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! 

Road in the Woods

Artist:  Constant Troyon (French, Sèvres 1810–1865 Paris)

Medium:  Oil on canvas

Dimensions:  22 7/8 x 19 in. (58.1 x 48.3 cm)

Classification:  Paintings

In this animated scene of a simple dirt track, the eye is led simultaneously upward to the left and downward to the right. Troyon adopted this dual perspective from seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, which vanguard French artists of his generation studied for naturalistic alternatives to the more formal, Italianate models favored by the Academy. Troyon depicted the penetration of brilliant sunlight through the tree canopy with palpitating brushwork that was rarely equaled in the mid-1840s, when this work was probably painted.