Charlotte Mason Picture Study Aids

Looking for ways to add depth to your picture study or art appreciation time? Here you can find all of the Charlotte Mason Picture Study Aids I’ve made, some of which you can download for FREE! Each Picture Study Aid contains a brief story from the artist’s childhood or a short biography, synopses of at least six of their works, and printable versions of the pieces covered. The premium options also include suggestions for further study and I offer professionally printed books and prints as well!

Why include fine art in your homeschool?

I’m making many of these art resources available for free because I believe that art is important (so much so that I have a BA in art history!). One of the things that drew me most to the Charlotte Mason philosophy of education is her emphasis on exposing children to fine art. I loved the idea of simply showing students works of great art and allowing them to absorb the pieces on their own. There were no convoluted explanations or in-depth analyses of the art to complicate them. The children were simply meant to enjoy and take in the art. By doing this we not only improve their powers of observation, but we also expose them to powerful ideas and inform their sense of beauty.

About this topic, Ms. Mason said:

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, sculpture, beauty of form and colour in things he sees. Perhaps we might secure at least a hundred lovely landscapes too,––sunsets, cloudscapes, starlight nights. At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold.
(Vol 6 pg 43 – emphasis mine)

I especially liked the last part… “imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold.”

When we first started doing picture study at home, there were a few times when my son asked me something specific about a picture like, “what’s that thing?” or, “who is that?” In some cases, I was able to answer his questions with topics I remembered studying in college, or I could pull one of my old textbooks down from the shelf and look up the piece in question. In other cases, though, I didn’t have a ready answer.

Because of this, I decided to come up with something I could use in my own homeschool to help me with picture study and wanted to share these resources with others who might run into this problem as well! If you’d like to read more about picture study in general, I have a series of posts covering why it’s important and how we do it in both our home and homeschool co-op here:

Charlotte Mason Homeschool: Picture Study

Why is picture study important?

How to do Picture Study