ion of Individual Styles from the Drawings of Five-Year-Old Children Jeffrey L. Hartley, Susan C. Somerville, Daniela von Cziesch Jensen, and Cindy C. Eliefja Arizona State University HARTLEY, JEFFREY L.; SOMERVILLE, SUSAN C.; JENSEN, DANIELA VON CZIESCH; and ELIEFJA, CINDY C. Abstraction of Individual Styles from the Drawings of Five-Year-Old Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1982, 53, 1193-1214. 3 experiments investigated whether 5-year-old children exhibit individual artistic styles. Lay adults judged, or learned to classify, representative sets of drawings obtained from 3 children in 2 collection periods, 9 months apart. In experiment 1, adults' similarity ratings of pairs of drawings indicated that there was some cohesiveness in the sets of same-artist drawings. Experiments 2 and 3 examined adults' ability to learn the children's styles using a category abstraction paradigm. evidence obtained for 2 of the 3 children was clear cut. Adults who learned to classify 6 or 9 (but not 3) exemplars, drawn by these children in the first collection period, were able to recognize new exemplars from both the same and the later collection periods. They were also able to select appropriate, abstract descriptions of these children's styles from a list. evidence was less convincing, in all respects, for recognition of the third child's style. Overall, these studies provided experimental support for the notion that young children possess recognizable styles. results were consistent with a conceptualization of artistic styles as ill-defined concepts. Artistic is an elusive quality. It cannot defined by reference to a set of critical features (Hartley & Homa 1981) or by the seductively simple notion that is the rather than the of creative expression (Finch 1974; Goodman 1978). Nevertheless, the concept of a characteristic of an individual artist or of a group of artists is used universally in the appreciation of art. Devotees, caricaturists, mimics, and critics of a given artist or school possess information about which enables them, among other things, to recognize previously unseen in that style. fact that recognized adult artists possess individual styles has been demonstrated experimentally (Hartley & Homa 1981; Tighe 1968; Walk 1967; Walk, Karusaitis, Lebowitz, & Falbo 1971). Lay adults possess distinctive handwriting styles (Indow, Kobayashi, & Dewa 1975) and also, presumably, characteristic painting or drawing styles. At what age do the drawings of a budding artist acquire enough consistency and individuality to establish a recognizable style? It has been suggested that children as young as 5 exhibit individual styles (Gardner 1980; Harris 1950; Lark-Horovitz, Lewis, & Luca 1973; Mendelowitz 1963). Some have claimed, furthermore, that the scribbles of much younger children are also distinguishable (Schaefer-Simmern 1976). These claims have been based on detailed inspection of the children's drawings for such aspects as composition, use of color, attention to shape and detail, and the pattern or manner of execution. question of whether and on what grounds young children might said to possess individual artistic styles was the focus of the present studies. Traditional investigations of children's art have relied on one or more expert adults judging drawings by a large number of children or judging many drawings by order of the first two authors' names was determined by the toss of a coin since each contributed equally to the research. This research was supported by a faculty grant-in-aid to the second author from Arizona State University. We are grateful to the director of the Child Study Laboratory, Kathleen Ritchie, for her assistance and to the individual children and parents who cooperated with our requests for drawings. Thanks are expressed to Rosann Messana, Gary Graham, Vicky Johnson, and Alexis Pie for their help in running subjects and compiling data. We would also like to thank Robert J. Sternberg and an anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Requests for reprints should sent to either Susan C. Somerville, Psychology Department, Arizona State University, rempe, Arizona 85287, or Jeffrey L. Hartley, Psychology Department, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine 04011. [Child Development, 1982, 53, 1193-1214. @ 1982 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved. 0009-3920/82/5305-0021$01.00] This content downloaded from 157.55.39.208 on Fri, 14 Oct 2016 04:17:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 1194 Child Development one or more children well known to them (e.g., Gardner 1980; Lark-Horovitz et al. 1973; Mendelowitz 1963). present studies adopted a different approach. Initially, representative sets of drawings were obtained from three 5-yearolds. Then lay adults, who had no information about the children, made judgments about the drawings or were tested on their ability to learn to classify drawings by artist. experimental procedures examined children's artistic styles as perceived by many lay adults. They were not designed to provide direct information about the children's graphic abilities or communicative intentions. Overall, developmental psychologists have paid comparatively little attention to artistic in their investigations of children's drawings. Instead the emphasis has been on drawings as indicators of intellectual ability (Goodenough & Harris 1950; Harris 1963), of spatial concepts (Phillips, Hobbs, & Pratt 1978; Piaget & Inhelder 1967), or of more general aspects of the development of representational skills (Freeman 1980; Goodnow 1977; Kellogg 1969). Developmental discussions of artistic typically have dealt with changes common to all children (e.g., Kellogg 1969; Richards & Ross 1967) or with very specific issues such as sex-role stereotyping (Lott 1979) or children's tendencies to use archaic versus traditional styles (Simon 1976). Recently, however, a more comprehensive analysis of artistic development has been provided by Gardner (1973, 1980). He defined an artist as .. an individual who has gained sufficient skill in the use of a medium to able to communicate through the creation of a symbolic object (Gardner 1973, p. 25). One major developmental prerequisite for artistic development is thus the capacity to create and appreciate symbols, a capacity attained in the infant's second year (Piaget 1951, 1954). From a careful analysis of the development of artistic skills in a variety of media, Gardner (1973, 1980) concluded that, with some qualifications, it is reasonable to consider the young child an artist. For drawings, in particular, there is abundant evidence that 3-year-old children employ graphic activity to represent experience, and there are also signs of these representational skills in the preceding 12-18 months (Gardner 1980; Piaget & Inhelder 1967). Furthermore, the basic elements and rules for drawing are progressively mastered in the fourth and fifth years (Freeman 1980; Goodnow 1977; Kellogg 1969). According to Gardner (1980), the real flowering of the child's art is between 5 and 7 years: The 5to 7-year-old has achieved some formal aspects of drawing-a sense of balance, harmony, composition-as well as an appreciation of the fact that drawing may used to represent aspects of the world (p. 218). What qualifications to this view are required? Young children make less deliberate and less conventional attempts to convey meaning in their art than adults. They are also relatively uninclined (perhaps unable) to assess the effectiveness of their efforts in this regard. Thus the 3to 7-year-old may understand the representational potential of graphic work but will not aware of the communicative traditions and idioms known to an older child or adult. For reasons similar to these, Gardner (1980) suggested that the 5to 7-year-old child is capable of only first-draft artistry rather than the directed artistry of an adult. Although there are clearly limitations to the artistic achievements of a young child, these in no way preclude the possibility that individual children possess characteristic and recognizable drawing styles. In what follows we provide a conceptual and empirical approach to the question of individual artistic styles in both children and adults. A Conceptual and Empirical Approach to Artistic Styles Although philosophers, artists, critics, and psychologists differ in their approaches to the definition of (e.g., Finch 1974; Gardner 1980; Goodman 1976, 1978; Hartley & Homa 1981), there is general agreement that (or technique), subject matter, and expression (or intended meaning) should all considered components of style. For example, Finch (1974) stated that style is any factor pertaining to form, subject, or meaning which is sufficiently constant in a group of art to establish a relationship among the works (p. 4). Similarly, Goodman (1978) argued that style comprises certain characteristic features both of what is said and of how it is said, both of subject and of wording, both of content and of form (p. 27). Of the three components of style, is often seen as the most reliable cue to an artist's identity. By themselves, . . . subject matter and meaning are usually inadequate gauges. . . Form usually betrays identifying characteristics-style-no matter what the subject and meaning may be (Finch 1974, p. 4). Goodman (1978) has also pointed out that . . not This content downloaded from 157.55.39.208 on Fri, 14 Oct 2016 04:17:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms