National Gallery Takes Art to Hospital Patients
NG Celebrates Tenth Anniversary of Outreach Programme
The National Gallery recently announced the tenth anniversary of its outreach programme that takes art into hospital wards and education centres. The project, known as Take Art, provides young hospital patients with access to paintings from the National Gallery's collections.
Take Art – Outreach Programme
The aims of the programme are:
- to stimulate children, teenagers, and young adults, through creative interactive activities, leading to a greater enjoyment of art,
- to alleviate the boredom suffered by short- and long-term patients,
- to improve concentration and communication skills,
- to enhance the existing hospital education programme, and,
- to provide an ever-growing learning resource that can be used across the curriculum.
During the 2007-8 academic year 11 National Gallery lecturers made more than 70 visits, and worked with nearly 400 patients at 17 London hospitals. These included the Royal Free Children’s Hospital School, the Royal Marsden Hospital School, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital and many others. (A full list is provided in the National Gallery's announcement.) Every hospital has six visits per year, each lasting approximately two hours.
Two more hospitals will be added to the list during the forthcoming year. Where patients are able to leave the ward, hospitals have organised visits to the National Gallery. In addition, since 2001, Take Art has also travelled to hospitals in Newcastle and Bristol.
Sessions are flexible with subject matter geared to the national curriculum and the needs of individual patients. Activities are presented by National Gallery lecturers together with hospital personnel and resident artists.
Patients, and their families, are encouraged to look at and discuss particular works of art. Discussions are followed by practical tasks such as creative writing and craft work. The activities are a welcome break from the tedium of ward life, and at the end of each visit a new print is left at the hospital thus creating a valuable library of famous art works.
Training for Hospital Teachers at National Gallery
The National Gallery offers a comprehensive programme of Continuing Professional Development training courses for hospital personnel. To date, at least 12 teachers have taken part and as a result the quality of hospital teaching sessions is continually updated and improved.
Take Art – Funding
Take Art is supported by the charitable organisations, The Austin and Hope Pilkington Trust, and the John S. Cohen Foundation.
Through this funding extra resources have been made available such as multi-sensory boxes which provide opportunities to handle key items from the Gallery's collection. The boxes include CDs linked to specific paintings, thus enabling patients with special educational needs or sensory impairments to enjoy art to the full. Paintings under discussion have included Surprised! (1891) by Henri Rousseau, The Umbrellas (ca. 1881-6) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Joseph Mallord William Turner's The Fighting Temeraire (1839).
As part of Take Art, the Gallery also provides materials to encourage patients to experiment with creative writing, printmaking, painting, drawing, modelling and even puppet making.
The National Gallery is home to the United Kingdom's national collection of European art from 1250-1900 including paintings by Turner, Renoir, Rousseau, Jan van Eyck, van Gogh, Uccello, Botticelli, Titian, Canaletto, Vermeer, Degas and van Dyck.
BNC101
Surprised! Henri Rousseau, 1881
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The Umbrellas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, ca.1881-6
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The Fighting Temeraire, 1839,
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