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 Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak
Artist: Albert Bierstadt (American, Solingen 1830–1902 New York)
Date: 1863
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 73 1/2 x 120 3/4 in. (186.7 x 306.7 cm)
Classification: Paintings
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 760
This painting is the major work that resulted from the artist’s first trip to the West. His intention to create panoramic views of the American frontier was apparent by December 1858, just before he embarked on the trip. In early 1859 he accompanied a government survey expedition, headed by Frederick W. Lander, to the Nebraska Territory. By summer, the party had reached the Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains in what is now Wyoming. Bierstadt dubbed the central mountain in the picture Lander’s Peak following the colonel’s death in the Civil War. This was one of a number of large works painted after Bierstadt’s return from these travels. It was completed in 1863, exhibited to great acclaim, and purchased in 1865 for the then-astounding sum of $25,000 by James McHenry, an American living in London. Bierstadt later bought it back and gave or sold it to his brother Edward.
Big mountains. Little people. A lot to examine.
I like looking at this when it is enlarged on my big desktop screen. There is soooooo much to examine. But is it realistic? Or fanciful? I wonder because the sun shining on the waterfall in the center background seems a little too twee for me.
It looks like a crowd is forming in the lower right corner around a dead bear. I agree with the other commenters that this painting offers a lot to look at. I think I even see people walking on the ridges in the background.
Note that the clouds at the top edge of the painting are brown. Just sayin’.
As the other commenters say, there’s a lot going on in this picture. When viewing it, my mind reels back and forth between the minutiae of the humans in the foreground (where indeed a lot is happening) and the enormous, grandiose set of mountains in the background.
I could spend all day looking at what the humans are doing, as well as the animals. There’s even a prairie dog (or some similar animal) sticking its head out of a hole in the ground in the lower left corner.
It’s interesting to me that the three “whitest” parts of the painting (where the white stands out and is practically shimmering) are: the peak of the central mountain; the waterfall (which is half in the sunlight and half in shadow), and the skull of a buffalo or similar animal lying on the grass at the foot of the picture.
I’m guessing the size of this painting is enormous.