Teaching Guides to the Works of Susan Vreeland

Vreeland explores the power of art by focusing on the lovers, servants, and children of the great Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters – Manet, Monet, van Gogh, and others. She then tells contemporary stories of ordinary people who encounter art in meaningful, often surprising ways.

A Dutch painting of a young girl, possibly a Vermeer, survives three and a half centuries through loss, flood, anonymity, theft, secrecy, even the Holocaust. This is the story of its owners whose lives are influenced by its beauty and mystery.

Few female post-Renaissance painters achieved fame during their own era. Artemisia Gentileschi led a remarkably "modern" and notorious life, beginning with her public humiliation in a rape trial at the age of 18 and continuing through her father's betrayal, her marriage of convenience, motherhood, and her growing fame as an artist.

Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo were not the first artists to blaze a path for modern women artists. Emily Carr (1871-1945) overcame the confines of late Victorian culture to become a major force in modern art. Susan Vreeland brings to life this fiercely independent and under-appreciated figure.

Susan Vreeland Podcast

Narrated by the artist Renoir and seven of his models, Vreeland, using settings in Paris and on the Seine, illuminates the gusto, hedonism, and art of the era after the Franco-Prussian War. With a gorgeous palette of vibrant, captivating characters, she paints their lives, loves, losses, and triumphs in a brilliant portrait of her own.

In this podcast, Susan Vreeland discusses why she chose the Renoir painting as her muse in her novel Luncheon of the Boating Party. She also stresses the importance of art in the world today.