This painting is a mid 19th century piece by an American artist. The painting is of a young boy standing on a patio next to a pillar. An almost entirely monochromatic dark gray sky looms behind him above darkened rolling hills. The subject holds a straw hat loosely at his side, and has a book resting on a bench directly behind him. His expression is blank, although the corners of his mouth are slightly raised. There are brightly colored roses in the garden at the bottom of the porch steps, and the rose vines have climbed around the pillar next to him. Only a splash of bright sky is apparent on the horizon. The boy is wearing a deep red overcoat adorned with fancy buttons, and brilliant white slacks over delicate black shoes. We can see his entire body from head to toe, as the wood planks he stands on frame his feet. I will be focusing on the visual elements of color, line, repetitive shapes and value in which the artist chose to convey the content in which I feel he is trying to express, which I will delve into deeper within this paper.
The sheer size of this painting, which stands a little over 4 feet high, 3 feet wide, creates a sense that the child could be real, suspended from invisible supports on the wall. It was this element that first attracted me to this work. The fact that the artist chose to create a representational-almost photographic-piece of art, and also create it true to life-like size, really provided a sense that the figure was, in truth, really there. .
The picture is very photo-realistic. The artist uses clean, softened lines to frame his subject and his environment. The sky, however, is painted with quick strokes, as if to establish the movement of the storm that seems to be coming in. There are blobs of paint used to create 3 dimensional elements to the pistols of the flowers, as well as dabs of paint on the boys buttons to create a sense of lighted glare off of them, as though they were made of reflective material.
