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!
Sarnen
Artist: Thales Fielding (British, Yorkshire 1793–1837 London)
Date: 1824
Medium: Oil on light brown paper
Dimensions: 7 1/8 x 10 3/8 in. (18.1 x 26.4 cm)
Classification: Paintings
References
Kathleen Stuart in The Thaw Collection: Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, Acquisitions Since 1994. Exh. cat., Pierpont Morgan Library. New York, 2002, pp. 192–93, no. 88, ill. (color), compares it to Richard Parkes Bonington’s oil study “Boulogne—Low Tide” (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), with its broad brushwork, quickly sketched figures, and suggestion of shadows in the water through slim vertical brushtrokes; states that the site is the Sarner See, a small lake in Unterwalden, south of Lucerne, where Fielding must have gone on his trip to Switzerland in summer 1824; notes the high-key palette, the abstracted foreground, and minimal, economic use of brushstrokes to present topographical details and the figure of the fisherman.
This painting looks unfinished in the foreground. The boat in the center-foreground looks unfinished. The dirt around the boat is just a single swirl of brown, a single brushstroke. But when you look at the back of the painting – that is, off in the distance – the painting looks whole, finished…….The mountain on the right looks finished, but its reflection in the water does not look finished at all. The reflection is just a bunch of short vertical brush strokes. As I look at it closely, I realize that the reflection is really supposed to be a spit of land jutting into the lake, and that the vertical strokes are reeds. But at first I was fooled into thinking it was the water reflecting the mountain.
The stick sticking up vertically out of the beached boat is weird.
Who’s on the boat all alone that is heading off to the far shore? And who is supposed to be in the boat that is in the foreground with the barely painted beach ? This picture is all about sadness and being left alone.
I’ m not sure the boat in the front of the painting is sea worthy. The side of the boat looks like it is not there. It looks the same as the dirt next to it. Maybe the picture is about leaving behind a boat that doesn’t float any more. Is that the message of this painting? Is it a political message? And the upright stick in the back of this boat is strange. It looks weak, fragile, about to break.