The Song of the Lark has always been one of my very favorite works of the French naturalists – the gorgeous, day-glo, corally-salmon Sun and the woman’s arrested and reverent attention — her ear-witness to the birdsong — she reminds me of myself on any given day at golden hour — dawn or dusk //

while most criticism — almost all criticism of this work agrees that this painting depicts a woman at dawn — at Sun’s rise: i’m not wholly convinced.

i have experienced Jules Breton’s “The Song of The Lark” twice in two separate exhibits — at its home in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago; and most recently, in 2015, at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art for “Visual Cather: The Writer’s Pictorial Imagination” — where i was able to linger a mere foot away from the painting, studying it, for as long as i wanted — i stayed there for a reverent half hour in its glow.

Author Willa Cather spent her formative years in Nebraska and was an alumnus of the University of Nebraska; her third novel, published in 1915, was named for Breton’s painting — The Sheldon was a natural recipient for a loan of this magnetic artwork ///

while viewing the painting at The Sheldon, i conversed and queried with the fellow-Chicago-born docent — the only other person in the gallery:

will the lark sing their song most sweetly or urgently at sunrise or sunset?

does this work actually depict a neon sunset in the west; or is it, in fact, a day-glo sunrise in the east?

DayGlo color, pigment, paint would not be invented and commercially available until the 1930s — yet, Breton painted his glorious Sun in 1884 — he had already figured out the recipe ///

and, is the woman’s fatigue residual — from yesterday — she, a worker rising so very early, again, — or, might it be fatigue from a just-completed long and hard day’s work under the Sun?

i asked the docent the rhetorical questions i had been silently asking myself.

is it both? it’s both? it’s both.

let the mystery be*

* i think it’s Sun’s set.

* nevermind, i concur, it is Sun’s rise.

* to be eternally pondered, but never definitively determined.

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