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!
Houses on the Achterzaan
Artist: Claude Monet (French, Paris 1840–1926 Giverny)
Date: 1871
Medium: Oil on canvas
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 957
On the advice of the French painter Charles-François Daubigny, Claude Monet traveled to the Netherlands in 1871, where he painted this landscape of limpid waters and azure skies along the Achterzaan River in Zaandam. Writing to fellow Impressionist Camille Pissarro, Monet noted the pleasures of painting the picturesque Dutch landscape: “This is a superb place for painting. There are the most amusing things everywhere: hundreds of windmills and enchanting boats, extremely friendly Dutchmen…” Using a limited palette of varying shades of green, Monet has captured the hazy atmosphere and light-dappled water of this picturesque Dutch port. Monet’s Dutch landscapes were widely admired by other contemporary artists, especially Daubigny, whose own studies of light and water share an affinity.
Damp basements.
I have three questions.
1. What is the black sooty object rising up from one of the chimneys? It looks like something a chimney sweep would use.
2. Is that a woman in white standing on the shoreline on the left?
3. Is this the Netherlands, what with the windmills in the background?
Thank you for posting this painting.
This is the feeling this painting gives me: a slight case of nausea. There’s so much sickly green and yellow in the picture. THe sky overhead is not blue but a sickly grey. Like smog. And I can only imagine how polluted the water is. I would not want to be on that sail boat. I would not want to be the woman in white standing at the water’s edge. I would not like to be there when there’s a serious storm and the tide is super high because of a full moon.
The setting looks serene but with today’s global warming I would be very scared.
There seems to be no sun in this picture as there are no shadows to speak of. The dominant yellow/green/gray coloring makes me feel queasy.
It’s interesting that this seems to be a residential part of town, and there are little docks by each house where small boats can pull up and deliver things or pick up or drop off people. I wonder how many boats there would be during a busy period, like a holiday or the morning rush hour. Or if there are roads on the other side of these houses that had more traffic.
There does’t seem to be alot of traffic at the moment .