Artist: Mary Chambers Hauge (?) Title: Untitled (City Children, Country Children) from the four-panel mural, Teaching of the Arts Date: 1940-1941 Medium: 4-panel oil on canvas
This mural was produced for the Illinois Art Project and originally hung at Julian Perry Elementary School on the city’s South Side. Over the years, the panels were moved, and the title was lost, so the descriptive wording above is now used. The mural contrasts the lives of children in the city and the country in two large rectangular panels that now flank the auditorium stage at Harold Washington Elementary School.
Rural children (above left) enjoy time with pets and flowers while urban children (lower left) rake leaves. In the above-left image a small rural town is defined by a church steeple. In the lower-left image stands a more industrialized landscape with factory smokestacks. In the auditorium, two additional triangular-shaped panels (not shown here) portray individual children: a young boy building a model airplane at a workshop table and a farm boy in overalls feeding a goat. Though the city and country children are contrasted through setting, clothing, and pastimes, the symmetry of the composition and uniform palette highlight their shared experiences.
George Pierre Seurat, Bathers at Asnières
Impressionist artists Renior and Seurat created these paintings of children in the city and country in France. What are the children doing? Are they working or playing?
