Studies of childhood

by James Sully

Coming now to the more elaborate and sophisticated stage of five or thereabouts, in which the shape of eyes, mouth, and nose is shadowed forth, the difficult appendages as hands and feet attempted, and the profile aspect introduced, we notice first of all a step in the direction of naturalism. The child like the race gets tired of his bald primitive symbolism, and essays to bring more of concrete fulness and life into his forms. Only this first attempt does not lead to a continued progress, but stops short at what is rude and arbitrary enough, substituting merely a second rigid conventionalism for the first.

This transition indicates an advance in technical skill; hence we find a measure of free and bold invention, as in the management of the facial features, e.g., the scissors-shaped nose, and still more in the treatment of hands and feet, which is at once exaggerative, as in the big burr forms, and freely conventional, as in the leaf-pattern for the hand, and the wondrous loop-designs for the foot.

Yet though this freer treatment shows a certain technical advance it illustrates the effect of the limitations of the child’s executive power. Thus the new partially profile figures are very apt to lean, looking as if they were falling backwards. It is probable that the wide-spread tendency to make the profile face look towards the spectator’s left rather than his right is due to the circumstance that the eye can much better follow and control the pencil in this case than in the opposite one. In the latter the hand is apt to interfere with seeing the line of the face, especially if the pencil is held near its point.

Habit, too, continues to assert its dominion. The tendency noticeable now and again, even among English children, to treat the feet after the manner of the hands illustrates this. Habit is further illustrated in the tendency to a transference of forms appropriate to the man to the animal; or, when (owing to the interposition of the instructor) the drawing of animals is in advance of the other, in the reverse process; as when a cat is drawn with two legs, or a horse is given a man’s face, or the human form develops a horse’s ears, or a bird’s feet. With these may be compared the transference of a bird-like body and tail to a quadruped in Fig. 45 [(i)], p. 377. The accompanying two drawings by a child of six show how similar forms are apt to be used for the man and for the animal (Fig. [52]).

Man. Bird.
Fig. 52.

But the really noticeable thing in this later sophisticated treatment is the bringing into view of what in the original is invisible, as the front view of the eye as well as both eyes into what otherwise looks a side view of the face, the two legs of the rider and so forth. Here, no doubt, we may still trace the influence of technical limitations and of habit. The influence of the former is seen in the completing of the contour of the head before or after drawing the hat: for the child would not know how to start with the lines which form the commencement of the visible part of the head. The influence of habit is also recognisable here. A child having learned first of all to draw the front view of the eye, the two eyes and the two legs side by side, tends partly as the result of organised hand-trick, partly in consequence of ‘association of ideas,’ to go on drawing in the same fashion in the new circumstances. A specially clear illustration of this effect of habit already alluded to is the introduction of the front view of the nose in the mixed scheme. These cases are exactly paralleled by the Egyptian drawing in which while one shoulder is pulled round the other is left in square front view (see above, p. 369, Fig. 39 [(b)]). Still, habit does not account for everything here. It does not, for example, explain why the child brings into view three sides of a house. The technical deficiencies of the small draughtsman, his want of serious artistic purpose, seem an insufficient explanation of these later sophistries. They appear to point plainly to certain peculiarities of the process of childish conception. We are compelled then to inquire a little more closely into the characteristics of children’s observation and of their mental representation of objects.

We are apt to think that children when they look at things at all scrutinise them closely, and afterwards imagine clearly what they have observed. But this assumption is hardly justified. No doubt they often surprise us by their attention to small unimportant details of objects, especially when these are new and odd-looking. But it is a long way from this to a careful methodic investigation of objects. Children’s observation is for the most part capriciously selective and one-sided. They apprehend one or two striking or especially interesting features and are blind to the rest. This is fully established in the case of ordinary children by the wondrous ignorance they display when questioned about common objects. It is hardly necessary to add that their spontaneous untrained observation is quite unequal to that careful analytical attention to form-elements in their relations which underlies all clear grasp of the direction of linear elements, the relative position of the several parts of a figure, and proportion.

This being so it maybe said that defects of observation are reflected in children’s drawing through all its phases. Thus the primitive bare schematism of the human face answers to an incomplete observation and consequently incomplete mode of imagination, just as it answers to a want of artistic purpose and to technical incapacity. How far defective observation assists at this first stage I do not feel sure. Further experimental inquiries are needed on this point. I lean to the view already expressed, that at this stage manual reproduction is far behind visual imagination.

When, however, we come on to the delineation of an object under its different aspects the defects of mental representation assume a much graver character. We must bear in mind that a child soon gets beyond the stage of recalling and imagining the particular look of an object, say the front view of his mother’s face, or of his house. He begins as soon as he understands and imitates others’ language to synthesise such pictorial images of particular visual presentations or appearances into the wholes which we call ideas of things. A child of four or five thinking of his father or his house probably recalls in a confused way disparate and incompatible visual aspects, the front view as on the whole the most impressive being predominant, though striking elements of the side view may rise into consciousness also. With this process of synthesising aspects into the concrete whole we call a thing there goes the further process of binding together representations of this and that thing into generic or typical ideas answering to man, horse, house, in general. A child of five or six, so far from being immersed in individual presentations and concrete objects, as is often supposed, has carried out a respectable measure of generalisation, and this largely by the help of language. Thus a ‘man’ reduced to visual terms has come to mean for him (according to his well-known verbal formula) something with a head, two eyes, etc., etc., which he does not need to represent in a mental picture because the verbal formula serves to connect the features in his memory.