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Art Tales: Sky Color

Age 4 through Grade 1

Request for winter/spring tours are no longer being accepted.

We will offer a selection of in-person and virtual tours, using Zoom, in fall 2023.

Requests for fall tours, October 1 – December 1, 2023, will be accepted from August 1 through November 3, 2023.

Art Tales: Sky Color is a tour designed for our youngest learners. Students will use their imaginations to explore works of art and discover how some artists depict the natural world. This tour includes the reading of Sky Color by Peter H. Reynolds, exploration of two landscape paintings, and an art-making experience. 

Book Summary

In Sky Color, Marisol volunteers to paint the sky for the class mural, but she is missing a key color that she needs. During her ride home on the school bus, she finds inspiration that helps her consider all the colors the sky can be. 

Looking and Learning Skills

On this tour, students:

• Observe, describe, compare, and contrast works of art.
• Create a landscape using tempera paint sticks.
• Feel a sense of belonging in the museum.

In-Person Tour Information

Group Size: Up to 60 students
Length: 60 minutes 
Meeting Location: West Building Rotunda

Important Scheduling Information

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

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

Title I Bus Stipends

Funding for the cost of bus transportation is available for Title I schools that participate in our docent-led school tours. For more information, please get in touch with Deirdre Palmer at [email protected] or (202) 842-6880, or use the application form.

Examples of Works Featured on Tour

Examples of Works Featured on Tour

Martin Johnson Heade, Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury Marshes, c. 1871/1875, oil on canvas, John Wilmerding Collection, 2010.74.1
Sheer, vertical, cliffs, brightly lit in cream white and rust orange by the low sun, tower over a band of people riding horses into the distance in this long, horizontal landscape painting. The glowing cliffs dominate the upper right quadrant of the painting. They lighten from burnt orange along the jagged tops to flame orange down the steep sides, and are and warm, parchment white near the earth. One tall, narrow promontory to our right looms over a range of lower, rounded cliffs. As the cliffs move into the distance, they are shrouded with a lavender-purple haze. The land closest to us dips into a shallow valley at the bottom center of the composition, leading away from us. The dirt-packed earth is dotted with pine-green, scrubby bushes and vegetation and a grove of low, gnarled trees a short distance to our right. One chestnut-brown horse walks along the path at the bottom center of the composition, lagging behind a cluster of at least two dozen horses and riders winding into the distance. The horses range from ivory white to tawny brown and charcoal gray. The riders are loosely painted so some details are indistinct, but they all seem to have brown skin and dark hair. They wear feathered headdresses and garments in teal blue, fawn brown, or golden yellow. They ride over a low hill toward a crystal-blue river, and then back along a flat expanse toward a row of miniscule, triangular tepees lining the horizon in the deep distance. The horizon comes halfway up the composition, and the tepees are backed by a row of rose-pink, flat-topped cliffs. A pale yellow disk hangs low in the sky, over the distant cliffs. The sky above deepens from soft, lilac purple along the horizon to ice and sapphire blue along the top. A few wispy clouds are burnished orange in the sunlight. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “TYMoran 1881,” with the T, Y, and M overlapping to make a monogram.
Examples of Works Featured on Tour

Thomas Moran, Green River Cliffs, Wyoming, 1881, oil on canvas, Gift of the Milligan and Thomson Families, 2011.2.1
A row of spire-like structures of different heights is silhouetted in azure blue against a soft pink, yellow, peach, and lavender-purple sunset and reflected in a rippling river in this nearly square landscape painting. Along the horizon, the buildings stretch from our right, almost fully across the canvas, and are painted with vertical brushstrokes in cool shades of blue. The sky behind the towers seems hazy with intermingling, pastel-colored clouds. The buildings are reflected in the river, which fills the bottom third of the painting. The surface of the water is painted with short, horizontal brushstrokes in azure blue for the buildings, and apricot, rose, and marigold orange for the sky’s reflection. A streak and smudge of olive-green paint on the water represents a person in a boat near the center of the painting. The artist signed and dated the work in the same olive color at the lower right: “Claude Monet 1903.”
Examples of Works Featured on Tour

Claude Monet, The Houses of Parliament, Sunset, 1903, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.48
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.
Examples of Works Featured on Tour

John Ward of Hull, The Northern Whale Fishery: The "Swan" and "Isabella", c. 1840, oil on canvas, The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund, 2007.114.1

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