Begin With What the Child Likes

Child with Toys by Pierre-Auguste-Renoir, 1895. Read and see more.

      It is too much to expect a very young child to like a picture because it is beautiful. The esthetic element is not to be reckoned with in his early picture experience. It is the subject which interests him, not the art in which it is embodied. His pleasure turns on what it is about, not on how it is treated. He has reasons of his own for his preferences, and some of them are rather hard to fathom. On the whole, however, they seem to grow out of very simple psychological principles, which we can analyze by careful observation. I recently asked a young mother what sort of pictures her little boy liked best. "Animals," was the prompt reply. I glanced around the nursery and saw a perfect menagerie of toys: horses, dogs, cats, bears, etc., in every imaginable form, from rubber and china to the most realistic skin and fur imitations. The father had begun in the child's infancy to bring home this sort of toy, and it was a natural transition from toy to picture. A girl baby's first and most common toy is the doll, and from this the natural transition is to pictures of children. 

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