Back to the Books: Pictures Every Child Should Know

This book, published in 1908, belonged to either my father's mother or even her mother.

It sat, untouched, on my parents' bookshelves for many, many years.

I borrowed the book when I started homeschooling my oldest son Christopher in 1989 when he was just seven, and we loved it!

Side note: Christopher and I were apparently the first people who ever read the book. A few of the pages needed to be carefully separated, as they were not perfectly separated when the book and was printed and bound.

Side, side note: The book I own now is one I ordered from a used book shop. I had (eventually) returned the book, but my parents (also eventually) had discarded many of their old books, and this one, apparently, was one that was given away.

The book is a series of biographies of master artists along with black and white plates of their work.

The frontispiece, as you can see, was in color.

While this sounds as if the book were very dry, it really wasn't. Read the above passage. 

I remember the way I stopped reading it to Christopher, how we looked at each other, how I re-read it, and how we laughed.

This book has similar portions all through it...

...such as this humorous story from J.M. W. Turner himself when someone mocked his work.

Most of what I know about these masters and their works, I learned from this book during the years I home-schooled my six children.

And, honestly, I don't think a book like it exists in today's market.

Nor do I feel children study art history in the same way, either.

Nor do I also feel today's world has an expectation that children - or anyone - should know and recognize this type of art and the artists who created them.

Of course, I feel the same way about many subjects, including history.

Whether or not we agree with history, we should study it, if only to know from whence we came and to where we ought not go.

This photo is a good illustration of my points.

At seven, Christopher recognized this piece of art in a church rectory office - and he knew what  The Angelus was.

At eight, when a pastor opened a sermon on the feast of the Annunciation, Christopher not only knew what the feast was, he knew this particular artwork and the artist's biography, he could recite The Angelus, (and we were Byzantine Catholic and later Eastern Orthodox, where The Angelus was not part of our prayer tradition), and he knew where the pastor was going in his words.

This is not to say Christopher is a know-it-all (although he can certainly come off that way sometimes).

But it does mean he could recognize a liturgical year, classic art, The Angelus, and how and why people stopped in their fields to pray it in Catholic countries.

That doesn't mean we endorse or agree with any of it - or that we disagree.

However, understanding art helps one understand the relevance of certain practices and cultural expressions within certain times in history.

Understanding these, I feel, is what it means to be liberally educated.