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!
Tennis at Newport
Artist: George Bellows (American, Columbus, Ohio 1882–1925 New York)
Date: 1919
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 40 x 43 1/4 in. (101.6 x 109.9 cm)
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 772
Renowned for his paintings of clandestine boxing matches, Bellows also depicted leisure-time pursuits of the wealthy. He painted Tennis at Newport in his New York studio from sketches he had made the previous summer. The annual tennis tournament at the Newport Casino in Rhode Island was an important sporting event and social occasion. Bellows’s painting emphasizes the setting more than the match; although the players appear in action in the foreground, the spectators strolling about the grounds and lingering on the lawn divert attention away from the contest. Bellows’s blended brushwork and lurid palette evoke both bright, almost blinding light and sweltering heat.
I can’t figure out what is going on in this picture. People are sitting on a lawn mostly facing me, the viewer, although my vantage point is high up. Is the “viewer” supposed to be an actor high on a stage? What am I supposed to do? They are sitting and waiting for me to do something. A bit disconcerting ……
The SUn is both IN this picture and NOT IN this picture ! There are all the ladies with their parasols and everyone is casting shadows on the ground. There are sun beans in the sky. But there is no ACTUAL SUN !!!!
I think they’re forming an aisle and are waitin g for someone or something to walk in front of them. I say this because I see two possibly more people in the two lower corners, and they’re facing th e crowd that’s lined up an d sitting. Maybe a famous race horse is going to walk in front of them or the cast of a famous travelling circus show.
The shadows make no sense. The shadows leading from the people on the left side of the screen angle downwards toward the lower left corner. But the shadows on the right side of the picture angle downward toward the lower right corner. This is unrealistic. On Earth shadows caused by the Sun are essentially parallel.THey don’t radiate outwards as they do here.
Actually, the high vantage point of the “viewer” is because this was painted by the giant gorilla, Mighty Joe Young, who, unlike in the movie that “documented” (= fictionalized with great liberty) his life, was an accomplished artist who was all the rage in Europe as the wealthiest of the wealthy paid huge sums of money to have him do their portrait.
In this scene, which is kind of a practice-sketch for him, a group of wealthy socialites are getting ready for their group portrait. They chipped in on the cost because he commanded such a high price. At one point he was engaged to be married to the princess of Monaco but she broke it off because she couldn’t stand his bad breath. What can you expect when his diet was mostly ripe blue cheese and bushels of onions?
Looks like cocktail time to me.