The Art of Children's Drawing

Abstract

Prior to the latter half of the nineteenth century, children's drawings were seen primarily as unskilled and primitive attempts at representation and hence received no serious attention. But with the growth of interest in child development at the end of the nineteenth century came a surge of interest in children's drawings. Perhaps because children's drawings look so strikingly different at different ages, drawings were seen as providing a sharply focussed lens through which to view development. Psychologists have typically viewed children's drawings as windows on personality and affect, on the one hand, or as perspectives on cognition and intelligence, on the other. Altschuler and Hattwick (1947) used drawings as indications of personality structure; Goodenough (1926) used drawings as measures of intelligence; Piaget (1963) used drawings as reflections of the child's concepts; and recently Freeman (1980) and Goodnow (1977) have made use of drawings to reveal the child's cognitive strategies such as planning and sequencing. These approaches have often used early drawings as indications of deficiencies of some sort: for instance, tadpole drawings of humans have been seen as a reflection of a global rather than differentiated concept of the human body (Piaget, 1963) or as evidence for poor memory for body parts (Freeman, 1980); lack of detail in drawings has been taken as evidence for low intelligence (Goodenough, 1926); transparencies (when the child reveals the insides of objects drawn) have been taken as evidence that the child can only draw what he knows but not what he sees (Piaget & Inhelder, 1967); and the overuse of dark colors has been taken as evidence of psychopathology (Altschuler & Hattwick, 1947). Only rarely have children's drawings been studied on their own terms, for what they can tell us about the child's knowledge of the symbol system of drawing and for what they can tell us about the child's aesthetic goals. Researchers in this tradition have reminded us that children's drawings may look odd not because the child lacks some set of skills possessed