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!
Sunset on the Lake, from the series, Views in Central Park, New York, Part 2
Publisher: Louis Prang & Co. (Boston, Massachusetts)
Date: 1864
Medium: Lithograph
Dimensions: Sheet: 4 in. × 2 3/8 in. (10.2 × 6.1 cm)
Classifications: Prints, Ephemera
She’s leaving him because he just insulted her for carrying such a tiny, useless parasol when the sun is going down anyway.
Postcard from the T wilight Zone !!
My grandson used all the extra space at the top of the card to draw in stars, planets and space ships. ( I printed it out large size. )
I just noticed he added fish and snakes at the bottom, in the water.
I think it’s funny the way Gabby in her comment added the drama of why the woman was walking away from the man. What other reasons might there be?
A man and a woman stand on a foot bridge over a lake or river at sunset. The sun is round, but I sense of lot of triangularity and oblique lines elsewhere. The land on both sides of the foreground slopes downward in a V shape. Similarly, the tree in the background rises up like a triangle. And then, of course, there’s the woman’s tiny triangle parasol.
I like the contrast of the swirling siding to the railing on the bridge.