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Uncovering America
This resource features seven modules, each of which explores works of art that reflect the richness and diversity of the people, places, and cultures of the United States.

Italian Renaissance Learning Resources
A freely available resource, this site features eight units, each of which explores a different theme in Italian Renaissance art.

Teaching Packets Available By Download
 

Art Nouveau, 1890–1914
At its height, art nouveau was a concerted attempt to create an international style. This teaching packet presents an overview of the movement, including significant examples of works of art in a variety of media.

Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868
This program surveys two centuries of art and culture in the city now known as Tokyo. Ceramics, screens, textiles, prints, paintings, and armor are among the materials discussed.

German Expressionist Prints
In 1905 a group of young artists banded together to form Die Brücke, a movement dedicated to revitalizing German art. The artists' concern for freedom and authenticity of expression is revealed in intense and sensuous images.

The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology
This teaching packet explores new perspectives on early Chinese culture and art that have resulted from dramatic new archaeological discoveries.

The Greek Miracle
Celebrating the achievements of classical Greece, this teaching packet provides the cultural and historical context for the fifth-century sculptures shown in the exhibition The Greek Miracle.

Teaching Packets to Download or Borrow

Teaching packets are designed to permit flexibility in use. All are part of our free loan program with many available for immediate PDF download. They include a printed booklet with in-depth background information, suggestions for student activities, supplemental image CDs, and often with color study prints, timelines, and bibliographies. We encourage you to review them, to select those images and information that are most useful to your teaching needs, and to adapt and shape the materials to your specific instructional objectives.

Art&: A Teacher's Guide to Lessons and Activities for Fifth and Sixth Graders
Four lessons—Greco-Roman Origin Myths, Heroes & Heroines, Art & Ecology, and 19th-Century America in Art & Literature—were written for teachers who may not teach art but would like to integrate art into their instruction.

The Art of Romare Bearden
The visual narratives and abstractions in watercolors, oils, and especially collages and photomontages of this preeminent African American artist explore the places where he lived and worked from the 1940s through the 1980s.

Art since 1950
This packet discusses artistic movements of the late 20th century, including abstract expressionism, pop art, minimalism, conceptualism, process art, neo-expressionism, and postmodernism.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment
The monumental Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment commemorates the first African American infantry unit from the North to fight for the Union during the Civil War.

Classical Mythology in European Art
This teaching packet discusses Greek and Roman mythology as a source for themes in art from the Renaissance to the 20th century.

An Eye for Art
This family-oriented resource brings together in one lively, activity-packed book a selection of forty art features from the National Gallery of Art’s popular quarterly NGAkids.
 

French Painting from the National Gallery of Art
The rich artistic heritage of France is illustrated in works spanning three centuries by such artists as Claude Lorrain, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean Siméon Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Édouard Manet, and Auguste Renoir.

I Am Still Learning: Late Works by Masters
Many artists have produced impressive work in their late years. This program reviews paintings by 17 artists whose works demonstrate creative vitality in the artists' old age.

The Inquiring Eye: American Painting
This packet introduces American painting from the colonial period to the early 20th century.

The Inquiring Eye: Early Modernism, 1900–1940
This overview traces the development of artistic styles from 1900 to 1940, examining fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, surrealism, and other movements.

Inquiring Eye: European Renaissance Art
The works of art discussed include painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from Italy and Northern Europe made between the 14th and 16th centuries.

Islamic Art and Culture
Prepared in conjuction with the exhibition Palace and Mosque: Islamic Art from the Victoria and Albert Museum, this packet is a resource for teaching Islamic art and culture, from its beginnings in the 7th century up to the 18th century.

Landscape Paintings from the National Gallery of Art
This program traces changing attitudes toward landscape painting from the Renaissance to the 20th century.

Painting in the Dutch Golden Age
This teaching packet provides background about the founding of the Dutch Republic and how art came to occupy an important place in the lives of its people. Includes genres such as landscape, still life, portraiture, and history painting.
 

Picturing France, 1830–1900
Not a chronological overview, this teaching packet instead travels region to region, from Brittany to Provence, offering a multifaceted look at art and culture that explores most of the 19th century's major stylistic trends and artists.

Surveys of American Crafts and Folk Arts from the Index of American Design
The Index of American Design consists of approximately 18,000 watercolor renderings of American decorative art objects from the colonial period through the 19th century. This CD provides images and an overview of the project's history.

Vincent van Gogh
Follow Van Gogh's career from his early artistic efforts in Holland and breakthrough work in Paris to the signature paintings he produced in the south of France.

Whistler: The Etchings
James McNeill Whistler is best known as a painter, but his graphics are of equal importance. This program traces the development of Whistler's style and techniques over the course of his career.

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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.”

Educational Resource:  Primeros Pasos en el Arte Para Prekínder y Recortes

Explorar obras de arte con sus hijos, leer libros de temas afines y probar suerte creando alguna pieza artística propia. (PDF)

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:  Exploring Identity through Modern Art

How do artists draw on memories and experiences to create art that reflects their identities? How does an artist’s connection to place spark inspiration? Through guided looking, sketching, and writing activities, students will consider how artists explore identity through their art.

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.

Educational Resource:  Spanish Art

During this two-building field trip, students explore and compare and contrast the style, subject matter, and technique of artists ranging from El Greco to Picasso.