Child art

Pestalozzi (1746–1827), John Ruskin (1819–1900), and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) laid the premises for understanding the importance of art for children.

Agenda of art education for children was discussed at the International Conference of 1884, held in London at the Health Exhibition.

The discussion framework was largely shaped by the widespread of schools of design for professional training of children and youth in the UK, beginning from 1852.

Some of the conference participants underlined the importance of creativity, imaginations and special methodology for development of children's artistic skills.

[5] The first collection of 1250 children's drawing and sculpture pieces was assembled by Corrado Ricci (1858–1934), an Italian art historian.

[6] Aesthetic appreciation of children's art as untainted by adult influence was extolled by Franz Cižek, who called a child's drawing "a marvelous and precious document".

[7] In 1897, Cižek opened the Juvenile Art Class, a weekend school upholding children creativity uninhibited by adult vocational standards.

[10] Psychologists' interest in children's art was reflected in works by Georg Kerschensteiner (Die Entwickelung der Zeichnerischen Begabung, 1905, on the grounds of analysis of some 100,000 drawings), Georges-Henri Luquet (Les Dessins D'un Enfant, 1912, using 1500 drawings of the author's daughter from 3 to 8 years old), Georges Rouma (Le Langage Graphique de l'Enfant, Paris, 1913), Karl Bühler (1918 ff.

[12] Presently, the stages are generally differentiated as follows: From about their first birthday children achieve the fine motor control to handle a crayon.

Later drawings from this stage show figures drawn floating in space and sized to reflect the child's view of their importance.

By this age, most children develop a "person" symbol which has a properly defined head, trunk and limbs which are in some sort of rough proportion.

Slightly older children may also add secondary baselines for background objects and a skyline to hold the sun and clouds.

They become more attentive to details and proportions in their drawings, often adding features like lips, fingernails, hairstyles, and joints when depicting people.

The Chapman Art Therapy Treatment Intervention, for example, was designed in 2001 to help children exhibiting PTSD symptoms.

[15] "Mess-making" is another form of art therapy where children are permitted to paint outside of the confines of a canvas, often spilling and destroying materials.

The New York City Board of Education noted that following 9/11, schoolchildren exhibited PTSD symptoms at a rate five times higher than usual.

[17] Art therapists could gain insight into children's concerns about their family, pets, and friends, often asking whether the crisis was truly over or if more danger was imminent.

[18] Marygrace Berberian, who developed art therapy programs throughout New York City and facilitated the World Trade Center Children's Mural Project (WTCCMP), emphasized the power of artistic expression in addressing this collective trauma.

"[20] Child art, as a concept, has been philosophically critiqued due to its framing as an adult invention that romanticized children's artistic creations as being free from external influences, such as social norms and expectations.

[21] Generally, this has been argued as limiting the full understanding of the depth of children's art and the cultural, historical, political and social differences they have.

In 2004, the International Criminal Court accepted a group of approximately 500 children's drawings as evidence during investigations of crimes against humanity committed during the War in Darfur.

This method utilizes children's drawings to assess their family dynamics and attachment patterns, employing a structured scoring system for evaluation.

[29] Historian Jack Hodgson argues that children's art will always come with ambiguity owing to the "need to interpret them" and that is often off-putting to discipline that remains logocentric, "thriving on precise textual details".

These artistic imprints are known as parietal art, meaning that they are counted as "paintings, drawings and engravings on immobile rock surfaces".

[30] However, recent research has uncovered a number of hand and foot imprints in Quesang within the Tibetan Plateau, and have been attributed to children due to their size.

[30] Although there remains debate on what counts as art, these imprints provide the earliest known proof of humans in the High Tibetan Plateau.

Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of Pompeii's archaeological park, explained that these paintings have been found to be based on scenes the child artist has directly witnessed rather than from imagination.

He explained that they had probably "witnessed fights in the amphitheatre, thus coming into contact with an extreme form of spectacularised violence"[33] and that the paintings pointed to "the impact of this on the imagination of a young boy or girl, subject to the same stages of development that are still found today... it is an anthropological constant that is independent of artistic and cultural fashions.

[38] Elisabeth Anisimow originally gained recognition for her watercolor paintings when she was seven years old, when her artwork was first showcased in the Children's Museum in Norway.

[40] At the age of seven, Kieron Williamson's art depicting various landscapes of his hometown, Norfolk, England, was exhibited for the first time.