Picture Study:The Limbourg Brothers, Herman, Paul, and John; (1385 – 1416), The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry; Septembre

"There is no talk about schools of painting, little about style; consideration of these matters comes in later life, but the first and most important thing is to know the pictures themselves." -Charlotte Mason


This miniature was almost certainly painted in two phases. In general, artists started with the background, then painted in the characters before finishing with their faces. It depicts the harvest of the grapes. In the background is the Château de Saumur.

“These extravagant towers are a dream landscape with constellations of canopies, pinnacles, gables and arrows, with their crockets fluttering against the light.”-François Cali

"...there must be knowledge and, in the first place, not the technical knowledge of how to produce, but some reverent knowledge of what has been produced; that is, children should learn pictures, line by line, group by group, by reading, not books, but pictures themselves. A friendly picture-dealer supplies us with half a dozen beautiful little reproductions of the work of some single artist, term by term. After a short story of the artist's life and a few sympathetic words about his trees or his skies, his river-paths or his figures, the little pictures are studied one at a time; that is, children learn, not merely to see a picture but to look at it, taking in every detail. Then the picture is turned over and the children tell what they have seen...there is enough for half an hour's talk and memory in this little reproduction of a great picture and the children will know it wherever they see it...In this way children become acquainted with a hundred, or hundreds, of great artists during their school-life and it is an intimacy which never forsakes them." -Charlotte Mason

We made our own fall pictures to add to our own Book of Days.

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