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!
Bacchanal
Artist: Nicolas Poussin (French, Les Andelys 1594–1665 Rome)
Date: ca. 1635–36
Medium: Pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, over faint black chalk underdrawing
Dimensions: 5 1/4 x 8 1/8 in. (13.3 x 20.6 cm.)
Classification: Drawings
Although he spent most of his career in Rome, Poussin was considered the greatest living French artist, and his work was avidly sought by influential French collectors. This sparkling study can be related to the Triumph of Pan (National Gallery, London) executed for Cardinal Richelieu, the French minister of state, along with a pendant depicting the Triumph of Bacchus (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City). While the finished painting depicts a scene of sensual abandon, the drawn studies reveal Poussin’s cerebral process of composition, in which individual figures are treated as formal elements of a tightly knit composition based on classical ideals of beauty. Here, broad, abstracted areas of wash are used to explore the volume and spatial relations of the complex figural group that can be seen, in reversed direction, at the left side of the painting. At least four other studies for the painting survive—two at Windsor Castle, England, and two at Bayonne, France—suggesting the care with which Poussin prepared this important commission.
Party time! I’ll go for the fruit platter!
I will have a strawberry mojito!!! Let’s have a party!!!
I think it’s funny that the two people on the left are sitting on the back of a goat. In general, this appears to be a drunken revelry, as nobody is sitting up straight and everyone is naked. And the platter of fruit is not level; it’s at an angle.
I always think it’s unusual in paintings like this to have a swirl of cloth covering someone’s private parts, in this case the woman on the goat.
Sun is off camera and to the left.
What’s that round thing hanging from the tree on the right?
There are five people in this drawing, all appear naked. A man and a woman are sitting on the back of a goat. The other three (a man, a woman, another man) are kneeling or lying on the ground. The man in the middle is balancing a tray of fruit on his head, although it’s not level. The woman sitting on the goat is reaching for some fruit with her right hand, while her head is turned in the opposite direction as she looks at the man who is sitting behind her and has is arms around her. The three men all seem to be sneering or smiling and assertive, but the women are more blank-faced. The men are muscular. The men appear to be having fun, but I don’t know about the women.