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!
Drawing the Eel
Artist: Salomon van Ruysdael (Dutch, Naarden, born ca. 1600–1603, died 1670 Haarlem)
Date: early 1650s
Medium: Oil on wood
Dimensions: 29 1/2 x 41 3/4 in. (74.9 x 106 cm)
Classification: Paintings
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 965
Against a wintry sky and bare branches, this village road becomes the setting for a cruel pastime: a live eel strung on a line is plucked down by young people charging past on horseback. The contest provides the pretext for a festive gathering, allowing Ruysdael to combine his eye for local color with an evocation of limpid winter light and its reflection in the frozen skating pond below.
Big sky country.
Is this the Netherlands? Is that why the ground is so low????
What’s funny and weird about this painting it that most of it is nearly blank – just gray clouds overhead. But down along the bottom of the picture there are hundreds of things going on, and I can’t begin to describe even a tenth of them. There are two or three pigeons on the roof. Why is that woman in the center midground holding aloft what looks like a rolled-up umbrella so that it touches the rope or wire that connects the house to the tree. Why is the muddy ground in the very foreground darker than the dirt roadway where most of the people are? Are the people sitting in the boats (or sleds?) underneath the tree in the middle of the painting waiting to be hitched up with horses to pull them out onto the ice? Why does the picture seem to glow in the very bottom right corner, with the white horse and the white kerchiefs on the women and the white dog?
I agree with Helen: there are so many questions here. The sun is off screen but I’m not sure where. I find it strange that the greatest amount of light emanates from the frozen pond on the left and the white horse on the right (flanked by the white neckwear of the woman near the horse, and by the white dog who’s in a kind of yin-yang position with the dark colored dog). The people skating on the lake or riding in sleds pulled by horses seem to be having a good time, but why are all these other people standing together on the land? Is something important about to happen? Is there something special about the man on the glowing white horse? And the dead tree lying in the foreground on the left: Is that some kind of trope that has a special meaning? You see it so often in other paintings – dead foliage in the foreground, but a lush and healthy forest or mountain or plains in the background.