Jigsaw 3, Series 3

A reprise of the jigsaw reported on 2nd April 2013, the painting of the jigsaw having been visited both before and after that event, most recently on 8th January.

Re-reading the entry from 2nd April, I find that that solution went near identically, uncannily so, to the present solution, with the only difference that I did not make any mistakes on the way on this second occasion. Nothing else to add really.

But to repeat, I went edge, then skyline, then buildings, then water. Pause for a week or so, deep breath, and then embark on the expanse of sky, working from left to right, roughly from dark blue to light blue, with the hole gradually becoming a rectangle, because, other things being equal, it is easier to solve a crooked line than a straight line, one has more clues. Racing to the finish line over the last few days.

Canaletto is becoming more of a master for me, despite knocking a lot of paintings out of his workshop with the help of his apprentices & collaborators. The way the colour of the sky steadily changes from left to right is, for example, most impressive. The man knew about sky and light. I must go back to take another look, but probably not during the coming week. No technical bulletin on this occasion, at least not from the National Gallery. I wonder if this means that the picture has survived more or less unscathed since it creation back in 1740 or so? Nothing much technical to be said about it?

See also 15th January 2011 in the other place and 28th December 2012.

I continue to fret about the blog's search box. Must sit down with and work out once and for all the relationship between the search results for Canaletto, canalettos, Canalettos, canaletto's and canaleto. My impression is that blog search is more picky than regular google search, but that is just an impression. Not the same as an experiment. A further complication is the need to check whether the current blog with its template works in the same way as the old with its (http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/).

And thinking a bit more, I am fairly sure that 'italian canal painter' would work in regular google but would give nothing in blog. I suppose you have to pay them if you want full access to their machinery, other than through the front door. And checking, with this very search term, this very minute, I am pleased to be able to report that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaletto is top of the list. The only fly in the ointment being that I suspect google of qualifying the search results it gives me with my search history. It knows, in some way or another, that I am interested in Canaletto and adjusts its searching accordingly. Perhaps clearing out cookies ought to be part of the experiment - which I suspect would reveal that google keep stuff about one back at base and no not rely entirely on cookies on one's PC to keep one's history.

PS: while we are in a technical vein, I find that my backup for January at 3.3Mb  is around three times the size of that for December, itself a lot larger than anything that went before. Maybe down to the new camera, the pictures from which come in at around 1Mb a go, compared with 50Kb for those from the old. But there is clearly some compression if not reduction, going on somewhere.