Nice Things: June Edition

A monthly dose of visual creative inspiration. This time: the sun.

Group X, Altarpieces, No. 1 (1915) by Hilma af Klint, via

Hello friends,

I’m not entirely sure how June went by so quickly (maybe it was all that island visiting), but as we’re in the final days of this month it’s time for another edition of Nice Things.

These monthly missives are intended as a dose of visual creative inspiration, like a virtual gallery visit. If you haven’t checked it out already, you can explore last month’s edition on seaweed.

Since we celebrated the summer solstice this month, I figured we’d devote this month to honoring the sun.

We’ve been taking inspiration from the sky since humans started painting on cave walls. History abounds with sun gods and goddesses, and almost every culture employs solar motifs, and even some sun worship.

Our English use of the word “sun” comes from Old English sunne. Science Friday elaborates:

“The Old English sunne likely derives from the old Germanic sunne; both attached a feminine gender to the “heavenly body.” There exist several variants of the word in other languages, such as zon or zonne (Dutch), sunna (Old High German, Gothic, and Old Norse), and sonne and son (Middle German). An Old Irish cognate is fur-sunnud, or “lighting-up.”

Illuminated Medieval manuscripts are chock full of hilarious looking suns, personified with human faces. We’ve even attempted to turn ourselves into our favorite celestial body: one fifteenth century prince noted that he wanted to be clothed to look like the “living sun.” That’s some summer sartorial energy for sure.

A collection of assorted suns from illuminated manuscripts from the Getty Museum.

And with that, let’s start looking at some sun art!