3  Thirty-Minute Programs
Grade(s):  9 - 12
Curriculum:  Art/History

In the 17th century, the state-sponsored French Academy codified the traditional divisions of painting by subject matter into a hierarchy of the genres, ranking them in order of prestige and supposed difficulty.  History painting was the highest, followed by portraiture, and the painting of everyday life, confusedly called genre painting.  Lowest in the hierarchy of the genres were the types of painting not primarily concerned with human beings: landscape with its many subdivisions, such as seascapes, and still life, which was thought to appeal to the senses rather than to the intelligence or emotions.  These programs explore the characteristic problems of representation of the landscape artist concerned with space and light, and the still life artist most concerned with two- and three-dimensional shapes, surface texture, and the play of lights, shadows and reflections on different objects seen in "close-up".

Program Titles and Outlines:

1. Seascape:  Turner: The Fighting Temeraire   (29:53)
   The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her Last Berth to be broken up, 1838, one of the best loved paintings in the National Gallery, London was singled out for praise by it's earliest viewers at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1839.  Through location footage on the river at Rotherhithe and from engravings of the period, this program shows how Turner, "the greatest master of the age", transformed the the raw facts - an empty hulk, without masts of sails being towed upriver in daylight hours by two steam tugs to be broken up for the value of her timber - into imaginative fiction, "the nobly composed poem" of his painting.  Written and narrated by Judy Egerton.
    
2. Landscape:  Reuben's Landscapes  (22:30)
   Peter Paul Ruebens has an immensely successful career as a painter of religious, mythological and classic subjects.  His landscapes, however, were painted largely for his own pleasure and are an expression of his intense love of his native country.   Many of Rueben's landscapes are painted on panels made up of several individual pieces of wood.  This program includes a reconstruction of the preparation of a panel, from the felling of a tree to the grounding, as well as looking closely at the delightful landscapes painted around his estate and the surrounding countryside.   Written and narrated by Christopher Brown.
    
3. Still Life:  Spain in the Golden Age (29:18)
   Independent still-life painting made a dramatic appearance at the end of the 16th century, in Golden Age Spain.  This program featuring original paintings - some of them in private collections - and on location, traces the bold traditions of Spanish still-life from its origins, in the work of Velázquez's older contemporary, the monk-painter Juan Sánches Cotán (1560-1627), to the impressive and disturbing images painted by Goya at the beginning of the 19th century.  From the imitation of natural appearances in the exquisite displays of food and flowers, through the virtuoso depiction of precious glass, wooden sweet boxes and glazed oil jars, to the vanitas pictures, in which the skull and hourglass remind us of the brevity of worldly life, Spanish still life introduces us to some of the central concerns of Europeon painting.  Written by Gabrille Finaldi and Erika Langmuir.  Narrated by Gabreile Finaldi.