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!
Boating
Artist: Édouard Manet (French, Paris 1832–1883 Paris)
Date: 1874
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 38 1/4 x 51 1/4 in. (97.2 x 130.2 cm)
Classification: Paintings
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 818
Manet summered at Gennevilliers in 1874, often spending time with Monet and Renoir across the Seine at Argenteuil, where Boating was painted. Beyond adopting the lighter touch and palette of his younger Impressionist colleagues, Manet exploits the broad planes of color and strong diagonals of Japanese prints to give inimitable form to this scene of outdoor leisure. Rodolphe Leenhoff, the artist’s brother-in-law, is thought to have posed for the sailor but the identity of the woman is uncertain.
Shown in the Salon of 1879, Boating was deemed “the last word in painting” by Mary Cassatt, who recommended the acquisition to the New York collectors Louisine and H.O. Havemeyer.
I see a man dressed in white ( he doesn’t look very dressed up ) sitting in the back of a small sailboat, ” manning ” the tiller, while a woman who IS dressed up is sitting on his right. I know it’s a sailboat because a small section of the sail appears in the upper right corner. The man is looking directly at the viewer, the woman is staring off to the side. Is the man inviting the viewer to join in? Or is he saying, or thinking , ” I’ve got this dressed-up woman who I am taking for a boat ride so leave us alone. ” His face is either expressionless or a look of disdain.
I can see that the woman’s fluid, blue dress echoes the water around her, but her white hat echoes the man’s clothing.
The man’s face is impassive. The woman looks lost in thought. Is there a class difference here?
What’s that white and gray bundle on the right side of the boat? Looks like fish or dead seagulls…or both. !!