Teaching Design to Children : The Meaning of Richardson’s ‘Pattern-making’

Theme II : Design Education in the age of the Bauhaus

English art educator Marion Richardson (1892-1946) is well-known for inventing a method of art education for children which stressed the importance of imagination and the spontaneous conception of ideas. Richardson took an opposing position to the traditional training methods of the Royal Academy of Arts, which were the dominant methods since its founding in the 18th Century and would have instructed to repeatedly portray natural objects realistically. Roger Fry (1866-1934) and Herbert Read (1893-1968), who have both had an enormous influence on the English-speaking world’s art/design in the 20th Century, supported Richardson’s views. Richardson’s emphasis on children’s grasping of forms and their ‘patternization’ derived from the child’s individual senses, bears a remarkable affinity to Fry’s theory of modern art. One can see Fry’s appreciation of both modern art and drawings by children from the viewpoint of art form in his early essay, ‘Expression and Representation in the Graphic Arts (1908),‘ where he criticized the academic art which dominated the art world at the time: ‘we find that no test of accuracy in the imitation of the appearances of nature will ever suffice to distinguish between what we find to be great works of art and inferior ones.’ Even in Richardson’s 1929 lecture on teaching design to children, we can find a viewpoint similar to Fry’s Formalism. In this lecture, she explains that ‘pattern-making’ and ‘picture-making’ are not separate activities but coinciding ones, despite the traditional conceptions which allocated them into different categories, the former belonging to graphic design, and the latter to painting. We can see such an affinity with Fry’s Formalistic idea in her approach as it focuses on compositions formed by colours and lines, rather than reading the subject matter and the stories narrated by them. In this paper, I will consider Richardson’s innovative methodology, where creativity is expressed not only in ‘art’ but in ‘design’ as well, confirming that the creativity-oriented method of art education of our time comes from her conception of children’s drawing education. Furthermore, I will point to how she differentiated herself from preceding art education methodologies promoted by Thomas Ablett (1848-1945) who had a great impact on Richardson.