no other print of this striking image is believed to exist.
Although made by a virtual unknown, this photograph possesses the aesthetic sophistication and technical mastery of the most advanced works of the 1850s. Unlike his Parisian counterparts, however, this artist exploited the large scale and dramatic lighting commonly reserved for the depiction of monumental architecture and historic statuary for a rustic, vernacular scene.
Renewed attention to seventeenth-century Dutch genre scenes spurred an interest among pre-Impressionist painters in the motif of the humble cottage, most often centering on the structure in the context of a landscape or on its role as a setting for manual labor, as in the work of Jean-François Millet. In this photograph, a whirlwind of disorder and patchwork of intense light and shadow, the half-timbered, thatch-roofed barn and farmyard implements—rakes, baskets, butter churns, buckets—suggest the activity of rural life. The innovative pictorial approach, with multiple and competing points of focus, closely parallels a natural way of seeing the world.