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!
A Basket of Clams
Artist: Winslow Homer (American, Boston, Massachusetts 1836–1910 Prouts Neck, Maine)
Date: 1873
Medium: Watercolor on wove paper
Dimensions: 11 1/2 x 9 3/4 in. (29.2 x 24.8 cm)
Classification: Drawings
Credit Line: Gift of Arthur G. Altschul, 1995
Accession Number: 1995.378
Description
In June 1873, Homer went to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he painted his first watercolors, depictions of the local children playing in dories, sitting on the wharves, helping with chores, or simply preoccupied by their own youthful concerns. One of the most delightful products of that summer of experimentation is A Basket of Clams. This is the earliest watercolor by him to be acquired by the Museum. The artist sums up the modest responsibilities of childhood in this engaging image of two boys carrying a large basket of clams along a shell-strewn beach. The background buildings and the cropped two-masted sailboat refer to Gloucester’s maritime activity. This charming sheet typifies the direct observation, vigorous design, and dazzling light of Homer’s first watercolors. Reminders of his experience as an illustrator are evident in his sense of pattern, use of sharp outlines and flat washes, and attention to detail.
Homer shared an interest in children with many American artists of the 1870s. Their paintings responded to the spirit of the postbellum era, when the desire for national healing and the challenges of urban and industrial growth made children symbols of a simpler and more innocent time and of America’s hope for the future.
Two boys lugging what looks like a heavy pail up the beach. Maybe it’s heavy because it’s filled with sea water. I say this because their pants are rolled up and they are barefoot.
That looks like a dead dogfish lying on the sand.
Someone always notes the position of the sun in these weekly paintings. In this case it’s clearly high in the sky and to the left. You can tell from the shadows the boys make.
Almost everything is on an angle in this picture. The large boat is tilted. The booms, the masts are on oblique lines. The boys are walking up a slightly tilting beach. Their hats are titled. Their shadows are oblique lines. Even the dead fish is neither horizontal nor vertical. About the only horizontal and vertical lines are in the three houses in the background.
The boys are carrying what looks like a heavy pail (it needs two of them to carry it). They are facing away from the viewer. I gather it’s low tide because of the dead fish and other detritus on the beach, and because the big boat is not in the water. When the tide comes in, perhaps the boat will float again.
The picture is mostly colorless, except for the taller boy’s red shirt, which is somewhat in the “heart” of the painting.
I find it amazing that when you enlarge the picture and look at the lines (the ropes?) running from the hull of the boat up to the top of the masts, you’ll see that the lines are black when the background is sky, and white when the background is darker. That’s quite a startling detail.