SLIDE 5


SLIDE 9


SLIDE 11


SLIDE 24


SLIDE 10

 

 LESSON PLAN #1
LEARNING TO LOOK AT AMERICAN PAINTINGS

Objectives:

This lesson plan is designed to meet several objectives. Students will become familiar with commonly used art terms and will learn to look for signs of history and culture in works of art. Examples of portrait, landscape, still-life, and genre painting will be presented, and students will be able to distinguish these four primary categories of painting. Another goal of this lesson plan is to teach students to observe paintings for functional, formal, and historical content. Students should understand that any painting can be appreciated from each of these three perspectives.

Slides:

Preparing to Look at Works of Art:

Before showing your students works of art it is important for them to look at images with which they are familiar

  1. Have students go through family photographs and find photos of themselves as babies or photos of the oldest people in their families. Have students share these photos with the class. Ask them: what are the similarities and differences in the photos? How many of them are formal shots, informal, black and white, color? Which is the oldest photo? Are there any portraits? Who took them? What was the occasion? Where and how are the photos kept? Who takes care of the photos?
  2. Have students find postcards or photographs of places they've lived or been to on vacations. Discuss the landscape, the climate, the geography. What is in the foreground? Background? Who took the photo?
  3. Have students bring in images of places from travel magazines, newspapers, etc. How do these images contribute to our knowledge of places we've never been? How do they influence our desires to visit these places?
  4. Show slides #5, #9 & #10. Ask students to compare the works of art depicted in the slides to their photographs. What are the differences? (older works of art painted by an artist, different subject, location, etc.) What are the similarities? (portraits, landscapes, important occasion, etc.)

Learning Four Categories of Paintings:

  1. Portrait: A portrait is a painting of one or more individuals; in this case, the subject was Mary Turner Sargent. Historians believe that this painting was probably commissioned by Daniel Sargent, Mary's new husband. To commission a painting means to request that an artist create a certain painting for an agreed upon amount of money.

      Slide #5: Mary Turner Sargent, 1763, John Singleton Copley

      Learn about the functional, formal, and historical content of this painting.
  2. Landscape: This painting presents a landscape view of the valley, mountains, lakes, and foliage around the Hudson River, about 100 miles north of New York City. A landscape is an outdoor scene in which a place or the land itself becomes the main subject of the painting.

      Slide #9: View Near the Village of Catskill, 1827, Thomas Cole

      Learn about the functional, formal, and historical content of this painting.
  3. Genre: This is an example of a genre painting that portrays the lives of ordinary people. The people and places within genre paintings are often not identifiable as specific individuals or locations; genre paintings give the viewer a more generalized picture of a culture, time, and place in history. Here the artist depicts four men in a tavern: a laborer, a farmer, a merchant and a politician.

      Slide #11: Country Politician, George Caleb Bingham, 1849

      Learn about the functional, formal, and historical content of this painting.
  4. Still-Life: This still-life painting shows an assortment of hunting objects, carefully arranged on a wooden door. A still-life presents objects, most often flowers or fruit, as the focus of the painting. After the Hunt is an example of trompe-l'oeil in which the artist has created the illusion that the painted objects are real; it looks as if the objects are on the surface of the canvas.

      Slide #24: After the Hunt, 1885, William Michael Harnett
  5. Putting it all together!

      Slide #10: Boatmen on the Missouri, 1846, George Caleb Bingham

      Learn about the functional, formal, and historical content of this painting.

Art Terms:

  • atmospheric perspective: creating the effect of distance in a painting by using paler, less intense colors, and fewer details for faraway elements
  • background: the area towards the back of a painting that appears farthest away from the viewer -- if there is a central subject, the background may be everything that surrounds the subject
  • balance: a sense of stability, sometimes symmetry, established by the way forms, lines, and colors are placed within a painting
  • commission: a request that a certain painting be done by an artist for a set amount of money (vs. the purchase of a painting the artist has previously created)
  • composition: the organization of objects (content) and forms (shapes, areas of light and dark, etc.) in a work of art
  • circa: means approximately, usually referring to a date or period of time -- ca. is an abbreviation for circa foreground: the area of a painting that appears closest to the viewer formal elements: those aspects of the painting dealing with composition
  • genre: a French word which is pronounced "john-ruh," a genre painting is a scene of ordinary life that shows people going about their everyday activities history painting: a picture that refers to or illustrates an incident in history or literature
  • landscape: a painting that depicts a scene from nature in which the place or the land itself becomes the main subject
  • linear perspective: a system of rendering objects in terms of receding planes in order to create the illusion of depth
  • perspective drawing: the technique of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface so that the objects seem to appear three-dimensional as in life
  • portrait: a picture of a person or a group of people
  • print: a work of art copied from a master or original image and reproduced on paper -- the original image was usually engraved on a wood or metal plate from which multiple copies could be printed with inks on paper
  • still-life: a picture of an object or group of objects -- still-life implies an absence of people or activity
  • title: the name given to a painting
  • trompe-l'oeil: pronounced "tromp-loy," a French phrase that means "fool the eye." A trompe-l'oeil painting looks so realistic that it appears as though real objects are on the surface of the canvas. It may be hard to believe that the objects are indeed a part of the painted canvas.
  • unknown: art historians do not know the artist's name -- same as anonymous
  • work: refers to a work of art or artwork

Recommended Reading:

Batterberry, Adrian Ruskin, and Michael Batterberry. The Pantheon Story of American Art for Young People. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.

Black, Mary. What is American About American Art? New York: M. Knoedler & Co., 1971.

Coen, R. Neumann. American History in Art. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, Co., 1974.

Frank, Phil. The Ghost of the De Young Museum. San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1995.

Introduction | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Slide List | Museum Visit