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 Belated Party on Mansfield Mountain

Artist: Jerome B. Thompson (1814–1886)

Date: 1858

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 38 x 63 1/8 in. (96.5 x 160.3 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Description

Thompson earned a reputation for combining the breadth of Hudson River School landscape painting with the anecdotal appeal of contemporary genre painting. This work is one of several in which he used Mount Mansfield, Vermont’s highest peak, as a foil for domestic recreation. As half the party of day trippers admire the summit and the vista toward Lake Champlain, another young man holds his watch aloft, warning of the lateness of the hour and the need to descend. But, as people their age are wont to do, the three youths watching the sunset ignore him, enraptured by the beauty of nature.