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!
Sunset on Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire
Artist: William Trost Richards (American, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1833–1905 Newport, Rhode Island)
Date: 1872
Culture: American
Medium: Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on gray-green wove paper
Dimensions: 8 1/8 x 14 3/16 in. (20.6 x 36 cm)
Classification: Drawings
A beautiful morning. Sun’s not yet up and someone is out fishing in the river. But I have two questions. First, he seems sort of far back from the water’s edge. I would expect him to be closer or actually standing in the river.
Second, if you enlarge the picture you see that the fishing pole doubles back on itself in a big loop. It’s like a giant hair pin. In addition, I’m not sure if it’s early Spring or early Fall because the leave have a tinge of yellow to them. It’s a nice landscape all in all.
This is big sky country, for certain!
Is there only one human in the picture? Across the river I see what may be cows grazing in a field, and maybe another human or two on the opposite shore. Also, is that smoke rising across the river from a house or cabin? This painting shows so much open space. It dwarfs the human that we do see.
As my eye travels from left to right when I view this picture, the space opens up immensely. I also like the detailing of the clouds mixed in with the sun’s rays.
I agree with most of the points above. I also note that the man is leaning backwards, to the left, and the fishing rod he’s holding leans “forward” to the right. Is this meaningful? They parallel the two white-barked trees to the left of them. I also see that the lower left corner is densely packed together with trees and bushes and in general is dark, but then everything above and to the right is light and far away. Does that mean anything?