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! 

[Landscape with Cottage]

Artists:  Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat (French, 1815–1858) and Stanislas Ratel (French, 1824–1904)

Date:  1844

Medium:  Daguerreotype

Classification:  Photographs

In the first decade of photography the overwhelming majority of daguerreotypes were portraits, as the complicated procedures required to produce these astonishingly detailed images on silver-plated sheets of copper were best carried out under the controlled conditions of the studio. A few adventurous travelers carried daguerreotype equipment with them and brought home dazzling records of far-off churches, castles, and classical ruins and, more rarely, of landscape and vernacular architecture. Seldom did they self-consciously strive for art. This full-plate daguerreotype, the first important French photograph of the 1840s to enter the Museum’s collection, is one such rarity.
Made during an excursion through eastern France just five years after the daguerreotype’s invention, this remarkable picture demonstrates how the camera prompted artists to see and represent the world in new ways. Rather than employing pictorial devices or perspectival and atmospheric effects rooted in the traditions of landscape painting, Choiselat and Ratel emphasized the two-dimensional organization of the picture’s surface. The poplars, reflected in the water, seem to stretch across the plate from top to bottom instead of sitting on the far side of the pond; the cottage (perhaps a rustic pleasure house for the château beyond) forms, with its reflection, a single geometric solid floating in space.

This work is believed to be from a series of views made by Choiselat and Ratel on a trip from Paris to southeastern France in 1844.