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!
Cider Making
Artist: William Sidney Mount (American, Setauket, New York 1807–1868 Setauket, New York)
Date: 1840–41
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 27 x 34 1/8 in. (68.6 x 86.7 cm)
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 758
Though this scene convincingly captures a moment in rural life, its inspiration lay in the political maneuvering surrounding the hard-fought presidential election of 1840. The image of down-home simplicity embodied by the cider makers was evoked by the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, promoted as a common man who preferred a log cabin and hard cider to the supposed excesses of the Democratic White House of Martin Van Buren. The work was commissioned by the prominent New York businessman and Whig leader Charles Augustus Davis. Davis was the creator of the folksy “Jack Downing” character, whose musings broadened Whig appeal through attacks on the disastrous Jacksonian financial policies responsible for the Panic of 1837. Mount, a conservative Democrat who opposed the populist Jackson, punctuated his painting with details, such as the prominently dated cider barrel, possibly intended to allude to the larger political context. In 1841, a Whig journalist wove the references into an anecdote in the “New York American” ripe with political insinuations and double meanings. Probably with greater specificity than the artist intended, he likened each figure to a character or interest group in the election. It is likely that Mount’s motives included both subtle political concerns and a commitment to the transcription of visual data gleaned directly from his rural surroundings. The cider mill immortalized here stood in Setauket, Long Island, until the early twentieth century.
On the one hand, this looks very American but a few things throw me off. The girl in the foreground is wearing a head scarf…and is barefoot. Everyone, in fact, has a head covering, although one man has doffed his. And the thatched roof strikes me as NOT in America, as well as the fish that is the weather vane.
What’s with all the apples? I see a whole apple and a half-eaten apple on the barrel in front, and it looks like hundreds of apples being ground up in the horse-led grinding thing in the mid-ground.
The sun is off screen to the right this time, and the white horse is the brightest point in the painting; it’s on the left.
There are so many animals in this scene. I just spotted the two pigs napping in the sun on the right.
I agree there are strange elements in this picture. It’s strange that the girl is barefoot. The people seem well fed. At least one man is portly. The boy in front seems to have a straw and is drinking out of the barrel on its side. The facial expressions lead me to think that everyone is happy. If it’s apple season, it must be fall which means a lot of food has been recently harvested, so there’s plenty on the dinner table for everyone.
The animals in this painting are all free range. The men have such high-waisted pants. Many people are smiling. The barrel is dated 1840, but the date below the artist’s signature is 1841. What was the artist’s inner motivation for painting this scene of rural life? It’s rather bucolic in a warm fuzzy way.