Page 4 - vermeer.pages copy 2

Charlotte Mason Picture Study Aid Johannes Vermeer

A Word on Charlotte Mason Picture Study

!e intention of this picture study aid is to equip the home educator with some basic facts and understanding of

various artists and a sampling of their works. It is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis or study of each piece or a

complete biography of the artist.

About picture study, Ms. Mason recommended keeping learning as simple as possible, especially in the younger
years, and put extra emphasis on the images by themselves.

“!ere is no talk about schools of painting, little about style; consideration of these matters comes in
later life, the first and most important thing is to know the pictures themselves. As in a worthy book we
leave the author to tell his own tale, so do we trust a picture to tell its tale through the medium the
artist gave it. In the region of art as else-where we shut out the middleman.” (vol 6 pg 216)

“Definite teaching is out of the question; suitable ideas are easily given, and a thoughtful love of Art
inspired by simple natural talk over the picture at which the child is looking.” (PR Article “Picture
Talks”)

“…we begin now to understand that art is not to be approached by such an acadamised road. It is of the
spirit, and in ways of the spirit must we make our attempt. We recognise that the power of appreciating
art and of producing to some extent an interpretation of what one sees is as universal as intelligence,
imagination, nay, speech, the power of producing words. But there must be knowledge and, in the first
place, not the technical knowledge of how to produce, but some reverent knowledge of what has been
produced; that is, children should learn pictures, line by line, group by group, by reading, not books, but
pictures themselves. A friendly picture-dealer supplies us with half a dozen beautiful little reproductions
of the work of some single artist, term by term. A$er a short story of the artist’s life and a few
sympathetic words about his trees or his skies, his river-paths or his figures, the little pictures are studied
one at a time; that is, children learn, not merely to see a picture but to look at it, taking in every detail.”
(vol 6 pg 214)

!is picture study aid is meant to o$er basic information about the artists as well as ready answers should your

student ask about a particular aspect of a piece and the explanation isn’t readily evident. Ms. Mason emphasized not
focusing on strict academic discourse when doing picture study, but rather simply exposing students to the art

itself:

His education should furnish him with whole galleries of mental pictures, pictures by great artists old
and new;––…––in fact, every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures by
great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings,

ahumbleplace.com ❦ Page of 4 25