After the Concert, Jonas Lie

“May the light of this flickering candle / Illuminate the night the way your spirit / Illuminates my soul.” What do you see when you hear this line from the famous song Papa Can You Hear Me sung by Barbra Streisand in Yentl? Does darkness sweep through your mind, or does light become prominent? Now imagine you were standing in the crowd that makes up the painting After the Concert created by Jonas Lie in 1900. Dirtied white snow is on the ground, but the wind makes it seem as if the already frigorific conditions are ten times worse. The people around you act as if they are impatient, as do you, and the people at the very back of the line stand with such a posture as to doubt going to the concert in the first place. The bright yellow lights in the distance from cars and apartment buildings make you hopeful that you will be home soon. You see dead, lifeless trees not far in front of you and off to the right in the distance are snow covered mountains. The layer of snow is not very thick, as you can see the yellow-green of the grass peeking through, but thick enough to notice other’s footprints from when they passed by. You are experiencing a mélange of feelings, from the excitement and fun of the beginning of the night to the exhausted and cold that you are currently feeling. After thinking about what it was possibly like, it makes me wonder why Jonas Lie would choose to capture this scene. Jonas Lie was one of the best-known American landscape painters in his lifetime, being born in Norway in 1880. It’s not much of a surprise that he painted an outside winter scene. Jonas Lie was an impressionist artist. Impressionism is a style of painting where the artist paints casual subjects (such as outdoor scenes) with divided brush strokes, in order to capture the mood of the moment. Jonas Lie believed that painting should be a mixture of interpretive color and expression. Jonas Lie paints After the Concert with a wide brush, yet is able to paint intricate details. From far away from the miniature image, the details become more clear then when seen close up. There are many interpretations behind the conundrum that is After the Concert. When I first studied this painting, I imagined the grumbling of a chilly, annoyed audience. I could picture the women with their hands on their hips, and the tapping of the men in the crowd’s feet as they are waiting for the line to move. Then just as easily I saw the crowd quietly walking to their cars after a great show, chilly in the cold. In both scenarios, the painting seems to have a crisp, intense feeling, like the song Papa Can You Hear Me. Did Jonas Lie intend for the crowd to be angry, happy, or was it an emotion to be created by the mind? This is Nikita Imafidon with another bulldog.