Six Kids at the National Gallery of Art
Believe it or not, it's really fun.
When I first started to read up on homeschool pedagogy, I read Charlotte Mason’s volumes and fell in love. Mason believed children naturally absorb truth, beauty, and wisdom when exposed to great works of art and literature, rather than through heavy-handed instruction. Instead of dissecting and analyzing too early, children should simply spend time with these works, developing their own relationship with them.
In the context of art, while they take art classes to work on their own expression, instead of teaching art appreciation as a boring academic subject, I should allow them to grow in a relationship with the great artists of history. I want them to know their histories, be exposed to their work, and get to know them by their technique.
Since they were toddlers, we’ve been going to art museums. My mother dragged me through art museums as a kid, and I despised it. I always consider “How can I do it, but better?” in every parenting department, and art appreciation has been no different.
The first answer is simple: We don’t spend more than two hours inside. The trick with all parenting in the early years is not to get to the breaking point; leave the party before your kid has a meltdown, and leave the art museum before your kid gets bored.
The second is to go in with a purpose: Are we going to see a particular artist, time period, or geographic region?
This year, we’ve been studying Rembrandt in our homeschool. I found terrific biographies on Purple House Press of artists, which taught us the history of their lives while intertwining images of their art and explanations of how their techniques changed over time.
Yesterday, we visited the National Gallery of Art (only 45 minutes from home) to see some of Rembrandt's paintings. We recalled the sad story of his wife Saskia’s death and visited her portrait. We visited his paintings of windmills and remembered how he would walk through Amsterdam after Saskia’s death, depressed and sketching windmills to ease his sadness.
All five kids were excited to be there and see a canvas that Rembrandt himself touched and painted — the sixth was merely along for the ride.
One of the most wonderful things about homeschooling (and having kids in general) is learning so much myself in the process and growing as a person as a result. Before I had kids, I hated going to art museums (a holdover from my own childhood), but now, walking the halls of the NGA is one of my favorite ways to spend an afternoon.
That’s not to say it isn’t stressful or that we don’t get lectured by the staff for merely having living, breathing children close to art worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Before we go in, we go over the ground rules: Hands to your side (no pointing), and do not touch anything. They need to be reminded frequently, but with a careful eye, they can do it without incident. I strap the youngest into a stroller (that he truthfully doesn’t need anymore, but I wanted to keep him strapped in in this circumstance). My next youngest, at 3.5, gets to hold my hand the entire time we’re inside the galleries.
Our favorite room has always been one filled with Claude Monet, and this was our first visit since a trip I took my older three kids on to Paris, where we went not just to Musee d’Orsay and the Louvre but also to Monet’s home and hour outside the city. My 11-year-old excitedly remembered standing on the bridge she saw in the Japanese Bridge painting she’d always admired.
These real-world experiences are what makes homeschooling so special. Seeing Van Gogh's paintings on paper and seeing the 3D way the paint blobs on the canvas in real life are two very different experiences. Admiring the work of Vermeer and seeing how small his paintings are in person are two very different experiences. We have the time to go on a Friday in the early afternoon because we’re all home together and make our schedule.
We also love to take rabbit trails through the history of art. We’re watching a documentary on Netflix about the greatest art heist of all time, and they love the excitement and mystery surrounding the question of who robbed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and wonder: Will the Rembrandt paintings taken from it (as well as others) ever be recovered?
We’ll go to the Gardner Museum on our trip to Boston in May and see those empty frames for ourselves. We’ll also hit the places we’ve been studying this year: Plymouth, the Freedom Trail, etc.
This is what I love most about homeschooling: taking the schooling out of our home and learning in person at the most awe-inspiring places imaginable.