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| Lesson
Title: Artist & Attitude
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| Work(s)
of Art: Julie as Flora, 1799, Elisabeth Vigeé-Le Brun
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| Curriculum
Connections(s): Language Arts
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| Audience: 10th grade |
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Lesson
ID: edu305
Date Lesson Entered: 07/14/2005 |
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| Main
Idea: |
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Establishing an artist’s attitude toward subject before analyzing a work of art. |
| Objectives:
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1. Students will understand the importance of tone in a piece of artwork.
2. Students will become more aware of purpose before they evaluate any form of art.
3. Students will use tone to help establish the success of a written story.
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| Hooks
(a question or object used to interest and focus the audience):
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Use a “tone of voice” activity to help students understand what is being asked of them. Ask four different students to say, “Where are you going today?” in four different attitudes. |
| Getting
Ready Activity: |
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Make a class list of tones that can be expressed - categorize the list into 6-7 main groupings, i.e.:
anger
satisfaction
joy
confusion
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| Exploring
the Work(s) of Art: |
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Questions–
1. What kind of dress is this woman wearing?
2. How do you think the artist feels about this kind of painting?
3. How do you think the artist felt about the model for this painting?
4. What environment do you think helped influence the artist in how she wanted to portray the subject?
5. What historical influences helped the artist in her choice of subject matter?
Activities–
1. Use 3 different but compelling pieces of art and ask for class discussion about why the artist chose the subject and how the subject is presented.
2. After each suggestion disclose 1 detail about the background of the painting so students realize artists make these decisions because of the tone they want to create.
3. Now that we have discussed tone of Flora, in groups of 3 write a poem of two stanzas of rhyming “Cool Quatrains” that express her tone.
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| Follow-up
Activities: |
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Using another print for each group (about 5 in class), have students write one paragraph about how artists feel about the subjects of paintings using at least 3 observable reasons for the observation. |
| Assessment
Activity: |
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Taking what they have learned about how an artist’s tone of attitude affects the results of their art, each student will pick a poem or short story from text and explain the work in relation to the writer’s attitude about the subject. They must use at least 3 examples to prove their assumptions. They need to consider what influences the tone, why the artist chose the subject, and how successful the artist was with this tone. |
| Comments:
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| Overview
of Works: |
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In this portrait, Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun painted her only child, Julie LeBrun, at age 19 as the Roman goddess Flora. In Roman mythology, Flora was the season of spring and flowers. Julie is dressed in a flowing white dress and red scarf that looks like clothing worn by women in ancient Greek and Roman times. She holds a basket of flowers on her head and holds a heart-shaped wreath in her right hand.
Vigée-Lebrun created about twelve portraits of her daughter out of the roughly 800 portraits she painted during her lifetime. She was one of the few women artists allowed in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Vigée-Lebrun left France after the French Revolution of 1789. She spent four years in Naples, Italy, near the famous ancient city of Pompeii, which was excavated by archaeologists in the mid-eighteenth century. Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. The landscape in Julie as Flora is similar to Italy’s mountainous coastline..
From Italy, Vigée-Lebrun and her daughter traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, where they lived for six years and where she created Julie as Flora. In Russia, Julie met and married Gaétan Nigris, a secretary at the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg. Vigée-Lebrun disapproved of Julie’s marriage, and their close relationship suffered. It is possible that Julie as Flora was the last of many paintings Vigée-Lebrun made of Julie, who died at the age of 39, possibly of pneumonia.
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