My Top Ten Favourite Pictures

 A tricky question

I started off trying to decide my top ten favourite pictures, but realised it is pretty impossible to choose a list.  I Googled top ten and mostly I don't particularly like them.  Do I prefer old to modern artists, pictures showing skilled brushstrokes, is the immediate impact or story told important and how much should knowledge of the artist/picture/environment/rarity/history be important?  I appear to have another impossible task.  Annette suggested picking my two favourite artists from each century but even this proved a headache. 

Criteria

I think my main criteria are:

• how much or how long I enjoy looking at a picture
• is the composition interesting
• are the colours expressive
• whether it is an enduring opinion rather than a whim
• is there an interesting story
• does it have a strong emotional effect
• is its rarity/age admirable
• is great skill evident
• does the work communicate a strong message 

My approach

I have a photo collection from the principal galleries I have visited so I will restrict myself to choosing from the pictures on my website.  Even so there is a great variety to choose from, I find it hard even to compare artists from different times.  My approach will be a sort of knock-out tournament.  When deciding which images to capture for my website I aim to choose about four per room and each gallery comprises a number of groups of rooms.  I will start the first round by choosing four pictures per group and move on in the second round to choose four of the winners to get the top four pictures in a gallery.  Galleries and Galley exhibitions are classified separately so I will end up with about 10 groups of four in the semi-final.

A snapshot

A selection of my favourite art based on those I like best and I have pinned up, in miniature, on my study wall.

1 Wheatfield with Crows, Vincent Van Gogh 1890

2 Claude Monet, Water-lilies, Setting Sun 1907

3 The Fighting Temeraire, JMW Turner 1838

4 Ballet Dancers, Degas, 888

5 Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol, 1980

6 An experiment on a bird, Joseph Wright of Derby 1768

7 Lake Keitele, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, 1905

8 Hylas surprised b Naiades, John Gibson, 1827

9 Salome, Aubrey Beardsley, 1893

10 Magna Carta (an Embroidery), Cornelia Parker, 2015

Top Ten Best Pictures in the world

What are the ten best artworks in the world?  It isn't easy to say, even with Google's infinite resources. It seems that Lady with Pearl Earrings, by Vermeer, is one of the most famous and Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is usually top of the list.  I certainly wouldn't put them amongst my favourites and it started me thinking.

It isn't possible to define simple criteria for a "best" painting as it is a very subjective opinion based on individual preferences, knowledge, outlook, culture and expertise. A suitable substitute is to search for "most famous" which might indicate some limited consensus for excellence.

I looked at a number of search results for "10 most famous paintings" and came up with the list shown below; it is mainly based on a CNN style article with some images reproduced fron Wikimedia Commons.  As a separate exercise, on another blog entry, I will try to choose my 10 favourite paintings that I have seen/photographed.   The overlap between the two lists will be minimal.

1 Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, 1503

2 The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci,1495 

3 The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh,1889 

4 The Scream, Edvard Munch, 1893

5 Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937 

6 The Kiss, Gustav Klimt, 1907

7 Girl with a pearl earring, Vermeer, 1665

8 The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli, 1485

9 Water Lilies, Monet, 1906

10 The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931

Chromecast

About eight years ago we purchased a small Samsung "Smart TV".  At the time we thought it was very clever as it has an ethernet connection which allowed us to use an inbuilt web browser and iPlayer.  Subsequently  it was used as a computer screen and to play media from a DLNA server.

I now want to integrate it with Home Assistant so that we can start and control videos as we do for music.  Unfortunately the Smart TV is not smart enough for this so I purchased a Chromecast to help it.

Chromecast installation and testing

As expected there is a slick installation procedure and I soon have the Chromecast working on HDMI with the usual apps such as Netflix, ITVhub available.  

Chromecast provides extra connectivity capabilities.
We can easily cast youtube or iplayer from the phone to Chromecast.
On the ipad we can cast from youtube, vlc or iplayer.
On the PC we can cast a chrome browser session to the TV allowing us to see whatever is displayed or playing in the browser.  Alternatively you can cast videos from the youtube app or vlc.
All these facilities are great but I probably wouldn't use them much in practice, so I now need to see what extras Home Assistant can offer.

Home Assistant

HA has a Google Cast integration built in and uses it to send speech or music to the Google Nest mini.  As far as HA is concerned the TV, with Chromecast attached, is just another casting device.

Using the "Browse Media" button on the card for the TV you can select a video from the DLNA server or local media and play it on the TV.  This is a great start, we can already play videos of our choice and it is as simple to use from HA as it is selecting DLNA directly on the TV.

Looking at the sample in Google Cast integration  it is easy to setup a script to cast a video to the TV.  The service is media_player.play_media, the target is media_player.john_study_tv and you just need to provide a URL and type for the media content. Running this script causes the video to play.  Now that I have a script I can use a webhook or Google Assistant command to initiate the video so I have the basis of a solution.

Clearly it is rather limiting if I have to setup a script for each video I want to play so I setup a helper, called xmas_anthem for testing.  I can can setup a number of valid options for xmas_anthem and set the value on a dashboard card.  Within the script I can now test input_select.xmas_anthem to determine which video to play.

You can also play youtube videos by specifiying suitable media_content details:

Since our first test was to play a video from DLNA it must also be possible to specify a DLNA video as the media_content.  This doesn't seem to be simple.  When looking at a DLNA video playing I can see that the media_content_id is a URL containing a numeric value (5240.mkv in the example shown below) rather than a filename.   To determine these values I would need to interrogate the DLNA server.  I have a python script which sort of does this but it doesn't work well yet.

Conclusion

I now have the tools I need to play videos on a TV, namely ChromeCast and Home Assistant scripts.  The next stage is to work out what videos I want and setup a webpage or voice commands to play them.