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 Banks of the Rance, Brittany
Artist: Pierre Henri de Valenciennes (French, Toulouse 1750–1819 Paris)
Date: possibly 1785
Medium: Oil on paper, laid down on canvas
Classification: Paintings
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 805
This study is the product of one of the earliest known plein-air painting excursions on the Channel coast. With a painterly sensibility honed by the direct observation of nature, Valenciennes sketched the light, atmosphere, and swiftly moving water at the mouth of the river Rance. This exercise was intended to train his eye and hand to capture such fleeting effects so that he could draw from the experience when painting in the studio. The investigatory spirit of Valenciennes’s sketches, painted in France and Italy, mark them as signal achievements of the Enlightenment.
I think I said this before, but I find it interesting that if you look at the main part of the painting, you “believe” the reality it’s depicting. But if you look at the edge where the paint stops and you see bare canvas, you realize that it’s all artifice.
When I look at the bottom of this painting, where the paint ends, and the white canvas begins, looks like the foam of waves. And I think it’s a nice touch. But then I see the same thing along the top edge of the painting, and it makes no sense. If you click on the painting and enlarge it, you can really see this.
In that way, this painting is merely a vision, a dream.
The sun seems off to the left, based on the glowing tops of the trees.
I agree with Collin , is that a frothy surf along the bottom edge of the painting, or just the end of the artwork?
Usually paintings of the sea leave me with a fresh feeling, but the drab colors in this painting leave me feeling “meh’.
I can’t tell if the weather is hot or humid or cool in the picture. It’s strange.