Classroom Activity

Art Starters: Mary Cassatt

Part of Art Tales for Pre-K

Mary Cassatt painted many images of mothers and children. She painted the scenes that she saw around her: children taking a bath, playing in the sand, and spending time with their parents. Observing from real life, Cassatt was able to capture everyday moments.

A small brown dog and a pale-skinned little girl wearing a white dress sit in matching celestial-blue armchairs in this horizontal painting. To our right, the girl sits with her legs angled to our left. She slumps back with her legs spread, and her left elbow, on our right, is bent so that hand rests behind her head. Her other elbow is draped over the armrest. Her dark brown hair appears to be pulled back, and tawny brown eyes under faint brows gaze down and to our left. She has a small nose set in a round face and a coral-pink mouth closed in a straight line. Her white dress has touches of gray, soft pink, and powder blue with a wide plaid sash around her waist. The pine-green, black, and sapphire-blue sash is accented with overlapping vertical and horizontal lines of burnt orange, light blue, and mustard yellow. Her socks match her sash and come up to mid-calf, over black shoes with silver buckles. The small dog has scruffy black fur and a russet-brown face. It lies curled in the chair opposite the girl, to our left, with its eyes closed and ears pricked up. The rounded backs of the upholstered chairs curve down to become the low arms. The vivid and light blue fabric of the chairs is scattered with loosely painted strokes of avocado and forest green, peach pink, cherry red, plum purple, and white. Beyond the chairs closest to us is another armchair and an armless loveseat, both covered with the same fabric. They sit at the back of the room, in a corner flooded with silvery light coming through four windows on the right side. The furniture is arranged on a peanut-brown floor. The artist signed in the lower left, “Mary Cassatt.”
Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1983.1.18

Grade Level

Subject

Language

Look

What colors can you find in the armchairs? What patterns?

What is the little girl wearing? Describe her outfit.

Look carefully at how the little girl is sitting, then take the same pose with your body.

What else can you find in this room?

What do you think this little girl might be thinking or feeling? (To help children think through this question, draw a speech bubble on a printed version of the image and fill in what the girl might be saying.) Have you ever felt this way?

If you could talk to this girl, what would you ask her? What might she ask you?

Imagine this painting is a scene from the middle of a story. What happened before this? What might happen next?

What name would you give the puppy? What title would you give the painting?

Read

Good Boy Fergus! (Spanish langauge version: ¡Muy bien Fergus!)
by David Shannon

Fergus the dog has a perfect day experiencing all his favorite things.

Mary Cassatt: Extraordinary Impressionist Painter
by Barbara Herkert and Gabi Swiatkowska

This book tells the story of Cassatt's life and her desire to be an artist at a time when few women were recognized in the art world.

Make: Paint a quiet moment

You Will Need

  • Paints
  • Paintbrushes
  • Heavyweight paper

Where do you go to have some quiet time? You might think of a place at home, at school, outside, or somewhere else. What do you do in this place? Are you by yourself, or is someone with you? If you can, spend some time in that place before making this painting.

Now, paint that special place. When you’re ready to paint, decide on the most important things to include in your painting. Try to make them fill the paper. How can you use color and pattern, or a person’s pose, to capture a particular feeling?

You might want to paint someone else in a quiet moment. Ask a family member or friend to pose for you, or even your family pet!

Vocab Bank

  • observe
  • pose
  • quiet

Download

Art Tales: Coloring and Cut-Outs booklet (PDF, 3.5 MB)

Art Tales for Pre-K (PDF, 7.2 MB)

Primeros Pasos En El Arte (PDF, 7.5 MB)

Primeros Pasos En El Arte: Colorear y Recortes (PDF, 3.7 MB)

Picturing France teaching resource

An Eye for Art: Mary Cassatt teaching resource (PDF, 9.4 MB)
 

Visit

Register for the Art Tales pre-K school tour

Submit Student Work

Send images of your students' projects that follow these activities - email [email protected]

You may also like

A man wearing armor, sitting astride a cream-white horse, drives a long lance down at a lizard-like dragon as a woman kneels with her hands in prayer in the landscape beyond in this vertical painting. Both people have pale skin and thin, gold halos floating above their heads. At the center of the composition, the man faces our left in profile as he looks down at the creature. The man has a straight nose and honey-brown hair under his gold-trimmed, pewter-gray helmet. Armor covers his entire body, and a celestial-blue cape billows behind him from where it fastens around his neck. A narrow, indigo-blue and gold band is tied around his left calf, and is inscribed with the word “HONI.” A black sword hangs from his left side. The horse is white with a silvery-white mane and tail. It rears on its hind legs as it turns its head to look at us with hazel-brown eyes. The horse wears a blue saddle and bridle, the same color as the man’s cape, trimmed with gold. A strap around the horse’s neck is painted in gold with the name, “RAPHELLO.” The rider thrusts his foot into the stirrup we can see as he plunges a lance down at the dragon under the horse’s front feet. The dragon has tawny brown skin with a mint green, dog-like head. It grips the earth with clawed feet as at pushes at the lance with one front foot. It twists its long, snake-like neck to look at the man with dark eyes. The dragon opens its pointed snout to show its teeth, and bat-like wings splay out. A tall outcropping over a cave rises along the left edge of the composition, behind the dragon. In a field a little farther back, to our right, the woman kneels with her body angled to our left. She tilts her head away from us and gazes past the man and horse. She has a straight nose, pale pink, bow-shaped lips, and her blond hair is pulled back in a bun. She wears a ruby-red dress and a sheer white wrap around her shoulders and across her arms. Around the woman, straw-yellow hills with bands of pine-green trees roll into the distance. Two terracotta-orange towers rise from a row of trees along the horizon. A few taller trees are outlined against the baby-blue sky, which lightens toward the horizon.

Educational Resource:  Art Starters: Raphael

A lesson for preschool to kindergarten students about artist Raphael’s painting Saint George and the Dragon. Students learn how to look at this painting, what you can read to learn more, how to create a “courage” mask, and a list of vocabulary terms related to this activity.

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.”

Educational Resource:  Art Starters: George Bellows

A lesson for preschool to kindergarten students about artist George Bellows' 1911 oil on canvas painting New York. Students learn how to look at this painting, what you can read to learn more, how to create your own city scene, and a list of vocabulary terms related to this activity.

An abstracted jug, bottles, shapes reminiscent of balled up paper or fabric, and a needle-like letter opener are gathered on a wood square in this horizontal still life painting. Rectangles in shades of corn yellow, violet purple, burgundy red-and-black checks, white, black, and spruce green splay out behind the objects like untidily stacked placemats. The brown jug is at the center, and an echo of its form in teal blue presumably represents a shadow. Portions of the jug, wooden board, and crumpled material shift color and pattern as they intersect or overlap with other areas. The artist’s initials, “DMR,” are stenciled in yellow in the lower left corner.

Educational Resource:  Art Starters: Diego Rivera

A lesson for preschool to kindergarten students about artist Diego Rivera’s painting No. 9, Nature Morte Espagnole. Students learn how to look at this painting, what you can read to learn more, how to make a still life collage, and a list of vocabulary terms related to this activity.