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!
The Gulf Stream
Artist: Winslow Homer (American, Boston, Massachusetts 1836–1910 Prouts Neck, Maine)
Date: 1899
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 28 1/8 x 49 1/8 in. (71.4 x 124.8 cm)
Classification: Paintings
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 767
Back in Prouts Neck, Maine, after one of his winter visits to the Bahamas, Homer painted this dramatic scene of imminent disaster. A man faces his demise on a dismasted, rudderless fishing boat, sustained by only a few stalks of sugarcane and threatened by sharks and a distant waterspout. He is oblivious to the schooner on the left horizon, which Homer later added to the canvas as a sign of hopeful rescue. Some art historians have read The Gulf Stream as symbolic, connecting it with the period’s heightened racial tensions. The painting has also been interpreted as an expression of Homer’s presumed sense of mortality and vulnerability following the death of his father.
From Wikipedia:
The Gulf Stream is an 1899 oil painting by Winslow Homer. It shows a black man in a small dismasted rudderless fishing boat struggling against the waves of the sea, and was the artist’s last statement on a theme that had interested him for more than a decade. Homer vacationed often in Florida, Cuba, and the Caribbean.
For more of Wikipedia’s discussion of this famous painting, click here.
This dramatic painting is kind of a joke, isn’t it? I mean, you wouldn’t really have sharks breaching out of the water like whales, would you? And all so close to each other and the boat. Furthermore, in the background on the horizon you have the big ship on the left and a water spout or tornado on the right. Everything is composed just so. It’s kind of like a cartoon.
But I give it credit for drama.
Is that sugar cane on the boat with him? At least he has some sustenance.
It’s interesting that he’s looking out over the back of the boat when the boat is pointed in the opposite direction.
This painting may be allegorical, but I think it’s powerful and masterful. A black man is I guess stranded on a boat that has no sail (it looks like the mast is broken) and no rudder. In other words, no way to power or steer the boat. In the background I see stormy weather and a big sailing ship. The sailing ship might be a source of rescue, or he might be trying to escape from it as he’s a runaway slave.
The sugar cane on the boat is, as a previous commenter said, a source of sustenance but I also think about how slaves from African were brought to Central American countries to cut down sugar cane and work on sugar cane plantations, so the message is mixed: he can live on the sugar cane right now, but he could die from it if he’s recaptured and returned to the plantations.
All in all he has a lot to worry about. The sharks, the sailing boat on the horizon, the stormy weather, the lack of any way to steer the boat. And the sunlight is far off on the horizon, right next to the water spout and the big ship.
And I agree that it’s interesting that he’s staring off the back of the boat when the boat is pointed in the opposite direction. Although if the boat is adrift with no way to steer it, direction may be meaningless.
This is a famous painting. I don’t know where it is from. For me it signifies hope and perseverance in extremely difficult times when there is no place at all to turn to.