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 in the picture?
- What does it make you think of?
- What observations can you make?
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
A rainbow on Thanksgiving !
Thank you very much !
OK, I’m seeing this at home today and I did try to ” embiggen ” it on my large desktop screen, usually I’m on my iPhone.
I would like to say two things, the first being that when you make the picture bigger you’ll see the cutest little train on the left side.
And also, the train is right where the rainbow comes down. Is that a statement on the artist’s part? Across the river things seems ” undeveloped ” and on the river you have just rafts, no engines or motors or anything modern. Is the artist saying that the modern train is the pot of gold where the rainbow ends ? It could be !
Oh and Happy Thanksgiving,, even tho I’m a day late !!!
Happy Thanksgiving Everybody !
Gabby, you are correct about the rainbow and the train because when I detailed the painting I saw that the rainbow actually arises out of the steam coming out of the train’s smoke stack.
In my opinion the rainbow truly “stands out” in this artwork because almost everything else is flat and horizontal, as in many landscapes, but the rainbow “bends” the vision from horizontal at the top in the clouds to vertical once it hits the train down on Earth.
Wishing everyone around the world Peace, Health and Prosperity!!!
This is a pleasant, dreamy scene with rafts on the river, cows wandering about, a man lying in the foreground, taking it all in. Does the man stand for all of us? Directing our attention to what’s happening down on the river? He can’t see the train behind him.
I notice that the two sides of the river come together in the middle of the painting, just below where the dip in the mountain ridges in the background. The center point of the rainbow arc seems to be about the same place. I mean, if you draw a vertical line straight down from where the arc appears up in the clouds, then draw a horizontal line out to the right of where the rainbow intersects with the train’s smoke, the intersection of the two lines would be about the same place where the two sides of the river come together . (If it were a full rainbow the center point would be farther to the right.)
The rainbow comes down out of the sky from a bright spot in the clouds. However, as we all know, when you’re looking at a rainbow, the sun is really behind you. In this case, behind the person who painted this scene.
I haven’t seen a rainbow in a long time. They are really marvelous things.
In this picture Everyones’ relaxing after a day of over eating on Thanksgiving..
Or their taking the train home .
There are many tiny things, going on, in this picture. A man is lying on the ground. Some cows are standing in the water. One cow is calling out to the others with a moo sound. Maybe the cow is saying, “wait for me”! Some men are polling a raft and there some kind of fire on the raft because, I can see smoke rising.
Smoke is rising at the train, too.
What nobody seems to notice is that the rainbow comes down from the skies and there are , two things to say about that. The first thing to say is that the clouds are lighted up in the portion, of the sky where the rainbow starts. Well, and good.
But if you look carfully you will see that there is a patch of blue sky there, too. A small patch of blue sky.
Blue sky.
This IS the kind of sleepy Picture that Makes you thiNk that Life 100 Years ago is lazy and relaxed With No Tension.s. It’s a LIE !!!!!!!! Life then and now is hard and full of STRESs AND N o RAINBOWS. !!!!!!!
As with one or two of the recent THursday paintings, this one has an amber tinge to it as if we’re looking through beer.
Maybe we are!
So much partying over the long Thanksgiving weekend!