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!
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri
Artist: George Caleb Bingham (American, Augusta County, Virginia 1811–1879 Kansas City, Missouri)
Date: 1845
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 29 x 36 1/2 in. (73.7 x 92.7 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Description
On June 4, 1845, Bingham returned from a winter stay in central Missouri to St. Louis, bringing with him several paintings and many sketches. This apparently was one of the pictures that he brought with him, and he sent it later that year for sale to the American Art-Union. It was first called “French Trader & Half breed Son,” but the Art-Union gave it the title by which it is now known. Bingham, whose earliest efforts were portraits, produced a masterpiece of genre painting with little precedent in his oeuvre. The strikingly spare, geometric composition and luminist light recall the paintings of William Sidney Mount, particularly his “Eel Spearing at Setauket” (New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown). The solemn, motionless scene immortalizes the vanished world of the American frontier, constructed for a northeastern audience. The tranquil work was submitted to the Art-Union as a possible companion to the more implicitly violent “The Concealed Enemy” (Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas), in which an armed Osage warrior lies in wait behind a boulder. The polar opposition of quietude, savagery, and frontier danger embodied in the paintings held enormous appeal for urban viewers. Bingham painted a similar, though less extraordinary, picture called “The Trapper’s Return” (Detroit Institute of Arts) in New York in 1851.
From Wikipedia, the font of all knowledge:
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri is an 1845 painting by George Caleb Bingham. Bingham brought the painting to St. Louis, Missouri on June 4, 1845, along with several other pieces of artwork.
One of Bingham’s most famous paintings, this work is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Painted around 1845 in the style called luminism by some historians of American art, it was originally entitled, French-Trader, Half-breed Son. The American Art Union thought the title potentially controversial and renamed it when it was first exhibited. It reflected the reality of fur traders’ common marriages with Native American women; in Canada the Métisethnic group formed as a result. The painting is haunting for its evocation of an era in American history-—note, in particular, the liberty cap worn by the older man. The animal in the boat is widely accepted as a bear cub and not a cat.
I know this is a famous picture but I don’t know who did it or where it’s from. The woman looks peaceful and at ease. The man looks fierce and the smoke coming from his pipe makes me think he’s a fire-breathing dragon. The black cat is inscrutable. The river has horizontal lines in it that make me think it’s not water but floor boards. I like their clothes, they are colorful and look clean and well tailored.
The man is smoking a pipe with a tiny bowl, but it or he is leaving behind a large plume of smoke.
I, too, like the clothing the two humans are wearing.
I feel sorry for the cat because it’s tied up, but that may be just my own interpretation.
Downtown Washington, DC, a few years into the future after global warming has really taken over.
Three noticings about the animals. First, if you enlarge the painting on your computer screen you’ll see a line of birds flying in the sky over the cat’s head.
Second, that may not be a cat but a dog. When you enlarge the painting it looks like it has a dog’s snout.
Third, I think there’ s a dead bird on the box the woman is leaning on.
I notice that the sun is coming from the upper left corner. Maybe it’s behind the haze, or out of the frame completely. But it leads me to the observation that the physical objects (the boat, the people in it, the island of trees in the background, the clouds in the sky) are all bunched up on the right side of the picture, with a lot of openness on the left, and the black cat/dog a counterweight blot on the left. And while this very narrow and low-in-the-water boat is headed leftward into the open space of the painting, the two humans and the animal in the bow of the boat are all facing the viewer; they’re posed, that is, as if this is a portrait.
I also see that the woman has on the box she’s leaning against not only a dead bird, but a golden-tasseled belt or scarf, and a purse, and a gun. Did she shoot the bird? Does that indicate that the animal in the boat’s bow is a dog, not a cat, and the dog is trained to swim and retrieve birds shot out of the sky?
And yes, there is that line of birds (probably geese) flying in the background directly over the dog’s/cat’s head.
This is another painting in this series that I could stare at forever. I don’t know why.