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!
Lake Squam from Red Hill
Artist: William Trost Richards (American, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1833–1905 Newport, Rhode Island)
Date: 1874
Culture: American
Medium: Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on light gray-green wove paper
Dimensions: 8 7/8 x 13 9/16 in. (22.5 x 34.4 cm)
Classification: Drawings
Description
Among the earliest contributors to the annual exhibitions of the American Society of Painters in Water Color, the Philadelphian Richards contributed significantly to raising the profile of the medium in the United States. The artist successfully wedded topographical precision and authority of design to a marvelous sense of light and atmospheric breadth, creating small-scale landscapes that are the nearest counterpart in watercolor to the paintings of the contemporaneous Hudson River School. The view of island-studded Lake Squam from Red Hill in New Hampshire was a well-worn tourist staple by the time Richards executed this radiant prospect at sunset. The picture hints at his admiration for the sky spectacles in oil of New York landscape painter Frederic Church.
This is like one of your haikus where there’s a late afternoon rainstorm after which you see many sunsets in the puddles.
Yes, it’s funny how a single dot in the sky, the sun, gets stretched out into a long vertical line when it sets over water.
Pretty picture.
I like the way the ridges in the clouds overhead mirror the ridges of the land below. Also, I don’t know why but I was shocked to enlarge the picture and see that it was dated 1874 ! It seems so contemporary !!!
Pretty colors, too.
I looked and looked and found no signs of humanity – no buildings, no people, no boats. I like the way the gray rocks in the foreground replicate the ridges in the clouds and in the islands off in the distance. I never realized until now that the artist can draw the viewer’s eye to the central idea of the painting, meaning the viewer has to force himself/herself to seek out what’s going on on the periphery. This painting raises a question, too: do all paintings of sunsets have the sun in the center of the canvas? It seems at least many of them do.