Picture Study: Mary Cassatt

We finished up our unit on Mary Cassatt last week.  The kids really liked her (and I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that I like her!). 

We looked both at her earlier works (such as Woman in Black at the Opera, above) and her later works, which we recognize as more typically “Mary Cassatt”.

I have to be very disciplined about putting it on the schedule and doing it every week, otherwise other more urgent things (like laundry) push it off, and off, and off.

We usually do 5-6 paintings (or works, if the artists does sculpture, too) per artist.  I try to offer them a variety of media– one week we do pencils, one week markers, one week paints, one week pastels.  Also, one week I like to choose a particularly busy painting, and use it as a memory work.  We look at the painting for 5 minutes, and then put it away and try to recreate as much of it as we can remember.  (We do that just as a pencil sketch.  I didn’t photograph our Cassatt memory picture, but this post explains it in detail.)

This year I’m using the prints offered (free) through Ambleside Online’s Art print group.