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!
Stage Fort across Gloucester Harbor
Artist: Fitz Henry Lane (formerly Fitz Hugh Lane) (1804–1865)
Date: 1862
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 38 x 60 in. (96.5 x 152.4 cm)
Classification: Paintings
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 761
Lane returned to his native Gloucester from Boston in 1848. His works of the 1850s and 1860s are successively purged of genre and topographical elements, becoming increasingly spare and essential. By 1862, Lane had engineered a seamless, self-effacing style, possibly influenced by the works of Martin Johnson Heade. Stage Fort, once the site of military fortifications, sits on an arching land form used to lead the viewer’s eye into the glowing, lucid, and almost eerily still distance. Despite the disjuncture between the virtually surreal, meticulously painted foreground and the sheer plane of water near the horizon, this work marks the transition to Lane’s final, taut, elemental style. The painting’s disquieting stasis, even with its hopeful pink and golden glow, creates a hermetic, elegiac mood found in many of Lane’s late works.
This is a funny painting because you have the soft almost pastel light gradations in the sky, and the hard, dark brown blobby things looking like lumps of fecal matter sitting in the water.
This picture is mostly serene but the dark brown rounded rocks are disturbing.
The sun is off to the right this time, which is unusual. There is such a serenity and stillness to the scene I can’t help but believe it’s dawn. Why is dawn always still and quiet compared to sunset? They should be equal.
In the lower left corner there is a boat beached on land, and it has a hole in it, it’s missing a board. A man is sitting in the boat and another man is standing outside the boat, talking to him. I find the broken boat weird.
The left side of the picture has an openness to it – the water extended far out, and there are humans and boats close up to the viewer and far off in the distance. The right side of the picture is enclosed by the spit of land; there’s also a house with roof and chimney, suggesting enclosure. On the other hand, on the left side of the picture you have a light house in the distance, suggesting travel to far off places.
The dark brown, rounded stones are an enigma.
The serenity of the scene is a man-made one, a way of idealizing nature by controlling it. Yes, the scene, especially the water, is peaceful, but real nature (and life itself) is precarious. The wild card has been removed.