Your brain: use it or lose it!
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 Third-Class Carriage
Artist: Honoré Daumier (French, Marseilles 1808–1879 Valmondois)
Date: ca. 1862–64
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 25 3/4 x 35 1/2 in. (65.4 x 90.2 cm)
Classification: Paintings
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 802
As a graphic artist and painter, Daumier chronicled the impact of industrialization on modern urban life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Here, he amplifies the subject of a lithograph made some ten years earlier: the hardship and quiet fortitude of third-class railway travelers. Bathed in light, the nursing mother, elderly woman, and sleeping boy emanate a serenity not often associated with public transport. Unfinished and squared for transfer, this picture closely corresponds to a watercolor of 1864 (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore) and a roughly contemporary oil (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), but the sequence of the compositions remains unresolved.
United Airlines economy class of the future.
The lighting is eerie as it seems to come from above and light up the people closest to us. And I don’t think they had sunroofs back then .
I can’t figure out if the central figure with the hood is a man or a woman, and what his/her smirking face is supposed to communicate. The entire scene looks dreary, because it’s so dark. It seems like a lot of people are crammed into this train car (is it a train car?) and the most interesting thing for me is that it’s silent as I experience it, like all paintings and pictures are silent, yet I can imagine that maybe there’s a lot of noise of people talking and the train moving down the tracks.
This picture, I think, is famous but I don’t know who did it or where.
The dominant color is brown, and the light pouring in through the window doesn’t provide the stronger light that’s falling on the figures up front. If I had to guess, the woman on the left is the mother not only of the baby she’s nursing but of the boy in the shadows who’s leaning on the central woman in the picture, who may be his grandmother (the woman’s mother). The grandmother figure is staring at the viewer with what looks like a tired, knowing smile.
When I enlarged the picture I noticed black vertical and horizontal lines making a kind of graph paper effect. Did the artist do this because he/she was a beginner at art and used the graphed squares to help keep everything the right size and shape? I never witnessed that before.