Artists are often particularly keen observers and precise recorders of the physical conditions of the natural world. As a result, paintings can be good resources for learning about ecology. Teachers can use this lesson to examine with students the interrelationship of geography, natural resources, and climate and their effects on daily life. It also addresses the roles students can take in caring for the environment. Students will look at paintings that represent cool temperate, warm temperate, and tropical climates.
In this lesson students will: Identify natural resources found in particular geographic areas; Discuss ways in which climate, natural resources, and geography affect daily life; Apply critical-thinking skills to consider the various choices artists have made in their representations of the natural world; Make personal connections to the theme by discussing ways they can be environmental stewards; Identify natural resources found in particular geographic areas; Discuss ways in which climate, natural resources, and geography affect daily life; Apply critical-thinking skills to consider the various choices artists have made in their representations of the natural world; Make personal connections to the theme by discussing ways they can be environmental stewards.

This site presents 31 paintings, bowls, and other objects that illustrate the Islamic world's influence on European art. Elements of Islamic art are identified in each of the European pieces, which date back to the Middle Ages.

BRUSHster is an online painting machine for all ages. This shockwave interactive includes more than forty brushes and customizable size, transparency, texture, and stroke options. A rainbow palette, along with a toolbox of special effects that blur, ripple, smudge, blend, and fragment your designs help make BRUSHster a full-feature painting program. You can save up to eight paintings as you work, which makes it easy to backtrack if you change your mind. Saved images will remain active and "re-paintable" as long as your Web browser window with the BRUSHster program remains open. To share your designs electronically or to save them to your computer, print to PDF or take a screen shot.

The word "Renaissance" in the exhibition title refers, in the traditional sense, to the rebirth of antiquity—the revival of interest in classical art, literature, and philosophy. But here it also signifies that Venetian painting was transformed—reborn—in the opening decades of the sixteenth century. The exhibition focuses on the period from 1500 to 1530, which represents, visually and intellectually, the most exciting phase of the Renaissance in Venice, when three great masters, the old Bellini, Giorgione, and the young Titian, were all working side by side. Their innovations and those of gifted contemporaries, such as Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma Vecchio, and Lorenzo Lotto, would influence European art for centuries.

This site provides a brief history of painting in Britain during the 18th and 19th centuries, when English artists began developing their own styles in marine, allegorical, and landscape painting. Paintings are organized in online tours of British conversation pieces and portraits, landscapes of Constable and Turner, the Royal Academy of Art, British and American grand manner portraits, and British and American history paintings.

This site tours Italian Byzantine paintings of the 1200s and 1300s. The site includes an overview of the genre, historical background, and information on the featured artists, the paintings, their provenance, a bibliography, exhibition history, and full-screen images.

In Counting on Art, students will explore the paintings of Horace Pippin and Wayne Thiebaud and the mobiles of Alexander Calder to discover and practice math and visual art concepts.In Pippin's Story, young children (grades K–3) focus on a painting by African American artist Horace Pippin. They will learn how to "read" the clues in a painting and write a story about the work. Students will also solve counting and time problems and create their own "secret number" painting.Calder's Balancing Acts focuses on math in the mobiles of Alexander Calder. Elementary- level students (grades 2–5) will learn about the artist and write equations based on Calder's art. Upper-level students (grades 6–8) will discover patterns and the Fibonacci sequence. Both levels will make their own math mobiles.Cake Math, based on a painting by California artist Wayne Thiebaud, features math challenges of many varieties. Elementary-level students (grades 2–5) will practice fractions, addition, subtraction, word problems, sorting, and classifying. Intermediate level students (grades 6–8) will find volume and surface area in Thiebaud's cakes.

This pamphlet for students looks at works of an artist whose career-long exploration of light established him as a progenitor and chief exponent of minimalism. His use of fluorescent light is featured in this exhibit, the first comprehensive retrospective on one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century.

This presents the first exhibition devoted solely to the powerful and evocative drawings of Annibale Carracci (1560-1609). From his early experiments with naturalism to his late, almost abstract, style, Annibale revolutionized our way of looking at the world around us and at the art of the past.

During and directly after World War I, four great empires (Germany, Austro-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottomans) crumbled precipitously, to be replaced by more than one dozen fledgling nation-states. The largely agrarian, in some cases semifeudal, societies of central Europe were thrust nearly overnight into crises of civil war, unemployment, or inflation — and beyond these crises into a world propelled by mass media and consumer economies. Becoming modern was attractive but also anxiety-provoking, and responses to this prospect ranged from jubilation to cynicism, from fond nostalgia to fantastic visions of the future.
Each of the eight thematic sections in Foto brings together work made between 1918 and 1945 from across the region, comparing individual or local differences against the larger heritage sketched here of common institutions and attitudes toward “the modern.”

Frederic Remington (1861–1909) has long been celebrated as one of the most gifted interpreters of the American West. Initially, his western images appeared as illustrations in popular journals. As he matured, however, Remington turned his attention away from illustration, concentrating instead on painting and sculpture. About 1900 he began a series of paintings that took as their subject the color of night. Before his premature death in 1909 at age forty-eight, Remington completed more than seventy paintings in which he explored the technical and aesthetic difficulties of painting darkness. Although immediately recognized as extraordinary works, Remington's late nocturnes have never before been the subject of an exhibition. Frederic Remington: The Color of Night gathers together for the first time the finest of these mysterious, often deeply personal paintings.

This site presents French paintings from the 19th century. The site includes paintings from the academic style that dominated the first half of the century as well as paintings from the latter half of the century by artists who came to be known as impressionists -- Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, and Mary Cassatt.

This site features American paintings from the late 1700s-1900s. Included are works by John Copley, Henry Tanner, John Sargent, James Whistler, Gilbert Stuart, and more. Much art of the American colonial period consisted of portraits, as settlers sought to establish their identities in a new world. After the new nation achieved its independence, landscapes and scenes of native flora, fauna, and folk customs began to express its unique qualities and illustrate its untapped resources.

Stuart portrayed virtually all the notable men and women of the Federal period in the U.S., and was declared the Father of American Portraiture by his contemporaries. Stuart portrayed American and European figures, including George Washington, John and Abigail Adams, John Jay, and Robert Liston. In 1805 he painted the Gibbs-Coolidge Set, the only surviving depiction of the first five presidents.

Mythology is a powerful vehicle for teaching students about symbols and the ways people have sought to explain their relationships to nature and to each other. Teachers can use this lesson to introduce or examine the role of myths in explaining human customs, mysteries about nature, or the reasons why things exist in the world. Students will discuss works of art that illustrate ancient Greco-Roman myths and various symbols used in them. So students do not judge the "truthfulness" of another culture's belief systems, they should understand that myth is not something imaginary, unfounded, or false, but rather something that illustrates the world view of a people.
In this lesson students will: Learn about myths that explain the world; Recognize some characters of Greco-Roman mythology and their symbols; Apply critical thinking skills to consider why artists chose to depict certain episodes in a story; Make personal connections to the theme by writing and drawing a myth of their own.

Teachers can use this lesson to introduce or examine in depth the concept of heroism through discussions of heroic actions and character.Students will look at images of military, religious, political, and everyday heroes and heroines and discuss their lives and the effects of their deeds. For the purposes of this lesson, heroes are defined as figures who have great strength and ability and are admired for their achievements. They may risk or sacrifice their lives for others or may be noted for special achievement in a particular field.
In this lesson students will: Identify character traits of heroes and heroines; Apply critical-thinking skills to consider the various choices artists have made in depicting heroes; Make personal connections to the theme by identifying heroes and heroines in their own lives.

In this packet we look at works that span nearly a thousand years—from shortly after the foundation of Islam in the seventh century to the seventeenth century when the last two great Islamic empires—the Ottoman and the Safavid—had reached their peak. Although the definition of Islamic art usually includes work made in Mughal India, it is beyond the scope of this packet. The works we will look at here come from as far west as Spain and as far east as Afghanistan.

This tour looks at the different styles of Raphael, Titian, and other artists and examines how their artwork differed from the next generation of Italian painters.

This site examines Vermeer's use of light, proportion, symbolism, and other techniques in this 17th century masterpiece. How the museum restored the painting is also explained.