The Usborne Book of Famous Paintings

The Usborne Book of Famous Paintings
     written by Rosie Dickens

REVIEW.

This book shares 35 of the world's best known paintings with explanations customized for each of the paintings presented giving you, the reader a behind-the-scenes peek at how the painting was accomplished, style and format, technique, and history. It's another "text" for Bay Farm's Media Center Library collection that proves learning something new can be interesting and fun.

It feels like you are on a private art gallery tour with a personal guide! There's even a website set up by Usborne to provide gallery links and art activities to accompany the book. Great idea for our Art Docent program as well as personal reading.  http://www.usborne-quicklinks.com  Choose United States. Then type in the key words "famous paintings." You can tour any number of famous museums and art galleries.

The famous painting "St. George and the Dragon" by Rafael has commentary that explains the technique of clustering major characters into a pyramid, how to create the feeling of distance, additional details that help to tell the story, symbolism used in art in the 16th century and how to add depth to a painting.







"A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" was painted in 1884 by Georges Seurat. Seurat used color according ot the theories of the day in the 19th century. He used 35 million dots, dabs, and dashes of color in his painting because he believed the theory that color mixing actually happened in the eye itself and he wanted his painting color to be brighter and richer. The characters in his painting are staged much like a movie director would do when setting a movie scene. He also painted people from all walks of life to assure us of the "modern people" of the 19th century.

There are so many classic works of art to view, and then the galleries and museums online to keep your artists interests going for hours on end. 



ISBN 978-0-545-24327-8