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!
Whalers
Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, London 1775–1851 London)
Date: ca. 1845
Medium: Oil on canvas
Classification: Paintings
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 808
Turner was seventy years old when Whalers debuted to mixed reviews at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1845. Its subject proved elusive, as the English novelist William Thackeray observed: “That is not a smear of purple you see yonder, but a beautiful whale, whose tail has just slapped a half-dozen whale-boats into perdition; and as for what you fancied to be a few zig-zag lines spattered on the canvas at hap-hazard, look! they turn out to be a ship with all her sails.” Apparently Turner undertook the painting—which was returned to him—for the collector Elhanan Bicknell, who had made his fortune in the whale-oil business.
Holy cow. Surprising painting. Sunlight appears diffused everywhere, except for the giant whale that is thrashing up out of the water. On close examination I see a group of rowboats with men riding in them, chasing after the whale. In the back is the mother ship in full sail.
What could have been just an everyday painting of a whaling expedition is instead a well-lit nightmare that is both fuzzy and stark.
Sun shines most brightly on the big billowing sails, whose undersides are shaded in gray .
To my eye, this painting has violent brush strokes that raise many questions. Are the men in the row boats in danger? The boats seem bunched together and almost vertical, as if they’re about to flip over. And what are the black strokes on the far right of the picture? They appear to be the outline, only the outline, of another whale. ANd you have more dark brush strokes in the sky over the ship. It’s an unsettling painting because of these enigmas and because catching and killing whales was always dangerous and violent.
The overall yellow/grey/brown coloring makes it seem like the world is on fire.
Yes. Those were fantastic and dangerous days when sailing ships set out after whales. I still don’t understand how relatively minuscule humans in tiny boats were able to harpoon and capture and kill and lash to the side of the ship these huge leviathans.