Washington Winter Show 2016

52 This page is sponsored by Mrs. H. Bartholomew Cox and Mrs. Michael Miller groups used in evaluation of the guides worked feverishly until done, and it was clear that completing the tasks was important to them. For most test groups, one and a half hours was the limit. The guides we produced are recommended for ages six to fourteen. While children up to the age of fourteen were interested in the projects and activities they contained, it was children six to ten years old who benefitted most from them. Those six to nine years old did best when they were helped by an adult, whereas those ten and older preferred to work independently or with peers. Sample Activities The American family guide looks at portraiture, folk art, and landscape painting from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. The goal of an activity titled “Let’s Go for A Walk” was to get children to look deeply at the details of nineteenth- century American landscape painting. Most of these works of art were composed to make the viewer feel as though he or she is personally witnessing the pictured scene. In the case of Jasper Francis Cropsey’s Autumn–On the Hudson River (Figure 3), the artist went so far as to supply leaf specimens to prove to a skeptical English audience that the vivid fall colors he captured really existed in nature. The guide sought to impart this concept of being in the place through a letter-writing exercise that asked children to describe the sensations they experience on a walk inside a painting of their choice (Figure 4). One important role of all the family guide exercises was to slow visitors down, forcing them to look and think. This can be challenging—except, perhaps, when the work in question is as Figure 5: John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ferdinand Lamott Belin Fund. Figure 6: Watson’s coat-of-arms. Family Guide: American Art at the National Gallery of Art, 10. Graphic designer Susanna Fields-Kuehl created a coat-of- arms template with places for children to add their own symbols, crests, and mottoes, along with space where they explain their choices.