Daylight to dusk11/26/2023 So you should treat any current title with a healthy scepticism until its provenance is established. For a great many older, and some newer, works, we have no good idea of the title given to the painting by the artist. But all too often the only evidence of a painting’s title is it being written onto its reverse, or stuck to the back on a label, which could be far more modern than the painting. Many paintings made since the middle of the nineteenth century have well-attested histories, such as artist’s and dealer’s records which are held in accessible archives. The only way to check that is to look the work up in a good catalogue raisonné, a luxury that is normally only available to the dedicated researcher. What we seldom know is whether the painting’s current title was assigned to it by the artist – its provenance. If it specifies the time of day, then that can surely be relied on, can’t it?įor those paintings whose current title is that given by the artist, that should be more reliable than anything else. Often the most obvious clue comes from the title given to the painting. In this article, I look at some of the clues we can use to distinguish paintings of dawn from those dusk in the next I’ll show ten paintings, some of them famous, and you can see how many you can get right. Although there are specific circumstances when this may be true, careful optical studies have failed to reveal any consistent differences on which the observer or viewer can rely. There are some who feel, from their observations, that there are clear visual differences in the light of dawn compared with that at dusk. Today and tomorrow I’m going to look at one relatively common question: does this painting show sunrise or sunset? Sometimes these can be identified with great precision, but other images prove a real puzzle. One of the fundamental questions when reading them is when that moment occurred: the time of year, and time of day. The great majority of paintings show a single moment in time.
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