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!
Landscape near Rome during a Storm
Artist: Simon Denis (Flemish, Antwerp 1755–1813 Naples)
Date: ca. 1786–1806
Medium: Oil on paper
Dimensions: 9 1/4 x 14 1/8 in. (23.5 x 35.9 cm)
Classification: Paintings
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 805
Denis painted the majority of his informal nature studies out of doors. Notations on the back of this example, however, indicate that he based it on a drawing that he had previously made in the countryside near Rome while observing the phenomenon of passing rain accompanied by a rainbow. The horses and rider fleeing the storm are a motif borrowed from the seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin.
Look at the man on the horse chasing the riderless horse at the bottom of the picture. Are they racing to get home before the big storm hits?
Also, is it possible to have just a slice of rainbow like that? It’s unrealistic.
It looks like the storm is going to quash the valiant rainbow.
It looks like the pot of gold is in a farmed field off in the distance. That looks like a silo just to the right of it. Good place to store all the gold!
BTW this is a very strange picture.
In nature you usually don’t see straight lines. But here you seem to have two: The slanting sheet of rain in the upper right corner, and the smidgen of rainbow (even though rainbows are actually curved). The rest of the landscape is non-linear, especially exemplified by the curving road the two horses and man are on.
Who thought to paint this, anyway? It’s such an odd picture.