Guiding young minds through the National Gallery of Art

“Are there any more questions?” I asked loudly.

I was struggling to make myself heard above about thirty seventh-graders, whom I was leading on a tour of the National Gallery of Art. There had already been many questions that morning, even before we began looking at objects in the museum’s permanent collection. We had just finished an analysis and discussion of techniques and symbolism in a seventeenth-century sculpture from Seville, so I took advantage of the momentary lull in the hand-raising and was walking toward the next work on our itinerary when I heard an unexpected sound. Thud.

Turning, I saw that one of the students had fainted, practically at my feet.

Teacher and chaperones rushed in, and after a few moments the student was fine. She had not breakfasted properly before she traveled with her class for some considerable distance on a bus, and then got “museum legs,” which are a lot like “military inspection legs” — one’s blood pressure can dive after a period of standing still. The teacher reminded the students not to lock their knees, and to take it easy rather than dashing about all over the place.

“Well,” I commented to one of the chaperones. “I’ve never had that reaction to a lecture before.”

The incident seemed an inauspicious start to our tour.

Over the years, I’ve led many art tours at home and abroad. I’ve also spoken to all kinds of audiences: art connoisseurs, professional associations, university students. However, I had never before spoken to members of the thirteen- to fourteen-year-old demographic, let alone shown them around a museum, and was not quite sure what to expect. Surliness, shyness, shoe-gazing, perhaps, thinking of myself around 1987, and how I never quite fit in with my own classmates.

To my pleased surprise, when I met with my tour group I was confronted with very alert and engaged young minds, all armed with copious questions and clipboards on which to write down their impressions of what they saw and heard. Thus, whether I was lecturing or answering a question, I could see dozens of heads bent down and scribbling furiously.

The questions began to rain down before we’d even left the reception room off the rotunda.

“Will we be seeing any Picassos?” asked one student. “Will we be seeing any studio copies of paintings?” asked another. “Is the ‘Mona Lisa’ here?” asked a third.

No, I explained, we wouldn’t be seeing any Picassos, but we would be seeing an original and a studio copy of an Old Master painting. And I noted that while the “Mona Lisa” lives in Paris, the only Leonardo in the Americas resides at the National Gallery. And it’s not far from the entrance — as we headed into the museum proper we paused to look at Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, only a few years older than these students, with her russet hair and solemn expression. Even the presence of a stern security guard didn’t discourage the chorus of ooohs and aaahs.

“That’s Bacchus!” exclaimed a student, pointing out a large bronze as we walked down the gallery. The statue of the god of wine, accompanied by a faun, was cast in Milan, probably in the late 1500s. “Are you interested in art history?” I asked. She nodded vigorously. Clearly, I would have to be on my toes. Or, like the little faun, my hooves.

The next gallery I’d planned to visit was disappointingly roped off — I’d checked a couple of days before, but ongoing renovations at the NGA, coming to a close after several years of work, mean unpredictable closures and rearrangements.

The student who’d asked about copies of paintings was in luck, though — we found ourselves examining the famous El Greco of St. Martin sharing his cloak with the beggar (1600/14) and near it, a studio copy. In the days before photography and color printing, I explained, someone who wanted a copy of a favorite painting could go to an artist’s studio and request one, in various sizes or even with different details. Sometimes such copies were produced by the original painter’s workshop; at others local painters did them. Several studio copies of the St. Martin are known to exist, in addition to the one hanging before us in the National Gallery. One copy was mysteriously stolen from the Royal Palace in Bucharest after World War Two — perhaps one day one of the group might find it? This notion seemed to particularly interest the boys.

We talked about the patronage system, and how during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance people sometimes commissioned art as a way of trying to make amends for something that they had done wrong, or as a way of distracting the people around them from their misdeeds.

“But how could they get away with that?” asked one student, incredulously. I pointed out that even now, people who do something shady and suddenly become wealthy often donate works of art or public buildings to try to distract people or to repair their reputations.

You never know what fruits will come from this sort of observation. A seed planted in a young mind may take many years to grow. But had I just planted a seed of indifference, skepticism, or something worse?

Our tour eventually came to Salvador Dalí’s enigmatic “Sacrament of the Last Supper,” once the most popular painting in the museum, although it is currently banished to a basement hallway near the restrooms past the gift shop. (Sic transit gloria mundi.) The students gazed at the picture and the questions soon came thick and fast. They weren’t all very sophisticated, but they were excellent questions.

“Is this a real place?”

“Why is that man dressed in blue, and that man dressed in yellow, when all the other men are dressed in white?”

“What’s that body with no head doing floating up there?”

As we finished our tour, I asked one last time for questions, wondering whether anything I’d shared that morning had really sunk in. Perhaps I was just another boring adult, droning on about boring things. I certainly didn’t anticipate being asked to give such a tour again in future. Just then, one of the students approached me with his clipboard.

“You said that Saint Martin was a Roman soldier who originally came from Hungary,” he said. “But what was Hungary called during the Roman Empire?” My brain froze for a moment. I knew the name began with a “P,” but had to look it up online. “Pannonia,” I said, showing the student my screen for spelling purposes. Maybe it’s true that men, even young ones, think about the Roman Empire pretty often.

As the students headed off to lunch, chattering loudly and ignoring the sidelong looks of the security guard, their teacher pulled me aside.

“This was so wonderful,” she said. “Do you think you’d be willing to do this for us again next year?”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2025 World edition.