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!
Egyptians Raising Water from the Nile
Artist: John Singer Sargent (American, Florence 1856–1925 London)
Date: 1890–91
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 25 x 21 in. (63.5 x 53.3 cm)
Classification: Paintings
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 774
Description
Sargent visited the Middle East several times in connection with a series of murals on the theme of the history of religion, for which he had received a commission from the Boston Public Library in 1890. Traveling in Egypt in 1890–91, he painted this canvas, which shows a man using a simple irrigation device called a shaduf to fill a ditch, from which others are drinking and waiting to fill containers. Like many of his contemporaries, the artist may have believed that life in the region was essentially unchanged since biblical times.
I don’t know where this is taking place. Is that the Nile? A man is pouring river water into a trough, and a child – I think a boy, appears to be drinking from it. THe colors are gentle on the eyes!
The woman or is it young girl looks like she’s holding a whittled-down coconut. I LOVE fresh coconut juice !!!
The question in my mind is that I would like to see the entire contraption that this man is using to gather the water in the bucket and then swing it onto the shore to dump in the trough … Is that really a trough?
I think a lot of camels are standing near by because this looks like a temporary drinking thing for animals that the man made. I believe that that’s his family with him.
There’s a lot of curves on the left side of the painting, mostly curved as if to contain everything on the left side. The sail on the boat, the curved rope hanging down to the bucket, the arch of the man’s back and body – they’re all cupped to hold everything else inside. In fact, all of the action and people are to the left of the man’s curving body and the rope above him. I like this picture!