Fig. 38.
A regular and apparently intelligent addition of the side view of the feet to the child’s crude profile drawing of the human figure produces a noticeable increase of definiteness. One common arrangement, I find, in the handling of the profile is the combination of the side view of the feet with a more or less consistent profile view of the head, while the bust is drawn in front view (see above, Figs. 35 [(a)], [36]). The effect is of course greater where the side view of the bent leg is added (see Fig. [38] and compare with this Fig. [37]). I find a liking for this same arrangement in the drawings of the unskilled adult. An example may be seen in a drawing by an English carpenter in General Pitt-Rivers’ Museum at Farnham. In the pictographs of the North American Indians we meet with cases of a similar treatment.[[266]] In the drawings on the Egyptian Mummy cases in the British Museum instances of a precisely similar treatment are to be found. We seem to have here a sort of transition from the first crude impossible conception to a more naturalistic and truthful conception. This twist of the trunk does not shock the eye with an absolutely impossible posture, as the early artistic solecisms shock it, and it is an arrangement which displays much that is characteristic and valuable in the human form.[[267]]
One point to be noticed among these drawings of the profile by children is that in a large majority of cases the figure looks to the left of the spectator. In the drawings which I have examined this appears like a rule to which there is scarcely any exception, save where the child wants to make two figures face one another in order to represent a fight or the less sensational incident of a salute. The way in which the new direction of the figure is given in these cases shows that children are not absolutely shut up to the one mode of representation by any insuperable difficulty. There is a like tendency observable in the treatment of the quadruped, which nearly always looks to the left. It may be added that a similar habit prevails in the drawings of untutored adults, as the pictographs of the North American Indians. The explanation of this, as well as of other generalisations here reached, will be touched on later.
I conceive, then, that there reveals itself in children’s drawings of the human figure between the ages of three or four and eight a process of development involving differentiation and specialisation. This process, instead of leading to a fuller and more detailed treatment of the front view, moves in the direction of a new and quasi-profile representation, although few children arrive at a clear and consistent profile scheme. Different children appear to find their way to different modifications of a mixed front and side view, some amazingly raw, others less so according to the degree of natural intelligence, and probably also the amount of good example put in their way by drawings in books, and still more by model-drawings of mother or other instructor.
I have met with only a few examples of a contemporaneous and discriminative use of front view and profile. Here and there, it is true, one may light on a case of the old lunar scheme surviving side by side with the commoner mixed scheme; but this sporadic survival of an earlier form does not prove clear discrimination. In the case of one boy of five the two forms were clearly distinguished, but this child was from a cultured family, and had presumably enjoyed some amount of home guidance. In the case of the rougher and less sophisticated class of children it appears to be a general rule that the draughtsman settles down to some one habitual way of drawing the human face and figure, which can be seen to run through all his drawings, with only this difference, that some are made more complete than others by the addition of mouth, arms, etc. Even the fact of the use of one or two eyes by the same child at the same date does not appear to me to point to a clear distinction in his mind between a front and side view. The omissions in these cases may more readily be explained as the result of occasional fatigue and carelessness, or, in some cases, of want of room, or as indicating the point of transition from an older and cruder to a later and more complete scheme of profile. This conclusion is supported by the fact that a child of six or seven, when asked to draw from the life, will give the same scheme, whether the model presents a front or a side view. This has been observed by M. Passy in the drawings of himself which he obtained from his own children, by General Pitt-Rivers in the drawings of uneducated adults, and by others. We may say, then, that children left to themselves are disposed each to adopt some single stereotyped mode of representing the human figure which happens to please his fancy.[[268]]
In this naïve childish art of profile drawing we have something which at first seems far removed from the art of uncivilised races. No doubt, as Grosse urges, the drawings of savages discovered in North America, Africa, Australia, are technically greatly superior to children’s clumsy impossible performances. Yet points of contact disclose themselves. If a North American Indian is incapable of producing the stupid scheme of a front view of the mouth and side view of the nose, he may, as we have seen, occasionally succumb to the temptation to bring both eyes into a profile drawing. We may see, too, how in trying to represent action, and to exhibit the active limb as he must do laterally, the untutored nature-man is apt to get odd results, as may be observed in the accompanying drawing by a North American Indian of a man shooting (Fig. 39 [(a)]).[[269]] This may be compared with the accompanying Egyptian drawing (Fig. 39 [(b)]).[[270]]
Fig. 39 (a).
Fig. 39 (b).