Teaching Packet

The Inquiring Eye: American Painting

Grade Level

Subject

This packet introduces American painting from the colonial period to the early 20th century. It includes works by George Bellows, William Merritt Chase, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, George Inness, Joshua Johnson, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.

The Inquiring Eye: American Painting loan packet includes:

  • a 48-page booklet with timeline
  • 14 color study prints
  • an image CD.

This teaching packet is available free of charge for a nine-month loan period, permitting extended use in classroom or library settings.

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The Inquiring Eye: American Painting
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A pale-skinned young woman with copper-orange hair, wearing a turquoise-blue robe, stands in a pastel-infused landscape in this stylized, vertical painting. The woman fills most of the left half of the composition. She faces our right in profile with her head bowed as she looks down at the silver and brown box she holds in her right hand, closer to us. Her body angles away from us so we see her back. Her hair is held back under a gold-colored headand, and her blue robe falls over a white skirt. Beyond her, rocky mountains in ice blue and pale lilac purple span the horizon, which comes about three-quarters of the way up the painting, beneath a pale, rose-pink sky. An area of mottled parchment-white to our right of the person could be a field. Along the bottom edge of the canvas, rounded and organic shapes in scarlet red, turquoise, lapis blue, golden and lemon yellow, and pumpkin orange could be abstracted earth or flowers at the woman’s feet.

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