Education Kit

The National Gallery of Australia has produced an education kit to complement school visits to this exhibition. The kit is the fourth in a series which allows students to explore selected works of art and develop an appreciation of the life and times in which the artist created the work.

 You can download the interactive program from the New Worlds from Old education kit from the Download page.

The exhibition tells the story of landscape painting in both Australia and the United States in the 19th century. It is the story of artists exploring, celebrating, finding solace in and finally feeling comfortable with the landscape of their respective countries. New Worlds from Old brings together one hundred and twenty of the greatest Australian and American landscape paintings. The comparison reveals not only what is common to landscape painting in the 19th century, but also the distinctiveness and unique qualities of these two continents in the hands of some great painters.

The Kit contains

• 12 large postcards of works of art with text and questions
• a CD-ROM containing a student interactive on the New World’s From Old Exhibition
• two worksheets containing exercises for primary (8-11 year old) and secondary school (11-16 year old) students related to their use of the CD-ROM
• an evaluation card

What’s on the CD-ROM...

The CD-ROM contains a stand-alone student interactive program capable of operating on Macintosh and Windows computers.You can download the interactive program and the Teacher Resources from the Download page.

The content of this program includes

• 15 works of art from the exhibition
• information about the works
• artist’s biographies
• hotwords (glossary)
• timelines, which link works with events in the social histories of Australia and the United States of America.
• The worksheets for primary and secondary students and the texts are also available for printing from the CD-ROM.
  

The 15 works are linked into five themes which trace the change in landscape painting style since 1780. These themes are:

• Meeting the Land
  
  Henry Cheever Pratt 1803-1880
  View from Maricopa Mountain near the Rio Gila  1855
  New Worlds from Old begins with the art of exploration and tourism. In both Australia and the United States artists wanted to show the novelty of the landscape.
• Claiming the Land
  
  John Glover  1767-1849
  My Harvest Home  1835
  Claiming the Land celebrates the changes produced on the landscape by settler societies.
• In Awe of the Land
  
  Eugene von Guérard
  North east View from the Northern Top of Mt Kosciuszko  1863
  The romantic landscape painting of mid century was dominated by grand scenery: mountain tops, waterfalls, broad rivers, storms and coastlines with horizons to the unknown.
• A Landscape of Contemplation
  
  Arthur Streeton  1867-1943  
  The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might  1896
  In both Australia and America during the 1860s there was a general shift in mood away from grand and forbidding natural phenomena, which had been the stuff of the painters of the 1850s, towards a more comfortable, intimate and contemplative view of nature.
• The Figure Defines the Landscape
  
  Winslow Homer  1836-1910
  Long Branch, New Jersey  1869
  In the 1880s and 1890s there was a move towards painting the human figure in harmony with nature rather than being dominated by it. The influence of European Impressionism can also be seen in these later works.

Macintosh (6.6 MB) To download the Macintosh version of the New Worlds From Old interactive, click the title above. It should download automatically and extract itself to where ever you have specified in the StuffIt Expander preferences.

To use the file you need a program able to deal with BinHexed documents, like the free StuffIt Expander from Aladdin
 Systems. Most modern browsers come with this program so there is probably nothing that needs to be installed.

To download the Windows version of the New Worlds From Old interactive, click the title above. Your browser will then ask you to specify a location to save the executable. When the download is complete, find the executable in File Manager and run it.

Windows 95 (8.9 MB) To download the Windows95  version of the New Worlds From Old interactive, click  the title above. Your browser will then ask you to specify a location to save the application. When the download is complete find the executable and run it.

Teacher Resources (36 KB) To download the Teacher Resources for New Worlds From Old interactive, click the title above. The file are compressed RTF documents. To use them you need a decompression program that can handle zip files, like WinZip for the PC or StuffIt Expander with Expander Enhancer for the Mac, and a word processor that can open RTF documents.