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!
Gathering Olives at Tivoli
Artist: François-Louis Français (French, Plombières-les-Bains 1814–1897 Plombières-les-Bains)
Date: 1868
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 83 3/4 x 51 5/8 in. (212.7 x 131.1 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Français began his career as an illustrator. He and a group of fellow graphic artists, including Célestin Nanteuil (1813–1873), published a popular series of lithographs reproducing masterpieces of painting. The first paintings that he exhibited were collaborative efforts done with Henri Baron (1816–1885) who, like Français, had studied with Jean Gigoux (1806–1894) and earned a reputation as a fine watercolorist. The most decisive influences on Français were his friendship with Corot, whom he met in 1837, and a three-year stay in Italy, from about 1846 until 1850. Both influences are evident in Gathering Olives at Tivoli. This painting and its pendant, Ruins in Italy at Sunset (location unknown), were decorative panels painted for a Parisian patron, Paul Lagarde.
Very curious ! Fishing in a tree ????????
It looks like the the boy who is climbing up the tree is trying to get away from the other children, who are going after him with sticks.
It’s a Frisbee stuck up in the tree. They’re trying to get it out.
Well, I don’t know what they’re doing, either. If you look closely at the boy on the right (the one holding the long stick) you can see some dot-like objects in the air around him. Are those part of the picture?
I notice that the left side of the picture is dark…you have the dark tree that extends up beyond the painting’s edge, and in the background the dark earth extends upwards – the hill in the background. On the right you have lots of light, including the glowing white waterfall in the background and what is either the ocean or river.
And actually, the picture’s darkness is diagonal. The lower right corner is where the darkness begins, and extends upward and to the left to the upper left corner.
THe sun seems to be off to the left, which I say based on the way the clothes of the three people in the bottom left corner are lit up from behind them, on the left.
I don’t know if the man with the horse in the distance on the right is part of the story of what the children are doing in the tree. He has two full bags loaded on the horse. What does that mean?