Time of day perception in paintings

The spectral shape, irradiance, direction, and diffuseness of daylight vary regularly throughout the day. The variations in illumination and their effect on the light reflected from objects may in turn provide visual information as to the time of day. We suggest that artists’ color choices for paintings of outdoor scenes might convey this information and that therefore the time of day might be decoded from the colors of paintings. Here we investigate whether human viewers’ estimates of depicted time of day in paintings correlate with their image statistics, specifically chromatic and luminance variations. We tested time-of-day perception in 17th-20th century Western European paintings via two online rating experiments. In Experiment 1, viewers’ ratings from 7 time choices varied significantly and largely consistently across paintings, but with some ambiguity between morning and evening depictions. Analysis of the relationship between image statistics and ratings revealed correlations with the perceived time of day: higher “morningness” ratings associated with higher brightness, contrast, saturation, and darker yellow/ brighter blue hues; “eveningness” with lower brightness, contrast, saturation, and darker blue/ brighter yellow hues. Multiple linear regressions of extracted principal components yielded a predictive model that explained 76% of the variance in time-of-day perception. In Experiment 2, viewers rated paintings as morning or evening only; rating distributions differed significantly across paintings; and image statistics predicted people’s perceptions. These results suggest that artists used different color palettes and patterns to depict different times of day, and the human visual system holds consistent assumptions about the variation of natural light depicted in paintings.