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 Valley of Wyoming
Artist: Jasper Francis Cropsey (American, Rossville, New York 1823–1900 Hastings-on-Hudson, New York)
Date: 1865
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 48 1/2 x 84 in. (123.2 x 213.4 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Description
This large studio work was commissioned in 1864 by Milton Courtright (1810 – 1883). Courtright was born and raised on his family’s farm in the heart of the Wyoming Valley. In his account book, Cropsey recorded a payment of $125 from Courtright on August 4, 1864, and three additional payments in January, March, and May 1865, totaling $3, 500. On August 8, Cropsey made at least two preparatory drawings of the site (now in Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). One of these served as the basis for the oil sketch for this painting (see 25.110.63). This final version of the picture was shown at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1865. It retains an original frame and plaque with a poem written in 1809 by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell.
It must be a hot day because most of the cows are seeking shelter from the sun in the shade.
I see so many things in this painting. The amount of detail is a wonder. There are people who look like they’re having a picnic on the hill close up in the lower right corner. But when you enlarge the painting, you can see all sorts of people working in the fields down in the valley. There seems to be three bodies of water. First, the major river on the left. Second, what I think is a canal in the middle. There are barges on it, long and thin, which makes sense for a canal. Third, there seems to be a creek at the bottom right of the picture. The whole valley – with its towns and farms and factories in the background, looks like it could flood completely after a hearty hurricane came through.
It’s an astounding amount of detail that the artist put into this painting. I would like to see it in person and study it more.
To my mind, this landscape painting follows a common formula, whereby the lower foreground is dark but off in the distance you get light. THe detailing is impressive. Even across the river in the distance you see precisely rendered buildings, bushes, trees. And then there’s that cliff across the river. How did that come about?
It’s funny how the sun is above the center of the picture – you can see its rays radiating outwardly in every direction – and the shadows follow suit. This doesn’t seem natural. The shadows of the tiny trees in the lower left corner (close to the river) slant to the left. Yet the shadow of the big tree on the right foreground, where the cows are, veers to the right. It seems to me that because Earth is so far from the Sun the shadows should go in the same direction, no matter whether they’re on your right or left, close to you or far away.
By the way, is that a brook in the right foreground where the two men and the woman are having a picnic? It looks like puddles of water here and there that probably connect to form a brook that goes down the mountain and ends up in one of the bodies of water in the valley.
I agree with the other comments that the amount of detail is astounding.