KATIE’S SUNDAY AFTERNOON

Mayhew’s Katie continues her exploration of the world of painting when she and her grandmother visit the art gallery on a hot Sunday afternoon. Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières looks so inviting that she climbs into the picture, as is her wont. Splashing about with the boy in the red hat, however, tilts the frame so that the river begins pouring into the gallery. Katie can’t resist inviting a little girl in white from Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (“no one is allowed to swim in this painting,” she sighs) to join her and the boy in the gallery, and soon all the ladies and gentlemen of Grand Jatte are hitching up their skirts and trousers to wade, too. When a gallery guard threatens to appear, other paintings provide boats and drying clothes to get everyone back where they should be. Mayhew as always transmutes his light and fresh style to what Katie is looking at—Pointillism in this case. No single museum owns all these paintings, of course, but in an afterword, Mayhew tells youngsters where they are and how to see them as well as a little bit about the artists. (Picture book. 4-8)