A painting
Wheat Field with Cypresses
Vincent van Gogh, 1889
The sky is moving and nothing in it asks anything of you. Stand in front of it — or in front of the nearest field you can find.
Featured
A few beautiful things, pointed away from the screen.
Gathered for July. Take one, and take it outside.
A print
Under the Wave off Kanagawa
Katsushika Hokusai, ca. 1830
Everyone knows the wave. Fewer people notice the rowers inside it, heads down, doing their work.
A painting
The Harvesters
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565
Work in the morning, then bread and a nap under a pear tree. A whole philosophy of the day, painted four and a half centuries ago.
A song
Clair de lune
Claude Debussy, 1905
Five minutes long. Listen once while doing nothing else, and notice how long it has been since you did that with music.
A poem
The World Is Too Much with Us
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
William Wordsworth, 1807
Two hundred years before the feed, he saw it coming.
A film
Perfect Days
Wim Wenders, 2023
Two hours with a man who keeps a small, deliberate life and photographs the light through leaves. The fullest days on screen in years.
Paintings and prints courtesy of The Met's open-access collection.