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Art Around the Corner: Example Artworks from Fourth Grade Lessons

About a dozen rust-orange and golden yellow apples and peaches are arranged on a white plate next to white and floral-patterned cloths nestled around a white pitcher and bowl, all on a wood tabletop that tilts toward us in this nearly square still life painting. A curtain patterned with royal blue, olive green, and beige falls along or near the back wall of the room and rests on the table to our left. The white pitcher is painted loosely with the suggestion of harvest-gold and pale lilac-purple flowers, and it sits amid the pooling folds of the curtain to our left. The white tablecloth is bunched under and next to it to our right, at the middle of the composition. The fruit is arranged on and around a white plate next to the tablecloth. A tall bowl with fluted sides and a ruffled, scalloped rim sits behind the fruit, near the right edge of the table. The curving skirt of the table reaches nearly to the bottom edge of the canvas. All the objects in the painting are outlined with dark blue and the shadows are painted with patches of spruce and cobalt blue.

Why do artists make paintings?
Fourth graders focus on the topic of painting during their visits to the National Gallery of Art. To consider the question "Why do artists make paintings?" they study the works of Paul Cézanne and identify the subjects of paintings: portrait, landscape, still life, and genre. In the studio, students create their own still-life paintings by examining a fruit or vegetable closely, then painting a small detail, paying special attention to textures and color.

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A pale turquoise footbridge arching over a pond lined with tall grasses and filled with petal-pink and butter-yellow waterlilies spans this horizontal landscape painting. The scene is loosely painted with touches of vibrant color. In the top third of the composition, the shallowly arched bridge nearly touches the top edge of the canvas, and it extends off each side. The shadows on the bridge are painted with eggplant purple. Bands of waterlilies gently zigzag into the distance on the surface of the water. The spring and emerald-green grasses growing along the banks fill the space around and over the pond, and they blend into a screen of trees beyond that enclose the scene. The green of the grasses and trees is reflected in the surface of the water, as is the underside of the bridge. The artist signed and dated the work with dark paint in the lower right corner: “Claude Monet 99.”

How do artists show nature?
To investigate the question "How do artists show nature?" students view a variety of still-life and landscape paintings. They learn about impressionism through the works of Claude Monet, consider how Thomas Cole used nature as symbol in The Voyage of Life, and examine realistic flowers and insects in a Dutch still life. In the studio, students closely observe and sketch real flowers, then add color on a transparency sheet with oil pastels. They layer and blend the oil colors to create vibrant, textured still lifes.

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Near a verdant riverbank against soaring, hazy cliffs, a nude, chubby baby sits in a golden boat on a bed of pink and white flowers in this horizontal painting. A winged angel wearing a white robe with a glowing starburst hovering overhead stands behind the child with one hand resting on the tiller of the boat. The angel and child both have pale skin and blond hair. The baby holds up handfuls of flowers and looks forward. The bow of the boat is angled to our right as it glides along the glassy surface of the river. The boat seems to be made of or carved to look like a mass of gold, winged angels clustered to make the vessel. They reach toward a single angel thrust forward from the bow, like a masthead, who holds up an hourglass. The boat has just emerged from a dark cave at the base of rocky, rose-pink cliffs that reach off the top left edge of the canvas. The jagged peaks become pale pink as they march into the distance. A spit of the lush riverbank fills the lower left corner of the composition; it and the far bank are dotted with white waterlilies and a profusion of yellow, blue, pink, purple, and red flowers. Celery and moss-green growth carpets the boulders on either side the cave mouth and the ground stretching beyond the riverbank. The growth becomes mauve-purple as it recedes to the horizon, which comes a third of the way up the composition and is lit by a golden glow. Petal-pink and gray clouds float among the cliff-tops against an otherwise pale blue sky. The artist dated and signed the lower left, “1842 T. Cole Rome.”
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Densely spaced lines and splatters in black, white, pale salmon pink, teal, and steel gray crisscross a rectangular cream-colored canvas in this abstract horizontal painting. The lines move in every direction. Most are straight but some curve slightly. The density eases a bit near the edges. Two sets of ghostly white handprints are visible at the upper corners. The artist signed and dated the painting in black paint in the lower left corner: “Jackson Pollock ’50.”
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Cows, horses, sheep, and pigs stand closely together in a band across the bottom edge of this horizontal painting. Rolling hills open onto grassy lawns, farms, and fields beyond. The two dozen cows spanning the leftmost two-thirds of the painting are cream white, tawny, russet, or dark brown, or speckled with brown or black and white. White sheep, six adult and one baby, cluster beyond the cows, to our left. Five black pigs are behind the cows across the middle of the picture, one of them suckling several piglets. Nine horses and foals gathered to our right are white, gray, or one of several shades of brown. The land on which the animals stand is teal blue underfoot. Pale green, grassy plots rise gently to either side of a trough or irrigation ditch that comes toward us from a culvert at the far side of the field. Eight men wearing tall hats, coats, and pants gather in pairs beyond the animals, and one man, farther in the distance, walks alone. The grassy lawn is hemmed to each side by fences, and more run across the back of the space. A man walks behind a horse-drawn plow to our right. There is a line of five spindly trees in front of the fence to our left. Three cows lie in that enclosure not far from one more tree. Several buildings painted with cream white and barn red line the plots across the back of the space. Beyond, painted lightly, as if hazy, lines of crops or trees blur into the horizon, which comes about two-thirds of the way up the composition. The sky above is pale petal pink, and it deepens to icy blue across the top edge. A couple bunches of white and tan-colored clouds drift to our right. Brown lettering against a sand-colored ground along the bottom edge reads, “An Indian summer view of the Farm & Stock of James C. Cornell of Northampton Bucks county Pennsylvania. Tat took the Premium in the Agricultural society, october the 12, 1848 Painted by E. Hicks in the 69th year of his age.” The name James C. Cornell is in all caps, and October begins with a lowercase o.
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We look across and down into a valley with a person sitting near a tall tree and a train puffing smoke beyond, all enclosed by a band of mountains in the distance in this horizontal landscape painting. Closest to us, several broken, jagged tree stumps are spaced across the painting’s width. A little distance away and to our left, the person wears a yellow, broad-brimmed hat, red vest, and gray pants. He reclines propped on his left elbow near a walking path beside a tall, slender tree with golden leaves. The green meadow stretching in front of him is dotted with tree stumps cut close to the ground. Beyond the meadow, puffs of white smoke trail behind a long steam locomotive that crosses a bridge spanning a tree-filled ravine, headed to our left. The ravine creates a diagonal line across the canvas, moving subtly away from us to our left. The train has climbed out of the valley, away from a cluster of brick-red buildings. The most prominent structure is a train roundhouse, a large building with a high, domed roof to the right of the tracks. Smoke rises from chimneys on long, warehouse-like buildings, and a steeple and smaller structures suggest a church and homes to our left. Hazy in the distance, a row of mountains lines the horizon, which comes about halfway up the composition. The sky above deepens from pale, shell pink over the mountains to watery, pale blue above. The artist signed the work in tiny letters in the lower left corner: “G. Inness.”
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We look across river at a bridge with a city skyline beyond in this stylized, horizontal landscape, which is painted entirely with broad, visible brushstrokes in vivid, saturated colors. The river spans nearly the width of the canvas, and the riverbank is lined to our left with a row of several buildings between us and the bridge. Those buildings are outlined with royal blue and filled in with mostly flat areas of color in coral pink, mint green, tangerine orange, and pinkish tan. Letters across the top of the building farthest from us reads “BREVER.” Eight boats are tied up at the foot of the buildings. The pointed hulls of three extend into the scene from the lower left corner, painted in marigold orange and outlined in cobalt blue. Five more boats, with rounded prows and hulls and painted with lapis blue and muted aqua, line up like a row of empty shoes. The bridge runs from behind the tallest building to our left across and off the canvas, and is painted with deep lapis blue with crimson-red Xes crisscrossing the span to suggest trestles. The front faces of the pilings below are also highlighted with red. The river fills most of the bottom half of the painting. The water to our left is painted as a field of coral pink with a few, short horizontal baby and cobalt-blue strokes, suggesting reflections of the boats and a bridge piling. A narrow band of kiwi green and sky blue lines the pink field to our right. Next to it, the water is painted as short, horizontal, disconnected strokes and dots mostly in bumblebee yellow with some strokes in bubblegum pink and pale burnt orange, all against the off white of the canvas below. The final zone, to our right, is more densely painted with short dashes in indigo, turquoise, and aqua blue. Beyond the bridge, the skyline is painted in silhouette with spiky spires to our left in mint green and a mass of shorter buildings in periwinkle blue to our right. Four clouds of pale yellow billow off the bridge in front of the skyline. The sky above is painted with short and long vertical strokes of butter yellow, rose pink, pale orange, and a few areas of watermelon pink. The artist signed the work with cobalt-blue paint near the lower left corner: “a derain.”
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Three tall sailing ships, each with three masts and full sails, float in calm, arctic waters, surrounded by fragments of icebergs and ice floes amid a smattering of arctic animals in this horizontal landscape painting. The horizon line comes about a quarter of the way up the composition so the sails and rigging of the ships are shown against the sky. The clouds have ivory tops and lavender-purple undersides, and they curve in a C-shaped bank to cover most of the left half of the painting and to span the horizon. The three ships closest to us are spaced evenly across the composition, with the left-most the closest, and therefore the largest. The ship to our right is set a bit farther back, and the center ship is the farthest away. A rowboat holding several men has pulled alongside the boat to our left, and more men haul massive slabs of whale blubber up the side of the ship. Others walk on an ice floe nearby. Close inspection reveals more rowboats around and beyond these ships, and several more ships fading into the hazy distance along the horizon. Jagged edged chunks of icebergs as tall as the ships float around them. Closer to us, a trio of seals sits on an ice floe near the lower center of the composition, and a polar bear stands nose to nose with a cub to our right. Two narwhal whales with long tusks break the surface of the water between us and the ships, as does a whale’s tail near the boat to our right. Two walruses with long tusks sit on a floe near the center ship. A couple dozen birds, many white with black wing tips, fly low over the surface of the water across the painting.
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