And then they would all vote on it, and arguments in favor of goat or donkey were eloquently and skilfully set forth.
I said that a very young child could draw pictures: standing by my chair as I write this line is a chubby little girl, just four years old, in a check dress, with two funny little braids down her back. She is begging me for this pencil that she may "make a pussy-cat for Mamma to put in a frame."
What boots it that the little girl's "pussy-cat" has five or six legs and three tails—these are all inferior details.
The evolution of the individual mirrors the evolution of the race, and long before races began to write or reason they made pictures.
Art education had better begin young, for then it is a sort of play; and good artistic work, Robert Louis Stevenson once said, is only useful play.
Probably Edwin Landseer's education began a hundred years before he was born; but his technical instruction in art began when he was three years old, when his father would take him out on the Heath and placing him on the grass, put pencil and paper in his hand and let him make a picture of a goat nibbling the grass.
Then the boy noted for himself that a goat had a short tail, a cow a switch-tail, and horses had no horns, and that a ram's horns were unlike those of a goat.
He had begun to differentiate and compare—and not yet four years old!
When five years of age he could sketch a sleeping dog as it lay on the floor better than could Thomas, his brother, who was seven years older.
We know the deep personal interest that John Landseer felt in the boy, for he preserved his work, and today in the South Kensington Museum we can see a series of sketches made by Edwin Landseer, running from his fifth year to manhood.