Smith-School: Picture Study

“Every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination . . . At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold.” — Charlotte Mason, Vol. 6, p. 43


This one makes me a bit nervous. I'm not a great artist myself, or a well-cultured student of The Greats. I'd really like to remedy that for my kids by making Picture Study, where you rotate between the great artists, a 2 or 3 day a week focus in our homeschool. 

Charlotte Mason's idea of Picture Study isn't about art criticism, but is focused on "spreading the feast" and just exposing children to beautiful works. I remember a lot of "learn to draw" in school, and not a lot of observing great works and becoming familiar even in a general sense with their styles and time periods. 

One method from Simply Charlotte Mason's page on picture study: 

• You hang prints of their famous work in the house so children can view them during the week.
• Show them one famous painting and have them study it, then turn it over and have the children narrate what was in it. Then you turn it back over so that they can note anything they missed the first time.
• Find an age appropriate biography about that famous artist.
• Place them in the right time/location to give a sense of where they were in history.

Real Life at Home lays out how you can choose 6 great works from one artist and focus on a new one each week. This makes for 6 week units of study. I like the idea of giving your children a bookmark with a sample from each artist. That seems like a really fun way to give them a little piece of art that they will recognize. Real Life at Home has the awesome idea to use the Dover Postcards for this, since they cost $1-3 and you get 6 postcards of each artist. That seems perfect to me and a really fun way to not just move on from the art, but to still have little usable, useful remnants around. 

The Art Curator for Kids has free PDF downloadable lesson plans based on famous artists that could be a great resource. And this Taschen Basic Art Series is very affordable with individual books covering a wide range of artists with large pictures of many of their famous works. 

Now, for those How to Draw and How to Create lessons? Those are going to be something separate. I might be calling on Grandma KayKay to be our Guest Speaker!