Field Trip

Every Picture Tells a Story

Uncover the many stories that works of art tell. During this field trip, students will learn to "read" works of art by considering multiple perspectives, characters, settings, and plots. They will engage in activities to imaginatively create narratives and dialogues inspired by the works of art.

The head, shoulders, and chest of a young man with brown skin, dressed in Ojibbeway tribal attire, faces and looks at us in this vertical portrait painting. The right side of his face, on our left, is painted crimson red, and horizonal stripes of red and white line his other cheek. He looks at us with dark brown eyes under black eyebrows. A silvery white ring hangs from his nose between his nostrils. His upper lip is darker than his skin-colored lower lip, and his mouth is closed. His brown fur headdress has a cardinal-red patch at the front center. Pearl-white feathers with red tips hang along both sides of his face and down to his shoulders. The sleeves of his tan coat are streaked with sky blue, tomato red, and lemon-lime green, and fringe of the same colors hangs along the arms. Fur lining at the neck follows the curve of a string of curving, white claws and a glinting string of silvery-gray beads. He also wears a high, beaded collar with white and dark brown geometric pattern. A strap crosses his chest. The background behind him is mottled with sage green, tan, and cream white.
George Catlin, Boy Chief - Ojibbeway, 1843, oil on canvas, Paul Mellon Collection, 1965.16.349

Grade Level

Duration

60-75 minutes

Language

Schedule a Field Trip

Looking and Learning Skills

During four or five field trip stops in the galleries, students engage in activities—such as looking exercises, small-group work, creative writing, and sketching—that foster conversations about works of art. On this field trip, students will practice the following skills:

  • Making and articulating careful observations.
  • Formulating questions that demonstrate curiosity and engagement.
  • Examining paintings from the perspectives of peers, the artists, and the people in the paintings.
  • Comparing and connecting different paintings.
  • Reasoning with evidence from the works of art themselves—developing narratives based on what is seen in the work of art.
  • Taking new ideas learned from the field trip and connecting them to prior knowledge and experience.

  • In-Person Field Trip Information

    Group Size: Up to 90 students
    Length: 60 minutes for grade 3; 75 minutes for grades 4 through 12
    Meeting Location: West Building Rotunda

  • Virtual Field Trip Information

    Length: 60 minutes

  • Important Scheduling Information

    Field trips must be scheduled at least four weeks in advance. Groups must contain at least 15 students.

    Once your field trip has been scheduled, you will receive an email confirmation within ten business days.

  • Bus Transportation

    Bus transportation is available for DCPS (District of Columbia Public Schools) participating in our docent-led school field trips. Teachers should follow the guidelines to apply for bus transportation.

Examples of Works Featured on this Field Trip

To our left, a young woman sits facing us on a low stone wall at the base of the vertical, black bars of an iron fence and a young girl stands facing away from us to our right in this horizontal painting. Both have pale skin. The woman looks directly at us with dark eyes as she holds an open book, a closed red fan, and a sleeping brown and white puppy in her lap. Her long auburn hair falls down over her shoulders. Her navy-blue dress is accented with white piping on the skirt, collar, and sleeves, and has three large, white buttons down the front and her black hat is adorned with two red poppies and a daisy. The girl wears a sleeveless white, knee-length dress belted with a marine-blue sash tied in a large bow at her back. The girl’s blond hair is pulled up and tied with a black ribbon. She raises her left hand to grasp the bar of the fence she faces. A bunch of green grapes lies on the low wall to our right. A plume of steam fills much of the space beyond the black fence, which spans the width of the painting and extends off the top edge. A few details can be made out beyond the fence, including a stone-gray building with two wooden doors to our left and a bridge along the right edge.
Edouard Manet, The Railway, 1873, oil on canvas, Gift of Horace Havemeyer in memory of his mother, Louisine W. Havemeyer, 1956.10.1
Shown from the knees up, a woman with brown, wrinkled skin, wearing a white blouse, apron, and black skirt is shown in front of a pale gray background in this vertical portrait painting. Straight-backed, she faces and looks at us with her hands resting in her lap. Her wavy, iron-gray hair is parted in the center and pulled back from her face. Her eyebrows are slightly raised, and her face is deeply lined down her cheeks and around her mouth. She wears a heart-shaped brooch with a red stone at its center at her neck and a gold band on her left ring finger. The light coming from our left casts a shadow against the wall to our right. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner: “A.J. MOTLEY. JR. 1922.”
Archibald John Motley Jr., Portrait of My Grandmother, 1922, oil on canvas, Patrons' Permanent Fund, Avalon Fund, and Motley Fund, 2018.2.1

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Five monkeys rest and play amid a lush jungle landscape in this horizontal landscape painting. Painted with areas of flat color, thick vegetation fills most of the scene, with giant leaves overlapping in shades of green. At the bottom center, a large brown monkey sits upright on a rock, looking directly at us. To our left, two gray and black monkeys climb in trees, and also face us. To our right, two rust-orange monkeys swing in trees. The orange of their fur is echoed in spiky, pumpkin-orange flowers to the right. Dark red leafy plants with spiky white flowers fill the lower left corner of the painting. A cloudless, pale blue sky stretches across the top of the composition. The artist signed and dated the painting with white letters in the lower right: “Henri Rousseau 1910.”

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We look slightly down onto a crush of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, wagons, and streetcars enclosed by a row of densely spaced buildings and skyscrapers opposite us in this horizontal painting. The street in front of us is alive with action but the overall color palette is subdued with burgundy red, grays, and black, punctuated by bright spots of harvest yellow, shamrock green, apple red, and white. Most of the people wear long dark coats and black hats but a few in particular draw the eye. For instance, in a patch of sunlight in the lower right corner, three women wearing light blue, scarlet-red, or emerald-green dresses stand out from the crowd. The sunlight also highlights a white spot on the ground, probably snow, amid the crowd to our right. Beyond the band of people in the street close to us, more people fill in the space around carriages, wagons, and trolleys, and a large horse-drawn cart piled with large yellow blocks, perhaps hay, at the center of the composition. A little in the distance to our left, a few bare trees stand around a patch of white ground. Beyond that, in the top half of the painting, city buildings are blocked in with rectangles of muted red, gray, and tan. Shorter buildings, about six to ten stories high, cluster in front of the taller buildings that reach off the top edge of the painting. The band of skyscrapers is broken only by a gray patch of sky visible in a gap between the buildings to our right of center, along the top of the canvas. White smoke rises from a few chimneys and billboards and advertisements are painted onto the fronts of some of the buildings. The paint is loosely applied, so many of the people and objects are created with only a few swipes of the brush, which makes many of the details indistinct. The artist signed the work with pine-green paint near the lower left corner: “Geo Bellows.”

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Two women with pale skin look out at us from the other side of a rectangular window opening with a shadowy interior behind them in this vertical painting. On our right, in the lower third of the composition, one young woman leans toward us over her left arm, which rests along the window ledge. She bends her right arm and props her chin on her fist. She looks at us with dark brown eyes under dark brows. She has shiny chestnut-brown hair with a strawberry-red bow on the right side of her head, to our left. She has a straight nose, and her full pink lips curve up in a smile. She wears a gossamer-white dress with a wide neckline trimmed in dark gray, with another red bow on the front of her chest. Her voluminous sleeves are pushed back to her elbows. To our left, a second woman peeks around a partially opened shutter. She is slightly older, and she stands next to the first woman with her body facing us. She tilts her head and also gazes at us with dark eyes under dark brown brows. She has dark brown hair covered by an oyster-white shawl. She holds the shawl up with her right hand to cover the bottom half of her face. Her mouth is hidden but her eyes crinkle as if in a smile. Her left arm bends at the elbow as she grasps the open shutter. She also wears a white shirt pushed back to her elbows, and a rose-pink skirt. The frame of the window runs parallel to the sides and bottom of the canvas. The room behind them is black in shadow.

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