Art, Boys, and the Boy Scout Movement: Lord Baden-Powell

Abstract

Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell (1857–1941), founder of the Boy Scout Movement in 1907, was a British military hero during the Boer War. Within an ethos and era of empire-building, athleticism, soldier-heroes and the pursuit of “manliness,” Baden-Powell valued the arts and adapted his artistic skill to his wartime and Scouting activities. His own sketches and paintings are accomplished, and he exhibited his work in India, Southern Africa, and London— including sending a sculpture to the Royal Academy and regularly receiving payment for sketches that he sent to The Graphic magazine. He took his friends to exhibitions at the Royal Academy, visited the Paris Salon, and wrote about the importance for boys of learning to draw. Most of his publications are illustrated with his own line drawings, or those by his friends in the London Sketch Club. Observation and perceptual awareness were requirements for successful scouting, and he claimed that there was no better way to develop those skills than by drawing. Thus at a time when the practice of the arts is often seen as “feminine,” and boys may resist participating in art education, it is important to examine Baden-Powell's “masculine” use of the arts and his emphasis on learning through doing. In his study of the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and their forerunners in the United States, Macleod (1983) makes an important point that “Although the behaviour of boys and their leaders in voluntary associations inevitably differed from what occurred in public schools, the patterns are nonetheless revealing because the boys and men were acting more freely than school pupils and teachers” (p. xvi).