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!
Wheat Fields
Artist: Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, Haarlem 1628/29–1682 Amsterdam)
Date: ca. 1670
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 39 3/8 x 51 1/4 in. (100 x 130.2 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Not on view
This large canvas of about 1670 is Ruisdael’s most ambitious view of grain fields, a subject he treated frequently. The monumental design, with its centralized recession into space, might have been intended for a particular location, perhaps above a mantelpiece. During the seventeenth century, paintings of this size were usually hung high.
This was Robert Frost’s inspiration for “the road not taken.” The fork in the road that leads down to the left seems less trod upon.
I see a man walking up the road toward the buildings in the center of the painting. I see a woman and a child walking toward the man. I see other people too, and animals. Farther back on the road is a man with a small flock of sheep. And on the hill on the left is another man, maybe two , are walking and maybe tending sheep. WHat’s the tall tower on that hill for? Is it a kind of lighthouse warning boats away?
I see that the land is glowing with light in the middle of the picture, and the brightest glow is in the road. THe woman and the child in the back, and the walking man in the front, are just about to enter this enlightened part. Is this Dutch? It look Dutch by their clothing.
I like what Yvonne says about the lighting in this painting. In fact, I think the structure of the entire picture makes the center of the painting the source of lights, and everything peripheral is in shadow. The foreground at the bottom of the picture is dark, as are the three banks of clouds on the left, at the top, and on the right. The cloud in the center is beaming sunlight, and as Yvonne noted, the center portion of the road is the brightest; the three humans about to enter it, two walking from the town in the background, one walking up the road. What was the artist trying to say here?