16 Responses

1. She seems thoroughly annoyed.

   1. If I had those giant sunflowers tied into my hair, I’d be annoyed too!

2. I feel the need to have a sangria party and use this as the invitation.

   1. 🤣

   2. This! 😀

3. What a gorgeous painting. I read Dvorak was ever moving and changing teachers trying to improve his art, sounds like he had great anxiety about his talent, when he clearly was incredibly talented! Sounds familiar.

   1. It depicts a situation unlikely to arise in real life. So is it mythological or some sort of allegory, or just Dvorak showing off? Not only is she endangering a good dress with fruit stains, but the thing holding the fruit is exactly the color of the dress. So is the darker colored part of the dress some sort of overwrap that she has partly undone in order to contrive a sort of tray? For all varieties of fruit at one carry?? To my taste (for what little it’s worth), here Dvorak’s ability to choose a suitable subject lags considerably behind his execution. But maybe this is what customers wanted in 1912.

      1. Forgot to add that the put-upon expression seems odd if the work is some sort of expression of bounty. Maybe it indeed is illustrating a myth or something—perhaps something familiar to Czechs, or from his interest (per Wikipedia) in Eastern religions.

      2. Jack is walking ahead of her, picking the fruits he wants and handing them to her to carry, so he keeps his hands free to pick more. She doesn’t have a hand free to pick any, and hasn’t for at least half the pile she’s got already.

         She’s wearing a somewhat gauzy (see the lower edge) orange wraparound overskirt over her heavy yellow brocade underskirt, and has had to pull the overskirt up and around on the left to create that carrying surface ( see the wrinkles under her backside, and the way the heavy brocade underskirt is uncomfortably pulled around with it, billowing out before her left leg).

         It’s staining and ruining her dress, and uncomfortable to walk with it all pulled around like this while trying not to drop any of the fruit (not to speak of those heavy and prickly sunflower in her hair, as someone else already said); and Jack just keeps on piling more fruit into her arms.
         No wonder she’s annoyed!

         Even if she’s meant to symbolise summer’s bounty or something allegorical like that, it was clearly an impractical setup and uncomfortable for the model.

4. What a luscious, gorgeous, colorful melange that painting is! I love it.

5. New drinking game: everyone takes a drink every time Jennifer Crusie apologizes for something she doesn’t need to apologize for.

   Shot 1 glug, shot 2 glug.

   Thanks Jenny. I adore you, as always.

6. Jack was stunned when Melissa informed him she used all the fruit she picked to make fruit salad.
   There would be no sangria.

   1. It’s 20 minutes before guests arrive for the party, Melissa still has to finish doing her hair (those sunflowers were a terrible idea) and NOW Jack says he promised the guests Sangria? Really, Jack? And of course he still has to go buy the wine, leaving her to gather the fruit. What a useless cabbage he is.

7. She does look put upon, rather as if she was invited to dinner and then told to go gather the fruit course herself

8. This is great!

   I just picked the first berries and plums of the season this past weekend. It took multiple trips to the house for different buckets because I wasn’t prepared. I see a woman with unexpected bounty and a one trip commitment. 😀

9. This is the last time I offer to bring dessert to the potluck. Harrumph.